India: A History. Revised and Updated (103 page)

22
‘Demockery’
1972-1984

THE MIGHTY FALLEN

I
N 1972, AS
the now three successor states turned from the horrors of another partition to the conduct of domestic affairs, many observers detected cause for renewed optimism. A Pakistan relieved of its eastern responsibilities looked a much more compact and viable proposition. Its chastened military was back behind barracks and its civilian leadership, the first in fifteen years, was free to address the social injustices it had so loudly decried. Now that yanking the tail of the Indian tiger was discredited as a national pastime, Islamabad could face the other way and cultivate closer relations with its Muslim brethren in Afghanistan and the Gulf while looking to Beijing instead of Washington for weaponry. In short, a new twist was being given to the Pakistan narrative and it was courtesy, once again, of Bhutto.

Likewise India, having established its primacy in the regional pecking order, could afford to be less paranoid about its old adversary, more attentive to the pressing needs of its rapidly expanding population, and more insistent than ever on the deference due to its central institutions. Meanwhile Bangladesh, overcoming its victimisation complex and little troubled by the religious and ethnic particularisms that characterised the other two states, could begin the Herculean tasks of post-war reconstruction and nation-building. Mujib had been speedliy released from his Pakistani cell to make a triumphant return to Dhaka. International recognition of Bangladesh (including by Islamabad), plus admission to the United Nations, followed in exchange for releasing the 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war and sparing them prosecution for war crimes. Seldom can a genocidal war, ‘the biggest human disaster in the world’ according to Mujib, have been laid to rest so hastily or left to fester so casually.

Elsewhere the Green Revolution was giving a timely boost to food
production, more especially in the wheat-growing areas of northern India and northern Pakistan. Further north, the Kashmiris were doing what they did best, fleecing tourists. At a meeting in Simla in July 1972, Bhutto and Mrs Gandhi signed a Kashmir accord whereby Pakistan recognised the new Line of Control and agreed to pursue a Kashmir settlement by ‘peaceful means through bilateral negotiations’ – all without actually forswearing war, betraying the Kashmiris’ right of self-determination or doing anything until it (Pakistan) felt so inclined. In effect, the Kashmir issue was shelved but not resolved.

Despite India’s new Soviet treaty, no ideological barriers separated the three successor nations. All were united in varying degrees of commitment to ‘nationalism, democracy, socialism and secularism’ as per the four guiding principles adopted by Bangladesh’s constitution-makers. Best of all, in the latterday Durga that was Indira Gandhi, the self-styled Quaid-i-Awam (‘Leader of the People’) that was Bhutto and the undisputed Bangabandhu (‘Friend of Bengal’) that was Mujib, all had inspirational leaders commanding massive parliamentary majorities. Bhutto was still in his forties, the other two in their early fifties. They looked good for at least a decade in power. It seemed inconceivable that within five years all three would have lost the trust of the people and have been, or be about to be, assassinated.

One contributory factor in the disillusionment responsible for this turnaround was not of their making. Like the rest of the world, South Asia would be affected by the recession of the 1970s. Triggered by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, hikes in oil prices brought world markets close to meltdown and ensured a decade of price instability that affected not just oil but almost all manufactured goods and commodities. Inflation in South Asia was nothing new. Complaints about higher prices, and especially the hoarding and profiteering that accompanied them, had figured in almost every protest movement to date. Nor were the effects of the crisis especially severe in South Asia. Mrs Gandhi had just nationalised oil and natural gas, and both Bhutto and Mujib would follow suit. Pump prices were subsidised and bank interest rates would be contained. Nevertheless basic commodities became more expensive; the poor suffered disproportionately; and, South Asia’s population being poorer than most, discontent would flare, though less over the global situation than over why governments pledged to ‘abolish poverty’ and provide ‘roti, roof and raiment’ were not doing more about it.

