Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

But it was by no means only the poor who were targeted by Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilisation scheme. It was supposedly a universal programme that was compulsory for all men who had already had three children or more, and some of the first people to whom it was applied were those to whom the government had easiest access: its own employees. Bureaucrats, policemen, school teachers — these people too were obliged to fall in line, often in so crude a way that the state was totally discredited, along with all its opinions about such private matters as childbearing.

For many of these middle-class families who had given themselves to the Nehruvian ideal and who sought out work as servants of the state, the imposition of male vasectomy represented another kind of disappointment with the entire national project. In north India, especially, where men were still trying to escape the emasculations, real and figurative, of the partition thirty years before, this symbolic castration by the very state in which they had taken refuge, to which they had pledged their life energies, rankled deep.

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On 31 October 1984, prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, who shot her thirty times as she was taking a walk in her garden in the heart of bureaucratic Delhi. The bodyguards surrendered to arrest: one was immediately shot dead; two more were imprisoned in Tihar Jail where they were later hanged.

In the 1977 election, Mrs Gandhi had been voted out of government to be replaced as prime minister by Morarji Desai, who now stood for the Janata Party, which had been newly constituted as an anti-Emergency coalition. But India’s first ever non-Congress government quickly collapsed amid infighting, and in the elections of 1980, Indira Gandhi took the country back under the banner, no longer of helping the poor, nor really of any big idea save that of her own power. This power, however, required some positive manifestation. Indira needed to produce economic growth to retain her legitimacy, and her economic policies took a marked shift to the right. She surrounded herself with new business-friendly advisers, deregulated key commodities such as cement and sugar and took a big loan from the World Bank to boost productivity.

But her enterprise was beset by adversity. Indira’s major source of personal strength, her son Sanjay, who was now a member of parliament himself, was killed shortly after the election while flying loops over Delhi in his private plane. She found herself embattled in the states, where parties catering to caste identities, religious ideals and hopes of regional autonomy were everywhere on the rise. A generation after Independence, Indian politics had grown beyond one-party federalism towards what some would call a more genuinely democratic variety, and Indira Gandhi found herself adopting strong-arm tactics to maintain the power of the centre.

Nowhere was this battle more serious than in Punjab, where demands for territory and autonomy had been growing under the leadership of the vehement and well-organised Akali Dal party. In order to divide the Akali Dal’s support, Indira Gandhi supported the agitations of the ultra-Orthodox break-away leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. But it soon became impossible to check the rise of Bhindranwale, who made increasingly overt calls for the armed liberation of Punjab from Hindus and from Delhi, and before long the Congress had a major problem on its hands. In 1981, a senior journalist who had been critical of Bhindranwale was assassinated. Bhindranwale was arrested, but at the cost of the death of several of the civilians who gathered to prevent it; widespread rejoicing broke out in Punjab when he was released three weeks later for lack of evidence. The central government had become hated and discredited, and in the wildness of 1980s politics no tactic, including political assassination, was disallowed to the leader who would take it on.

Terrorist acts became more and more persistent, and in 1984 Mrs Gandhi decided to take military action. Bhindranwale and his fighters took refuge in the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where they built up a great arsenal of arms and defences. On the night of 5 June 1984, several regiments of the Indian army stormed the temple. A huge battle ensued which resulted in the death of Bhindranwale and hundreds of his men.

Ramachandra Guha writes:

The Golden Temple is ten minutes’ walk from Jallianwala Bagh where, in April 1919, a British brigadier ordered his troops to fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians… The incident occupies a hallowed place in nationalist myth and memory; the collective outrage it provoked was skilfully used by Mahatma Gandhi to launch a countrywide campaign against colonial rule. Operation Blue Star differed in intent — it was directed at armed rebels, rather than a peaceable gathering — but its consequences were not dissimilar. It left a collective wound in the psyche of the Sikhs, crystallizing a deep suspicion of the government of India. The Delhi regime was compared to previous oppressors and desecrators, such as the Mughals, and the eighteenth-century Afghan marauder Ahmad Shah Abdali. A reporter touring the Punjab countryside found a “sullen and alienated community”. As one elderly Sikh put it, “Our inner self has been bruised. The base of our faith has been attacked, a whole tradition has been demolished.” Now, even those Sikhs who had previously opposed Bhindranwale began to see him in a new light. For, whatever his past errors and crimes, it was he and his men who had died defending the holy shrine from the vandals. 43

And so: the murder in Delhi, a few weeks later, of the prime minister.

The city-wide anti-Sikh rampage of murder and destruction that followed this assassination blew open the troubled heart of the city. Sikhism was, far more than Islam, the sibling of Hinduism: its founder, Guru Nanak, was part of a sixteenth-century movement of reform and renewal within the Hindu religion. Until recently many Hindu Punjabi families gave their first-born son to the Sikh religion, often in fulfilment of a vow made when a childless couple prayed for children. Like the events of 1947, then, the violent eruption of 1984 had all the fervour of a struggle over the nature of the family. Sikh militancy had been fuelled by the sense that Hindus treated Sikhs as India’s illegitimate offspring; Sikhs had in turn rejected an Indian state they described as “effeminate” and unleashed instead their own principle of virile, martial valour:

In one of his speeches Bhindranwale propounded the idea that it was an insult for the Sikhs to be included in a nation that considered Mahatma Gandhi to be its father, for his techniques of fighting were quintessentially feminine. He (Gandhi) was symbolized by a charkha, the spinning wheel, which was a symbol of women. “Can those,” asked the militant leader, “who are the sons of the valiant guru, whose symbol is the sword, ever accept a woman like Mahatma as their father? Those are the techniques of the weak, not of a race that has never bowed its head before any injustice — a race whose history is written in the blood of martyrs.”… To be able to claim true descent from the proud Gurus (the ten acknowledged founders of the Sikh religion), it was argued, all corruption that had seeped into the Sikh character because of the closeness to the Hindus was to be exorcised… The dangers of a “Hindu” history, it turned out, were not just that Sikhs were denied their rightful place in history but that the martial Sikhs became converted into a weak race: “The Sikhs have been softened and conditioned during the last fifty years to bear and put up with insults to their religion and all forms of other oppression, patiently and without demur, under the sinister preaching and spell of the narcotic cult of non-violence, much against the clear directive of their Gurus, their Prophets, not to turn the other cheek before a tyrant, not to take lying down any insult to their religion, their self-respect, and their human dignity.” 44