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MAHATMA GANDHI’S ASSASSINATION cast a long shadow over the early years of India’s independence. The forces of communalism had struck the country at its most vulnerable moment. But Gandhi’s vision for a new India proved more resilient than the message of hatred his killers had used to justify their actions. Jawaharlal Nehru was a strong and charismatic leader. Backed by Congress, Asia’s largest and effective political organisation, he set about erecting the four pillars of the new Indian state: secularism, democracy, socialism and non-alignment.
The challenges faced by the new nation were extreme. Around eight million refugees had to be fed, housed and integrated into society. When India conducted the first post-independence census in 1951, the literacy rate was just 16 per cent. In rural areas, just 4.9 per cent of women could read and write. Life expectancy was thirty-two years, and 47 per cent of the rural population lived below the poverty line (the proportion would peak at 64 per cent in the mid-1950s). The British may have left India with an enviable network of railways and irrigation canals, but industry accounted for a mere 6.5 per cent of national income and employed less than 3 per cent of the labour force – a figure that had hardly changed since the beginning of the century. Out of 640,000 villages, just 1500 had access to electricity. For a population of 360 million in 1951, there were only 735 primary health clinics. India’s new leaders also faced the challenge of unifying a heterogenous society divided by language, religion, geography, ethnicity and, above all, caste: a hierarchical order that was opposed to the idea of political equality. In the northeast, Naga tribals had launched an armed insurrection demanding a separate homeland, and a communist insurgency had taken hold in the Deccan.
The immediate threats to India’s survival as a nation came from an unexpected quarter. Just prior to India’s independence, the rulers of 562 princely states were given the choice of joining India, throwing their lot in with Pakistan or remaining independent. Aside from those that found themselves within the borders of the new country of Pakistan, all but three acceded to the Indian Union. Of those that held out, the smallest was Junagadh, on the Kathiawar peninsula in western India. Its canine-obsessed Muslim prince Nawab Muhammad Mahabat Khan (1900–1959), who spent more than 10 per cent of the state’s income on the upkeep of the royal kennels, presided over an overwhelmingly Hindu population. On 15 August 1947, the nawab acceded to Pakistan. Threats of Indian military intervention and a popular insurrection by his Hindu subjects caused him to cut his losses. After handing over the administration of his state to India, he fled with four of his favourite hounds to Karachi. India’s annulment of Junagadh’s accession has never been recognised by Pakistan, which still shows the tiny state as part of its territory on official maps.
A much more serious crisis was brewing in Hyderabad, whose ruler, Nizam Osman Ali Khan (1886–1967), was considered the richest man in the world on account of his vast holdings of land and jewellery. As in Junagadh, the Nizam was a Muslim ruling over a majority-Hindu population. Encouraged by Islamic zealots known as Razakars, he declared Hyderabad’s independence, something the new Indian government was not prepared to countenance given the state’s strategic position, its size (roughly the same as France) and the precedent this would set. Despite the best efforts of Lord Mountbatten, who had remained in India as its first governor-general, Khan refused to back down. His patience exhausted, Nehru decided to settle the matter by force. An Indian army invasion made short work of Hyderabad’s poorly equipped forces, which surrendered on 18 September 1948. Jinnah, who died just a few days earlier, had predicted that a hundred million Muslims would rise up if Hyderabad was invaded. There was no uprising but ‘Operation Polo’, the code name for the Indian annexation, left thousands of civilians dead and unleashed a wave of reprisal attacks by Hindus against Muslims.
The state of Jammu and Kashmir presented the most complex conundrum. Its Hindu maharaja, Hari Singh (1895–1961), ruled over a heterogenous state that shared a border with the new dominions of India and Pakistan. The district of Jammu was predominantly Hindu, while Ladakh in the far east of the state was mainly Buddhist. Only the stunningly beautiful Kashmir valley had a Muslim-majority population. The Maharaja had toyed with the idea of independence as early as July 1946, harbouring dreams of making his state ‘the Switzerland of the East’ – independent and neutral. Unlike Junagadh and Hyderabad, the state had a well-organised opposition led by the charismatic Muslim politician Sheikh Abdullah (1905–1982). A close ally of Nehru, he wanted Kashmir to remain part of India.
Singh’s choices were stark. He detested Congress as much as it detested him. Joining India would see the end of his feudal autocracy. A similar fate awaited if he joined Pakistan. The question was settled when tribal militias, mainly Pathans from the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, started crossing into Kashmir on 22 October 1947. There is still no definitive answer, three-quarters of a century later, as to why they invaded and who was helping them. What is certain is that India was caught completely off-guard. When the invaders were just 80 kilometres from Srinagar, the Maharaja sent out an urgent plea for military assistance. Nehru agreed, but the price was Kashmir’s accession to India. Hari Singh had no choice but to comply. Within hours of signing the accession agreement, thousands of Indian troops were being airlifted to Srinagar. Having secured the capital, the troops proceeded to retake towns captured by the Pakistani irregulars. Although Kashmir had been saved, its future was still to be negotiated. And hostilities were not at an end. Fighting resumed in 1948 after the winter snows had melted, and better equipped Pakistan-supported forces made significant inroads in the north of the state.