Blaming the government seemed a reasonable response to any crisis because the state was so keen to assume responsibility for everything. Of those four guiding principles adopted by Bangladesh and shared by India and Pakistan, socialism (in the sense of state-run economic development) was the
one most in evidence in the early 1970s. Indeed Mujib, Bhutto and Mrs Gandhi seemed to be competing in the interventionist stakes. All had another stab at limiting the size of landholdings, redistributing the confiscated hectares among the landless and securing tenurial rights. Again, implementation fell short of intent. Bhutto was probably the most successful, Mujib the least so, having fewer estates to break up. But it helped that, courtesy of the Green Revolution’s new seeds, higher yields could now be expected from smaller holdings; and even in India lowering the land ceiling and circumventing the legal objections that bedevilled it began to have some cumulative effect. More dramatic was the pace of nationalisation. Having secured a source of cheap capital by nationalising the banks, Mrs Gandhi took over the insurance companies, oil and gas, and the coal industry. Bhutto went further, claiming iron and steel, petrochemicals and cement, heavy engineering and electricals, cotton ginning and flour mills, and various utilities. As for Mujib, by commandeering whatever could be construed as important for the state’s reconstruction, he nationalised just about everything.

Though seldom good for productivity, this expansion of the state sector furnished politicians and bureaucrats with substantial leverage in the form of an inexhaustible source of patronage. Socialism for Nehru had been a matter of deep conviction and lofty ideals. For his daughter, as for Bhutto, it was more a means of engrossing power. Isolated among prime-ministerial advisers, with bureaucratic Leviathans to do their bidding and a sycophantic assembly to endorse it, Bhutto surpassed Ayub in his dictatorial style, with Mrs Gandhi not far behind. Popularity being an addictive substance, both developed an applause-dependency that subverted the democratic machinery responsible for dispensing it in the first place. In India according to Sunil Khilnani, as in Pakistan, the meaning of democracy was being transformed. ‘[It] now signified, simply, elections … The drift was unmistakably towards a Jacobin conception of direct popular sovereignty … the mere capture of power rather than its responsible exercise became the exclusive aim of politicians.’
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Parliamentary procedures were circumvented and civil institutions ignored; office represented an opportunity for reward rather than service; scrutiny was deemed unnecessary, opposition intolerable.

Having seen off Congress (O) and then the Pakistani army, Mrs Gandhi’s appetite for political jousting seemed undiminished as she turned to the annexation of the Himalayan state of Sikkim and then to the detonation of India’s first nuclear device. Conducted in 1974, both actions were provocative – of the Chinese, who claimed a special relationship with Sikkim, and of the anti-proliferation community, including the Chinese, in the case of the bomb. Yet these achievements were rapturously received in nationalist circles
and well served their dual purpose of gratifying the prime minister and distracting attention from discontent elsewhere.

Like democracy itself, the documents that enshrined it could be a another barrier to the uninhibited exercise of popular sovereignty. Bhutto was spared embarrassment on this score by the need for a new constitution. Pakistan’s third in as many decades, it was approved in 1973 and reserved to the prime minister – as Bhutto now preferred to be – such extensive powers that he was effectively president as well. India, of course, already had an established and revered constitution. Mrs Gandhi could therefore only tinker with it. Seeing it ‘as a conservative obstacle to her radical ambitions’, she introduced several amendments, one of which prejudiced the independence of the judiciary.
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When in 1975 the courts still proved defiant, she would simply declare an Emergency, so suspending all rights guaranteed under the constitution and clearing the way for a string of further amendments.

But it was in Bangladesh that the constitution proved most contentious, indeed fatal. The four constitutional pillars of so-called ‘Mujibism’ had looked unexceptionable. Over the first, ‘nationalism’, only the state’s non-Bengalis, mostly Buddhist or Christian hill peoples, could quibble; by redefining it as Bangladeshi (rather than Bengali) nationalism, the semantic problem was solved – though not the social and cultural alienation of these groups. ‘Socialism’ was more tricky. Within the Awami League, as well as outside it, many shades of leftist opinion were represented from Maoist scarlet to Nehruvian pink. They had divided even the government-in-exile and they continued to do so after Mujib secured a new mandate in 1973. No less divisive was ‘secularism’. Its very mention in the constitution antagonised the orthodox and swelled the ranks of the religious opposition, while any gesture in their direction brought squeals from the liberal intelligentsia and outrage from Marxist intellectuals.

