India: A History. Revised and Updated (109 page)

By 1996 the Taliban had surpassed all expectations, marginalising Afghanistan’s warring mullahs and chiefs and overrunning much of the country. Success bred confidence and attracted support from all quarters. Even US President Clinton warmed to the Taliban’s achievement.
⁶
But others now saw
jihad
as something of a Taliban franchise, indeed a franchise that had served so well against one superpower that it might be the key to humbling the other. Radicalised Muslims from the repressive regimes of the Middle East and the ghettos of Europe and North America converged on the pious safe-haven of Afghanistan. From there, trained while guests of the Taliban, a network of terror-merchants fronted and funded by Usama bin Laden masterminded the series of sensational attacks across three continents that included the 11 September 2001 outrages in New York and Washington.

Suddenly, and for the third time in half a century, the West discovered an urgent new need to re-engage in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had to be hunted down and his Taliban hosts acquainted with regime change. The US relationship with Pakistan was therefore reactivated and an arms embargo that had been imposed following Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests was lifted. This time Washington put its own troops on the ground as the NATO-led invaders took the major Afghan cities and rampaged through the countryside in search of bin Laden and his virtual al-Qaeda.

The Taliban and their guest-terrorists scattered but regrouped, overwhelmingly in the badlands along the frontier and within the adjacent Federally Administered – or mostly unadministered – Tribal Areas of Pakistan’s NWFP. NATO intrusions into the latter merely discredited
Pakistan’s rulers, military and civilian, encouraged the
mujahidin
to strike deeper into Pakistan territory and won them some patriotic sympathy from otherwise fearful civilians. The effects became apparent from 2007 onwards as a so-called Pakistani Taliban occupied vast areas of Buner, Swat, Waziristan and other districts in the NWFP. Inevitably the Pakistani army was cajoled by its American allies into a reluctant engagement with these former friends. More sensationally the Taliban responded by attacking high-profile targets throughout Pakistan in one of the bloodiest and most sustained terrorist offensives ever mounted.

In sum, seldom can a policy aimed at influencing a neighbouring state have backfired so catastrophically. An early victim of the atrocities was Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in December 2007 while campaigning for the 2008 elections that ended Musharraf’s eight-year rule. Martyred Bhuttos being one of the PPP’s greatest electoral assets, the party won the poll and then chose her widowed husband, Azif Ali Zardari, as her replacement. Politically inexperienced and heavily implicated (even by Pakistani standards) in corruption, Zardari inherited less a country than an existential crisis. The succession of governments, the coming and going of the military and the chronic state of the economy – all now paled into insignificance as the bombers struck and the carnage soared. Nowhere in the country, from the bustees of Karachi to the headquarters of the military and ISI, was safe. Innocent lives, often a hundred a day, each of them worthy of history’s regard, lay spent among the cartridge cases or shredded by the shrapnel. A nation confronted its nemesis.

DEMOLITION WORK

Observing events from across the border, Indians could perhaps be excused for indulging in that malicious enjoyment of another’s misfortunes known as
Schadenfreude.
While Pakistan was being bombed and burned, ‘lethargic, underfed’ India, though itself beset by countless insurgencies and a major identity crisis, was somehow being reincarnated as a potential superpower. Pakistanis, of course, saw these developments as connected. They suspected all manner of unholy but well-funded alliances between RAW, the Indian intelligence service, and their own dissident elements – Sindhis, Baluchis and
mohajirs
as well the mainly Pathan
mujahidin.
They also noted New Delhi’s close relations with the NATO-backed Karzai government in Kabul. A 2005 Indo-US agreement to exchange civil nuclear technology heightened Pakistan’s sense of international isolation, while the growing presence in Afghanistan of Indian counsellors, technocrats and corporate investors
revived the spectre of encirclement. Bhutto’s ‘defence in depth’ had become a sick joke, Zia’s ‘defence in Islam’ likewise.

Though little acknowledged in Delhi, there were, however, other grounds for supposing that developments in India had contributed to the crisis in Pakistan. For just as most Indians liked to imagine that Pakistan was finally paying for the presumption of Partition, most Pakistanis detected confirmation of the fear that had led to Partition in the first place – namely that an independent India would degenerate into a ‘Hindu raj’ with Muslims there becoming second-class citizens. This perception owed everything to the sensational rise in India’s political firmament of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), together with the outrages and atrocities that accompanied it and an Indian military offensive in Kashmir that was partly informed by it.

