India (11 page)

There was a difficulty here: Ram was a mythological figure, and there was no evidence he was born in Ayodhya, or indeed anywhere else. Because the mosque, like many religious buildings around the world, had probably been built on an earlier sacred site, it was deduced that it was the birthplace of Lord Ram. Advani himself wrote that once the rath yatra got started, it was less about “reclaiming a holy Hindu site from the onslaught of a bigoted foreign invader … It was about reasserting our cultural heritage as the defining source of India’s national identity.”
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This was the crux of what the BJP was trying to do. It wanted to redefine Indian identity by linking it to a mythologized Hindu past and at the same time turn itself into a busy, modern political movement. There were elements
of Bollywood in L. K. Advani’s long procession across north and central India. A naturally reserved man with a clipped white moustache now found himself the most famous politician in the country. As his chariot—really a decorated Toyota truck—drove from town to town, ceremonial arches were erected and enormous crowds turned out; in remote rural areas, the chariot would be stopped by apolitical villagers so that ceremonial pujas could be performed, honouring Lord Ram.

Advani was astonished by the depth of religiosity he encountered. From a political point of view, he had attained success. After years in the wilderness, wandering about with men in khaki shorts at hot RSS camps and avoiding large meals, he had found a deep, raw, colourful instinct through which he could channel his theoretical Hindu nationalism. Back in political circles in Delhi, the rath yatra was at first ignored and then—once the giant crowds turned out—spoken of as an embarrassing manifestation of mystical fervour. Who was this kacchawallah, this wearer of shorts, wooing the masses from a garlanded Toyota truck? The Congress-led minority government prevaricated over what to do. Could they allow a Ram Mandir to be built at the site of the mosque? The new prime minister, Narasimha Rao, a Brahmin from Andhra Pradesh who in his youth had been given a rough time by the Razakars, the Muslim guards of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, tacitly allowed the worship of Hindu deities inside the mosque. When more than 100,000 people gathered at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, inspired by Advani’s chariot ride, little was done to disperse them. The atmosphere at this time—and the surreal but not uncommon reasons for the veneration—was described by the journalist Jawed Naqvi, who noted the idol of Lord Ram “in his avatar as a toddler” placed on a platform inside the mosque, protected by a pujari, or priest, the whole overseen by security:

This was Ayodhya a few months before sadhus carrying tridents and frenetic youths in saffron-coloured headbands climbed on top of the old mosque and smashed the domes, some of the men plunging through the rubble to their death, watched by an uneasy parade of BJP bigwigs, including L. K. Advani himself. With the mosque destroyed, Advani was careful neither to embrace the violent desecration nor to repudiate it, but at the general election four years later, the BJP displaced Congress as the largest single party; the ruined Babri Masjid has remained under guard ever since, the Ram Mandir unbuilt, the incendiary issue fading from public consciousness. More recently, Advani has said he never intended the old mosque to be damaged in such a way, but it took no imagination to see what would happen if you combined popular religious fervour with an angry determination to make good a perceived historical wrong. Against this, a member of a family at the heart of the Ram Mandir movement told me: “We were all watching it on television. The family were showing pure delight, the elders knew exactly what was going to happen on that day, and disapproved of Advani, whom they said was cowardly.”
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The implication here was that hardliners had intended to destroy the mosque regardless of Advani’s instinctive caution.

