India has stumbled into the most serious crisis in its-44 years since independence from Britain. The slide toward chaos has occurred largely unnoticed by the West preoccupied by months of fast paced events in the Persian Gulf and central Europe.
Yet the upheaval in India is every bit as profound as the Soviet Union’s disintegration and seems certain to alter the future course of events in the country in unsettling ways.
The gathering political and economic crisis is composed of a comparatively sudden simultaneous avalanche of troubles: caste unrest religious rioting rising inflation an economic slump incipient government bankruptcy and tenacious regional revolts. In the past the system dealt with successive crises. Now the crisis is the system itself.
The subtitle of V.S Naipaul’s recent books on India “A Million Mutinies Now” could not be more apt: The collapse on March 7 of India’s third government in 16 months simply caps a wave of disarray. Another election promises only further paralysis in which no party wins a majority.
Yet elections and parliamentary instability only hint at India’s torn fabric. Topping the list are rebellions convulsing the Punjab and Kashmir. During recent visits to these states I found evidence of abuses by security forces too numerous to doubt; in Kashmir especially the degree of alienation between the 4 million Kashmiris and the several hundred thousand security forces positioned in the beautiful valley is profound.
I detected no shred of common ground between the populace and what has become an occupying force. Yet the retention of Kashmir India’s only Muslim majority state remains an article of faith for all Indian parties and politicians Kashmir sustains India’s now vulnerable view of itself as a secular democratic country something different from and better than Pakistan the religiously defined part of British India that went its separate way in 1947. Nothing unites Indians more than the determination to “hold” Kashmir nothing unites Kashmiris more than a desire to be rid of India a tragic impasse that results mostly but not entirely from India’s manipulation of Kashmiri politics during the last three decades. When I interviewed former Prime Minister V.P Singh he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln without a trace of self-consciousness. He too would defend his Union.
In the Punjab a different logic yields the same grim result. Especially in the districts near Amritsar site of the fabled Golden Temple an original demand for a separate state for the majority Sikhs has now become a fratricidal rebellion. Predominantly Sikh policemen create new groups to fight the older groups. As Kashmir the Punjab and another revolt in the northeast state of Assam dividedly show abuses by security forces are not the prerogative of Arab dictatorships alone. The Sikhs’ most likely electoral leader a former police commander named S.S.Mann showed me his toenail-less feet a result he said-of interrogation by former comrades.
Rajiv Gandhi told me of these worsening revolts “India always gets through its troubles.” His remark reflects a type of dynastic calm borne of the fact that Gandhi’s grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru and mother Indira Gandhi ran the Congress Party and the country for decades. Much of India’s harvest of troubles results from Rajiv Gandhi’s era from 1984-89 which came after his mother’s assassination in November 1984.
The Congress Party long ago lost its prestige as the winner of Indian independence. Its last internal party election occurred two decades ago. Indira Gandhi transformed the Congress into a party of chamchas, Hindi for “yes-men”. Her son continued her habit of arbitrarily dismissing elected officials. This had dismal consequences in Kashmir and the Punjab evident to all, but the habit continues; Recently, New Delhi dismissed state governments of Assam and Tamil Nadu, resulting in direct rule.
The last faction to try its hand at governing the country, until March 7, was a tiny grouping of just 54 of the 524 MPs in India’s rowdy parliament. Led by political maverick Chandra Shekhar, it gave up after only four months. One reason Shekhar abandoned the effort was bitter controversy over his decision to allow U.S. and allied transport planes to stop and refuel in India on their way to the Persian Gulf.
Under pressure from Rajiv Gandhi (who had quietly allowed periodic U.S. Air Force over flights during his term), Shekhar rescinded the permission in February. Shekhar had little choice: His premiership rested entirely on Gandhi’s whim, because the defeated Congress party still has the largest tally of legislators.
The steady breakdown of national cohesion is strikingly reflected in the political party’s campaign plans in the next elections. The bigger faction of the splintered Janata Dal party will contest the election using blatant appeals to caste identity, Shekhar group will promise socialism.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, or BJP, India’s Hindu revivalists, want to revive “Hindu-ness,” a glorious time before the Muslim and Christian invaders, but the prospect frightens the country’s 100 million Muslims (after Indonesia, India is the most populous Muslim nation).
The BJP also calls for equipping India’s armed forces with nuclear weapons, It wants an absolute ban on cow slaughter and sup- ports moves by a Hindu missionary group to demolish mosques built over Hindu sacred sites. The country’s two communist parties, which command 56 MPs, will offer a Marxist program, proof if any is needed that India remains impervious to outside trends.
Contemplating this political muddle last month, India’s ceremonial president, Ramaswami Venkataraman, wearily told the country it must “get used to” coalition government.
