India After Gandhi (100 page)

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, the government also clinched an agreement with the All-Assam Students Union. The two
sides agreed on cut-off dates for ‘infiltrators’: those who had arrived after 1 January 1966 but before 25 March 1971 (when the civil war in East Pakistan began)would be allowed to stay but not vote, while those who came later would be identified and deported. Here too President’s Rule was ended and elections called. A student’s union transformed itself into apolitical party, with AASU members creating the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). When polls to the state assembly were held in December 1985 the AGP trounced the once-dominant Congress. The new chief minister, Prafulla Mahanta, was only thirty-two years of age; many of his legislators were even younger. As in Punjab, the result was hailed as a vindication of democracy. Senior Congress figures in Delhi argued that, while their party had lost, the Republic of India had won. ‘Men who were distributing dynamite earlier were handling poll posters,’ remarked one Union Minister: From a nationalistic point of view is that victory or defeat?’
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In June 1986 the government of India signed a peace agreement with Laldenga, leader of the Mizo National Front. By its terms, the MNF rebels laid down their arms and were granted an amnesty against prosecution. The government agreed to grant full statehood to Mizoram, and Laldenga himself assumed office as chief minister, taking over from the Congress incumbent. The model here was the Kashmir agreement of 1975, when Sheikh Abdullah had returned to power in a similar fashion.
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One journal remarked that Rajiv Gandhi ‘had brought to the Mizos the goodwill of the nation’; as he had previously done to the Sikhs and the Assamese.
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Although these agreements had actually been envisioned and drafted by officials – such as the veteran diplomat G. Parthasarathi – the credit accrued to the young prime minister, who was seen as standing above party rivalries in the interests of national reconciliation. In all three cases, parties or leaders opposed to the Congress had come to power through peaceful means.

That Rajiv Gandhi was an outsider in politics was to his advantage. In the popular mind, ‘his name was not associated with any controversial issues, he was not aligned to any caucus, and he had not yet created a coterie of his own’. His appeal was enhanced by his youth – he was still
under forty in 1984 – his good looks, and his open manner. Here was a ‘fine gentleman, thoroughly well-meaning, earnest and honest ... [H]is indulgent countrymen stuck the label “Mr Clean” on him’.
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Rajiv’s main advisers also came from outside politics. They included Arun Singh and Arun Nehru, two friends from the corporate sector who were made ministers. Like him, they were young and English speaking. Like him, they were at ease with modern technology. They made manifest their intention to take India directly from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, from the age of the bullock cart to the age of the personal computer. In some parts of the media the new recruits attracted derision or amusement, being known as ‘Rajiv’s computer boys’. In other parts they attracted approbation; here, Rajiv Gandhi was compared to John F. Kennedy, who had likewise ‘symbolised youth and the hope of a new generation’, assembling a ‘team of the best and the brightest’ to carve a new future for his land.
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In the first year of his term the prime minister was often on tour, making his acquaintance with parts of the country he had not previously seen. Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Discovery of India’ was appreciatively covered in the press, and on television. The 1980s had seen an enormous growth in the ownership of TV sets. With broadcasting still a state monopoly, the government channel, Doordarshan, shot and showed hundreds of hours featuring the young and handsome prime minister in the field: on a houseboat in Kashmir, in a remote tribal hamlet, among coconut trees in Kerala. Everywhere, he met ordinary Indians and received their petitions, passing them on to the district administration for action.
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The first crisis of the new regime was, in fact, caused by a petition. It had, however, been submitted not to the prime minister but to the Supreme Court of India. The petitioner was an elderly man named Mohammed Ahmed Khan, who wished to appeal against a lower court’s decision demanding that he pay monthly maintenance to his divorced wife, Shah Bano. Khan contended that he had fulfilled his duties by paying Shah Bano an allowance for three months, the period specified (he claimed) under Islamic law. In rejecting Khan’s appeal, the Supreme Court invoked Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, whereby a divorced woman was entitled to claim an allowance from her ex-husband if he had taken another wife (as Khan had), and if she had not remarried and could not otherwise maintain herself (as was the case with Shah Bano). Section 125, noted the Court, ‘was enacted in order to provide a quick and summary remedy to a class of persons who are unable to
maintain itself. What difference would it then make as to what is the religion professed by the neglected wife, child or parent?’ In their opinion, the explanations to the Criminal Procedure Code showed ‘unmistakably, that Section 125 overrides the personal law, if there is any conflict between the two’.

