COMETH THE KALASHNIKOV
ALTHOUGH HISTORY, ‘THE essence of innumerable biographies’ according to Thomas Carlyle, ought to be about people, it mostly isn’t. Rather few individuals, many of them monsters, make the historians’ cut, leaving countless other lives, often well if obscurely lived, to be swept up like dust by the winds of policy and the gusts of war. Amid all the tallying of events and the telling of dramas the living get lost; humanity eludes one of the traditional humanities. To assert the obvious – that the past is packed with people and that people are not a collective agency but millions of individual individuals – it may take a narrative jolt, like a natural disaster or an unexpected twist of fate.
For such visitations the third of the South Asian successor states has come to be something of a byword. Cyclones, floods and crop failures assail Bangladesh so frequently as to constitute a feature of its existence. Indeed the higher sea levels associated with accelerated climate change may actually imperil that existence. Beset by inundation, salination, upstream deforestation and seasonal desiccation, Bangladesh could provide a clue to the fate of another deltaic civilisation, that of Harappa with which this book began.
Just when Bangladeshis think it safe to focus on party politics and GDP, along comes a new tsunami of human destitution to swamp the Dhaka agenda and tug at the foundations of the state. The government totters, NGOs take over more of its functions and the international aid agencies dig in deeper. Yet it is on these surges of distressed humanity that the world’s media seizes and it is from them that the most poignant accounts of individual tragedy and fortitude are culled. In the most densely populated country in the world each life asserts the right to be reckoned with.
Elsewhere in South Asia such shock reminders are mercifully less frequent. But in the 1980s two events, one in Pakistan, the other in India, both of them catastrophic, did indeed gatecrash the national narratives and might well have derailed the political process. On 10 April 1988 residents in Rawalpindi and neighbouring Islamabad thought their cities were under surprise attack, presumably from India. Explosions rent the morning air, bombs and missiles rained down on densely packed housing, bullets whistled across playgrounds, and smoke and fire billowed into the sky. The resultant casualties ran into the thousands, with the killed in the hundreds. Official estimates tended to be more conservative only because it soon emerged that this was not in fact a hostile attack at all. An underground arsenal in nearby Ojhri, where US ordnance was being stockpiled for onward shipment to the mujahidin in Afghanistan, had mysteriously ignited.
It could have been sabotage; more acceptably it was an accident. General Zia-ul-Haq took it for the latter and, holding his prime minister Mohamed Khan Junejo ultimately responsible, used it as a pretext to dismiss him. Junejo had lately betrayed ambivalence about the general’s programme of making Pakistan more Islamic, plus a worrying tendency to assert civilian interests. He had to go. Four months later Zia himself died in an aircrash. Again, it could have been an accident or sabotage. The facts would remain obscure because, in both cases, no government would ever see fit to release the findings of the official inquiries into them. Air crashes being an occupational hazard and Zia being little regretted, Pakistanis largely accepted this silence in the case of the general. But it was not so with the arms-dump explosion, especially when, years later, inquisitive schoolboys and incautious contractors were still being blown to bits by undetonated ordnance embedded in the subsoil by the Ojhri eruption.
Earlier, in 1984, when the assassination of Mrs Gandhi and the retaliation wreaked on Delhi’s Sikh population were still hogging the headlines, far worse befell India. Again it was early morning; 3 December was another unremarkable day and the location another unfancied neighbourhood, this time in the Madhya Pradesh capital of Bhopal. Unlike Ojhri, there were no explosions and pyrotechnics to alert the still sleeping city to impending disaster, just a tangy fog. It eddied from a valve high on the rusting structure of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant and rolled down on to the adjacent sprawl of low-rise housing, stealing under clapboard doors and tracking up the roof timbers of one-room shacks. Those who awoke – those who didn’t never would – experienced a burning sensation in the throat and lungs and an excruciating eye pain that got worse as they fled, coughing, vomiting and dying. Much of the city closed down. The corpses lay unrecovered. It was like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Trains stood backed up on the nearby main line waiting for signals that never changed because the signalmen lay slumped over their levers after the first toxic whiff.
The gas was 500 times more poisonous than that used in the First World War. Eight thousand men, women and children, most of them impoverished Muslims and ‘untouchable’ Dalits, died within 72 hours, while up to half a million sustained eye damage and internal injuries. Another 12,000 would later succumb to these injuries or to the effects of subsequent contamination. Miscarriages, abnormal births and deformed babies would continue down the generations. It was, and still is, ‘the worst industrial accident ever recorded’ – the worst clinically and then the worst judicially.
Union Carbide claimed that it was not even an accident; because a disgruntled worker had supposedly sabotaged the plant, the company was not liable. However, accusations of staff cutbacks at the Bhopal plant, negligible maintenance, ignorance of safety procedures and environmental indifference – all of them attributable to corporate cost-cutting – were widely made. Cumulatively they constituted a damning account that seemed to guarantee redress when the Indian government, evading responsibility for its own regulatory failures, took up the case for compensation in the US courts. Yet five years later the government accepted a paltry settlement that precluded the chances of any further action and denied the now jobless victims anything more than a compensatory pittance. Union Carbide, and both its US parent company at the time and its subsequent owner Dow Chemicals, continue to deny responsibility. Meanwhile both the central government and the Madhya Pradesh government signally failed to ensure that the site was made safe, indeed were inclined to deny every report that it represented an ongoing hazard.
Twenty-five years later the Bhopal survivors were still seeking redress by mounting pathetic protest marches and engaging the sympathy of the media. Despite the Indian economy now enjoying growth rates that were the envy of the world, despite the proliferating shopping malls and the info-tech billionaires, the provision of even uncontaminated drinking water could not be guaranteed to Bhopal’s despised survivors. Their individual tragedies as much as their collective plight may serve as a salutary reminder that lesser lives matter, that democratic formalities are no guarantee of accountablity and that economic miracles may be underwritten by rank discrimination and enduring levels of the most abject poverty.
Ojhri and Bhopal also raised serious questions about the competence of South Asian states to handle technologies whose volatile nature called for sophisticated safeguards and responsible supervision. Although India had exploded an atomic device in 1974, it was not until 1998, ten years after Ojhri, that both New Delhi and Islamabad would euphorically celebrate the successful testing of battle-ready nuclear weapons. Yet by the late 1980s each was known to have developed or acquired the necessary know-how and materials and to be successfully testing delivery systems. Conducted in defiance of international pressure for non-proliferation, these programmes were vigorously condemned by the existing nuclear powers as inviting armageddon in an already chronically unstable region.