By the time of a hastily brokered United Nations ceasefire in 1948, Pakistan was in possession of the mountains and valleys to the north of the Kashmir valley and to the west. The Line of Control became a de-facto frontier. Nehru agreed to a plebiscite that would allow the Kashmiri people to choose their own future, but this never took place. His failure to honour his promise turned Sheikh Abdullah against the prime minister. For the rest of his life, he would spend more time in jail for advocating separatist views than as a free man. Today, the disputed status of Kashmir remains the subcontinent’s most intractable and dangerous political problem.
THE BIRTH OF THE INDIAN REPUBLIC
Nehru’s commitment to secularism was unwavering. Writing in The Discovery of India, he insisted it was ‘entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture’. Guaranteeing the rights of minorities was a central tenant of India’s Constitution. Four years in the making, the Constitution came into effect on 26 January 1950, transforming India from a dominion with the British monarch as head of state into a full-fledged republic. The Constitution had 395 articles and eight schedules, making it the longest in the world. The chairman of the drafting committee was B.R. Ambedkar, the country’s first law minister and leader of the Untouchables. Supporters of Mahatma Gandhi had advocated a constitution based on locally elected village republics. At the other extreme were those arguing for an American-style presidential system. Both models were rejected in favour of a Westminster model, with a lower chamber, or Lok Sabha, elected on the basis of universal franchise, and an upper chamber, or Rajya Sabha, that acted as a house of review. Its members would be either appointed by the president or indirectly elected by members of the state legislature. A complex system of fiscal federalism governed the collection of taxes.
Disillusioned with the state’s failure to abolish untouchability, Ambedkar and thousands of Untouchables converted to Buddhism in a mass ceremony in 1956.
DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
India’s first national election was held in 1951. All citizens aged over twenty-one, at the time numbering over 170 million, had to be registered despite the lack of identity documents and the fact that 85 per cent could not read or write. Elections were to be held simultaneously for 489 seats in the Lok Sabha and another 4000 in provincial assemblies. The exercise required 56,000 presiding officers and 224,000 police to maintain security at 132,560 polling stations. Political parties were identified by myriad symbols. In Calcutta, stray cows were inscribed with slogans imploring people to vote for Congress – its symbol was two bullocks and a plough. Turnout was just under 46 per cent. Congress won by comfortably picking up 364 seats in the Lok Sabha and 45 per cent of the vote. The Communist Party of India, the main opposition, could only muster sixteen seats in parliament. By the 2019 general election, the total number of eligible voters (aged eighteen and over) had risen to 911 million. Voter turnout was 67 per cent, the highest ever, and the percentage of women voters was a record 68 per cent. There were just over one million polling stations, many with electronic voting machines. More than 2.25 million police and paramilitary officers provided security. The BJP won 303 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, while Congress was reduced to fifty-two seats. The total number of women candidates rose from 2.9 per cent in the 1957 elections to just under 8 per cent in 2019. With just sixty-six women in the Lok Sabha, India ranks 149th out of 193 countries by percentage of women representatives in parliament.
The Constitution enshrined the principles of the separation of powers, equality before the law, freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste or sex was prohibited. Article 17 abolished Untouchability. While it made no provision for reservations for Muslims or women, the Constitution recommended job quotas for government positions and university places, as well as reserved seats in state legislatures. Its most contentious aspect was the power it gave to the president to impose a state of emergency, suspend the Constitution and detain anyone perceived to be a threat to the security of the country. A quarter of a century later, Indira Gandhi (1917–1984) took advantage of these powers to trigger a state of national emergency that lasted for nearly two years. The president also has the power to suspend state legislature and impose direct rule from Delhi, a practice that would be used with increasing regularity from the 1980s onwards. Although equality was guaranteed by the Constitution, women fared poorly. Child marriage was common, divorce was difficult, and inheritance and property rights were severely limited, as was access to education.
‘THE HINDU RATE OF GROWTH’
Nehru’s economic mantra of self-reliance was socialist in its outlook and implementation. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927, he was euphoric, declaring, ‘If the future is full of hope, it is largely because of Soviet Russia and what it has done.’ The philosophy of Marxism, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘lightened up many a dark corner of my mind’. But he was under no illusion that socialism would not have to be adapted to Indian conditions. While the state would control the commanding heights of the economy, the private sector was allowed to invest in high-priority industries approved by the government. To create a society based on social justice, ceilings were placed on land ownership, and wealthy individuals and corporations were slugged with steep tax rates. The importation of foreign goods was heavily restricted.
Five-year plans set production targets and monitored the country’s economic progress. The goal was self-reliance in industry led by a state-controlled public sector that grew to be the world’s largest outside the communist bloc. Nehru’s ‘new temples of modern India’ consisted of massive steelworks, oil refineries, power stations, cement works and fertiliser plants. Huge dams were constructed with little regard for their environmental impact or the thousands of poor farmers they inevitably displaced. Highly protectionist tariff barriers that typically saw duties of 350 per cent ensured that obsolete, inefficient and shoddy products proliferated, the most recognisable of which was the Ambassador car.
Based on the Morris Oxford Series III, the Ambassador rolled off the production line from 1956 to 2014 with minimal modifications. According to one reviewer, it ‘had a steering mechanism with the subtlety of an oxcart, guzzled gas like a sheikh, shook like a guzzler, and yet enjoyed waiting lists of several years at all dealers’.