M. A. Khan had first filed the appeal in 1981; it took four years for the case to come to judgement. Dismissing the appeal on 23 April 1985, the Supreme Court confirmed that Khan would have to continue to pay Shah Bano maintenance as fixed by the High Court (at the curious figure of Rs179.20 per month). Then the judges went beyond the specifics of the case to make some general remarks. They deplored the fact that Article 44 of the constitution, mandating a uniform civil code, ‘has remained a dead letter’. They observed that ‘a belief seems to have gained ground that it is for the Muslim community to take a lead in the matter of reforms of their personal law. A common civil code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies.’
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In some circles these remarks were taken as a gratuitous chastisement of the minority community as a whole. Muslims took exception to the judges, saying that ‘it is alleged that the “fatal point in Islam is the degradation of women”’. (In fairness, they had also noted that the Hindu law-giver, Manu, believed that the woman does not deserve independence’). Muslim clerics criticized the judgement as an attack on Islam. Mosques up and down the country resounded with the voices of mullahs and maulvis denouncing Shah Bano and the Supreme Court judgement’.
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On the other hand, some Muslim scholars supported the verdict, or at any rate held it to be not inconsistent with scripture, where there existed ‘ample and respectable Islamic authority’ for the proposition that the divorcing husband must provide maintenance until his ex-wife’s death or remarriage.
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Three months after the Supreme Court judgement an MP named G. M. Banatwala moved a private member’s bill in Parliament seeking to exempt Muslims from the purview of Section 125. The bill was opposed in the House by the minister of state for home affairs, Arif Mohammed Khan, representing, so to say, ‘the progressive’ Muslim point of view. He defended the Court’s judgement by quoting Maulana Azad, who was at once the most famous nationalist Muslim and an acknowledged authority on the scriptures. The Maulana had written that
the ‘Quran takes occasion to re-emphasize that proper consideration should be shown to the divorced woman in every circumstance’. This call ‘was based on the reason that she was comparatively weaker than [a] man and her interests needed to be properly safeguarded’. Further, argued Khan, we should have better practices these days and only if the down-trodden are uplifted, the Islamic tenets can be said to have been followed and justice done’.
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Arif Mohammed Khan had the support of the prime minister; with the Congress voting against it, the bill was defeated. However, the debate carried on outside the House. In her native Indore, the 75-year-old Shah Bano was denounced by conservatives as an infidel; demonstrations were held outside her house and neighbours were asked to ostracize her. On 15 November Shah Bano succumbed to the pressure, affixing her thumb impression to a statement saying that she disavowed the Supreme Court verdict, that she would donate the maintenance money to charity and that she opposed any judicial interference in Muslim personal law.
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Towards the end of 1985 the Congress Party lost aseries of by-elections in northern India. Commentators saw a ‘Shah Bano factor’ at work, with rivals of the Congress ‘whipping up religious fervour’ by attacking the Supreme Court in constituencies with large Muslim popu-lations.
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Reports of the alienation alarmed Rajiv Gandhi, who, within his party and Cabinet, began increasingly taking the advice of the conservative Z. A. Ansari rather than the liberal Arif Khan. In a three-hour speech in Parliament Ansari attacked the Supreme Court verdict as ‘prejudiced, discriminatory and full of contradictions’. The judges, he added maliciously, were small men who were incompetent to interpret Islamic law’.
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By now, it was not merely Shah Bano who had succumbed to the pressure. The Congress itself had ‘accorded recognition to fundamentalists as the sole spokesmen of their community’.
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In February 1986 the government introduced a ‘Muslim Women’s Bill’ in Parliament which sought to over turn the Supreme Court verdict, by taking Muslim personal law out of the purview of the Criminal Procedure Code. The bill placed the burden of supporting the divorced wife on her own relatives; all the husband was obliged to do was provide three months’ maintenance. In May, the bill passed into law, with the Congress issuing a whip to its members to vote for it. Abandoned by his leader, his party
and his government, Arif Mohammed Khan resigned, telling an interviewer that with this new legislation Indian Muslim women will be the only women to be denied maintenance anywhere in the world’.
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The controversy sparked by the Shah Bano case was in many ways a reprise of the debates over the reform of Hindu personal laws three decades previously. Then, too, attempts to enhance gender equity had been bitterly resisted by priests claiming to speak for the community as a whole. The claim was tested and found wanting, when Jawaharlal Nehru fought and won the 1952 elections on, among other things, the issue of the Hindu Code Bill.

Faced with a comparable situation in 1985–6, Rajiv Gandhi already had the support of 400 MPs. A reform of Muslim personal law to enhance the rights of women was comfortably within reach. So, even, was a gender-sensitive common civil code (as asked for by the constitution). What was lacking was a prime minister consistently committed to social reform. For as a high official in Rajiv Gandhi’s government was to recall later, in the handling of the aftermath of the Shah Bano case the young P[rime] M[inister] was suddenly overwhelmed by the political system’. His initiatives in the Punjab and Assam had shown boldness and independence, but here, after first supporting the reformists, he had given way to the conservatives for fear of losing the Muslim vote. And so, ‘Rajiv Gandhi the statesman started transforming himself into a politician’.
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Ten months after the Supreme Court handed down its verdict in the Shah Bano case, a judgement by a lower court provoked a controversy more furious still. On 1February 1986 the district judge of the town of Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, ordered that the locks be opened to permit worship at a small Hindu shrine. Despite its modest size this was a rather special place. It was located inside a large mosque, built as far back as the sixteenth century by a general of the Mughal emperor Babar (and hence known as the Babri Masjid). Moreover, it was claimed that the site was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram, and that before the mosque was built, it had been home to a temple devoted to his worship.

There is no evidence that the hero of the epic Ramayan was a historical character, but Hindu sentiment and myth widely held that he
was, and that he had been born in Ayodhya at the very spot where the mosque was later built. The site was known locally as Ram Janmab-hoomi, literally, the piece of earth where Ram was born. Through the nineteenth century there were a series of clashes between rival groups claiming possession of the place. The British rulers then effected a compromise, whereby Muslims continued to worship inside the mosque, while Hindus made offerings on a raised platform outside.

Two years after India became independent in 1947 an official sympathetic to Hindu interests allowed an idol of the child Ram (Ram Lalla) to be placed inside the mosque. This was done under cover of darkness, and devotees were persuaded that it had appeared miraculously, a sign that the displaced deity wanted to reclaim his birthplace. Fresh tension broke out, defused only by an order allowing the worship of Ram Lalla on a single day in December. For the rest of the year, the idol was kept locked away from worshippers.

For three decades the status quo held until, in the early eighties, an organization named the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) began campaigning for the ‘liberation of the spot where Ram was born’. The VHP brought under one banner hundreds of monks from the numerous old temples that dotted Ayodhya. Processions and public meetings were organized, where fiery speeches were made urging Hindus to free their god from ‘a Muslim jail’. A local lawyer then filed a suit seeking public worship of the Ram idol. It was in response to this appeal that the district judge ruled that the locks be opened, and worship allowed.
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