India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
The violence that began on the night of 31 October spread and intensified through the first two days of November. The first serious episodes occurred in south and central Delhi; later, the action moved east across the river Yamuna, to the resettlement colonies located there. Everywhere it was Sikhs and Sikhs alone who were the target. Their homes were burnt, their shops looted, their shrines and holy books violated and desecrated. The mobs’ deeds were accompanied by angry words: ‘Finish off the Sardars’, ‘Kill the gaddars [traitors]’, ‘Teach a lesson to the Sikhs’, were some of the slogans eyewitnesses reported hearing.
In Delhi alone more than a thousand Sikhs perished in the violence. Sikh males between eighteen and fifty years of age were particularly targeted. They were murdered by a variety of methods, and often in front of their own mothers and wives. Bonfires were made of bodies; in one case, a little child was burnt with his father, the perpetrator saying, ‘Ye saap ka bachcha hai, isse bhi khatam karo’ (This offspring of a snake must be finished too).
The mobs were composed of Hindus who lived in and around Delhi: Scheduled Caste sweepers who worked in the city, and Jat farmers and Gujjar pastoralists from villages on the fringes. Often they were led and directed by Congress politicians: metropolitan councillors, members of Parliament, even Union ministers. The Congress leaders promised money and liquor to those willing to do the job; this in addition to whatever goods they could loot. The police looked on, or actively aided the looting and murder.71
Rajiv Gandhi’s own comment on the riots was: When a big tree falls, the earth shakes’. Without question, the killing of Mrs Gandhi provoked strong feelings among her many admirers. Sections of the middle class venerated her for her conduct and leadership during the 1971 war; sections of the poor thought her the only Indian politician who empathized with their lot. And Hindus in general were dismayed at the happenings in the Punjab. The Khalistan movement, they believed, was aimed at tearing the country into pieces, and the fact that it was two Sikhs who had killed the prime minister seemed to confirm these fears. Immediately after Mrs Gandhi’s killing rumours of other actions began to circulate. It was said that trains with dead bodies of Hindus were coming in from the Punjab, and that the capital’s water supply had been poisoned by malcontents.
The public mood in Delhi was angry, distorted by happenings real and imagined. That said, Rajiv Gandhi’s comment was still deeply insensitive. It was of apiece with the behaviour, overall, of the administration he was now asked to lead. By showing crowds baying for blood in Teen Murti House, state television was issuing a self-fulfilling prophecy. The police’s indifference was shocking, the role played by Congress politicians positively immoral. But the lapse that perhaps signalled more than all the others was the unwillingness to call in the army. There is a large cantonment in Delhi itself, and several infantry divisions within a radius of fifty miles of the capital. The army was put on standby, but despite repeated appeals to the prime minister and his home minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, they were not asked to move into action. A show of military strength in the city on the 1st and 2nd would probably have quelled the riots – yet the order never came.
While Sikhs in the capital bore the brunt of the violence, there were also attacks on the community in other cities and towns of northern India. More than 200 Sikhs died in incidents in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Twenty Sikhs were killed in Indore, and as many as sixty in the steel town of Bokaro, where the mobs, as in Delhi, were led by local Congress politicians.
One city where the violence was minimal was Calcutta. There were 50,000 Sikhs resident in the city, many of them taxi-drivers, each one easily identified by his turban and beard. Very few were harmed; and not one died. The West Bengal chief minister, jyoti Basu, had ordered the police to ensure that peace be maintained. The instructions were honoured, with the city’s powerful trade unions keeping a vigilant eye. The example of Calcutta showed that prompt action by the administration could forestall communal violence; a lesson, alas, lost to the rest of the country.72
X
Mrs Gandhi’s impact on the history of her country was definitive; as definitive, indeed, as her father’s. Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister of India for sixteen years and nine months. His daughter served in that post almost as long, albeit in two stretches: from January 1966 to March 1977, and then again from January 1980 to October 1984. These are the two figures of pre-eminent importance in the history of independent India. To compare one to the other is inevitable, and perhaps also necessary.
As a military leader Mrs Gandhi was immeasurably superior. Her decisiveness at the time of the Bangladesh crisis was in striking contrast to Nehru’s wavering attitude towards the Chinese: now promising undying friendship, now issuing threats with no force to back them. So far as economic policies went, Nehru’s stress on the public sector and self-reliance was in keeping with the spirit of the age, whereas in the 1960s, when the time had come to cautiously open up the economy to market forces, Mrs Gandhi instead further strengthened the hold of the state. Socially, both were genuinely non-parochial, seeking to represent all Indians, regardless of their gender or class, or religious and linguistic affiliation.
Where the advantage rests squarely with Nehru is with regard to the processes and procedures of democracy. This point was made, after Mrs Gandhi’s death, by Krishna Raj, the editor of India’s leading journal of public affairs, the Economic and Political Weekly. One point of contrast was how father and daughter treated the party to which both owed a lifelong allegiance. When Indira Gandhi took charge in 1966, wrote Krishna Raj, ‘she found a reasonably well-organised Congress party, with several layers of responsive leadership across the length and breadth of the country’. But she then ‘dismantled the party and she did so with a clear purposiveness. Because she did not trust anyone who would not play a subservient role to her and her family, she got rid of the intermediate leadership and re-built the party as a paper entity, without a democratic structure and with office-bearers personally selected and named by her.’