The Ambassador was manufactured by the Birla corporation, one of several high-profile, family-based companies that had risen to prominence under British rule, but now found themselves stymied by regulations. Even if Hindustan Motors, the Birla company that produced the Ambassador, wanted to improve its performance by adding something as basic as power steering, its managers would come up against a wall of bureaucratic hurdles that stifled innovation. All aspects of the manufacturing process, from hiring and firing to building new plants, were regulated by what became known as the ‘Licence Raj’. Foreign-exchange regulations made it nearly impossible to import new technology and equipment. Yet the Birlas could hardly complain. Protected from cheaper and better-made cars in East Asia by high tariff barriers, there was no competition. That left little incentive to improve their products or increase efficiency.
The same applied to the state sector. In the mid-1980s the Steel Authority of India employed 247,000 people to produce 6 million tonnes of steel, whereas it took only 10,000 South Korean workers to manufacture 14 million tonnes. Adding to the economy’s poor performance was lack of investment in ports, roads, railways, power generation and communications. In the first four decades following independence, India’s economy barely moved out of the much-maligned ‘Hindu rate of growth’ of around 3.5 per cent, or slightly ahead of an annual population growth rate of 2.5 per cent. During the same period Pakistan managed a 4 per cent economic growth rate, while South Korea hit 9 per cent. From a per capita income twice the size of India’s in 1947, South Korea’s grew to be twenty times larger in 1990.
The fourth main pillar of Nehru’s vision for the new India was non-alignment. Articulating the policy in 1947, he said that India would not choose the United States over the Soviet Union ‘in the hope that some crumbs might fall from their table’. With European decolonisation, Nehru saw India’s independence as part of an Asian resurgence. A non-aligned bloc could act as stabilising influence in an increasingly bipolar world. In 1955, Nehru played a leading role in the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which was attended by representatives from twenty-nine countries and is considered the beginnings of the Non-Aligned Movement. The following year, India concluded a friendship treaty with China based on the principle of non-interference in internal affairs, peaceful coexistence and territorial integrity.
But Sino-Indian friendship, or ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai’, came to a crushing end in 1962 when China inflicted a humiliating blow on its southern neighbour by seizing large chunks of territory of what is now the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, and laying claim to the disputed Aksai Chin region to the north of Ladakh. The earlier failure to demarcate the border between the two countries, and India’s embrace of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama when he fled Chinese oppression in 1959 with thousands of followers, had raised tensions between the two Asian giants. An ill-prepared Indian military was no match for the People’s Liberation Army. China’s unilateral withdrawal saved India further humiliation, but Nehru would never recover politically. Opposition parties stepped up their attacks on his leadership and his failure to read the early warning signs of Chinese aggression. Congress lost a string of by-elections and regional parties grew in strength.
Nehru’s death on 27 May 1964 triggered a brief power struggle within Congress that led to the selection of Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) as the new prime minister. Believing Shastri was a weak and ineffectual leader, Pakistan’s military dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan (1907–1974), decided India was vulnerable. Troops disguised as ‘civilian volunteers’ poured across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Kashmir, hoping to capture Srinagar and foment a pro-Pakistan uprising in the valley. Srinagar did not fall, and there was no uprising. Shastri responded by ordering the army to take Lahore. A humiliated Khan was forced to sue for peace. His standing forever tarnished, he was overthrown in a popular uprising two years later. For India, the defeat of Pakistan was a sublime moment, coming just three years after its own humiliation at the hands of China. But Shastri had little time to savour it. On 11 January 1966, he died of a heart attack in his sleep while attending a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tashkent.
This time the party’s president, K. Kamaraj (1903–1975), decided to back Nehru’s daughter, Indira, who had served as information and broadcasting minister in Shastri’s government. Kamaraj and his clique believed that this ‘dumb doll’, as they called her behind her back, could be easily influenced. They were wrong. From her father, Indira had learned the art of political manipulation. She also became a master of political survival. Her first hurdle was addressing the country’s dire economic situation, exacerbated by the fallout of the wars with China and Pakistan and a series of monsoon failures (i,e. the monsoon fell far short of its normal rainfall). India’s dependence on US food aid and an emergency IMF bailout to keep the economy afloat led her enemies to accuse her of selling India out to foreign interests. Despite clocking up more than 24,000 kilometres on the campaign trail and speaking at over 160 rallies, Indira failed to stem the rot that was eating away at her party. The 1967 polls saw Congress’s majority reduced to 283 out of 520 seats. The main beneficiaries of this decline were communist parties, with forty-two seats, and the far-right Jan Sangh, which picked up thirty-five, as well as regional groupings such as the Akali Dal in Punjab and the DMK in South India. The Nehru magic was fading.
Indira Gandhi became one of the world’s most powerful women, but her legacy was tarnished when she declared a state of emergency in 1975.
The election result also strengthened the hand of Indira’s main rival for prime minister, Morarji Desai (1896–1995), who had the backing of the party’s powerful provincial leaders, known as the Syndicate. Indira met the challenge by moving the party’s ideology sharply to the left, announcing a program of bank nationalisation and scrapping privy purses and other perks enjoyed by India’s erstwhile royals, a number of whom had gone into politics and won seats in the Lok Sabha on anti-Congress platforms.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Political dynasties have thrived in South Asia. In Sri Lanka, Sirimavo Bandaranaike (1916–2000) took over from her husband to become the first woman head of state in a democracy. Indira Gandhi in India would be the second. In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) stepped into the shoes of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979), after he was executed by the country’s military dictator. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina still dominates politics in the country her father founded. The roots of dynasticism in India go back to 1929, when Motilal Nehru made his son, Jawaharlal, Congress president. Jawaharlal repeated the exercise with his daughter Indira in 1959 (her surname came from her brief marriage to Feroze Gandhi, no relation to the Mahatma). Following her assassination in 1984, the baton passed to her son Rajiv (1944–1991). After his death in 1991, the party reached out to his Italian-born Roman Catholic wife, Sonia (b. 1946). She turned down the offer but went on to become Congress president. Her son Rahul (b. 1970) led the party to its humiliating defeats in the 2014 and 2019 elections.
