India After Gandhi (108 page)

There is a massive military presence in the north-east. The states of the region variously border China, with whom India has fought a costly war, Bangladesh, with whom India has a profoundly ambivalent relationship, and Burma. But it is not merely for external security that the Indian army has so many men here. They are also needed to maintain the flow of essential goods and services, protect road and rail links, and, not least, suppress rebellion and insurgency. ‘We have no say vis-à-vis the army’, says along-serving Manipur chief minister: ‘They have their own way of working, they will not tell us or listen to us, although they are supposed to be aiding the civil administration.’
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In the north-east the army operates under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (APSPA), which gives its officers and soldiers immunity from prosecution by civil courts, unless specifically permitted by the central government. Since the Act also grants permission to ‘fire upon or otherwise use force even to the extent of causing death’ anyone suspected of breaching the law, it has acted as an incentive to aggressive behaviour.

For many years now human rights groups have asked for the repeal of the APSPA. In the lead are the women of Manipur, long active in opposing male violence of all kinds. The state has dozens of local Meira Paibis (Women Torch Bearers) groups. These campaigned successfully against alcoholism before turning their attention to the excesses of the security forces. The Meira Paibis have demanded that troops leave schools and marketplaces, that they stop detaining young boys at will and that they open up their prisons and detention centres to public scrutiny.
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These demands were renewed in July 2004, when a Manipuri housewife was picked up from her home on the charge of abetting terrorism. She was tortured, raped and killed, and her body left to rot by the roadside. The incident sparked a wave of angry protests in the Manipur valley. A group of women marched to the army base in Imphal, where they took off their clothes and covered themselves with a white banner carrying the legend ‘Indian Army, Take our Flesh’. A student leader set himself on fire on Independence Day, leaving a note which read: ‘It is better to self-immolate than die at the hands of security forces under this Act. With this conviction I am marching ahead of the people as a human torch.’ A girl student went on an indefinite fast; taken to hospital, she still refused to eat. Several years later she lay in her bed, force-fed by the state because she said she would rather die than live under a regime run by the military.
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In May 2000 the population of India reached one billion. The government chose a girl born in Delhi as the official ‘billionth baby’. Aastha Arora’s arrival was greeted by an excited mob of press and television cameramen who clambered onto beds and tables to get a better shot. ‘The billionth baby’, noted one reporter wryly, ‘was greeted by a zillion flashlights and doctors say her skin could have been affected’.
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The choice of Aastha was politically correct, since the United Nations had recently observed the Year of the Girl Child. Yet it was flagrantly at odds with how girls – born or unborn – were treated in many parts of India, not least the countryside around Delhi. Throughout the preceding century the sex ratio had been steadily falling – from 972 females to 1,000 males in the year 1901 it had dropped to 947 by 1951 and 927 by 1991. Child mortality was highly variable by gender. In most Indian homes boys were treated better than girls – provided more nutritious food, better access to health care and sent to school while their sisters laboured in field and forest. From the 1980s advances in medical technology had worked to make more lethal an already deadly prejudice. Thus, the new sex-determination test allowed parents to abort female fetuses. Although illegal in India, the test was widely available in clinics throughout the country.

By the turn of the century demographers were releasing data that was chilling indeed. For the period 1981-2001, and the age group 0–6 years, the number of females born per 1,000 males had fallen from 992 to 964 in Andhra Pradesh, 974 to 949 in Karnataka, 967 to 939 in Tamil Nadu and 970 to 963 in Kerala. The changes were more dramatic in northern India. In Haryana the ratio had fallen from 902 to 820 between 1981 and 2001. In Punjab, the fall had been even greater, from 908 to 793.
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The falling sex ratio in Haryana and Punjab had led to a ‘crisis of masculinity’. According to the traditional rules of marriage, one’s spouse had to be from one’s caste and linguistic group, though not usually from one’s village. As boys grew into men, an increasing number found that brides were simply unavailable in the locality. So they contracted unions with girls from hundreds of miles away, belonging to other states, castes and linguistic groups. During the 1990s and beyond, women from the states of Assam, Bihar and West Bengal were being sought – and,
occasionally, bought – by men from Haryana and Punjab. These ‘cross-region’ liaisons were sometimes informal, at other times legitimated through the ritual of marriage. Questions remained about how the offspring of these highly unusual unions would be treated by a society still bound, in most other respects, by the ties of caste and kinship.
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The variations in gender relations were spatial as well as cultural.
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Indian women were treated better (or less badly) in the south and in the cities. In the urban context they were somewhat more free to go to school, take a job and choose their life partner. There was a rising class of women professionals making their mark – sometimes a considerable mark – in the law courts, hospitals and universities. Successful women entrepreneurs were running advertising agencies and pharmaceutical companies.