Back in 1988 the prospects for Indo-Pak bilateral relations had seldom looked brighter. In Rajiv Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and Dr Farooq Abdullah (son of Sheikh Abdullah, the ‘Lion of Kashmir’) a new generation of more photogenic leaders approached the Kashmir conundrum minus all the hardline baggage of their parents and at the head of comfortable majorities in their respective national and state assemblies. Their relations were cordial and their first exchanges promising. Only the timing was wrong. In Kashmir the recent victory of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference/Congress coalition in the state elections had benefited from outrageous vote-rigging and been hotly challenged by the opposition Muslim United Front. Failing to win redress, and so despairing of Indian democracy, some of the Front’s more militant supporters had then crossed into Pakistan in search of arms and support for the campaign of terror that began the following year.

Meanwhile in India, the nation was being held hostage by its television sets. In 1987 the state broadcaster had begun relaying a lavishly dramatised serialisation of the
Ramayana.
Broadcast of a Sunday, it ran to seventy-two episodes, lasted a year and a half and was watched by an unprecedented 80 million viewers. Cities fell silent, lunch went uncooked and markets were deserted as each screening took on the sanctity of an act of worship. Sets were garlanded for the occasion; sales and rentals rocketed. India was discovering not just the joys of family viewing but the excitement of a wider, more contentious identity. Muslims viewers were said to be equally entranced, but among those who thought of themselves as Hindus this TV rendering of an epic of uncertain provenance, many recensions and questionable historicity acquired near-canonical status. More scripture than catechism, it served to define Hindu values and instil a sense of India as one great Ram-worshipping Hindu congregation. Ram himself was elevated above other avatars of Lord
Vishnu, and attention then turned to such snippets as tradition preserved of his possible place in history.

Ayodhya in UP is mentioned as the site of his capital; and there, according to a later local tradition, beneath a Mughal mosque built on the orders of Babur to celebrate the Muslim triumph over India’s idolators, lay the actual ground (the
Ramjanmabhumi
or ‘Ram’s-life-giving-earth’) where Lord Ram had been born. A small and suspiciously recent image of the baby Ram within the Baburi (or Babri) mosque marked the spot. But the mosque was locked and no longer in use, preventing access to this shrine. Then in 1986, at the behest of a World Hindu Council (VHP) demanding Lord Ram be liberated from his ‘Muslim gaol’, the locks had been opened. Coming hard on the heels of the Shah Bano decision placating Muslim orthodoxy, it looked as if Rajiv Gandhi’s government now sought to placate Hindu radicalism. Primed by this success and emboldened by the impact of the TV series, the VHP and its affiliates (including the paramilitary RSS and the vote-hungry BJP) scented a once-in-a-century opportunity.

The BJP, a reincarnation of the post-Independence Jan Sangh and the pre-Independence Mahasabha, had seldom won more than a handful of seats in a national election. But in 1989 its tally shot up to 86 with 11 per cent of the vote, in 1991 to 120 with 20 per cent of the vote, and by the late 1990s it had increased to 25 per cent of the vote and enough seats to head a coalition government in New Delhi. The agitation over the Babri mosque was the making of the party. For though the VHP led the cry for the mosque to be replaced with a gleaming new temple, it was the BJP’s leaders, especially L. K. Advani and A. B. Vajpayee, who capitalised on the issue.

In the run-up to the 1989 elections, BJP men were prominent in a campaign to fund and consecrate bricks from all over north India for the construction of the proposed temple. The ‘bring-a-brick’ ceremonies triggered serious Hindu-Muslim strife and massacres in Bihar, but they won the BJP support among TV-savvy middle-class voters thoughout the populous north. A year later, Advani upped the stakes by staging a
rath yatra,
a chariot procession, from Somnath in Gujarat (where a magnificent new temple had lately been built to replace that destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1025) to Delhi, Bihar and Ayodhya. The chariot, a Toyota utility van festooned in saffron and customised to resemble the prehistoric wagons seen on TV, wound its way amid massive crowds to Delhi. When the new government, a coalition National Front, failed to stop it, it continued on, leaving in its wake more riots and massacres. Advani was eventually arrested by the anti-BJP government in Bihar and the cavalcade itself was halted by its counterpart in UP. But enough fanatical ancillaries reached the Ayodhya
site to give the security forces a tough battle and provide the movement with its first martyrs.