Indira’s populist policies caused a split in Congress. In 1969 she turned on Desai and the Syndicate by forming a breakaway faction known as Congress (Requisitionists), taking the bulk of the party’s old guard with her. Internal party elections were abolished and loyalty became the sole qualification for electoral tickets for senior party positions in the centre and the states. The party’s transition from being a functioning political party to a Nehru family patrimony was complete.
Indira’s popularity was about to get a further boost. In 1970, elections were held in West and East Pakistan, ending decades of military rule. The vote highlighted the deep divisions between the country’s two wings. In East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s (1920–1975) Awami League rode to victory on a wave of discontent over the lack of resources being invested by the central government, and in March 1971 he made good his party’s election pledge by proclaiming Bangladeshi independence. Pakistan responded by sending tanks into the streets of Dhaka, triggering a civil war. Millions of refugees streamed into West Bengal. In December 1971, the Pakistani air force started shelling Indian airfields, providing India with an excuse to send its troops into East Pakistan. Pakistan responded by invading India’s western border. News that the US Seventh Fleet was heading to the Bay of Bengal raised hopes that America would intervene on the side of its ally, Pakistan. But it was too late. On 16 December, after a two-week war, India accepted the surrender of 93,000 Pakistani troops in East Pakistan. A ceasefire was ordered on the western front, where India had pushed back Pakistani forces and occupied some 13,000 square kilometres of territory. By unilaterally ending the war, Indira had restored India’s pride. The press likened her to Durgā, the tiger-riding Hindu goddess of war. After a millennium of humiliating defeats by Muslim invaders from the West, European colonisers and most recently the Chinese army, Indians could savour victory. Indira was at the height of her power and, according to a Gallup poll, the world’s most admired woman. Promising to end poverty, she called an election in March 1971. Her Congress (R) bounded back with 352 seats. The party’s other faction, Congress (O), could muster only sixteen. But the halcyon days were not meant to last.
Just two years after winning office, Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cut production and quadrupled the price of oil in retaliation for the Yom Kippur War. Heavily dependent on imported oil, India’s economy shuddered to a halt and inflation hit 33 per cent per annum. Her unrealistic campaign promise of abolishing poverty sounding increasingly hollow, Indira took the populist route, ordering a tightening of rules governing large businesses, which now needed permission to expand capacity, invest in new equipment or merge with other companies.
DARKNESS AT MIDNIGHT
In 1974, India successfully tested a nuclear device in the Thar Desert, making the country the world’s sixth nuclear-armed power. But if the intention was to win popular support, it failed miserably. As the country’s economic ills started to take centre stage, regional parties such as the Akali Dal and DMK, communists, far-right Hindu nationalists and her old foes in Congress started to rally around the veteran Gandhian socialist Jaya Prakash Narayan (1902–1979). Worse was to come. In June 1975, the Allahabad High Court ruled on a petition filed four years earlier and found her guilty of electoral malpractice, effectively annulling her election to parliament and barring her from standing for office for six years.
Instead of resigning, Indira forced a compliant president to proclaim a nationwide state of emergency starting at midnight on 26 June 1975. The Constitution was suspended, hundreds of opposition leaders were arrested, newspaper offices found their power cut off and organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were banned. Most estimates put the number of people detained without trial at around 110,000. Indira defended the state of emergency as being necessary to ‘save the country from disruption and collapse’. Rather than an abrogation of democracy, it was an ‘effort to safeguard it’, she insisted. The opposite was true. The Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth amendments to the Constitution that were rushed through parliament barred judicial review of the emergency and removed the Supreme Court’s right to challenge the election of a prime minister.
The most egregious excesses of the state of emergency were engineered by Indira’s son Sanjay (1946–1980), the leader of the youth wing of the party. Under Sanjay’s orders, slums were bulldozed and more than six million people, mostly men, were subjected to a campaign of forced sterilisation, fifteen times the number sterilised by the Nazis. Officials who didn’t meet their quotas found themselves sacked from their jobs or evicted from their government housing. The campaign set back voluntary family planning efforts by a decade.
In January 1977, Indira revoked the state of emergency just as abruptly and unexpectedly as it was called. Hubris, rather than any commitment to democracy, was behind the decision. She believed her victory in the upcoming national election was assured and her ruthless pattern of rule could continue under the cloak of democracy. The gamble backfired spectacularly. When the results of the election were announced, Congress had won just 154 seats, its worst performance to date. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, the party’s heartland, it lost in every constituency. Her old foe Morarji Desai became prime minister and leader of the Janata Party alliance.
As India’s first experiment in coalition government, the Janata alliance was an abject failure. Made up of parties representing socialists, right-wing groups and farmers, it had no common purpose and soon degenerated into infighting. In late 1979, two of its members who had been sacked by Desai brought down the government in a no-confidence motion. Fresh elections were called for January 1980.
