India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
Patkar’s struggle was unsuccessful in stopping this particular dam, but it did draw wide attention to the government’s disgraceful record in resettling the millions displaced by development projects. Official acknowledgement of the long history of adivasi suffering, meanwhile, came through the creation in 2000 of two new states of the Union, named Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, carved out of the tribal districts of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh respectively. Also formed was the state of Uttarakhand, from the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh, likewise rich in natural resources and likewise subject to exploitation by powerful external interests.
VII
From conflicts in the heartland of India we now move to conflicts in the extremities. Pre-eminent here was that old sore spot, Kashmir. After a quiet decade or two, the Valley erupted in the first months of 1989. In November of that year Rajiv Gandhi was replaced as prime minister by V. P. Singh. Singh appointed a ‘mainstream’ Kashmiri politician, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, to the powerful position of home minister. This was a gesture meant to please the Muslims of India in general and the Muslims of the Valley in particular. With one of their kind in charge of law and order, surely the police would bear down on them less heavily than before?
The experiment was very soon put to the test. On 8December 1989 a young woman doctor was kidnapped as she walked to work in Srinagar. But this was no ordinary medic; the lady was Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the Union home minister. She had been abducted by militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). They demanded that, in exchange for her release, five specified JKLF activists be freed from detention. The chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, did not want to yield to the threat. He was overruled by the prime minister in Delhi. On the 13th, the jailed militants were released; a large crowd welcomed them and marched them triumphantly through the streets of Srinagar. Among the slogans they shouted, one was especially ominous: ‘Jo kare khuda ka kauf,utha le Kalashnikov’ – If you wish to do God’s work, go pick up a Kalashnikov. Later that day, Rubaiya Sayeed was reunited with herfamily.34
The government’s capitulation was regarded as a major victory by the militants. Further kidnappings followed: of a BBC reporter, of a senior official, of another daughter of a prominent politician. There was also a series of assassinations: those killed included the vice-chancellor of Kashmir University and the head of the local television station.35
At this stage, circa 1989–90, Indian intelligence reported as many as thirty-two separatist groups active in the Valley. Of these two were especially important. The first was the JKLF, which stood for an independent, non-denominational state of Jammu and Kashmir, in which Hindus and Sikhs would have the same rights as Muslims. Its goal was captured in the popular cry, Hame kya chhaiye? Azaadi! Azaadi! (What do we want? Freedom! Freedom!). The second was the Hizb-ul Mujahideen, which (as its name suggests) veered more towards an Islamic regime and was not averse to a merger of the state with Pakistan. The Hizb-ul was led by Syed Salauddin, the nom de guerre of a once democratic politician who had contested the 1987 elections but been denied victory by blatant vote rigging. It was then that he turned to the gun, and to Pakistan, taking many other young men withhim.36
Both the JKLF and Hizb-ul had amassed a wide variety of arms. With these they killed soft and hard targets, looted banks and dropped grenades in front of police posts. Their acts grew more daring; in November 1990 they even launched a rocket at the studios of All-India Radio. The government now decided to take a tougher stance, moving in paramilitary forces and some army units to help maintain order. By 1990 there were as many as 80,000 Indians in uniform in the Valley. Thus, ‘the attempt to find apolitical solution was put a side in favour of a policy of repression’.37
The situation in Kashmir is tellingly reflected in this series of newspaper headlines, all from the year 1990:
Youth to the fore in secession bid
Blasts rock Kashmir Kashmiri
militants hang policeman in Srinagar
Pakistan blamed for rebellion in Jammu and Kashmir
Army joins battle against militants in Kashmir
Troops called out in Anantnag, curfew imposed
Security forces kill 81 militants
3 die in firing on J&K procession
Total bandh in Kashmir, headless bodies found
J and K trouble claims 1,044 [lives] till Sept[ember]
‘People Power’ in Srinagar: Curfew lifted, shops shut
Tricolour burnt at UN office
5 lakh attend J&K ‘freedom’rally
‘Independence alone can heal Kashmir’s wounds’38
The inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley were caught in the cross-fire, although, as the last few headlines suggest, their sympathies lay more with the militants than the security forces. Those who might have been neutral were persuaded to take sides following the murder in May 1990 of the respected cleric Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq. A massive crowd of mourners accompanied his body to the burial ground. Somewhere, somehow – the details remain murky – they got into an altercation with a platoon of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). The CRPF men, in panic, fired on the mourners, killing thirty and injuring at least 300 others. The Mirwaiz’s assassins were apparently in the pay of Pakistan, but by day’s end the propaganda war had been decisively lost by India.39 The alienation of the Kashmiris was deepened by the behaviour of those sent apparently to protect them. Indian soldiers, and more particularly the CRPF men, were prone to treat most civilians as terrorist sympathizers. Their actions were documented by Amnesty International,40 but also by Indian human rights activists. In the spring of 1990 a team led by the respected jurist V. M. Tarkunde travelled through the Valley, talking to government officials, militants and ordinary villagers. Many cases of police and army excesses’ were reported: beatings (sometimes of children), torture (of men innocent of any crime), extrajudicial (or ‘encounter’) killings, and the violation of women. ‘It is not possible to list all the cases which were brought to our notice’, commented Tarkunde’s team,
but the broad pattern is clear. The militants stage stray incidents and the security forces retaliate. In this process large numbers of innocent people get manhandled, beaten up, molested and killed. In some cases the victims were caught in cross-fire and in many more cases they were totally uninvolved and there was no cross-firing. This tends to alienate people further. The Muslims allege that they are being killed and destroyed because they are Muslims.41
VIII
In 1990, as in 1950, radicals in Kashmir were giving politicians in Delhi a severe headache. So too, and perhaps predictably, were radicals in the north-east.