But whether they in fact made the region more unstable or less so was debatable. The forty-year Cold War between the global superpowers had stayed cold for so long arguably because, with each capable of annihilating the other, neither had dared try. The same could be true of India and Pakistan, especially since, as neighbours, neither could be sure that the fall-out from its nuclear aggression would not affect its own citizens. Indeed it seemed possible that, where all else had failed, the bomb might be the catalyst to fast-freeze Partition once and for all. India saw its nuclear capability as marking its coming of age on the world stage and as a necessary deterrent to further invasion by its neighbours, China as much as Pakistan. Likewise Pakistan saw its bomb as boosting its standing within the Islamic world and offsetting India’s superiority in conventional weapons, so discouraging any all-out offensive across its borders like those of 1965 and 1971. Both countries denied any hostile intent and undertook to discontinue testing, although they shied away from agreements on mutual disarmament (in the case of India) and on not being the first to use the nuclear option (in the case of Pakistan).
In so far as no fourth Indo-Pak conflict has yet materialised, these arguments may stand. Yet each of them also had implications for Kashmir. In the light of a potential nuclear holocaust, the international community would be more inclined to resume its efforts to broker a Kashmir settlement; a nuclear-armed India felt more confident about pressing ahead with the integration of Kashmir regardless of Pakistani objections; and beneath its own nuclear umbrella Pakistan felt free to train and arm Kashmiri militants and launch low-level interventions without fear of a disproportionate retaliation.
There remained, too, the perhaps greater danger of nuclear arsenals falling into hostile hands, domestic or foreign, or detonating accidentally. This gave each government an interest in the internal stability of its neighbour and argued for some normalisation of relations as conducive to it. But it also prompted mutual scrutiny, most notably in the 1990s when the Indian electorate seemed willing to entrust the levers of power to bellicose nationalists and when in Pakistan uncertainty prevailed over whose finger (the military’s, the intelligence services’ or the government’s) was actually on the button. Meanwhile in both countries radical militias with terrorist agendas appeared increasingly able to strike at the most sensitive of installations; and as for accidental detonation, there remained of course the terrible legacy of Ojhri and Bhopal.
Assuming the figures are approximately correct, the total of Indian lives lost and blighted by the Bhopal disaster would scarcely be exceeded by either the ongoing Panjab crisis, the imminent intifada in Kashmir or the intermittent Hindu-Muslim massacres of 1992-2002. Likewise, Ojhri set a bloodstained benchmark for the countless individual bombings and shootings to which both Pakistan and India were about to be subjected. In effect, both ‘accidents’ lent a grim perspective to that catalogue of conflicts that characterised turn-of-the-century South Asia.
The population of India was now nearing the 1 billion mark, with those of Pakistan and Bangladesh each soaring towards 150 million. More people meant more potential victims. As the Kalashnikov replaced the tribal jezail, as the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) gave every sniper a tank-busting potential and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could seemingly be assembled at will, the scale of outrage could only escalate. Yet the headline-grabbing body-counts were, if possible, less shocking than the extreme brutality that accompanied all these conflicts. Mutilation, rape, human incineration and the butchery of infants were widely logged and again stoked memories of Partition. An avowedly benign Islam, no less than a supposedly inclusive secularism, seemed incapable of restraining the violence or resolving the conflicts. The police were neither impartial nor effective, the military were among the worst offenders, the administrative services were hopelessly politicised and the governments, when not actually complicit, were often ambivalent. The state itself was compromised. Any national consensus, whether that projected by Jinnah or forged by Nehru, seemed to have atrophied.
Violence as between different sects, castes, linguistic communities, ethnic groups and ideological persuasions had been endemic long before Partition and had, if anything, escalated. In India orthodox Sikhs (with Bhindranwale to the fore) had hounded Nirankari Sikhs much as, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, orthodox Muslims had hounded Ahmedi (Ahmaddiya) Muslims. Condemned as heretics by their own government, most Pakistani Ahmedis had by the late 1980s been driven to emigrate to the West. Among Muslims in general the Sunni habitually antagonised the Shi’i, and among non-Muslims in general – Christians and Sikhs as well as Hindus – the caste-conscious habitually oppressed the casteless. In Karachi, Urdu-speaking mohajirs fought with both Sindhi-speaking natives and Pushtu-speaking incomers. In Bombay, Marathi-speaking Hindus of the Shiv Sena (‘Shivaji’s Army’ as well as ‘Shiva’s Army’) managed to provoke just about everyone. For each well-publicised celebration of communal harmony there were hushed whispers of another eruption of particularist sentiment, often in the back of beyond. Caste warfare ran riot in Bihar; Maoist revolutionaries (Naxalites) terrorised other parts of eastern India; and just as refugees from Afghanistan swamped the borderlands of Pakistan, economic migrants from Nepal and Bangladesh destabilised the Indian borderlands. Pakistan’s ‘tribals’ – they being the mostly Pathan clans of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the north-west frontier – were a law, or lack of it, unto themselves. India’s ‘tribals’ – they being the adivasi (‘aboriginal’) peoples of the forests and hills – were being harried into an equally truculent resistance by speculators and proselytisers. The ‘Million Mutinies Now’ of V. S. Naipaul’s book were certainly no novelty; but neither were they a preposterous exaggeration.
As ever, underlying all these conflicts was competition for scarce resources, especially land and water, for jobs and for educational places, along with expectations of an end to various forms of discrimination. From the late 1970s another way of escaping penury and prejudice offered itself in the form of overseas employment. This was nothing new either. Bonded migrant labourers had been leaving South Asia ever since the mid-nineteenth century. Many had never returned, their descendants forming the nuclei of the substantial ‘Indian’ communities of East and South Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji and South-East Asia. In the aftermath of Partition another exodus, principally to the UK and North America, had lasted well into the 1960s, and again, though some had returned, many had not. All, however, had invariably remitted home any savings they could spare, so galvanising otherwise neglected local economies and providing an unexpected facelift in districts like Mirpur (in Azad Kashmir) and Sylhet (in north-east Bangladesh) from which mid-century migration had been substantial.
The latest exodus was an unforeseen bonus of the 1970s hike in oil prices. It was on a much bigger scale, was directed almost exclusively towards the now cash-rich Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) and was governed by fixed-term contracts, so precluding permanent settlement. Families did not follow their migrant menfolk, and remittances did not tail off as tended to happen with second-generation settlers. On the contrary, the constant turnover of labour meant that the pool of recruits spread ever wider and the flow of remittances ever further. Given the religious complexion of the Gulf, the takeup was greater among Muslims than non-Muslims. Pakistan and Bangladesh were thus prime beneficiaries, but with Kerala, Gujarat and other parts of India participating on a scale to justify regular direct flights between, for example, Trivandrum and Dubai.