Aged sixty-two and accompanied for the most part by Sanjay, Indira chalked up 64,000 kilometres in a gruelling campaign, addressing two rallies a day and reaching an estimated 100 million voters. In what would prove one of the most remarkable comebacks in Indian political history, she shook off the taint of the state of emergency and led Congress to a thumping victory, securing an outright majority of 351 in the 524-seat Lok Sabha. With his mother back in office, Sanjay was made Congress General Secretary, prompting speculation that he was being groomed to take over the prime ministership. But on 23 June 1980, shortly after taking off from Delhi’s Safdarjung Airport, his new stunt plane crashed, killing him and his co-pilot instantly. Distraught and lonely, Indira turned to her eldest son, Rajiv, a commercial airline pilot with no experience or interest in politics, to fill the breach. In 1981 he was elected to the Lok Sabha from the family’s traditional constituency of Amethi, in Uttar Pradesh.
During the final years of his life, Sanjay had been sponsoring Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947–1984), an itinerant Sikh preacher, to undercut the Akali Dal, the main opposition party in the Punjab. Congress feared that the Akali Dal’s demand for a Sikh state within the Indian union would encourage the Balkanisation of India by inspiring other ethno-religious groups to make similar demands. Indira’s response was to split Punjab along linguistic lines by creating the Hindi speaking-majority state of Haryana. Rather than pacifying the Akali Dal, the move encouraged hardline secessionists who wanted their own independent homeland.
Instead of being a Congress stooge, Bhindranwale developed a taste for power and became the champion of the demand for a puritanical Sikh state to be known as Khalistan. Inspired by his preachings, Sikh extremists turned against Hindus, murdering innocent civilians as well as members of the security services. Moderate members of the Akali Dal also found themselves targets of Bhindranwale’s henchmen. In May 1984, the Sikh preacher and hundreds of his followers barricaded themselves in Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Sikhdom’s holiest shrine, and began fortifying the sprawling complex with weapons. On 4 June, the Indian Army launched Operation Bluestar, sending tanks into the temple compound. After twenty-four hours of fighting, Bhindranwale was dead, as were some 500 Sikh extremists. The complex was badly damaged and many irreplaceable Sikh scriptures were destroyed.
Threats of reprisals against Indira followed swiftly, mostly from large Sikh communities in Britain, the United States and Canada. But when a proposal came to remove Sikh bodyguards from her security, she wrote ‘Aren’t we secular?’ on the file. On the morning of 31 October 1984, two Sikh officers who had been recently reinstated as her personal bodyguards shot her at point-blank range.
Within forty minutes of All India Radio’s announcement that Indira was dead, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister of the largest democracy in the world. His unpreparedness for the job was immediately apparent. Indira’s assassination unleashed the worst communal violence since partition as Hindus turned against Sikhs in cities across northern India. In most cases, the police either looked on and refused to intervene or disarmed Sikh-majority neighbourhoods to allow mobs to take revenge. Instead of going out into the streets to quell the rioters, some Congress Party leaders encouraged and led the mobs. The state-sponsored violence raged for three days, leaving up to 3000 Sikhs dead, property destroyed and trust shattered. It would take two weeks for Rajiv to finally acknowledge the bloodshed.
In the December 1984 elections, Congress secured 415 out of 543 seats – the largest mandate of any party in the Republic’s history. Asked by a journalist to explain why the party he led had won so convincingly, Rajiv responded, ‘Mainly because of my mother’s death … Nobody knew anything about me, so they’d projected on to me. I became the symbol of their hopes.’
THE COMING OF ‘MR CLEAN’
Courteous and self-effacing, Rajiv started public life as ‘Mr Clean’, but he lacked his mother’s aura. Keeping himself out of the public eye while living a life of privilege had removed him from the real India. One of his favourite slogans, ‘A computer in every school by the twenty-first century’, ignored the fact that the majority of villages were not even connected to electricity. Although he abolished licensing in around thirty industries, the economy barely exceeded the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Under his mother’s leadership, ‘briefcase politics’ – the paying of bribes by businessmen disguised as party donations to secure contracts and permission to operate – had become endemic. As Rajiv admitted on the 100th anniversary celebration of the Congress Party in December 1985, ‘Corruption is not only tolerated but even regarded as the hallmark of our leadership.’
Eighteen months later, his words came back to haunt him when Swedish media broke the news that massive kickbacks had been paid to Indian officials at the very top of the Congress government who were involved in the purchase of Bofors guns from Sweden. The scandal led to the stalling of the reform process. With one eye on the upcoming election, Rajiv turned to populist policies that had worked so well in the past – increasing taxes on luxury goods and introducing a rural employment guarantee scheme.
Despite winning a huge mandate in the 1984 election and kickstarting the economic reform process, Rajiv Gandhi would be remembered for undermining India’s secular fabric and failing to rein in corruption.
Rajiv’s failure to curb corruption was not the only stain on his administration. More far-reaching was his betrayal of India’s secular fabric. Nehru’s determination to introduce a common civil code had the backing of Ambedkar, but never saw the light of day because of opposition from India’s large Muslim minority. Legislation covering personal law in matters such as marriage secession, guardianship and alimony was finally introduced for all communities except Muslims in the mid-1950s. In 1985, Muslim traditionalists were infuriated by a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of divorcee Shah Bano Begum to claim maintenance beyond the three months specified by Islamic law. But instead of welcoming the court’s ruling, which in effect granted equality before the law to Muslim women, Rajiv bowed to hardliners who threatened to remove their community’s support for Congress and rushed through a bill that liberated Muslim men from paying maintenance.