There was good news from the largest state in the region, Assam. An accord had been reached with the Bodos, allowing for an ‘autonomous council’ to be formed in those districts where that community was in amajority.42 The bad news was that the secessionist United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was very active. Some parts of the state were securely under the control of the official administration whereas in other parts it was the writ of ULFA that ran. Practically every tea plantation paid an annual sum to the rebels, this based on the numbers of workers the estate employed and on its profitability. To further augment their coffers the insurgents mounted raids on banks. Army units were sent in to restore order; they captured and killed some top ULFA cadres, and others fled over the border into Bangladesh.43
The 1990s were also a turbulent decade for the state of Tripura. Armed groups fighting for tribal rights regularly attacked settlements of immigrant Bengalis. Here, too, insurgency was sometimes hard to distinguish from sheer criminality. As one researcher wrote in 2001, ‘innocent deaths, kidnappings and extortions are a regular part of life in Tripura and have been for many years now’. Nearly 2,000 killings were reported between 1993 and 2000 – of security men, insurgents and, most numerous of all, civilians.44
The gun was also ubiquitous in Manipur, another tiny state that had once been an independent chiefdom. The violence was chiefly a product of ethnic rival
In several towns in the region separatists had banned the screening of Hindi films, that hugely popular conduit of the culture of the subcontinent. This was part of a defiant definition of themselves as ‘not-Indian’. In this negative identification, ULFA, the Tripura National Volunteers, the Kuki National Army and the Meitei rebels all took inspiration from the Nagas, creators of the mother of insurgencies in the north-east. In 1962 one Naga faction had made its peace with the government of India, as had another faction in 1975. But there remained a group stubbornly committed to the idea of an independent and sovereign Nagaland. This was the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, led by Isaak Swu and T. Muivah.
The NSCN had a solid core of several thousand well-trained fighters. They operated from bases in Burma, making raids across the border and engaging the Indian army. Within Nagaland the rebels commanded support, respect and perhaps also fear. At any rate, they were sustained by collections made from the public. Even government officials paid a monthly ‘tax’ to the underground, this a curious if typically Indian paradox, the subsidizing by the state of a group committed to its destruction.
In the mid-1990s, however, a collective of church groups and civil society organizations called the Naga HoHo persuaded the rebels and the government to declare a ceasefire. In 1997 the guns fell silent and the two sides began to talk. At first the conversations were held in Bangkok and Amsterdam, but eventually Muivah and Swu agreed to visit India. They met the prime minister and travelled to the north-east, but failed to clinch an agreement. There were two stumbling blocks: the rebels’ insistence that a settlement had to be outside the framework of the Indian Constitution and their demand that parts of Manipur, Assam, and Arunachal Pradesh, where Naga tribes lived, be merged with the existing state of Nagaland into a Greater Nagalim.
