Indian needs Gandhi today more than it ever did. The nation has a very poor track record on all fronts in the 40 odd years since it gained independence.
The image is rather strange. A nation where millions are starving goes about bullying its neighbors not to talk of the repression on its own people.
There are several secessionist movements especially in Punjab and Kashmir that have gained world attention.
On May 22, India launched the Agni, a homemade missile capable of carrying a nuclear bomb almost 3,000 kilometres. (India exploded a nuclear device in 1974 but claims it has not yet made deliverable bombs.) India’s first aircraft carrier is nearing completion. Scientists at Dehra Dun announced laser and computer aided firing systems for the Arjun tank. Other reports tell of training and modification to jet aircraft so they can drop nuclear bombs.
An on Wednesday, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stiffly rejected a Sri Lankan government request for India to withdraw 45,000 of its soldiers from the island.
The Indian troops sent there to try to control the Tamil Tiger separatist guerrillas have been accused of violating human rights. Thousands of innocent civilians have been massacred by the Tigers clearly the No. 1 violators of human rights in Sri Lankaso the public outcry has been muted over any roughing up, rape or torture or committed while Tiger hunting.
Meanwhile, since March 23, tiny, land locked Nepal with 18 million has endured an Indian economic blockade because it refused to sign a treaty linking transit rights to bilateral trade.
As a result, Nepalis have run out of medicine, gasoline, cooking fuel, materials to run factories and other vital materials.
It is hard to think of Prime Minister Gandhi as an aggressive leader of a bullying nation that is fiddling with terrorists, economic blockades, invasions and a dozen other covert ways to force its tiny neighbors to their knees. After all, Gandhi is an attractive young man who upon the untimely death of his brother by accident and his mother Indira by assassination reluctantly descended from the cockpit of the Air India jetliners he used to pilot to assume the role of Prime Minister.
But Gandhi is kin neither by blood nor temperament to the Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi most Westerners think as the spirit and soul of India. The Mahatma seeking India’s independence from Britain, led millions to follow him by fasting and a willingness to suffer in prison and to meet violence with peace. His moral code brought the British Empire to his knees.
Rajiv Gandhi, on the other hand has sent troops into Sri Lanka and the Maldives, blockaded the landlocked nation of Nepal and skirmished with Pakistan in the glaciers of the Kashmir.
Sources say that Gandhi threatened the President of Bangladesh, Hossain M. Ershad, that “we can dry your drown you” by means of Indian controls over the floodwaters of the Ganges. India has also been accused of harboring guerrilla groups wishing to dismember parts of Bangladesh.
This is hardly the stuff of nonviolence.
In fact the series of aggressive acts show Gandhi is quite willing to continue the tradition of intervention begun by his mother and known as the Indira Doctrine or the Indian Doctrine.
“The Indian Doctrine means keep the pots boiling in other countries so none can threaten India,” said a Western diplomat in Colombo recently.
Since independence in 1947, India has fought with Pakistan, including the 1971 battles that split that Muslim enemy in half creating Bangladesh out of East Pakistan; annexed Sikhism in 1974 and Goa in 1961 and continued to dominate Bhutan an ostensibly independent nation.
Why does a nation whose people still lack shoes, education, tractors, drinking water and polio vaccine spend money on nuclear reactors and missiles? Some say a rightwing, nationalist, Hindu supremacist passion has flowered inside the leadership.
Another explanation, by Prof Shelton Kodikara of Colombo University’s international relations program, is that “these people in Delhi inherited the British strategy and doctrine and stick to it: that India’s security is tied up with its neighbors.”
Even Indonesia and Australia have expressed concern and fear at India’s continual amassing of military power beyond any apparent threat to its own security.
In Sri Lanka, often called India’s Vietnam, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began to support the Tamil minority in 1977 after the election of pro American J.R. Jayewardene as president. Intervention was popular at home since Tamils are Hindu, like Indians, while most Sri LanKans are Buddhist.
The Indian army gave training and weapons to the Tamils who operated from bases in India. Attacks on Sri Lankan troops led to a backlash in 1983 when the majority Singhalese attacked Tamils in Colombo and other cites burning their shops and murdering at least 500, Indira Gandhi had perhaps only meant to destabilize Sri Lanka and prevent Jayewardene from inviting the United States into India’s zone of influence, But the hatred chaos and bloodshed she unleashed continues to prowl like a Frankenstein through the nights of a former paradise. Massacres car bombs, landmines and slaughter are now commonplace. Some 8,000 have died.
By 1987, after Indira Gandhi was replaced by her son, India was invited by Sri Lanka to send in troops to keep the peace. The Tigers played along for a few months but kept their weapons and in October they murdered hundreds of Singhalese to drive them out of the Northeast.
Now Nepal is on the line. Nepal has been under India’s wing since 1950; until 1967, India manned Nepal’s borders as it was without roads and virtually cut off from the outside world.
Since then, Nepal has tried to assert its independence.
“We were weak then but now we want to be free a Nepal diplomat said.
The squabble is partly due to improving Nepal Chinese relations which worries India. Angered at the new Chinese connections and at Nepalese efforts to control the flow of Indians inside the Himalayan kingdom, India cut off all its trade with Nepal, closing 15 of the 17 border posts.
India now insists upon a unified treaty to cover all the issues. Nepal wants a separate trade treaty and believes transit rights from the sea should be granted under international law without any preconditions.
The result Nepal’s growth rate will fall. With no cooking fuel, trees that were preserved to stop erosion are now cut for fuel. Even so, people reportedly can only eat hot meals once a day or less. Some tourists, lured by treks into the Himalayas, have cancelled trips.
Ironically the same sort of ethnic violence India promotes as a policy weapon abroad is flaring within India itself in the Punjab, Kashmir, Darjeeling, Bihar, Assam and Tamil Nadu. New Delhi is finding that unleashing the powers of destabilization is a game that can be used against the central government as well as against its neighbors.
But in the most populous democracy on earth, with an impending election amid crumbling support for the Congress party, many expect Gandhi to continue to wave the “foreign hand” threat before the populace. Shoring up support at home behind foreign threats and militant national pride may be one way to win an election.
Article extracted from this publication >> September 8, 1989