The backdown strengthened the hand of Hindu nationalists, who now had a political force that could articulate their voices – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party was formed in 1980 as a repackaging of the Jana Sangh, the main post-independence right-wing grouping. In 1984 it won just two seats in the first election it contested, but the BJP was about to see its fortunes improve dramatically. In 1986, a local court approved a petition allowing Hindus to worship at the Babri Masjid (mosque), which was claimed to be the birthplace of the god Ram. When thousands of Muslims protesters took to the streets, Rajiv equivocated, leading the BJP to accuse Congress of using state-enforced secularism to appease Muslims. Stung by the accusations, Rajiv allowed Hindus to lay the foundations of a temple made from thousands of specially consecrated bricks brought from villages all over India inside the Babri Masjid compound.
By the time elections were called in 1989, India’s electoral landscape had changed irrevocably. Political formations based on caste in the north and language in the south began attracting substantial support. Meanwhile, religious nationalists stepped into the void left by Congress, pledging to heal Hindu pride by renewing their promise to build the Ram temple. The strategy worked. In the 1989 election, the BJP stormed in with eighty-five seats. Congress saw its majority more than halved.
With no party obtaining an outright majority, a National Front coalition led by the Janata Dal under Vishwanath Pratap Singh (1931–2008) took office. The BJP stayed out of government, preferring instead to support it from the outside. Dependent on the political allegiance he received from so-called ‘backward castes’, Singh decided to implement the Mandal Commission report. The report had been gathering dust for more than twenty years – its recommendation that 27 per cent of all government jobs be reserved for ‘backward’ castes, in addition to the 22.5 per cent reserved for ‘scheduled castes and tribes’, considered too controversial to touch. The prospect of being shut out of half of all government jobs sparked anger among middle and upper castes. Twelve people immolated themselves in protest, most of them students.
But it was the failure of V.P. Singh’s government to work out a compromise over Ayodhya that proved his death knell. In 1990, BJP president L.K. Advani set out from the sacred temple of Somnath in Gujarat on a 10,000-kilometre pilgrimage to Ayodhya in a truck decorated to look like Ram’s mythical chariot. Fearing an eruption of communal violence, Advani was arrested on the orders of the chief minister of Bihar before he could reach the town. In protest, the BJP withdrew its support for the government. After losing a non-confidence vote, Singh resigned. The door was open for Rajiv, as the head of the largest party in the Lok Sabha, to accept the president’s offer and form a government. He refused, deciding instead to give outside support to a breakaway faction of the Janata Dal with only fifty-four members, led by the veteran politician Chandrashekhar (1927–2007). Like its predecessor, this experiment in coalition government was doomed to fail. On 13 March 1991, Chandrashekhar resigned and parliament was dissolved, paving the way for a fatigued electorate to go to the polls for the second time in just fifteen months.
This time the main threat to Rajiv securing a third term in office came not from within India but from outside. In 1987, Sri Lanka’s president, J.R. Jayewardene (1906–1996), asked Rajiv to help mediate in his country’s long-running and brutal civil war against the Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for a separate Tamil homeland in the north. Under an agreement brokered between Colombo and New Delhi, an Indian Peace Keeping Force would be sent to the island. Sri Lankan troops would return to their barracks and the Tigers would be persuaded to disarm. Opposed by Sinhalese and Tamil hardliners, the agreement never stood a chance. Rather than being welcomed as peacekeepers, the Indians were soon being viewed as an occupying force. Sri Lanka became India’s Vietnam, a battleground that claimed the lives of more than 1000 Indian soldiers by the time Delhi pulled out its troops in early 1990.
The Tamil Tigers got their revenge on 21 May 1991, when a suicide bomber sent by the group assassinated Rajiv Gandhi as he was campaigning in Tamil Nadu. Once again, the question of succession weighed on Congress, whose natural tendency was to enlist Rajiv’s grieving widow, Sonia. She emphatically turned down their requests. The party eventually settled on Narasimha Rao, a semi-retired politician from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The seventy-year-old Rao was seen as a neutral stop-gap leader by Congress powerbrokers, who were already jockeying to step into his shoes as soon as the time was ripe. A pro-Congress sympathy wave allowed the party to scrape together 244 seats in the general election. That left the party about thirty short of a majority, forcing Rao to rely on the support of independents to form government. The BJP now had 120 seats, making it the main opposition party.
Instead of floundering in his new role, Rao suprised India and Congress by proving to be a decisive leader. His first move was to appoint Manmohan Singh (b. 1932), an Oxford-educated former professor of economics and a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, as finance minister. The collapse of the Soviet Union had robbed India of its major trading partner, and the invasion of Kuwait saw thousands of Indian workers flee the Gulf, drying up the remittances that had sustained the country’s foreign cash reserves. The war also caused a spike in oil prices, with the monthly bill for India’s petroleum imports jumping 60 per cent. Under pressure from the IMF, Rao devalued the rupee twice and announced a drastic austerity project. Singh tore down the ‘Licence Raj’, deregulating industry, removing barriers to foreign investment in thirty-four sectors including food processing and power generation, and providing tax concessions to private corporations. Tariffs were slashed from 300 to 50 per cent. The effects were almost immediate, with industrial production and employment enjoying growth never seen before. By 1995/96, GDP was sprinting along at 6.2 per cent. The Indian tiger had been unleashed, but it was still no match for China.