For Nehruvians, the destruction of the Babri Masjid appeared to mark the end of India as a secular state, with no mosque or Muslim now safe from Hindu fundamentalists. The author Vikram Seth and his mother, Leila Seth, who was the first woman to become the chief justice of an Indian high court, published an advertisement in the
Times of India
saying the demolition had “shamed the nation across the world” and “debased Hindu culture.”
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Amartya Sen, the economist, deduced the destruction had been caused by “the extreme gullibility of the uneducated.” The Hindu masses of the cow belt were unqualified: “While illiteracy may not be a central feature of communal fascism or of sectarian nationalism in general, its role in sustaining militant obscurantism can be very strong indeed.”
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Several thousand people were killed in the riots that followed, most of them Muslim, and in 1993 a series of bombs exploded across Bombay (now Mumbai) in revenge, planted by a Dubai-based Indian Muslim crime and terror mafia. The most damaging effect was local to Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, where relations between Hindus and Muslims became polarized. At aggressive rallies, loudspeakers blared the injunction: “Jab jab Hindu jaga hai, desh se mullah bhaga hai”—“Every time the Hindus rose, the mullahs fled the country.” Aware of the degree of Congress duplicity in what had happened, Muslim voters shifted to other political parties. In
the words of one man from nearby Kanpur: “There was now a view among the enabled class of Indian society that rabid feelings against Muslims were acceptable. It was regressive. As a child I was taught by the maulvi saheb [teacher or Islamic scholar] to be proud of being Muslim and proud of being Indian.”
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In a broader context, the smashing of the Babri Masjid was less momentous than it appeared at the time. The act of destruction—widely filmed and photographed—did not prefigure the nationwide shattering of mosques or the emergence of a Hindu Taliban. The strictures of the Constitution and the broader Indian allegiance to secularism prevented this kind of focused religious assertion. Rather, the events of this year formed a pattern of atrocity since 1947, in which the usually harmonious relationships between hundreds of millions of people would at times turn loud and violent, spurred by politicians.

When Narasimha Rao took the premiership in the summer of 1991 after the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, the cupboard was bare. Many forms of economic stagnation had collided. The previous eighteen months had seen two prime ministers come and go, each one running a ragtag coalition of regional outfits, propped up in Parliament by a larger political party. Nobody owned the ensuing mess, with the result that the component parts or parties tried to take whatever they could, personally or regionally. Rao, near to retirement, was surrounded by ambitious colleagues within Congress like Sharad Pawar, Madhavrao Scindia, Rajesh Pilot (who had started out as a milkman, and changed his name after becoming an air force pilot) and Jitendra Prasada. He led a minority government, and there was every reason to think it would not last a full term.

It turned out to be one of the most important administrations since independence, headed by India’s most elusive and inscrutable prime minister. Born in 1921, P. V. Narasimha Rao was a widower with eight children who had started as a legislator in Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s. In his spare time he liked to translate novels from Telugu to Hindi and from Marathi to Telugu; he was also thought to know Urdu, Oriya, Kannada, Tamil, Arabic and Latin.
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The oddity was that he rarely spoke—I remember talking to an MP from the north-east who had just left a meeting with Narasimha Rao, unclear whether or not they had reached a deal because of the complete lack of verbal signals. Although he appeared to be a loyal servant of the Nehru–Gandhi family, it is apparent from his own novel
The Insider
that Rao had an
ambiguous view of Congress politics, and an acute, cynical understanding of the arts of political manipulation and intrigue. He was careful to sideline Sonia, the widow of Rajiv Gandhi. Wherever possible, he kept every outcome open so that nobody knew in which direction his own thinking was heading. He was heavily superstitious and regularly guided by Chandraswami, a mystical adviser to the powerful and wealthy who was sometimes referred to in the press as “controversial godman Chandraswami.”

When Rao took office, India faced grave economic problems. The first Gulf War and the high price of oil had created a balance-of-payments crisis. In response, structural changes were agreed which brought in foreign direct investment, enabled industry to become more competitive and allowed the market to function in areas that had previously been closed. He picked an economist, Manmohan Singh, and a lawyer, P. Chidambaram, and let them get on with taking down the enveloping mass of state-administered red tape known as the “permit raj” (or “rule by permit”) which controlled much of the daily working of business. It was a revolutionary achievement. Although the economic reforms of his premiership would transform India, Narasimha Rao was not a neoliberal. Rather he wanted to raise government revenues through the generation of wealth by the private sector and hoped to have more money for the state to distribute. He continued the ruthless crushing of the Sikh insurgency in Punjab, improved relations with other Asian countries and devoted a substantial amount of his time to manoeuvring against his colleagues, sucking in money through corruption and paying it out to MPs to win crucial parliamentary votes.

