India: A History. Revised and Updated (107 page)

Twenty-five years later the Bhopal survivors were still seeking redress by mounting pathetic protest marches and engaging the sympathy of the media. Despite the Indian economy now enjoying growth rates that were the envy of the world, despite the proliferating shopping malls and the info-tech billionaires, the provision of even uncontaminated drinking water could not be guaranteed to Bhopal’s despised survivors. Their individual tragedies as much as their collective plight may serve as a salutary reminder that lesser lives matter, that democratic formalities are no guarantee of accountablity and that economic miracles may be underwritten by rank discrimination and enduring levels of the most abject poverty.

Ojhri and Bhopal also raised serious questions about the competence of South Asian states to handle technologies whose volatile nature called for sophisticated safeguards and responsible supervision. Although India had exploded an atomic device in 1974, it was not until 1998, ten years after Ojhri, that both New Delhi and Islamabad would euphorically celebrate the
successful testing of battle-ready nuclear weapons. Yet by the late 1980s each was known to have developed or acquired the necessary know-how and materials and to be successfully testing delivery systems. Conducted in defiance of international pressure for non-proliferation, these programmes were vigorously condemned by the existing nuclear powers as inviting armageddon in an already chronically unstable region.

But whether they in fact made the region more unstable or less so was debatable. The forty-year Cold War between the global superpowers had stayed cold for so long arguably because, with each capable of annihilating the other, neither had dared try. The same could be true of India and Pakistan, especially since, as neighbours, neither could be sure that the fall-out from its nuclear aggression would not affect its own citizens. Indeed it seemed possible that, where all else had failed, the bomb might be the catalyst to fast-freeze Partition once and for all. India saw its nuclear capability as marking its coming of age on the world stage and as a necessary deterrent to further invasion by its neighbours, China as much as Pakistan. Likewise Pakistan saw its bomb as boosting its standing within the Islamic world and offsetting India’s superiority in conventional weapons, so discouraging any all-out offensive across its borders like those of 1965 and 1971. Both countries denied any hostile intent and undertook to discontinue testing, although they shied away from agreements on mutual disarmament (in the case of India) and on not being the first to use the nuclear option (in the case of Pakistan).

In so far as no fourth Indo-Pak conflict has yet materialised, these arguments may stand. Yet each of them also had implications for Kashmir. In the light of a potential nuclear holocaust, the international community would be more inclined to resume its efforts to broker a Kashmir settlement; a nuclear-armed India felt more confident about pressing ahead with the integration of Kashmir regardless of Pakistani objections; and beneath its own nuclear umbrella Pakistan felt free to train and arm Kashmiri militants and launch low-level interventions without fear of a disproportionate retaliation.

There remained, too, the perhaps greater danger of nuclear arsenals falling into hostile hands, domestic or foreign, or detonating accidentally. This gave each government an interest in the internal stability of its neighbour and argued for some normalisation of relations as conducive to it. But it also prompted mutual scrutiny, most notably in the 1990s when the Indian electorate seemed willing to entrust the levers of power to bellicose nationalists and when in Pakistan uncertainty prevailed over whose finger (the military’s, the intelligence services’ or the government’s) was actually on the button. Meanwhile in both countries radical militias with terrorist agendas appeared increasingly able to strike at the most sensitive
of installations; and as for accidental detonation, there remained of course the terrible legacy of Ojhri and Bhopal.

Assuming the figures are approximately correct, the total of Indian lives lost and blighted by the Bhopal disaster would scarcely be exceeded by either the ongoing Panjab crisis, the imminent intifada in Kashmir or the intermittent Hindu-Muslim massacres of 1992-2002. Likewise, Ojhri set a bloodstained benchmark for the countless individual bombings and shootings to which both Pakistan and India were about to be subjected. In effect, both ‘accidents’ lent a grim perspective to that catalogue of conflicts that characterised turn-of-the-century South Asia.

The population of India was now nearing the 1 billion mark, with those of Pakistan and Bangladesh each soaring towards 150 million. More people meant more potential victims. As the Kalashnikov replaced the tribal jezail, as the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) gave every sniper a tank-busting potential and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could seemingly be assembled at will, the scale of outrage could only escalate. Yet the headline-grabbing body-counts were, if possible, less shocking than the extreme brutality that accompanied all these conflicts. Mutilation, rape, human incineration and the butchery of infants were widely logged and again stoked memories of Partition. An avowedly benign Islam, no less than a supposedly inclusive secularism, seemed incapable of restraining the violence or resolving the conflicts. The police were neither impartial nor effective, the military were among the worst offenders, the administrative services were hopelessly politicised and the governments, when not actually complicit, were often ambivalent. The state itself was compromised. Any national consensus, whether that projected by Jinnah or forged by Nehru, seemed to have atrophied.