THE RISE OF HINDU MAJORITARIANISM
As the leader of a minority government, Rao initially tried to court the BJP and seek a negotiated settlement to the Ayodhya dispute. But hardliners wanting decisive action prevailed. Responding to a call from Hindu leaders for the liberation of the mosque and the establishment of a Rama Rajya, or God’s Kingdom, more than 100,000 kar sevaks, or volunteers, reached Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. Armed with tridents, bows and arrows, axes and hammers, thousands of Hindu fanatics scaled the walls around the compound and, within hours the mosque’s three domes had been reduced to rubble. Rao responded by dismissing all four BJP state governments, banning Hindu organisations and placing Advani under arrest once again. Hindu–Muslim riots broke out across India. The commercial capital, Mumbai, suffered the worst of the violence, with at least 900 killed, the majority Muslims. Commenting on the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the author and journalist Kapil Komireddi wrote, ‘The barbarism in Ayodhya contained a self-empowering, even redemptive, message: an ancient civilisation had purged itself of the shame inflicted by history by razing the monument to its subjugation. The past, so many felt, had been avenged.’
The Babri Masjid was a symbol of the Indian government’s determination to protect the Muslims and uphold the tradition of the secular state.
Rao’s administration survived the Ayodhya crisis, but Congress was now well and truly past its peak as a political force. Muslims turned away from the party once it became apparent that the promise to rebuild the mosque would not be honoured. Singh’s economic reforms had increased inequality, and corruption was rife. The rural poor, traditionally the backbone of Congress support, bore the brunt of rising food prices and cuts in public investment and social programs. When the counting of votes finished in the 1996 election, Congress had suffered its worst defeat, holding on to just 140 seats, compared with the BJP’s 160. Incapable of accepting the need to look for new blood, Congress stalwarts anointed Sonia Gandhi as the party’s president.
Despite heading the largest grouping in the Lok Sabha, the BJP leader, Atal Bahari Vajpayee (1924–2018), failed to form a government – memories of Ayodhya were still too fresh for most parties to associate themselves with a Hindu nationalist–led administration. A coalition of regional parties calling itself the National Front clung to office for the next two years, until the mid-term polls in 1998 saw the BJP boost its numbers sufficiently to attract enough allies to take office. Within weeks of coming to office, it flexed its muscles by detonating three nuclear devices under the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, prompting Pakistan to retaliate by testing five bombs beneath the mountains of Baluchistan a couple of weeks later. Although the BJP had proven its nationalist credentials, the coalition it headed survived for barely a year before a key regional party withdrew its support. The national election of 1999, the fifth in a decade, saw a further erosion of Congress support, with the party holding on to just 114 seats. This time the BJP had the numbers to cobble together a coalition government that lasted for five years – with Vajpayee at the helm.
A skilled orator and a poet, Vajpayee represented the moderate face of Hindu nationalism. He put on ice three of the party’s most contentious goals: building a Ram temple in Ayodhya, adopting a common civil code and abolishing Kashmir’s special status in the Constitution that gave it limited autonomy, a state flag and certain rights relating to property and other matters. In February 1999, he visited Lahore to inaugurate a new bus service between the two countries. But hopes that the visit might lead to a long-term thaw in relations were dashed when Pakistani troops occupied the strategic heights near Kargil on the Srinagar to Leh highway, sparking a mini war. Then in December 2001, Pakistan-supported militants launched a brazen attack on Parliament House in New Delhi, raising tensions dangerously close to another open conflict between the now nuclear-armed nations.
Vajpayee’s term as prime minister also saw an alarming spike in communal violence. On 27 February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya was set on fire when it pulled into Godhra, a town in Gujarat. Fifty-eight people were killed. Despite there being no evidence as to the identity of the attackers or their motivation, Muslims in Godhra and in numerous towns in Gujarat were attacked, leaving an estimated 3000 people dead and more than 100,000 displaced.
The attack took place four months after the election of the BJP national secretary, Narendra Modi, as chief minister in Gujarat. The son of a chai wallah who made tea on a railway platform, Modi had become a full-time member of the RSS in 1971, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation. A decade and a half later, he joined the BJP, rising rapidly through its ranks and earning a reputation as a highly effective organiser and orator. In 2001 he was selected to replace Keshubhai Patel as the chief minister of Gujarat and to restore the party’s declining fortunes in the state.
An investigative team appointed by the Supreme Court found no evidence of Modi’s complicity in the violence. Yet critics blamed him for doing too little to stop the bloodshed, much of which was orchestrated by members of his party. According to a Human Rights Watch report, Hindu groups came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears), explosives and gas cylinders. ‘They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties, information obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs’ way.’
In the 2004 elections, the BJP’s campaign slogan of ‘India Shining’ had begun to look a little tarnished. A return to populist slogans of ending poverty and protecting minorities saw Congress scrape back into power, with former finance minister Manmohan Singh leading the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Initially, Congress benefited from strong economic growth, averaging over 8 per cent, which helped reduce poverty across all groups and regions. In 2007, India joined the trillion-dollar club, the same year as Russia. But the impressive numbers hid a distinctly mediocre story. India’s per-capita income of US$950 put it in 160th position among 197 countries. By 2010, 400 million Indians still lived below the poverty line, while the top 1 per cent owned half the national wealth. Nearly 45 per cent of children under the age of five were malnourished. China’s economy was seven times the size of India’s and growing.