His premiership came to an extraordinary climax in 1995 when he ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to pursue more than a hundred politicians and officials who were alleged to have been paid bribes. The spur was some coded diaries which had been found in a raid on a businessman suspected of buying favours from politicians of several parties. They contained lists of payments to named individuals. The normal practice in such situations was for the people at the top to be spared punishment. For reasons that remain opaque (perhaps he was seeking to gain a reputation for probity, perhaps he intended to rout his enemies, perhaps he just wanted to invert Indian politics), Rao told the authorities to go after everybody—senior business people, friends of the Gandhi family, leading opposition MPs like L. K. Advani, even his own ministers. Several had to resign when legal cases were brought against them.

Things did not work out in the way Rao had perhaps intended: much of the material in the diaries was inadmissible as evidence, and he became
supremely unpopular within his own party. In the general election that followed, Congress lost ground, taking only 29 percent of the vote nationally. In the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh it won a mere 8 percent of the vote, against 33 percent for the BJP, with new rivals the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party taking 21 percent each.
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No party won a nationwide majority, and a composite government was formed from smaller parties. Rao was himself targeted by investigators, and his political career was finished after five years as prime minister. Despite the political loss, the economic changes brought in during his time in office were to be transformative.

By the time the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence struck in 1997, it looked as if the Congress party might be over. The once great movement of national liberation, which had sat astride the country’s political system for half a century, was in tatters. Narasimha Rao’s machinations had led to major politicians leaving, and his replacement as party leader, Sitaram Kesri, was an elderly, incompetent Congress functionary. Voters were bored by the corruption scandals, the obvious hypocrisy, the absence of direction and the on-off support for the latest coalition government. New parties were bubbling up across the country, and they seemed to have a stronger understanding of the experiences facing millions of younger voters. V. P. Singh’s affirmative action programme for backward classes was producing important social change, but even the people who had opposed it, such as the poor Brahmins of north India who felt they were now suffering discrimination, tended to avoid Congress.

The party was brought back from the edge by an unlikely person. Usually, when a political movement wins power, it is the result of a collective shift, with a figurehead at the top. In this case, the impetus came from a single, unlikely figure deciding to join a race that she had never wanted to take part in—Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s wife, who when she came to India from Italy in 1968 had been nervous to enter a roomful of people alone. She knew the party of her husband’s family was fragmenting; she knew too that this was probably the last chance to secure a possible political future for her children; and there was even talk that she and her family might be ordered to leave their large, government-supplied bungalow in New Delhi, 10 Janpath.

Half the people in the world who live in a democracy live in India, and an Indian general election can be like nothing on earth. During the 1998 campaign,
when Sonia Gandhi joined politics, there were over 600 million registered voters, and ballot boxes had to be transported by donkey, mountain porter and fishing boat. Nearly 5,000 candidates ran for office, and some of these aspiring parliamentarians were bizarre. In Bihar, a candidate named Ravindra Kushwaha chose to file his nomination papers under the alias Santraj Singh because he was absconding from the police. In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, the “bandit queen,” Phoolan Devi, a gang leader turned politician, was standing despite having sixty-three court cases pending against her. Not far down the road, Dhruv Ram Chaudhary was up for election. He had two cases registered against him for murder, five for attempted murder and two for dacoity. Meanwhile a candidate in Maharashtra, the fifty-year-old Mr. Deshmukh, interrupted his campaign to kill two dogs and a buffalo and burn banknotes worth Rs10,000, for no apparent reason. In Meghalaya, voters could choose between Adolf Lu Hitler Marak, Hopingstone Lyngdoh and Frankenstein W. Momin.
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(Such names usually came from parents in the north-east who liked their sound but did not realize the implications: others included Clutch, Billy Kid and Bombersingh. An academic in Shillong told me he had a student called Latrine Born, who had changed the name on her behalf to Laktrang—which means “something you really want” in Khasi.)
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