Tragically, it was not just the Congress Party that was made an extension of the prime minister’s will. So was the government of India. Despite the ignominy of the China war, when Indira Gandhi came to power in January 1966 ‘India was a coherent nation, a nation marked by a quiet aura of social stability’. There was a set of socio-economic objectives around which it was united. The political class recognized the interconnection between means and ends. The ‘faith was still widely shared that the paraphernalia of the state was never intended – at least not consciously intended – to be put to use for advancing private interests’. But by the time of Indira Gandhi’s death there had been ‘a qualitative transformation. India is a divided nation.’ There were now ‘deep wounds and deep dissensions’. The five-year plans, once acknowledged as ‘an earnest statement of hopes and aspirations’, now ‘do not mean a thing’. Now, the ‘apparatus of the state is all the time being manipulated for the sake of [the] fractional minority of the population at the top of the social hierarchy’. Now, the ‘government at the centre is corrupt to the core and Indira Gandhi could not be absolved of direct responsibility for this state of affairs’.73
Sections of the Western press, meanwhile, saw dark days ahead for India. With Mrs Gandhi’s death, wrote the New York Times, the country faced a ‘period of prolonged uncertainty, with the potential for greater domestic instability and new tensions with its neighbours, particularly Pakistan’. The New York Sun was even more pessimistic, writing that the prime minister’s assassination ‘has opened a bleak possibility that India may fly apart, internally, and become increasingly the catalyst for regional and global rivalries’. Some officials in Washington were worried that ethnic and religious rivalries would ‘explode into general violence’, that the country would fragment, and that ‘a desperate leadership in India might look more and more to the Soviet Union for help’.74
This was not the first epitaph being written for the Union of India; nor would it be the last. Still,
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THIS SON ALSO RISES
In India the choice could never be between chaos and stability, but between manageable and unmanageable chaos, between humane and inhuman anarchy, and between tolerable and intolerable disorder.
ASHIS NANDY, sociologist, 1990.
I
EVEN BY THE STANDARDS of Indian politics, 1984 was an especially turbulent year. The first week of June witnessed Operation Bluestar, an unprecedented attack by the state on a place of worship. The last day of October saw the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the first major political killing since that of Mahatma Gandhi. That murder had temporarily brought a halt to Hindu-Muslim violence; this one provoked a wave of violence by Hindus on Sikhs.
It was against this bloody backdrop that Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister. A month after he took office, the country witnessed a tragedy that claimed as many lives as had the anti-Sikh riots. In the early hours of 3 December 1984 white smoke began filling the air of the central Indian city of Bhopal. Citizens asleep in their homes were woken up with fits of coughing, vomiting and a burning sensation in the eyes. In panic they got out of bed and went out into the street, the gas cloud following them. By dawn, ‘the main thoroughfares of the city were jammed with an unending stream of humanity, plodding its way in search of safer surroundings’. Many fell down in the streets, overcome by dizziness and exhaustion. Others found their way, somehow, to the city’s few modern hospitals, whose beds were rapidly filled to capacity.1
The deadly gas was methyl isocyanate (MIC), and it came from a pesticide plant owned and run by an American firm, Union Carbide. Stored in underground tanks, it was usually rendered harmless by a scrubber before being released into the atmosphere. However, on this night an unanticipated chemical reaction led to the release of MIC in its toxic state. The effects were devastating. Within hours of the leak, at least 400 people had died of exposure to the gas. The final tally was in excess of 2,000, making it the worst industrial accident in human history. The bulk of the victims lived in the slums and shanty towns which ringed the factory. Apart from those who died, another 50,000 would be affected for the rest of their lives by illness and injury caused by exposure to the gas.