By the UPA’s second term (2009–2014), its shine had also worn off. The coalition was still reeling from the botched response to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks – a four-day-long killing spree by Pakistani militants that left 166 dead. In 2011, a seventy-four-year-old former army officer, Kisan Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare, went on a hunger strike in New Delhi in an effort to convince the government to pass his party’s anti-corruption bill. His grievances were embraced by millions of middle-class Indians. Instead of reining in ‘briefcase politics’, Singh responded by putting the brakes on the economic reforms and retreating into a vast program of rural benefits and agricultural welfarism.
THE REMAKING OF INDIA
When Manmohan Singh declined to contest the 2014 election, Congress turned to Rajiv Gandhi’s son, Rahul, a political novice who had remained all but invisible during his two terms in parliament and had even turned down the offer of a cabinet post. Modi ran a presidential-style campaign that targeted Rahul’s privileged upbringing, while cultivating his own reputation for decisiveness and getting things done. Rajiv’s failure to stem the anti-Sikh violence in 1984 deprived Rahul of a platform to criticise Modi for his handling of the Gujarat riots of 2002. Instead, Modi trumpeted the success of the ‘Gujarat model’, supposedly based on good governance, rising incomes and employment. Tapping into a yearning for change, he downplayed the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda and instead projected the party’s market-friendly and pro-liberalisation credentials. The RSS mobilised the grassroots, while at the other end of the spectrum, big business started moving its support away from Congress. Among those publicly declaring their backing for Modi’s authoritarian methods was Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics at Columbia University who told the Financial Times: ‘If people don’t exercise authority, nothing gets done. You need someone who is providing a vision of somewhere where you can go.’
Narendra Modi mockingly called Rahul Gandhi a shahzada, or ‘princeling’, while highlighting his lower-caste, working-class, self-made-man image.
A poll of first-time voters in the 18–23 age bracket – a massive group of 120 million – found that 42 per cent favoured Modi. Only 17 per cent supported Rahul, who was twenty years younger than his rival, but as the acclaimed journalist Rajdeep Sardesai noted, ‘appeared to speak the language of an older India – of handouts, of entitlements, even vote banks’. The BJP blitzed social media. Holograms of Modi virtually addressed hundreds of rallies across the country. When the results came in, the BJP had won 282 seats. All that Congress could muster was forty-four seats and 19.4 per cent of the vote. To add insult to injury, it was fifteen seats short of being the number required to become official opposition.
The 2014 elections were a watershed moment for India. The BJP became the first party in thirty years to achieve a parliamentary majority. Only a handful of Muslim candidates were nominated by the party, and for the first time in India’s history there were no Muslims in the ruling party’s parliamentary group in the Lok Sabha. When Rahul Gandhi tendered his resignation for his dismal showing in the polls, the Congress old guard rejected it.
Once dismissed as a Brahmin–Bania party – a reference to its support among only high-caste Hindus and the merchant community – the BJP’s base had crossed regional and caste boundaries. The only community that did not vote for the party was Muslims. Reflecting on the debacle, historian Ramachandra Guha declared, ‘The sometimes noble, sometimes ignoble “structure of renown” erected by Motilal Nehru and his descendants is now merely a heap of rubble.’
The 2019 elections saw further gains for the BJP, with its vote share rising from 31 per cent to 37.4 per cent and its tally of seats hitting 303 seats. This was despite an alarming rise in religiously motivated violence directed at minorities and shocking sexual crimes against women. Voters also shrugged off the economic hardship caused by the shock November 2016 decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, rendering 86 per cent of the country’s currency in circulation worthless, ostensibly to crack down on corruption.
No matter how the 2019 election is analysed, there is no question that the BJP’s rise to power is an aberration. Nearly twenty years of often rocky experiments with multi-party coalition government had come to an end. But the size of Modi’s victory also raised fears of ‘democratic dictatorship’ or a version of ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ taking hold of the political landscape, particularly as it rested on a highly personalised leadership.
The Indian electorate’s acceptance of a shift towards a more hegemonic style of politics is borne out by a 2017 Pew Research Center report, which found support for autocratic rule higher in India than in any other nation surveyed. A majority (55 per cent) of Indians backed a governing system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts, while 53 per cent supported military rule. There was also majority support for experts, rather than elected officials, running the country on the basis of what they thought was best for the nation. In today’s India, China is increasingly being seen as the model for countries wanting to lift themselves out of poverty and to become economic powerhouses thanks to the strong hand of their rulers.
The increasingly strident majoritarian tone of the BJP government is unsettling for many Indians, not just its vast Muslim minority. But democracy’s gift to India has been a strong and resilient civil society and a safety valve that provides an outlet for frustration and anger. Indians take their democratic rights seriously, punishing governments that don’t perform to expectations. The BJP has also lost all but a handful of state elections it has contested since 2017. In the winter of 2019–2020, thousands of people took part in a nationwide protest against the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act. The Act provided a fast track to citizenship for refugees of all faiths fleeing to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh – except for Muslims. A year later, an estimated 250 million people went on strike in support of farmers who had marched on the Indian capital in protest against government moves to deregulate the agricultural sector, making it the single largest protest in history. In November 2020, Modi bowed to the farmers’ demands and repealed three contentious farm laws that would have removed agricultural subsidies and price regulation on crops.
India’s economic reforms have unleashed expectations among young Indians aspiring to a better education, job security, access to affordable housing and a safe environment to raise their families. While the reforms that began in the early 1990s are irreversible, the farmers’ protest shows how difficult it will be to widen them progressively without unleashing widescale unrest.