There was also a vigorous feminist movement. This was based in the cities and led by writers and activists, who produced a steady stream of high-quality essays and books on the lives and struggles of women in modern India.
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After years of lobbying politicians, these feminists were able to bring about a change in the law that would principally benefit their less fortunate, rural-based sisters. This was an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, which, for the first time, brought agricultural land under its purview, allowing women the same inheritance rights here as men. Another amendment brought female heirs on par with males with regard to Hindu joint families (where sons had previously had claim to a greater share than daughters). The economist Bina Agarwal, whose own work on gender and agriculture had been a critical influence, said of these changes that ‘symbolically, this has been a major step in making[Hindu] women equal in the eyes of the law in every way’.
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Sadly, social practice remained another matter.

An old teacher of mine used to say that ‘India is a land of grievance collectors’. The characterization is incomplete, for Indians do not merely collect grievances, they also articulate them. In the 1990s, as before, a variety of rights were being asserted by a variety of Indians, and in a variety of ways. However, as before, while some conflicts were being expressed in more intense and violent forms, other conflicts were being attenuated and even, at times, resolved.

There was, for instance, the return of peace to the state of Mizoram. The leaders of the Mizo National Front (MNF) had made a spectacularly successful transition; once insurgents in the jungle, they were now politicians in the Secretariat, put there by the ballot box. Peace had brought its own dividend in the form of water pipelines, roads and, above all, schools. By 1999 Mizoram had overtaken Kerala as India’s most literate state. The integration with the mainland was proceeding apace; Mizos were learning the national language, Hindi, and watching and playing the national game, cricket. And since they also spoke fluent English (the state’s own official language), young Mizos, men as well as women, found profitable employment in the growing service sector, in hotels and airlines in particular. Mizoram’s chief minister, Zoramthanga, was speaking of making his territory the ‘Switzerland of the East’. In this vision, tourists would come from Europe and the Indian mainland while the economy would be further boosted by trade with neighbouring Burma and Bangladesh. The Mizos would supply these countries with fruit and vegetables and buy fish and chicken in exchange. Zoramthanga was also canvassing for a larger role in bringing about a settlement between the government of India and the Naga and Assamese rebels. It was easy to forget that this visionary had once been a radical separatist, seeking independence from India when serving as the defence minister and vice-president of the Mizo government-in-exile.
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The troubles had also been resolved, more or less, in the state of Punjab. Here the process had been more tortuous. In 1987 President’s Rule was imposed on the state, and repeatedly extended for six months at a time. Without elected politicians to report to, the police energetically chased the militants, by means fair and foul. Gun battles were common, quite often around police posts but also in the countryside. In 1990 the army was called in to help; a year later it was withdrawn. In 1992 elections were at last held to the state assembly. The Akali Dal boycotted the polls and the elected Congress chief minister, Beant Singh, was killed by a suicide bomber not long after he took office.

In 1993, however, the Akalis returned to democratic politics by taking part in elections to local village councils. Four years later they won an emphatic victory in the assembly polls. By this time militancy was perceptibly on the wane. Some terrorists had become extortionists, squeezing money from Sikh professionals and from ordinary peasants. The popular mood had turned away from the idea of a separate state of Khalistan. Sikhs once more saw the advantages of being part of India.
Agricultural growth had slowed down, but trade was flourishing and the state’s languishing industrial sector was being primed for revival.
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A sign of normality was that the Akalis, now in power, were fighting among themselves, individuals and factions vying for control of particularly prestigious or profitable ministries. The veteran chief minister Prakash Singh Badal sought to transcend these squabbles through a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the proclamation by the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, of the Khalsa, or Sikh brotherhood.
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His Government allotted Rs3,000 million for the festivities, and the centre chipped in with a further grant of Rs1,000 million. New memorials to Sikh heroes were built, along with new sports stadia, shrines and guest houses. At the great
gurdwara
of Anandpur Sahib, Sikh intellectuals and writers were honoured in a colourful ceremony attended by both the chief minister and the prime minister. One of those felicitated, the novelist and journalist Khushwant Singh, noted with satisfaction that this once ‘alienated community’ had ‘regain[ed]its self-esteem and resume[d] its leading role in nation-building’.
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The costs, however, had been heavy. By one reckoning, more than 20,000 lives were lost in the Punjab between 1981 and 1993 – 1,714 policemen, 7,946 terrorists and 11,690 civilians.
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In February 2005 I visited Punjab for the first time in three decades. At the time, the prime minister of India was a Sikh; so was the chief of army staff and the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. That Sikhs commanded some of the most important jobs in the nation was widely hailed as a sign of Punjab’s successful reconciliation with India. Travelling through the state myself, I could not tell that the insurgency had ever happened, that the troubles had lasted as long as they did. A spate of fresh investments suggested that things were now very stable indeed. There were signs everywhere of new schools, colleges, factories, even a spanking new ‘heritage village’ on the highway, serving traditional ‘Punjabi food to the sound of Punjabi folk’ music.

I drove the entire breadth of the state, from the town of Patiala to the city of Amritsar. My last stop, naturally, was the Golden Temple. The temple was as tranquil as a place of worship should be; spotlessly clean, with orderly queues of pilgrims whose eyes shone with devotion and wafts of music coming in from the great golden dome in the middle.

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 run 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 now thoroughly at ease with the government of India. A marble slab was paid for by a Hindu 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.