Violence as between different sects, castes, linguistic communities, ethnic groups and ideological persuasions had been endemic long before Partition and had, if anything, escalated. In India orthodox Sikhs (with Bhindranwale to the fore) had hounded Nirankari Sikhs much as, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, orthodox Muslims had hounded Ahmedi (Ahmaddiya) Muslims. Condemned as heretics by their own government, most Pakistani Ahmedis had by the late 1980s been driven to emigrate to the West. Among Muslims in general the Sunni habitually antagonised the Shi’i, and among non-Muslims in general – Christians and Sikhs as well as Hindus – the caste-conscious habitually oppressed the casteless. In Karachi, Urdu-speaking
mohajirs
fought with both Sindhi-speaking natives and Pushtu-speaking incomers. In Bombay, Marathi-speaking Hindus of the Shiv Sena (‘Shivaji’s Army’ as well as ‘Shiva’s Army’) managed to provoke just about everyone. For each well-publicised celebration of communal harmony there were hushed whispers of another eruption of
particularist sentiment, often in the back of beyond. Caste warfare ran riot in Bihar; Maoist revolutionaries (Naxalites) terrorised other parts of eastern India; and just as refugees from Afghanistan swamped the borderlands of Pakistan, economic migrants from Nepal and Bangladesh destabilised the Indian borderlands. Pakistan’s ‘tribals’ – they being the mostly Pathan clans of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the north-west frontier – were a law, or lack of it, unto themselves. India’s ‘tribals’ – they being the
adivasi
(‘aboriginal’) peoples of the forests and hills – were being harried into an equally truculent resistance by speculators and proselytisers. The ‘Million Mutinies Now’ of V. S. Naipaul’s book were certainly no novelty; but neither were they a preposterous exaggeration.

As ever, underlying all these conflicts was competition for scarce resources, especially land and water, for jobs and for educational places, along with expectations of an end to various forms of discrimination. From the late 1970s another way of escaping penury and prejudice offered itself in the form of overseas employment. This was nothing new either. Bonded migrant labourers had been leaving South Asia ever since the mid-nineteenth century. Many had never returned, their descendants forming the nuclei of the substantial ‘Indian’ communities of East and South Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji and South-East Asia. In the aftermath of Partition another exodus, principally to the UK and North America, had lasted well into the 1960s, and again, though some had returned, many had not. All, however, had invariably remitted home any savings they could spare, so galvanising otherwise neglected local economies and providing an unexpected facelift in districts like Mirpur (in Azad Kashmir) and Sylhet (in north-east Bangladesh) from which mid-century migration had been substantial.

The latest exodus was an unforeseen bonus of the 1970s hike in oil prices. It was on a much bigger scale, was directed almost exclusively towards the now cash-rich Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) and was governed by fixed-term contracts, so precluding permanent settlement. Families did not follow their migrant menfolk, and remittances did not tail off as tended to happen with second-generation settlers. On the contrary, the constant turnover of labour meant that the pool of recruits spread ever wider and the flow of remittances ever further. Given the religious complexion of the Gulf, the takeup was greater among Muslims than non-Muslims. Pakistan and Bangladesh were thus prime beneficiaries, but with Kerala, Gujarat and other parts of India participating on a scale to justify regular direct flights between, for example, Trivandrum and Dubai.

What all this was worth in economic terms remained largely a mystery until early in the twenty-first century American and international agencies
began to monitor the flow of remittances as part of ‘the war on terror’. According to the World Bank, the transfer of funds to South Asia from migrant workers worldwide was running at $20 billion per annum in 2000 and had by 2008 risen to a colossal $75 billion per annum. In 2009 ‘India alone got $52 billion from its diaspora, more than it took in foreign direct investment’ – and this at a time when its economy was out-perfoming (and out-attracting) most others.
¹
Unlike international aid, the migrants’ money orders bypassed governmental and non-governmental agencies, so reaching their intended recipients more or less intact. If the cash was then mostly blown on consumer durables, nuptial extravaganzas and land purchases, it at least served to boost domestic demand, alleviate national shortages of hard currency and relieve the indebtedness and hardship of innumerable unsung lives.