In good times maybe India could. But these are not good times. Cynical politics and regional rebellions aside, the Persian Gulf cri- sis dealt India a severe economic blow, hiking imported oil costs (India produces only about 40% of domestic needs) while slashing vital foreign exchange remittances from emigre workers in the gulf. Deficit spending has sent annual inflation rates to historic highs, reaching 159% in the cities.
Meanwhile, India’s once-praised economic liberalization program has stopped dead in its tracks. Both the trade account and government budget are in chronic deficit, and with the economy sliding into recession, prominent politicians seek to fan rural jealousies over faster economic growth in cities.
While the fracturing of national politics proceeds, so does the unraveling of civic peace. Riots between dominant Hindus and the big Muslim minority have ravaged communal harmony in recent months. Indian observers say the unrest is the worst since the 1947 Partition which split British India in two. Even in the safer south, Sri Lanka’s Tamil rebels behave as if they own large chunks of India’s Tamil Nadu state, where they find refuge from Sri Lanka’s civil war.
Many longstanding social issues have re- surfaced with new bitterness, such as ethnic quarreling over retention of the English language; and the vexed issue of caste, fanned by controversial plans last year for an affirmative action program giving many government jobs to “backward castes”, a category distinct from caste “untouchables”.
The weather is about the only thing going right for India. The last three monsoons have brought plentiful rain and record harvests. Some areas of the economy, including the small but growing export-oriented sector, remain resilient.
Another plus is that India remains wedded to perhaps the best legacy of British rule- the ballot box. Although politics have become deeply criminalized in some Indian states, governments change in Delhi and in its states through elections, not (as in Pakistan) through overt or disguised military coups. When observing elections. I have seen both a mixture of textbook civics and ballot-box hijacking reminiscent of the Philippines; still, it beats periodic shows of bayonets in the capital city.
India has overcome many challenges in its short, post-independence history, including a 1962 war with China, linguistically based separatism in the 1960s, a dictatorial period of Indira Gandhi’s “emergency” rule ended by ballot in 1977 and, not least, the abatement of drought and famine. India has partially industrialized, fashioning the world’s third largest pool of engineers and technicians.
Yet other national institutions are in de- cline, seen most clearly in the decline of the legal and educational systems, in police corruption and in irresponsible populism of successive governments. Too much democracy can hurt.
Above all, India’s population growth has not slowed much. An estimated 853 million, it is about three times larger than at independence 44 years ago, Women’s groups decry the country’s lamentable literacy rate; for rural women, India’s most frequent child bearers, the illiteracy rate soars above 80%. Studies show a direct correlation be- tween high birth rates and low literacy rates. Yet the drive towards comprehensive primary education and universal literacy has faltered. The number of poor has grown.
India’s underpaid bureaucratic elite has be- come demoralized and increasingly corrupt, while the professionalism of the military- always source of pride-is under assault as the army is ordered, again and again, to put out communal or separatist fires. Worst of all, the mindset of India’s articulate elite refuses to budge.
The gulf crisis sharply illuminated this. As the crisis unfolded in a region India regards as its backyard, the government stood impotently on the sidelines. In the crisis’ first weeks, India’s diplomats even created suspicions that Delhi might be tempted to circumvent U.N. sanctions against Iraq, an old ally against Pakistan. Yet the bureaucrats who give India a semblance of continuity cannot comprehend the rapid decline of the Soviet Union, with which India has had a special relation- ship for two decades.
Excluded from the gulf by its policies, India may now begin a new military buildup. A recently retired army chief of staff has called for overt deployment of nuclear weapons (India exploded a nuclear device in 1974). Rajiv Gandhi spoke in February about lifting India’s nuclear weapons program “from capability to capacity.” Fears that Pakistan has already produced deliverable nuclear weapons feed this sentiment.
The sense of India “out of synch” has a direct bearing on the foreign response to India’s gathering crisis. It seems only reason- able to impose-more conditionality on loans from IMF or World Bank. Reductions in deficit spending and military Spending and genuine attempts at rapprochement with Pakistan should be at the top of the agenda when India comes to the next “Paris Club” aid consortium meeting later this year.
And yet, beyond these moves, the outside world can do little but watch the gathering confusion. John Kenneth Galbraith said last year that India remained, four decades after independence, in a state of “suspenseful in- decision”. India, like Europe, is not one but many nations, a tapestry as varied as the expanse between Sicily and Sweden. India also remains, as much as America, an idea, a transcendent enterprise. It was bad luck that foreigners, not Indians, unified the country, its complex crisis today reveals in part the slipping away of an alien dominance-the British legacy of structure and form-within & mass of cultures held together only by their Indianness,” the essence of which still eludes the Indians themselves but which exists as strongly as any civilization. Washington Post March 31
Article extracted from this publication >> April 19, 1991