The pillar that cracked, though, was seemingly the most solid of all, namely ‘democracy’. For a politician whose career had been built on electoral arithmetic, and for a nation that owed its existence to democratic consensus, Mujib’s January 1975 amendment of the new Bangladeshi constitution to permit an authoritarian one-party state looked like utter madness. In the previous year an appalling famine might have been taken as a warning of trouble ahead, like the typhoon of 1970. Over a million are thought to have perished and, as in Bihar a decade earlier, multi-party democracy provided neither safeguard nor certainty of redress. The hoarding and black-marketeering that accountable government was supposed to prevent were all too evident. So too were corruption and preferential treatment in the distribution of relief. Dissension had overcome consensus, self-interest had subverted national
cohesion. Three years of reconstruction seemed to have failed. To Mujib and his disciples this suggested not weak leadership but impeded leadership. ‘Democracy’ was sabotaging ‘nationalism’. The solution to such a conflict of principles was what Mujib dubbed his ‘second revolution’.

A single party (acronym BAKSAL) with Mujib as leader was authorised; all other parties were banned; and Mujib assumed the office of national president. Civil liberties were curtailed and summary arrests became common. Maoist tendencies were evident in the regime’s mobilisation of the masses into five popular ‘fronts’ – peasants, workers, women etc – and in the promotion of village co-operatives. On the other hand, a reorganised and devolved administrative system under presidentially appointed district governors smacked more of Ayub’s ‘basic democracy’. If the idea was to contain dissent by dispersing it, it was a tactic that would be pursued by subsequent regimes. Whether it would have worked under Mujib’s chaotic dispensation is unknown, for in August 1975 the Bangabandhu himself, his family and his whole experiment were consigned to history. Tanks commanded by a group of young officers in league with a rightist Awami League splinter group stormed the presidential residence and made sure there were no survivors. Only because they happened to be in London at the time would two of Mujib’s daughters live on to reclaim his reputation and in the case of one, Hasina Wajed, to resurrect the Awami League and lead it back to power in 1996, and then again in 2009.

Counter-coups and counter-counter-coups quickly followed Mujib’s death. In a scenario not unlike that which had brought Ayub to power in Pakistan, the man behind Bangladesh’s first martial-law administration in late 1975 did not actually take over as president until 1977. This was General Zia-ur-Rahman who, back in March 1971 as Operation Searchlight got under way, had been responsible for alerting the world to the birth of Bangladesh by broadcasting Mujib’s declaration of independence. No one doubted Zia’s nationalist credentials, but of his commitment to socialism, secularism and democracy there would be little sign. Rather would he, like his contemporary and namesake in Pakistan, free up the economy, pander to religious zealotry and make of democracy a ‘demockery’. Under his presidency, and then that of his former deputy General Ershad, Bangladesh would have to wait till the 1990s to renew its brief acquaintance with meaningful elections and popular accountability.

Next to be hoist on the petard of his own populism was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Unlike Mujib’s fate, the downfall of Pakistan’s idol was a protracted process and allowed ample time for introspection. No one would deny Bhutto’s appeal, least of all himself. On a political stage unaccustomed to
intellectual panache his speeches mesmerised the nation and his confidence knew no bounds. ‘Perhaps I have embedded myself too deep in the hearts of the poor of this land …’ he would write. ‘I am a household word in every home and under every roof that leaks in rain. I belong to the sweat and sorrow of this land. I have an eternal bond with the people which armies cannot break.’ Yet somehow this bond was never quite enough, the rain, sweat and sorrow insufficiently sustaining. As he noted of his military opponents, it was ‘the appetite for aggrandisement, the unquenchable thirst for naked power’ that were so addictive. ‘It can bring hallucinations…’
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Hallucinating or just high on his own esteem, Bhutto certainly made a better showing as ‘the People’s Leader’ than Mujib as ‘Bengal’s Friend’. Retrieving the nation after the 1965 war and then ‘picking up the very small pieces’ after the 1971 debacle should rate as his greatest achievements. Pakistanis prefer his response to India’s 1974 nuclear test and his repositioning of Pakistan on the international stage. ‘We will eat grass,’ he is supposed to have said when confronted with the Indian detonation, ‘but we too will make an atom bomb.’ With some help from the Chinese, he was as good as his word. Pakistan thus joined India in owing its eventual nuclear arsenal not to war-mongering generals or religious fanatics but to a vote-mongering democrat.