What all this was worth in economic terms remained largely a mystery until early in the twenty-first century American and international agencies began to monitor the flow of remittances as part of ‘the war on terror’. According to the World Bank, the transfer of funds to South Asia from migrant workers worldwide was running at $20 billion per annum in 2000 and had by 2008 risen to a colossal $75 billion per annum. In 2009 ‘India alone got $52 billion from its diaspora, more than it took in foreign direct investment’ – and this at a time when its economy was out-perfoming (and out-attracting) most others.1 Unlike international aid, the migrants’ money orders bypassed governmental and non-governmental agencies, so reaching their intended recipients more or less intact. If the cash was then mostly blown on consumer durables, nuptial extravaganzas and land purchases, it at least served to boost domestic demand, alleviate national shortages of hard currency and relieve the indebtedness and hardship of innumerable unsung lives.
The new migration experience, like the traditonal haj, also tended to excite expectations of change and spiritual renewal, in this case among a menial and marginalised class of labourers with no previous exposure to international Islam. In a globalised world ideas, like cash, transferred easily but were hard to quantify. It was assumed that the inflow of so-called ‘knowledge transfers and social and political remittances’ was on a comparable scale to that in money orders. The migrant phenomenon was therefore seen as a contributory factor in the contemporary assertion throughout South Asia of the more legalistic and politically intrusive traditions of Sunni Arab Islam. The growing prominence of indigenous reformist and ‘fundamentalist’ movements, the proliferation and popularity of Quranic madrassahs, the construction of gleaming new mosques and the multiplicity of Islamic political parties were accounted a by-product of the new diaspora. So was the considerable foreign, often Saudi, investment required for all these enterprises.
The implications were not lost on politicians. In India vigilant Hindu activists detected an Islamic conspiracy. The conspiracy, which was supposedly aimed at politicising Indian Muslims, attracting converts and promoting foreign – that is, Pakistani – designs on the integrity of the nation, seemed to have seduced even Rajiv Gandhi when in 1985 his Congress government intervened in an excruciatingly convoluted affair known as the Shah Bano case. Basically the Supreme Court had just rejected the plea of a male Muslim divorcee against a lesser court’s ruling that he must indefinitely support his seventy-five-year-old ex-wife, the eponymous Shah Bano. Muslim law required that he pay only three months’ maintenance but the Indian criminal code required that he pay up as long her circumstances required. In favouring the Indian code, the Supreme Court raised the thorny issue of whether constitutional safeguards in respect of Muslim personal law still applied, or whether, as the constitution intended, they might now be overridden by the uniform criminal code. Naturally most Muslims took the former view. They saw the Court’s judgment as an assault on Islamic jurisprudence and a gratuitous swipe at the submissive conduct expected of Muslim women. Shah Bano was duly vilified by her community and eventually driven to award her husband’s stipend of 180 rupees a month (about £4 or $6) to a charity.
More progressive Muslims, however, welcomed the Supreme Court’s judgment as a chance to remove an embarrassing and Quranically suspect anomaly; and so too, of course, did most Hindus and all those concerned with women’s rights. Thus when the issue came before parliament, while a Muslim MP made the case in favour of Islamic practice, a Muslim minister made the case against it. The minister won, having the backing of Rajiv Gandhi and the massive majority he had secured in the post-Indira elections. But there then followed a string of poor by-election results that prompted Rajiv to think again. Under Nehru and Indira the Congress party’s electoral accounting had required the Muslim vote; evidently it still did. So a government that had just upheld the Supreme Court’s decision quickly introduced a bill that effectively reversed it. The bill was passed in 1986, leading to howls of protest from all quarters save those of conservative Muslims. Rajiv’s reputation as a peacemaker – won in brokering accords in Kashmir and Assam as well as Panjab – was shattered, his political honeymoon over. Meanwhile, buoyed by accusations of the government’s capitulation to a ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ conspiracy, the star of Hindu zealotry soared impressively under the direction of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
JIHAD, THE FRANCHISE
For evidence of a resurgent Islam, Indians were invited to look no further than Pakistan and Bangladesh. In both countries the military rulers who had ended the populist extravagances of Bhutto and Mujib had since shed any pretence of secularism to accord greater prominence to Islamic values and interests. After much Pakistani indecision on the matter, by 1987 both states called themselves Islamic Republics and spattered their official discourse with pious phrases for the edification of reformist clerics and orthodox ulema.To generals badly in need of legitimacy, the approval of Muslim ideologues was the next best thing to electoral endorsement. Zia-ur-Rahman in Bangladesh had even extended an amnesty to the leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, an ultra-religious party compromised by its links to Pakistan, its opposition to Mujib’s breakaway and so its ambiguity over the very existence of Bangladesh. More fatefully Zia-ur-Rahman had also awarded pardons and political sinecures to his predecessor’s military killers, a move that launched his, and then his widow Khaleda’s, new Bangladesh National Party (BNP) on a permanent collision course with the Awami League of the murdered Mujib, and now of his daughter Hasina. Thus a clemency that Zia billed as in the interests of national unity proved exactly the opposite. Thirty years later Bangladeshi politics remained polarised as between the BNP and the Awami League with the main bone of contention still being whether or not to try Mujib’s killers. Moreover whatever Zia-ur-Rahman’s clemency had been meant to achieve, it had been ill requited in that he too was assassinated by military mutineers in 1981.
The succession-by-coup of General Husain Mohamed Ershad as Bangladesh’s new chief martial-law administrator (1982) and then president (1983) changed very little. Like Zia, Ershad veered away from the socialist policies and the pro-India stance of Mujib to cultivate better relations with the US, the Islamic world and potential foreign donors. With education a high priority, Muslim madrassahs continued to multiply, Islamic studies were incorporated into the state school curricula and in 1988 a constitutional amendment declared Islam the official state religion. Thanks to such initiatives, literacy in Bangladesh, among women as well as men, forged ahead of that in both India and Pakistan, while the birth-rate fell behind. Reduced fertility and wider literacy were revealed as by no means incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy.
The shift towards an Islamicised society and an Islamic definition of the state had been even more pronounced in Pakistan, though less obviously beneficial. There, according to one authority, Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime ‘wanted to set Pakistan “straight”, or as Zia used to say, correct the politicians’ qibla, or direction of prayer’.2 Following the loss of Bangladesh, Bhutto had reoriented the state towards the Islamic world; Zia-ul-Haq now finessed this position by narrowing its focus to Mecca. Besides encouraging religious schooling as in Bangladesh, he set out to reform society as a whole in accordance with what he took to be Islamic principle and law. Just as government was best served by the military, so the governed would be best served by Islam. The sale of alcohol was banned, public performances required a licence, donations to religious charities became obligatory, a Quranic financial system was announced and, most notoriously, sharia law was introduced, albeit on a limited basis. Provided the evidence conformed to the rather elevated standards of proof required by the sharia, religious courts were obliged to convict in accord with archaic notions of criminality, then mete out the draconian and gender-repugnant penalties – including floggings, stonings and amputations – appropriate to the Middle Ages.