In December 1992 the BJP leaders headed for the Babri mosque yet again, this time to attend a foundation-laying ceremony for the proposed new temple. By now the VHP had acquired some adjacent land and had poured a certain amount of concrete, all in contravention of a standstill court order that UP’s new BJP government declined to enforce. Emboldened by the state government’s apparent sympathy and unimpressed by Delhi’s efforts to have the matter referred to the Supreme Court, 100,000 saffron-clad zealots turned up for the ceremony on 6 December. According to the BJP, things then got out of hand; according to a later inquiry, the BJP leaders had ensured that they would.
⁷
The flag-waving mob scaled the mosque’s protective railings and then the mosque itself. Picks, sledgehammers and grappling irons materialised. As the mosque’s three Mughal domes came crashing down in a tableau worthy of Goya, the foundation-laying ceremony degenerated into a demolition spectacle. The state police had fled; 20,000 troops stationed near by were not even summoned. The wreckers rounded off their day by torching Muslim homes in the vicinity.

Courtesy of the media, the events in Ayodhya instantly excited such Hindu triumphalism and Muslim resentment that ‘communal rioting’ – a euphemism for sectarian atrocities – broke out right across northern and central India on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Muslims were more often the victims than the perpetrators. Of the 800 massacred in Bombay’s ‘riots’, two-thirds were Muslims. There and elsewhere Muslims would strike back, targeting the police and national institutions like the Stock Exchange and the metropolitan railway. But they risked a greater retaliation. The worst came in Gujarat in 2002 when a train carrying ‘pilgrims’ back from Ayodhya caught fire as it left Godhra station. The fire claimed fifty-eight lives, and because the passengers had used the halt to abuse local Muslim vendors it was assumed to be a case of retaliatory arson. The retribution that followed left less room for doubt. All over southern Gujarat death squads sallied forth to dispossess, maim, rape and murder Muslims. With a BJP government in power in Delhi and another in power in the state, the victims felt especiallly vulnerable. At least 2000 died horribly, with many more losing limbs, virginity, property and livelihoods. As in Delhi during the pogrom of Sikhs in 1984, officials reportedly aided the destruction by distributing electoral registers, the police had orders to make themselves scarce and government ministers took over control posts to orchestrate the attacks.

Eight years later, a bandannaed gunman in Bombay’s Taj Hotel was
asked by one of his hostages why he was about to kill them all. He reportedly replied: ‘Have you not heard of Babri Masjid? Have you not heard of Godhra?’ Then he opened fire.

The demolition of the Babri mosque, the massacres that followed and the state’s complicity in them antagonised all South Asia’s Muslims, whether
mujahidin
or moderates, Sunni or Shi’i, Indian, Kashmiri, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Comparisons were again drawn with the dreadful events of Partition. But few paused to consider how the logic of the BJP’s demand for
Hindutva,
or ‘Hinduness’, merely mirrored that of Jinnah’s two-nations theory. BJP ideologues insisted that in the name of secularism the Indian state had been appeasing Muslim sentiment for too long; for India to realise its potential it needed to reject such policies and embrace and assert its overwhelming ‘Hinduness’; Muslims and Christians had dominated the country’s past by dividing and oppressing Hindus; it was time for the Hindu nation to reunite, rediscover its prior identity and its glorious heritage, and take pride in celebrating them; non-Hindus merited only suspicion and must accept a subordinate status. All of which, after juggling ‘India’ for ‘Pakistan’ and ‘Muslim’ for ‘Hindu’, could have come from the textbook of Jinnah’s Muslim League.

Liberal opinion in India was also horrified. In the English-language press the Babri affair was portrayed as the greatest ever threat to the state, worse even than Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency or the Chinese incursion. For as of 1992 India could no longer call itself a secular nation. The dark forces of sectarian conflict had been unleashed, the noble legacy of Gandhi and Nehru rejected. The state was irrevocably tainted with the bigotry it had so long decried. Intellectual and press freedom would suffer – and did – under the BJP’s chauvinist rule. And the political process that had brought that party to power seemed itself thereby discredited. One by one, the founding principles of the nation were falling. Socialism had died in the 1970s, secularism was expiring in the 1990s and democracy looked doomed by association.