IndiaAfterGandhi excerpt

From India After Gandhi by Ramchandra Guha 

India's first general election was, among other things, an act of faith. A newly independent country chose to move into universal adult suffrage, rather than - as had been the case in the West - at first reserve the right to vote to men of property, with the working class and women excluded from the franchise until much later. India became free in August 1947, and two years later set up an Election Commission. In March 1950 Sukumar Sen was appointed chief election commissioner. The next month the Representation of People Act was passed in Parliament, While proposing the Act, the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru expressed the hoope that elections would be held as early as the Spring of 1951. - - -

There were times when even Nehru had second thoughts about universal franchise. On 20 December 1951 he took a brief leave of absence from the campaign to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. In his speech Nehru accepted that democracy was the best form of government, or self-government, but still wondered whether  the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates beacased of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda .. He [the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repitition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.  This was a rare confession, based no doubt on his recent experiences on the road. - - -

Nehru had an unusual capacity - unusual among politicians, at any rate - to view both sides of hte question. He could see the imperfections of the process wven while being committed to it. - - -

The communist victory in the Kerala assembly election was a spectacular affirmation of the possibilities of a path once dismissed by Lenin as 'parliamentary cretinism.' ... With the Cold War threatening to turn hot, what happened in Kerala was of worldwide interest. But it also posed sharp questions for the future of Indian federalism. There had, in the past, been a handful of provincial ministries led by opposition parties or Congress dissidents. What New Delhi now faces was a different matter altogether; a state ruled by a party which was underground till the day before yesterday, which still proefessed a theoretical allegiance to armed revolution, and whose leaders and cadres were known to have sometimes taken their orders from Moscow. - - -

In the winter of 1957/8 the Hungarian writer George Mikes travelled through India. As a refugee from communism - by then settled comfortably in London - he found 'the Kerala affair' most intriguing. 'What is a democratic Central Government to do with a Communist state?' he asked. 'What would the American administration do if California or Wisconsin suddenly - and I admit, somewhat unexpeectedly - turned Communist? And again, how is a Communist government itself to behaev with democratic overlords sitting on its neck?' - - -

On the 29 April Abdullah flew into Palam airport with his principal associates. The party drove on to Teen Murti House, where the prime minister was waiting to receive Abdullah. It was the first time the two men had seen one another since Nehru's government had locked up the Sheikh in August 1953. Now, as one eyewitness wrote, 'the two embraced each other warmly. They were meeting after 11 years, but the way they greeted each other reflected no traces of embarrassment, let aside bitterness over what happened in the intervening period.; The duo posed for the battery of press photographers before going inside. This was the reconciliation between the leader of a nation and a man till recently regarded as a traitor to it. It anticipated, by some thirty years, the similarly portentous reconciliation between the South African president and his most notorious political prisoner. But even F. W. De Klerk did not go so far as to ask Nelson Mandela to stay with him. - - -

Back in West Bengal, the coalition government had fallen apart in less than a year. President's rule was imposed before fresh elections in early 1969 saw the CPM substantially increase its tally. It won 80 seats; making it by far the biggest partner in a fresh alliance with the Bangla Congress an dothers. Ajoy Mukherjee once more became chief minister, the CPM preferring to keep the key Home portfolio and generally play Big Brother. ... Where Ajoy Mukherjee and his Bangla Congress tried weakly to keep the machinery of state in place, the CPM was not above stoking street protest and even violence to further its aims. In factories in and around Calcutta, workers took to the practice of gherao - the mobbing of their managers to demand better wages and working conditions. ...     Apart from capitalists worried about their profits, the prevailing lawlessness also disturbed the chief minister of West Bengal. He saw it as the handiwork of the CPM, whose ministerial portfolios included Land and Labour - where the trouble raged - and Home - where it could be controlled but wasn't. So in protest against the protests that old Gandhian Ajoy Mukherjee decided to organize a satyagraha of his own. He toured the districts, delivering speeches that railed against the CPM for promoting social discord. Then, on December 1, he began a seventy-two-hour fast in a very public place - the Curzon Park in south Calcutta. In the rich history of Indian satyagrahas, this must surely be counted as the most bizzare: a chief minister fasting against his own government's failure to keep the peace. - - -

It was only when I entered the Museum of Sikh History, located above the main entrance to the temple, that I was reminded that this was, within living memory, a place where much blood had been shed. The several rooms of the museum ran chronologically, the paintings depicting the sacrifices of the Sikhs through the ages. Plenty of martyrs are commemorated on its walls, the last of these being Shaheeds Satwant, Beant and Kehar Singh. Below them lies a picture of the Akal Takht in tatters, with the explanation that this was the result of a 'calculated move' of Indira Gandhi. The text notes the deaths of innocent pilgrims in the army action, and then adds: 'However, the Sikhs soon had their revenge'. What form this took is not spelt out in words, but in pictures: those of Satwant, Beant and Kehar.- - - To see the killers of Indira Gandhi so ennobled was unnerving. However, down below, in the temple proper, there were plenty of contrary indications, to the effect that the Sikhs were not thoroughly at ease with the government of India. A marble slab was paid for by a Hindy colonel, in grateful memory of the protection granted him and his men while serving in the holy city of Amritsar. Another slab was more meaningful still; this had been endowed by a Sikh colonel, on 'successful completion ' of two years of service in the Kashmir Valley. - - -

In 1994 the VHP leader Ashok Singhal remarked that the destruction of the Babri Masjid was 'a catalyst for the ideological polarization which is nearly complete.' Two years later the Bharatiya Janata Party reaed the rewards in the eleventh general election. ... the big story of the decade [1990s] was in fact the rise of Hindu communalism, as manifested most significantly in the number of seats wone by the BJP in successive general elections. ...     ... while there have been hundreds of inter-religious riots in the history of independent India, there have been only two pogroms: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and that directed at the Muslims in south Gujarat in 2002. ... In both cases, the pogroms were made possible by the willed breakdown of the rule of law. The prime minister in Delhi in 1984, and the chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, issued graceless statements that in effect justified the killings. .. The final similarity is the most telling, as well as perhaps the most depressing. Both parties, and leaders, reaped electoral rewards from the violence they had legitimized and overseen.

Sixty years after Independence, India remains a democracy. But the events of the last two decades call for a new qualifying adjective. India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one. 

© Ramchandra Guha