Few doubted Zia’s sincerity in all this. In realigning Pakistani society with that of its Muslim neighbours, and in re-envisaging the nation as an impregnable bastion of West Asian Islam rather than as a battered relic of Muslim rule in India, he drew on personal conviction, as well as on his experience of secondment to the staff of King Hussein of Jordan in the early 1970s. Hussein had successfully reconciled pro-Western policies with Islamic orthodoxy; so could Zia. Personally devout, if politically devious, ‘[Zia’s] working assumption was that an Islamic state had to be preceded by an “Islamised” citizenry’ – with Zia himself setting the example.3 Unlike Yahya and Bhutto, he never drank; unlike Ershad and Bhutto, he was no philanderer. Whereas Bhutto had turned to Islam and cosied up to the Jamaat-i-Islami only when his regime was under threat, Zia had done so from the start and only regretted it later. King Hussein himself had eventually turned on his Palestinian jihadist guests and driven them from Jordan in the ‘Black September’ of 1970. Just so, when the doctrinaire Jamaat-i-Islami baulked at Zia’s gradualism, the general had no compunction in performing an about-turn, rebuffing the Islamist intellectuals and turning to a rival Jamaat (‘Muslim party’) dominated by the more conservative ulema.
Oddly the country to which Pakistan was most commonly likened was not in fact Jordan but Israel. Pakistan and Israel were unique in being twentieth-century nation-states predicated solely on the basis of religion. Additionally both had been wrenched from British rule in 1947, had opted for a territorial sovereignty that entailed partition, had struggled to assimilate substantial numbers of immigrants and had had to contend with ultra-conservative minorities. Both, too, had survived three major wars with powerful neighbours; both had seen fit to develop a nuclear capacity (though both had long denied it); and both had habitually aligned themselves with the US.
More controversially, Pakistan was still being credited with ‘the dynamism and insecurity of an Israel’ as late as 1987. According to a staff writer on The Economist, Pakistan’s evident vitality at the time contrasted favourably with India’s ‘hopeless poverty of lethargic, underfed people’. Pakistanis were mostly bigger and healthier; they had more colour TVs and cars per 1000 people; and in real terms the growth rate of their economy had for years been double that of India. As a result, ‘prosperity is now visible in even the poorest areas’ – which weren’t slums, according to The Economist, just ‘areas called slums’.
Yet the political insecurity implied by years of authoritarian rule and all manner of social conflicts was as acute as ever. However ‘dynamic’, Pakistan seemed ‘stuck in a crisis-ridden adolescence’. Compared to the chaotic state takeovers of Bhutto’s ‘Islamic socialism’, the ‘Islamic capitalism’ preferred by Zia went down well enough with The Economist. As under Ayub, military rule did wonders for the balance of payments. But the results were a credit less to indigenous investment and enterprise than to extraneous windfalls. Migrant workers’ remittances, mostly from the Gulf, were already being put at $2.9 billion a year, with US aid at around $300 million a year and the profits from the illicit trade in heroin at ‘incalculable millions’.4
Both the migrant phenomenon and Zia’s Islamising policies pre-dated the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. It was therefore somewhat fortuitous that the role suddenly assigned to Islamabad in the Afghan conflict chimed so well with the heavily amplified muezzins already coming from Pakistan’s mushrooming minarets. On the face of it, Zia’s willingness to resume the responsibilities of a front-line state in the US containment of communism was a reprise of Ayub’s role. As Washington saw it, Soviet access to the Indian Ocean had to be blocked and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan challenged. Only Pakistan could deliver on both counts. Its Baluchistan province barred the path to the Arabian Sea, its military were accustomed to American weaponry, its Islamic credentials would defuse international criticism and its madrassahs teemed with motivated Muslim youths keen to support the Afghan jihad against the godless invader. The Pakistani army would not itself be expected to take the field, merely to act as a conduit and facilitator; and in return for reviving the Great Game of stirring up trouble across the north-west frontier, it would receive massive US arms shipments, financial aid and logistical support, plus some latitude in respect of its nuclear programme. Even a civilian government would have found it hard to resist such terms. Neither M. K. Junejo (Zia’s prime minister) nor Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif (their own prime ministers to the extent that they were freely elected) would cancel the arrangement.
Moreover, like New Delhi at the time of the birth of Bangladesh, Islamabad had reasons of its own for engaging in Afghanistan. The influx of refugees from the Afghan conflict, which by 1989 topped 3 million, placed an intolerable social burden on the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Baluchistan and, after some resettlement, Panjab. As well as the need for an internationally aided relief operation, the refugees brought to an already fiercely competitive labour market a contentious expertise in transport, opiates and firearms. A ‘Kalashnikov culture’ quickly overran cities like Peshawar and Karachi, further eroding the authority of the state. Clearly, enabling the refugees to return was in everyone’s best interests; and like Indira Gandhi in 1971, Zia was not above stressing this humanitarian consideration as reason to back the jihad against the Soviets.
But nor were he and his military colleagues innocent of wider designs. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had proposed that the security of a Bengal-less Pakistan would best be served by a strategic realignment aimed at ‘defence in depth’. What Bhutto seems to have had in mind was a bulking up of Pakistan’s slender northern neck through alliances with central Asian neighbours and through the exercise of influence or authority in Afghanistan; that country could then serve as a possible redoubt in the event of an Indian invasion of Pakistan as well as affording some compensation for the loss of Bangladesh. The Soviet occupation elevated this exciting prospect into a veritable imperative. Reclaiming Afghan Islam from its new communist rulers qualified for the sanction of a jihad, and it also offered the satisfaction of a proxy war against India. Mrs Gandhi had conspicuously declined to condemn the Soviet occupation and had been rewarded with increased diplomatic, economic and intelligence access in Kabul; briefly Pakistan’s ‘defence in depth’ had looked to have invited encirclement. But the Afghan jihad held out the promise of reversing this situation and so confounding New Delhi as much as Moscow. It would also demonstrate how, in the new religious climate, Sunni Muslim identity transcended national sovereignties and territorial boundaries. India would in future be dealing not with a peripheral sliver of the erstwhile raj but with a key component of the Islamic world. In effect ‘defence in depth’ was to be realised as ‘defence in Islam’.
An additional consideration was that the long-standing demand by the NWFP’s Pushtu-speaking Pathans for an independent Pushtunistan might be blunted by the Afghan adventure and even turned to good account. Pathans straddled the long north-west frontier whose demarcation (as per the British-drawn ‘Durand Line’) Afghanistan had generally declined to recognise. But the prospect of Pushtu/Pathan reunification in the name of a universalist Islam could be expected to turn old foes on both sides of the frontier into eager activists. In short, the ‘a’ in the ‘Pakistan’ acronym that had been meant for a somewhat vague ‘Afghania’ might finally be realised.