By July 2008 the ceasefire had held for nearly eleven years. Yet a mutually satisfactory solution remains, if not out of reach, at least out of sight. The government of India says it will give the Nagas the fullest possible autonomy, but with in the terms of the Indian Constitution. The NSCN insists that any solution must acknowledge Naga sovereignty, for – it claims – ‘Nagaland was never a part of India either by conquest by India or by consent of the Nagas’.46 It also asks for the retention of a separate Naga army. Anything less would be a betrayal of the memory of those who died for the cause. In Phizo’s native village there is a stone memorial bearing the inscription ‘These men and women of Khonoma gave their lives for the vision of a Free Naga Nation. We remember them and still hold fast to their vision’.47
The calls for a Greater Nagalim have been resisted by states who would have to cede territory to this new entity. The Meities of Manipur have militantly opposed the proposal, claiming that their state had existed as an independent and integrated territory for over a thousand years. In the summer of 2001 Meitei radicals torched government buildings and attacked police posts in protest against talks with the Nagas. Posters were pasted on the walls of homes and offices, proclaiming: ‘Do not Break Manipur/No Compromise on Our Territory’.48
The north-east is a region of violence and conflict, and hence also of migration. Some of it is a cross national borders, as in the continuing immigration from Bangladesh. Others move within the region, some in search of jobs, some fleeing ethnic persecution. There is also a growing number of ‘environmental refugees’. In the 1960s a high dam in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of East Pakistan displaced some 60,000 Chakmas. Since they were second-class citizens anyway (as Buddhists in a state dominated by Muslims), they sought refuge in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, where they live on, still second-class, denied passports by the Indian government. Meanwhile, a series of dams being built in Arunachal and Nagaland will render homeless up to 100,000 villagers. These too will have to move elsewhere, in search of that essential resource so very scarce everywhere in South Asia, cultivable land.49
There is a massive military presence in the north-east. The states of the region variously border China, with whom India has fought a costly war, Bangladesh, with whom India has a profoundly ambivalent relationship, and Burma. But it is not merely for external security that the Indian army has so many men here. They are also needed to maintain the flow of essential goods and services, protect road and rail links, and, not least, suppress rebellion and insurgency. ‘We have no say vis-à-vis the army’, says along-serving Manipur chief minister: ‘They have their own way of working, they will not tell us or listen to us, although they are supposed to be aiding the civil administration.’50
In the north-east the army operates under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (APSPA), which gives its officers and soldiers immunity from prosecution by civil courts, unless specifically permitted by the central government. Since the Act also grants permission to ‘fire upon or otherwise use force even to the extent of causing death’ anyone suspected of breaching the law, it has acted as an incentive to aggressive behaviour.
For many years now human rights groups have asked for the repeal of the APSPA. In the lead are the women of Manipur, long active in opposing male violence of all kinds. The state has dozens of local Meira Paibis (Women Torch Bearers) groups. These campaigned successfully against alcoholism before turning their attention to the excesses of the security forces. The Meira Paibis have demanded that troops leave schools and marketplaces, that they stop detaining young boys at will and that they open up their prisons and detention centres to public scrutiny.51
These demands were renewed in July 2004, when a Manipuri housewife was picked up from her home on the charge of abetting terrorism. She was tortured, raped and killed, and her body left to rot by the roadside. The incident sparked a wave of angry protests in the Manipur valley. A group of women marched to the army base in Imphal, where they took off their clothes and covered themselves with a white banner carrying the legend ‘Indian Army, Take our Flesh’. A student leader set himself on fire on Independence Day, leaving a note which read: ‘It is better to self-immolate than die at the hands of security forces under this Act. With this conviction I am marching ahead of the people as a human torch.’ A girl student went on an indefinite fast; taken to hospital, she still refused to eat. Several years later she lay in her bed, force-fed by the state because she said she would rather die than live under a regime run by the military.52
XI
In May 2000 the population of India reached one billion. The government chose a girl born in Delhi as the official ‘billionth baby’. Aastha Arora’s arrival was greeted by an excited mob of press and television cameramen who clambered onto beds and tables to get a better shot. ‘The billionth baby’, noted one reporter wryly, ‘was greeted by a zillion flashlights and doctors say her skin could have been affected’.53
The choice of Aastha was politically correct, since the United Nations had recently observed the Year of the Girl Child. Yet it was flagrantly at odds with how girls – born or unborn – were treated in many parts of India, not least the countryside around Delhi. Throughout the preceding century the sex ratio had been steadily falling – from 972 females to 1,000 males in the year 1901 it had dropped to 947 by 1951 and 927 by 1991. Child mortality was highly variable by gender. In most Indian homes boys were treated better than girls – provided more nutritious food, better access to health care and sent to school while their sisters laboured in field and forest. From the 1980s advances in medical technology had worked to make more lethal an already deadly prejudice. Thus, the new sex-determination test allowed parents to abort female fetuses. Although illegal in India, the test was widely available in clinics
By the turn of the century demographers were releasing data that was chilling indeed. For the period 1981-2001, and the age group 0–6 years, the number of females born per 1,000 males had fallen from 992 to 964 in Andhra Pradesh, 974 to 949 in Karnataka, 967 to 939 in Tamil Nadu and 970 to 963 in Kerala. The changes were more dramatic in northern India. In Haryana the ratio had fallen from 902 to 820 between 1981 and 2001. In Punjab, the fall had been even greater, from 908 to 793.54
The falling sex ratio in Haryana and Punjab had led to a ‘crisis of masculinity’. According to the traditional rules of marriage, one’s spouse had to be from one’s caste and linguistic group, though not usually from one’s village. As boys grew into men, an increasing number found that brides were simply unavailable in the locality. So they contracted unions with girls from hundreds of miles away, belonging to other states, castes and linguistic groups. During the 1990s and beyond, women from the states of Assam, Bihar and West Bengal were being sought – and, occasionally, bought – by men from Haryana and Punjab. These ‘cross-region’ liaisons were sometimes informal, at other times legitimated through the ritual of marriage. Questions remained about how the offspring of these highly unusual unions would be treated by a society still bound, in most other respects, by the ties of caste and kinship.55