The new migration experience, like the traditonal
haj,
also tended to excite expectations of change and spiritual renewal, in this case among a menial and marginalised class of labourers with no previous exposure to international Islam. In a globalised world ideas, like cash, transferred easily but were hard to quantify. It was assumed that the inflow of so-called ‘knowledge transfers and social and political remittances’ was on a comparable scale to that in money orders. The migrant phenomenon was therefore seen as a contributory factor in the contemporary assertion throughout South Asia of the more legalistic and politically intrusive traditions of Sunni Arab Islam. The growing prominence of indigenous reformist and ‘fundamentalist’ movements, the proliferation and popularity of Quranic madrassahs, the construction of gleaming new mosques and the multiplicity of Islamic political parties were accounted a by-product of the new diaspora. So was the considerable foreign, often Saudi, investment required for all these enterprises.

The implications were not lost on politicians. In India vigilant Hindu activists detected an Islamic conspiracy. The conspiracy, which was supposedly aimed at politicising Indian Muslims, attracting converts and promoting foreign – that is, Pakistani – designs on the integrity of the nation, seemed to have seduced even Rajiv Gandhi when in 1985 his Congress government intervened in an excruciatingly convoluted affair known as the Shah Bano case. Basically the Supreme Court had just rejected the plea of a male Muslim divorcee against a lesser court’s ruling that he must indefinitely support his seventy-five-year-old ex-wife, the eponymous Shah Bano. Muslim law required that he pay only three months’ maintenance but the Indian criminal code required that he pay up as long her circumstances required. In favouring the Indian code, the Supreme Court raised the thorny issue of whether constitutional safeguards in respect of Muslim personal
law still applied, or whether, as the constitution intended, they might now be overridden by the uniform criminal code. Naturally most Muslims took the former view. They saw the Court’s judgment as an assault on Islamic jurisprudence and a gratuitous swipe at the submissive conduct expected of Muslim women. Shah Bano was duly vilified by her community and eventually driven to award her husband’s stipend of 180 rupees a month (about £4 or $6) to a charity.

More progressive Muslims, however, welcomed the Supreme Court’s judgment as a chance to remove an embarrassing and Quranically suspect anomaly; and so too, of course, did most Hindus and all those concerned with women’s rights. Thus when the issue came before parliament, while a Muslim MP made the case in favour of Islamic practice, a Muslim minister made the case against it. The minister won, having the backing of Rajiv Gandhi and the massive majority he had secured in the post-Indira elections. But there then followed a string of poor by-election results that prompted Rajiv to think again. Under Nehru and Indira the Congress party’s electoral accounting had required the Muslim vote; evidently it still did. So a government that had just upheld the Supreme Court’s decision quickly introduced a bill that effectively reversed it. The bill was passed in 1986, leading to howls of protest from all quarters save those of conservative Muslims. Rajiv’s reputation as a peacemaker – won in brokering accords in Kashmir and Assam as well as Panjab – was shattered, his political honeymoon over. Meanwhile, buoyed by accusations of the government’s capitulation to a ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ conspiracy, the star of Hindu zealotry soared impressively under the direction of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

JIHAD,
THE FRANCHISE

For evidence of a resurgent Islam, Indians were invited to look no further than Pakistan and Bangladesh. In both countries the military rulers who had ended the populist extravagances of Bhutto and Mujib had since shed any pretence of secularism to accord greater prominence to Islamic values and interests. After much Pakistani indecision on the matter, by 1987 both states called themselves Islamic Republics and spattered their official discourse with pious phrases for the edification of reformist clerics and orthodox
ulema.
To generals badly in need of legitimacy, the approval of Muslim ideologues was the next best thing to electoral endorsement. Zia-ur-Rahman in Bangladesh had even extended an amnesty to the leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, an ultra-religious party compromised by its links to
Pakistan, its opposition to Mujib’s breakaway and so its ambiguity over the very existence of Bangladesh. More fatefully Zia-ur-Rahman had also awarded pardons and political sinecures to his predecessor’s military killers, a move that launched his, and then his widow Khaleda’s, new Bangladesh National Party (BNP) on a permanent collision course with the Awami League of the murdered Mujib, and now of his daughter Hasina. Thus a clemency that Zia billed as in the interests of national unity proved exactly the opposite. Thirty years later Bangladeshi politics remained polarised as between the BNP and the Awami League with the main bone of contention still being whether or not to try Mujib’s killers. Moreover whatever Zia-ur-Rahman’s clemency had been meant to achieve, it had been ill requited in that he too was assassinated by military mutineers in 1981.