According to the most perceptive account of modern Pakistan, the great achievement of Zia’s decade lay not in its patchy record of corporate privatisation but in its ‘privatising the concept of jihad’.5 The twin tasks of Islamising society and providing motivated manpower for the Afghan jihad were seen as complementary, yet also as probably beyond the capacity of the state and possibly injurious to the efficiency of the army. It was convenient, therefore, ‘to sub-contract them out’ to the numerous Muslim ideologues and institutions already empowered by Zia’s Islamising policies and increasingly fronted by their own political parties and fielding their own privately trained militias. In cities like Karachi sectarian assaults by these vigilante enforcers, especially on the minority Shi’ah community, escalated in the late 1980s and added a further dimension to the mainly ethnic strife between Sindhis, mohajirs, Afghans and Pathans. The twice-elected but short-lived governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in the 1990s, no less than Zia’s regime itself, ended amid widespread bloodshed and a near breakdown of law and order. Herein lay a pretext not only for the dismissal of incumbent governments but for the reimposition of military rule. In 1999 General Pervez Musharraf duly availed himself of it.
From the maelstrom of jihadist fervour released by the combination of Zia’s Islamisation and Washington’s indiscriminate support for the struggle in Afghanistan, there also emerged the bewildering array of jihadist lashkar (‘levies’) and hisb (‘parties’) that actually fought in Afghanistan and that then, after the Soviet retreat in 1989, continued to fight among themselves while more notoriously extending their activities to Kashmir, Pakistan itself, India and the wider world. Encouraged and initially directed by Pakistan’s pro-Islamist intelligence services, they included mainstream groupings like Hisb-ul-Mujahidin of the Jamaat-i-Islami; state-sponsored mavericks like the Lashkar-i-Taiba of a religious foundation based near Lahore; and assorted recruitment and training centres attached to radical foundations like the Red Mosque in Islamabad. By 2000 the Hisb-ul-Mujahidin would be the most active of the many terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. In 2007 the Red Mosque would be a scene of carnage when the Musharraf regime stormed the premises in a bid to contain its vigilante activities. And a year later it would be the Lashkar-i-Taiba who stood accused of the carnage in Bombay when mujahidin rampaged through that city targeting prestige venues like the Taj Hotel.
Most of these groups attracted funds and fighters from outside South Asia, especially after 1989 when the role of the US and the Western powers came to be perceived in a new light. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, quickly followed by the collapse of the communist bloc, had ended US interest in the Afghan conflict. Six years of civil war ensued in which the Afghan contenders were left to their own devices, plus such logistical support as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) saw fit to render and such financial assistance as could be obtained from elsewhere in the Muslim world. Meanwhile the mujahidin’s former Western sponsors were exposed not as sympathetic onlookers but as rank traitors. The 1990-1 UN action over Kuwait and the ongoing sense of outrage over Israeli actions in Palestine and a US military presence in the Arabian peninsula brought to Muslim minds all the horrors of the crusades and the perfidy of the post-First World War carve-up of the Middle East. The West, as politically treacherous as it was morally corrupt, was revealed in its true colours as the inveterate enemy of Islam.
In Pakistan, those Afghan Pathans who had been raised in the sprawling refugee camps of the NWFP and schooled in their rough-and-ready madrassahs were encouraged to blame their plight on the US betrayal and a new world order that was one-sidedly Western. Responding to this perception, they stressed the redemptive powers of a puritanical Islam when launching a movement known simply as the Taliban. Taliban being Muslim ‘students’ (as opposed to the ulema of ‘scholars’), the movement had little time for the niceties of Quranic exegesis or the bickering of Muslim divines. Untainted by involvement in Washington’s proxy Afghan war in the 1980s, and committed to restoring an Islamic peace in that country, albeit of the harshest hue, the Taliban entered the Afghan fray apparently with the support of Pakistan’s alternating prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and of the ISI.
By 1996 the Taliban had surpassed all expectations, marginalising Afghanistan’s warring mullahs and chiefs and overrunning much of the country. Success bred confidence and attracted support from all quarters. Even US President Clinton warmed to the Taliban’s achievement.6 But others now saw jihad as something of a Taliban franchise, indeed a franchise that had served so well against one superpower that it might be the key to humbling the other. Radicalised Muslims from the repressive regimes of the Middle East and the ghettos of Europe and North America converged on the pious safe-haven of Afghanistan. From there, trained while guests of the Taliban, a network of terror-merchants fronted and funded by Usama bin Laden masterminded the series of sensational attacks across three continents that included the 11 September 2001 outrages in New York and Washington.
Suddenly, and for the third time in half a century, the West discovered an urgent new need to re-engage in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had to be hunted down and his Taliban hosts acquainted with regime change. The US relationship with Pakistan was therefore reactivated and an arms embargo that had been imposed following Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests was lifted. This time Washington put its own troops on the ground as the NATO-led invaders took the major Afghan cities and rampaged through the countryside in search of bin Laden and his virtual al-Qaeda.
The Taliban and their guest-terrorists scattered but regrouped, overwhelmingly in the badlands along the frontier and within the adjacent Federally Administered – or mostly unadministered – Tribal Areas of Pakistan’s NWFP. NATO intrusions into the latter merely discredited Pakistan’s rulers, military and civilian, encouraged the mujahidin to strike deeper into Pakistan territory and won them some patriotic sympathy from otherwise fearful civilians. The effects became apparent from 2007 onwards as a so-called Pakistani Taliban occupied vast areas of Buner, Swat, Waziristan and other districts in the NWFP. Inevitably the Pakistani army was cajoled by its American allies into a reluctant engagement with these former friends. More sensationally the Taliban responded by attacking high-profile targets throughout Pakistan in one of the bloodiest and most sustained terrorist offensives ever mounted.
In sum, seldom can a policy aimed at influencing a neighbouring state have backfired so catastrophically. An early victim of the atrocities was Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in December 2007 while campaigning for the 2008 elections that ended Musharraf’s eight-year rule. Martyred Bhuttos being one of the PPP’s greatest electoral assets, the party won the poll and then chose her widowed husband, Azif Ali Zardari, as her replacement. Politically inexperienced and heavily implicated (even by Pakistani standards) in corruption, Zardari inherited less a country than an existential crisis. The succession of governments, the coming and going of the military and the chronic state of the economy – all now paled into insignificance as the bombers struck and the carnage soared. Nowhere in the country, from the bustees of Karachi to the headquarters of the military and ISI, was safe. Innocent lives, often a hundred a day, each of them worthy of history’s regard, lay spent among the cartridge cases or shredded by the shrapnel. A nation confronted its nemesis.