In the wake of the tragedy came a wave of visitors to Bhopal, not all of them welcome. There were doctors who came to help, but also lawyers seeking an avenue of profit through a ‘class action’ suit on behalf of the victims to be filed in an American court of law. The CEO of Union Carbide came, was briefly arrested, then released on bail and flown back to New York. Ten days after the accident a team of Indian scientists came to neutralize the stocks of MIC that still lay in the Carbide factory. The project was named Operation Faith, but it inspired only distrust. Fearing a fresh leak, thousands of residents made to leave Bhopal, with ‘the city bus terminal and the railway station presenting] a chaotic scene ... as fleeing people swarmed them carrying their essential belongings’.2
Investigations into the leak suggested a range of possible causes: that water had got into the tank; that the tank had not been properly cleaned; that the MIC was being stored at temperatures higher than recom-mended.3 What was clear was that a potentially hazardous industry had no business to be in the city. Before the plant went into production in 1980, the town planner M. N. Buch recommended that Union Carbide choose a safer and less populated location. Indeed, as a report of June 1984 revealed, the history of the plant had been punctuated by gas leaks and burst pipelines – minor accidents, unacknowledged intimations of the major one that was waiting to happen.4
II
The accident in Bhopal occurred in the first week of December. At the end of the month, India witnessed its eighth general election. The polls were dominated by the murder and memory of Indira Gandhi. The Congress campaign, overseen by the advertising agency Rediffusion, presented Rajiv Gandhi as the logical heir to his mother’s legacy, and the party itself as the only bulwark against the forces of secession. ‘India could be your vote away from unity or separation’, ran the punchline of one ad featuring Rajiv. ‘Will the cast of ’77 ever be united by a common ideology instead of a common greed for power?’ ran another.5 The Congress campaign, wrote one commentator, capitalized on the growing mass insecurities’, whereby ‘Mrs Gandhi’s assassination was equated in the public mind withan assault on the Indian State and that perception was constantly reinforced.’6
When the results came in, the Congress had swept the polls, capturing almost 50 per cent of the popular vote and almost 80 per cent of the seats in Parliament. Under the leadership of apolitical novice, the Congress won 401 seats, far more than they ever had under Nehru or Indira Gandhi. However, as one of the prime minister’s advisers admitted, the victory was as much his late mother’s as his own’.7
The general election had been won by stoking the fear of secession: but now, with a comfortable majority in hand, the prime minister moved swiftly to make peace in the Punjab. The leaders of the Akali Dal were let out of jail and emissaries sent to talk to them. Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal seemed as keen as Rajiv Gandhi to put the past behind him. In July 1985 the two leaders signed an accord, agreeing to transfer Chandigarh to Punjab within a specified time frame, assuring Punjab a fair share of river waters and committing the government to a fresh review of centre–state relations in general. President’s Rule was to be revoked and state elections held.
Following the agreement, Sant Longowal toured the Punjab, speaking at public meetings and preaching in gurdwaras. Everywhere he asked that the people support the moves for reconciliation. While addressing a congregation in Sangrur, Longowal was shot dead by two young men, who held him to have betrayed the Sikh cause by breaking bread with the rulers in New Delhi. The incident occurred on 20 August; bravely, the government chose to go ahead with assembly elections in late September. The Sant’s death created a wave of popular support for his party. The Akali Dal won a comfortable majority, for the first time in the province’s history. With two-thirds of the adult population casting their ballots, the polls were interpreted as a vote against extremism.8
Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, the government also clinched an agreement with the All-Assam Students Union. The two sides agreed on cut-off dates for ‘infiltrators’: those who had arrived after 1 January 1966 but before 25 March 1971 (when the civil war in East Pakistan began)would be allowed to stay but not vote, while those who came later would be identified and deported. Here too President’s Rule was ended and elections called. A student’s union transformed itself into apolitical party, with AASU members creating the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). When polls to the state assembly were held in December 1985 the AGP trounced the once-dominant Congress. The new chief minister, Prafulla Mahanta, was only thirty-two years of age; many of his legislators were even younger. As in Punjab, the result was hailed as a vindication of democracy. Senior Congress figures in Delhi argued that, while their party had lost, the Republic of India had won. ‘Men who were distributing dynamite earlier were handling poll posters,’ remarked one Union Minister: From a nationalistic point of view is that victory or defeat?’9
In June 1986 the government of India signed a peace agreement with Laldenga, leader of the Mizo National Front. By its terms, the MNF rebels laid down their arms and were granted an amnesty against prosecution. The government agreed to grant full statehood to Mizoram, and Laldenga himself assumed office as chief minister, taking over from the Congress incumbent. The model here was the Kashmir agreement of 1975, when Sheikh Abdullah had returned to power in a similar fashion.10
One journal remarked that Rajiv Gandhi ‘had brought to the Mizos the goodwill of the nation’; as he had previously done to the Sikhs and the Assamese.11 Although these
III
That Rajiv Gandhi was an outsider in politics was to his advantage. In the popular mind, ‘his name was not associated with any controversial issues, he was not aligned to any caucus, and he had not yet created a coterie of his own’. His appeal was enhanced by his youth – he was still under forty in 1984 – his good looks, and his open manner. Here was a ‘fine gentleman, thoroughly well-meaning, earnest and honest ... [H]is indulgent countrymen stuck the label “Mr Clean” on him’.12
Rajiv’s main advisers also came from outside politics. They included Arun Singh and Arun Nehru, two friends from the corporate sector who were made ministers. Like him, they were young and English speaking. Like him, they were at ease with modern technology. They made manifest their intention to take India directly from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, from the age of the bullock cart to the age of the personal computer. In some parts of the media the new recruits attracted derision or amusement, being known as ‘Rajiv’s computer boys’. In other parts they attracted approbation; here, Rajiv Gandhi was compared to John F. Kennedy, who had likewise ‘symbolised youth and the hope of a new generation’, assembling a ‘team of the best and the brightest’ to carve a new future for his land.13