DEMOLITION WORK
Observing events from across the border, Indians could perhaps be excused for indulging in that malicious enjoyment of another’s misfortunes known as Schadenfreude. While Pakistan was being bombed and burned, ‘lethargic, underfed’ India, though itself beset by countless insurgencies and a major identity crisis, was somehow being reincarnated as a potential superpower. Pakistanis, of course, saw these developments as connected. They suspected all manner of unholy but well-funded alliances between RAW, the Indian intelligence service, and their own dissident elements – Sindhis, Baluchis and mohajirs as well the mainly Pathan mujahidin. They also noted New Delhi’s close relations with the NATO-backed Karzai government in Kabul. A 2005 Indo-US agreement to exchange civil nuclear technology heightened Pakistan’s sense of international isolation, while the growing presence in Afghanistan of Indian counsellors, technocrats and corporate investors revived the spectre of encirclement. Bhutto’s ‘defence in depth’ had become a sick joke, Zia’s ‘defence in Islam’ likewise.
Though little acknowledged in Delhi, there were, however, other grounds for supposing that developments in India had contributed to the crisis in Pakistan. For just as most Indians liked to imagine that Pakistan was finally paying for the presumption of Partition, most Pakistanis detected confirmation of the fear that had led to Partition in the first place – namely that an independent India would degenerate into a ‘Hindu raj’ with Muslims there becoming second-class citizens. This perception owed everything to the sensational rise in India’s political firmament of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), together with the outrages and atrocities that accompanied it and an Indian military offensive in Kashmir that was partly informed by it.
Back in 1988 the prospects for Indo-Pak bilateral relations had seldom looked brighter. In Rajiv Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and Dr Farooq Abdullah (son of Sheikh Abdullah, the ‘Lion of Kashmir’) a new generation of more photogenic leaders approached the Kashmir conundrum minus all the hardline baggage of their parents and at the head of comfortable majorities in their respective national and state assemblies. Their relations were cordial and their first exchanges promising. Only the timing was wrong. In Kashmir the recent victory of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference/Congress coalition in the state elections had benefited from outrageous vote-rigging and been hotly challenged by the opposition Muslim United Front. Failing to win redress, and so despairing of Indian democracy, some of the Front’s more militant supporters had then crossed into Pakistan in search of arms and support for the campaign of terror that began the following year.
Meanwhile in India, the nation was being held hostage by its television sets. In 1987 the state broadcaster had begun relaying a lavishly dramatised serialisation of the Ramayana. Broadcast of a Sunday, it ran to seventy-two episodes, lasted a year and a half and was watched by an unprecedented 80 million viewers. Cities fell silent, lunch went uncooked and markets were deserted as each screening took on the sanctity of an act of worship. Sets were garlanded for the occasion; sales and rentals rocketed. India was discovering not just the joys of family viewing but the excitement of a wider, more contentious identity. Muslims viewers were said to be equally entranced, but among those who thought of themselves as Hindus this TV rendering of an epic of uncertain provenance, many recensions and questionable historicity acquired near-canonical status. More scripture than catechism, it served to define Hindu values and instil a sense of India as one great Ram-worshipping Hindu congregation. Ram himself was elevated above other avatars of Lord Vishnu, and attention then turned to such snippets as tradition preserved of his possible place in history.
Ayodhya in UP is mentioned as the site of his capital; and there, according to a later local tradition, beneath a Mughal mosque built on the orders of Babur to celebrate the Muslim triumph over India’s idolators, lay the actual ground (the Ramjanmabhumi or ‘Ram’s-life-giving-earth’) where Lord Ram had been born. A small and suspiciously recent image of the baby Ram within the Baburi (or Babri) mosque marked the spot. But the mosque was locked and no longer in use, preventing access to this shrine. Then in 1986, at the behest of a World Hindu Council (VHP) demanding Lord Ram be liberated from his ‘Muslim gaol’, the locks had been opened. Coming hard on the heels of the Shah Bano decision placating Muslim orthodoxy, it looked as if Rajiv Gandhi’s government now sought to placate Hindu radicalism. Primed by this success and emboldened by the impact of the TV series, the VHP and its affiliates (including the paramilitary RSS and the vote-hungry BJP) scented a once-in-a-century opportunity.
The BJP, a reincarnation of the post-Independence Jan Sangh and the pre-Independence Mahasabha, had seldom won more than a handful of seats in a national election. But in 1989 its tally shot up to 86 with 11 per cent of the vote, in 1991 to 120 with 20 per cent of the vote, and by the late 1990s it had increased to 25 per cent of the vote and enough seats to head a coalition government in New Delhi. The agitation over the Babri mosque was the making of the party. For though the VHP led the cry for the mosque to be replaced with a gleaming new temple, it was the BJP’s leaders, especially L. K. Advani and A. B. Vajpayee, who capitalised on the issue.
In the run-up to the 1989 elections, BJP men were prominent in a campaign to fund and consecrate bricks from all over north India for the construction of the proposed temple. The ‘bring-a-brick’ ceremonies triggered serious Hindu-Muslim strife and massacres in Bihar, but they won the BJP support among TV-savvy middle-class voters thoughout the populous north. A year later, Advani upped the stakes by staging a rath yatra, a chariot procession, from Somnath in Gujarat (where a magnificent new temple had lately been built to replace that destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1025) to Delhi, Bihar and Ayodhya. The chariot, a Toyota utility van festooned in saffron and customised to resemble the prehistoric wagons seen on TV, wound its way amid massive crowds to Delhi. When the new government, a coalition National Front, failed to stop it, it continued on, leaving in its wake more riots and massacres. Advani was eventually arrested by the anti-BJP government in Bihar and the cavalcade itself was halted by its counterpart in UP. But enough fanatical ancillaries reached the Ayodhya site to give the security forces a tough battle and provide the movement with its first martyrs.
In December 1992 the BJP leaders headed for the Babri mosque yet again, this time to attend a foundation-laying ceremony for the proposed new temple. By now the VHP had acquired some adjacent land and had poured a certain amount of concrete, all in contravention of a standstill court order that UP’s new BJP government declined to enforce. Emboldened by the state government’s apparent sympathy and unimpressed by Delhi’s efforts to have the matter referred to the Supreme Court, 100,000 saffron-clad zealots turned up for the ceremony on 6 December. According to the BJP, things then got out of hand; according to a later inquiry, the BJP leaders had ensured that they would.7 The flag-waving mob scaled the mosque’s protective railings and then the mosque itself. Picks, sledgehammers and grappling irons materialised. As the mosque’s three Mughal domes came crashing down in a tableau worthy of Goya, the foundation-laying ceremony degenerated into a demolition spectacle. The state police had fled; 20,000 troops stationed near by were not even summoned. The wreckers rounded off their day by torching Muslim homes in the vicinity.
Courtesy of the media, the events in Ayodhya instantly excited such Hindu triumphalism and Muslim resentment that ‘communal rioting’ – a euphemism for sectarian atrocities – broke out right across northern and central India on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Muslims were more often the victims than the perpetrators. Of the 800 massacred in Bombay’s ‘riots’, two-thirds were Muslims. There and elsewhere Muslims would strike back, targeting the police and national institutions like the Stock Exchange and the metropolitan railway. But they risked a greater retaliation. The worst came in Gujarat in 2002 when a train carrying ‘pilgrims’ back from Ayodhya caught fire as it left Godhra station. The fire claimed fifty-eight lives, and because the passengers had used the halt to abuse local Muslim vendors it was assumed to be a case of retaliatory arson. The retribution that followed left less room for doubt. All over southern Gujarat death squads sallied forth to dispossess, maim, rape and murder Muslims. With a BJP government in power in Delhi and another in power in the state, the victims felt especiallly vulnerable. At least 2000 died horribly, with many more losing limbs, virginity, property and livelihoods. As in Delhi during the pogrom of Sikhs in 1984, officials reportedly aided the destruction by distributing electoral registers, the police had orders to make themselves scarce and government ministers took over control posts to orchestrate the attacks.
Eight years later, a bandannaed gunman in Bombay’s Taj Hotel was asked by one of his hostages why he was about to kill them all. He reportedly replied: ‘Have you not heard of Babri Masjid? Have you not heard of Godhra?’ Then he opened fire.
The demolition of the Babri mosque, the massacres that followed and the state’s complicity in them antagonised all South Asia’s Muslims, whether mujahidin or moderates, Sunni or Shi’i, Indian, Kashmiri, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Comparisons were again drawn with the dreadful events of Partition. But few paused to consider how the logic of the BJP’s demand for Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, merely mirrored that of Jinnah’s two-nations theory. BJP ideologues insisted that in the name of secularism the Indian state had been appeasing Muslim sentiment for too long; for India to realise its potential it needed to reject such policies and embrace and assert its overwhelming ‘Hinduness’; Muslims and Christians had dominated the country’s past by dividing and oppressing Hindus; it was time for the Hindu nation to reunite, rediscover its prior identity and its glorious heritage, and take pride in celebrating them; non-Hindus merited only suspicion and must accept a subordinate status. All of which, after juggling ‘India’ for ‘Pakistan’ and ‘Muslim’ for ‘Hindu’, could have come from the textbook of Jinnah’s Muslim League.
Liberal opinion in India was also horrified. In the English-language press the Babri affair was portrayed as the greatest ever threat to the state, worse even than Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency or the Chinese incursion. For as of 1992 India could no longer call itself a secular nation. The dark forces of sectarian conflict had been unleashed, the noble legacy of Gandhi and Nehru rejected. The state was irrevocably tainted with the bigotry it had so long decried. Intellectual and press freedom would suffer – and did – under the BJP’s chauvinist rule. And the political process that had brought that party to power seemed itself thereby discredited. One by one, the founding principles of the nation were falling. Socialism had died in the 1970s, secularism was expiring in the 1990s and democracy looked doomed by association.
But to Muslim minds secularism was just a red herring. They had no more time for it than did the BJP. To their way of thinking the main casualty of the Babri affair was not some suspect Western liberal value but Islam, their life-force and their identity. In the cities of Pakistan every anti-Muslim outrage in India brought thousands on to the streets and swelled the ranks of the jihadist lashkars. The mujahidin in Kashmir became national heroes. Outbidding one another in their promises of support, the civilian governments of Benazir and Sharif brazenly countenanced the despatch of Pakistani volunteers to stiffen the resolve of the Kashmiri ‘freedom-fighters’.
There, in Indian-held Kashmir, the liberationist movement prompted by the vote-rigging of 1987 and the 1989 dismissal of Farooq Abdullah’s government had taken both Delhi and Islamabad by surprise. Electoral malpractice had seemingly achieved what forty years of Pakistani prompting and Indian provocation had failed to elicit – a militarisation of the Kashmiris themselves. Self-determination was initially the goal, but in the early 1990s, as the BJP ramped up its rhetoric in India and jihadist lashkars in Afghanistan were redirected to Kashmir, the struggle turned increasingly sectarian. The liberation movement was subsumed in a jihadist bloodbath. Mujahidin targeted the Valley’s Hindu minority, hundreds of whom were horribly massacred while most of the remainder were removed to safety. With the state now under President’s Rule, the exodus was organised by Kashmir’s controversial governor, a man associated with Sanjay Gandhi’s excesses during the 1975-7 Emergency who had been despatched to Kashmir in 1989 by a Delhi government that included the BJP and who would later himself join the BJP.
The impression that India was clearing the decks for action in Kashmir was heightened by the despatch of ever more troops. Following a Pakistani infiltration of the Line of Control near Kargil (between Srinagar and Leh) in 1999 – itself a test of whether Pakistan’s recently demonstrated nuclear capability was insurance against a disproportionate Indian response – the number of Indian troops in Kashmir approached half a million. The Valley was now clearly under military occupation, and if not technically a war zone was certainly a ‘dirty war’ zone. One of the main reasons for India’s claiming Kashmir in the first place – to demonstrate the secularist credentials of the Indian republic – had become as redundant as secularism itself. Hindu fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism were feeding off one another. ‘The two processes began independently, yet each legitimised and furthered the other.’8
In 2001 ‘Kashmiri terrorists’ mounted an attack on the state assembly in Srinagar, then followed it with an attempted suicide bombing of the Indian parliament in New Delhi. Neither succeeded, and the latter, a murky affair involving a one-time Indian informer, raised questions that have yet to be answered. Together they occasioned an eruption of national outrage, followed by warlike deployments along the Pakistan frontier that came to nothing. But perhaps it was the terrorists’ targets that were most instructive. Chosen for maximum impact, they yet hinted at an ongoing grudge against electoral mismanagement as much as the nation responsible. A year later the state elections in Kashmir went ahead regardless. Generally reckoned fair and well organised under the circumstances, they attracted a surprising 48 per cent of voters. Subsequent polls improved still further on this. Though the bombings and shootings continued, Kashmiris had clearly not given up on the democratic process.
Nor had the governments of India and Pakistan given up on improving their bilateral relationship. Despite war scares over Kargil in 1999, the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the terrorist rampage through Bombay in 2008, both governments fitfully pursued a normalisation of relations. Of all people it was Prime Minister Vajpayee of the first BJP-led government in Delhi who in 1999 epitomised the launch of these overtures with a well-publicised visit to Lahore to meet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. International pressure following the previous year’s nuclear tests played its part in the meeting; nothing substantial was achieved; and the Kargil incursion seemed to scupper further progress. But in 2001 Vajpayee welcomed a return visit, this time of Musharraf who had by then taken over as president of Pakistan. Again little was achieved. But later in the year the events of 9/11 and Washington’s re-engagement in Afghanistan revived what was now being called a ‘process’. Under American pressure to end Pakistan’s support of the mujahidin, Musharraf needed a face-saving quidproquo of talks on Kashmir; and Vajpayee, needing something to show for his previous efforts, was prepared to have one last go.
Thus direct dealings were resumed in 2004 at a heads-of-state meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC), a body set up in the days of Rajiv and of the Indian involvement in Sri Lanka that had led to his 1991 assassination. Political progress remained minimal. But the setting did encourage confidence-building agreements on cultural contacts, travel links, social concerns and anti-terrorism measures. Above all, the enormous potential of regional trade and economic development was recognised in a commitment to establish a South Asian Free Trade Area.
Expectations of what might yet become the world’s most populous trading group have still to be realised. On the other hand, the impact of globalisation and of India’s growing economic clout had at last entered the bilateral equation. Optimists hoped that Delhi’s new-found confidence promised an end to its obsession with Pakistan. Prosperity, whether feared or shared, could conceivably trump political intransigence; and, sixty years on, the conundrum that is Kashmir could yet be laid to rest by an Indian-led surge in cross-border trade, investment and collaboration. Pessimists might retort that with Pakistan looking ungovernable, Bangladesh looking submersible and both of them mired in post-military recriminations, the outlook for regional co-operation could scarcely be bleaker. Yet if recent history is anything to go by, all such forecasts merely invite contradiction. Expect the unexpected.
Though the great turnaround in India’s economic fortunes had become self-evident by the turn of the century, it had not been at all widely foreseen. Nor for that matter is it easily explained. The gradual deregulation of the economy and the enthusiasm with which the Indian private sector, both at home and abroad, embraced the opportunities of globalisation were undoubtedly critical. So too were India’s vast human resources; thanks to the industrialisation and language policies of the Nehru era, Midnight’s grandchildren outnumbered any other modestly remunerated but technically proficient English-speaking generation in the world. The West’s earlier outsourcing of its technology, economic thinking and favoured language had made possible India’s insourcing of the West’s service industries.
Necessity, too, played its part. By 1991 India’s financial deficit, accumulated over decades of state-run inefficiency, had threatened to bring the country to a standstill. The national debt topped $70 billion and foreign exchange reserves were sufficient for just two weeks. Narasimha Rao, the Congress prime minister who had just replaced Vajpayee, had little choice but to invite his chosen finance minister, Manmohan Singh, to embrace the market. Although Rajiv Gandhi, A. B. Vajpayee and others had got the engine of reform started, it was Rao and Singh who released the handbrake of state control and let private enterprise run riot.
Less obviously, a variety of social and political factors provided a context and climate in which the reforms could thrive. One such was a gradual restoration of the federalist principles enshrined in the original constitution. Rajiv Gandhi, though no great thinker, had concluded from the turmoil of his mother’s later years that government had become too interventionist. The people and their elected representatives had grown accustomed to looking to the state for every imaginable provision and facility. It was time they rediscovered their own potential through the exercise of private initiative, local endeavour and personal responsibility. In terms of the economy this had meant a first tentative simplification of the licensing raj with a reduction of tariffs, the freeing of some quotas and a little encouragement for private investment. At the grass-roots level it led to the revival of locally elected bodies that could be entrusted with community responsibilities, plus the funds to perform them. And at the constitutional level it led to a reining in of the central government’s propensity for interfering in the states.
The circumstances under which President’s Rule might be imposed were more closely defined, legislation was introduced to discourage elected representatives from changing their party allegiance whenever the inducements of office, cash or concessions directed, and efforts were made to provide state governments with a more equitable share of federal revenues. States run by governments that were of the same party as that in power in Delhi still tended to be better funded than others, and centre-state tensions were by no means reduced. But with post-electoral digvijayas like that conducted by Mrs Gandhi becoming a thing of the past, state governments enjoyed greater stability and generally responded by behaving more responsibly. Instead of pandering to New Delhi, they increasingly competed with one another to attract investment, improve infrastructure and, in the best cases, extend social provision.
These trends anticipated a wider decentralisation of the political process and encouraged a dramatic maturation of Indian democracy. Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide victory in 1984 would not be repeated. In fact the one-party domination by Congress became the exception rather than the rule as minority governments, multi-party coalitions and electoral fronts trooped through the corridors of power in Delhi. In some states Congress became an irrelevance, in others it survived through local alliances. Everywhere it was parties based on caste allegiance, sectarian sentiment and regional or linguistic solidarity that were in the ascendant. Instead of simply deciding between Congress or a non-Congress party of one’s choice, voters now encountered a great electoral bazaar stocking a political style to suit every identity. In reflecting the numerical balance of Indian society as well as its diversity, the bazaar naturally empowered those parties identified with the hitherto uncultivated masses that comprised the lower castes and the Dalits (Harijans, outcastes). This was especially evident in the great northern states of UP and Bihar where, by 2000, the votes of Dalits and Yadavs were consistently returning caste-based governments pledged, above all, to uplifting their own communities. As chief minister of UP, the formidable Ms Mayawati of the (Dalit) Bahujan Samaj Party ordained Dalit theme parks and festooned the state with statues of distinguished Dalits, herself among them.
Not everyone approved. A degeneration in standards of political conduct was widely remarked and often attributed to these new caste-based parties. Studying a 2004 analysis of the affidavits filed by elected MPs, Ram Guha reports that 35 per cent of the (Yadav) Rastriya Janata Dal members and 27 per cent of the (Dalit) Bahujan Samaj Party members confessed to having once faced criminal charges. The Congress party and the Hindu nationalist BJP fared slightly better with 17-20 per cent having faced criminal charges. Yet to judge by the assets and loans the latter saw fit to declare, members of these two mainstream parties had much stickier fingers. For a Congress member, assets of 31 million rupees were the average. ‘We may conclude’, says Guha, ‘that, while in power, the Congress and BJP have systematically milked the system.’9
With the Delhi parliament sitting for no more than seventy or eighty days a year and seldom well attended, it could be argued that a decline in the probity of its members and in the quality of debate scarcely mattered. Legislation was pre-approved behind closed doors, parliament’s job being simply to pass it. Getting elected was what mattered; and what with by-elections, state elections and local elections providing an almost continuous commentary on the political scene, the counting of ballots had become a constant of political life.
But by the same token India’s democracy could not be considered unresponsive. If it empowered the underprivileged and inducted the hitherto under-represented, then that surely was what democracy was all about. The exigencies and expenses of office, whether above-board or not, generally had a sobering effect. The chauvinism of the BJP had sent shivers down secular spines in the early 1990s, but in government the party, though obdurate in matters dear to its heart, proved far from irresponsible. Likewise Kashmir’s unimpeded participation in the electoral bazaar increased hopes for a solution to South Asia’s most intractable problem. In 2010, with elected governments once again in power in all the successor states of pre-Partition India, democracy looked far from doomed. Arguably its promise of a better tomorrow was never brighter.