India (10 page)

To help him with his modernizing mission he brought personal friends with a similar agenda into his political circle. There was also a greedy clutch of less sophisticated hangers-on, some left over from Sanjay’s day. The prime minister’s office functioned in a haphazard and amateurish fashion, with the cabinet frequently being reshuffled. Rajiv Gandhi ignored corruption among his colleagues, and the payment of financial incentives became a growing part of Indian public life. The most serious scandal of his premiership related to the government’s award of a contract for field guns to
the Swedish arms company Bofors. He denied any money had been taken in bribes to facilitate the contract, only to be undermined by documentary evidence which showed he knew this to be untrue. Millions of dollars in commissions were paid into overseas accounts. Unlike his mother, Rajiv Gandhi did not start in office with a good working knowledge of international diplomacy, although he did develop a strong interest in areas such as the anti-apartheid movement. At a personal level, he was often better than Indira Gandhi at making a connection, but he lacked her strategic sense. He became involved in the politics of the neighbouring island of Sri Lanka, sending a huge peace-keeping force to implement a pro-Tamil agreement, only to find the Tamil Tigers refused to cooperate. When too many Indian soldiers returned home dead, the effort was abandoned. Sikh insurrection continued in Punjab, with the police being allowed to use savage methods against militants. By the end of the 1980s, as his wife, Sonia, wrote guilelessly, India contained “a dozen major terrorist outfits: for each of them he was the number one target.”
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A general election was called in 1989, and Congress tumbled to defeat at the polls. A coalition government took power headed by V. P. Singh, a senior minister whom Rajiv Gandhi had sacked for investigating corruption too vigorously. During his brief period as prime minister, V. P. Singh brought in a major and exceedingly controversial affirmative action programme to help lower castes, reserving a quota of government jobs and university places for them. Rajiv began a period of introspection. He realized he had made mistakes and distanced himself from his courtiers. Some of his associates felt he would make a much better prime minister if he had a second chance in office.

In 1991 the minority coalition administration fell, and Rajiv Gandhi returned to the election trail. The new government had reduced his personal security. Near the end of the campaign, he arrived exhausted for a rally at a small town near Madras. Advancing through the throng in a plain kurta pyjama and red-and-white Lotto training shoes, he was surrounded and jostled by well-wishers and supporters. One of the crowd was a young woman called Dhanu, a Tamil Tiger terrorist set on avenging his government’s military escapade in Sri Lanka. As she bent down to touch his feet, as if in homage, he stopped and bowed slightly over her. At that instant she pressed a toggle switch on her belt, exploding a bomb. Rajiv’s old friend and media adviser Suman Dubey heard a low noise and watched the crowd dissolve “like a red flower unfolding in slow motion.”
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When Sonia heard the news, she told her daughter Priyanka that she wished she had died too. She had an asthma attack and began to howl; her cries could be heard by the Congress activists who were gathering outside the house. In the days that followed, Mrs. Gandhi made it clear to visiting dignitaries, as well as to close friends and family, that she would never, ever enter politics.

T
HE
C
ONGRESS STORY
is not the only story. If you are Lal Krishna Advani, you might have bad memories of Indira Gandhi, not only politically but personally, for what she did to you. When I asked him about this, he said he was not bitter but was unable to forget she had taken away two years of his freedom by putting him in prison. “I was protected by my station: others had a worse experience.” She returned to power, was killed, her son came to power, was killed, and later her son’s widow and son’s son would come to a different kind of power, orchestrating the government from behind the scenes.

Advani did not like the idea, still propagated by the legions of Congress sycophants, that one family had a destiny to rule a country. Resentment, not surprisingly, was part of the undertow for him and his colleagues. “When Manmohan Singh became prime minister he visited me and said he had a list of five statues he wanted to be put up, and needed my agreement as leader of the opposition. I looked at the list and said to him, they’re all from the same family! Can’t you at least put up one of Narasimha Rao, who made you the finance minister?”

At the time the Emergency was declared, Advani was president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, an organization founded in 1951 to promote Hindu culture, a non-socialist economy and a strong India. He was in Bangalore,
staying in a shared room in a hostel, when woken by news that prominent Congress and opposition MPs, including himself, had been arrested; so it was not a surprise when police officers arrived after breakfast and yoga. Together with his long-time colleague Atal Behari Vajpayee, he was taken into custody. They had time to tell reporters this was as significant a moment in national history as the mass arrests during the Quit India movement in 1942. His wife and children were not allowed to see him. The crackdown spread far. The private houses of several former princely rulers were requisitioned and damaged. Students, trades unionists, regional politicians, farming activists and personal enemies of Indira Gandhi were all scooped up, along with some of her late father’s associates. J. B. Kripalani was an example: during the First World War he was a college professor who fought against colonial rule, in 1942 he was imprisoned by the British in Ahmadnagar Fort with Nehru, 1947 found him in the Constituent Assembly framing the future of India, and by 1975 he was protesting against the Emergency, although Indira Gandhi did not dare to detain him for long.
¹

In jail, Advani and his colleagues forged lasting bonds, as Nehru and his colleagues had before them. They were given books from the prison library, Vajpayee did the cooking and each evening they would take a two-mile circular walk inside the compound. The idyll did not last. They were released and rearrested, transferred north, shifted again and on arrival had their possessions pulled apart by a convict warder, searching for hidden papers. With other leading politicians, they were placed in a prison dormitory. Information from outside was patchy. They heard mass non-violent resistance was taking place, and more people were being rounded up. Then they were transferred back to south India. Sometimes the prisoners were able to pick up foreign radio stations like the BBC and Voice of America and learn of the opposition to “Madam Dictator.” At times they would see direct evidence of what was happening. A young student caught distributing underground literature was brought to the jail covered in bruises, followed by another who was so terrified after being interrogated upside down for five days on a pulley that he was unable to talk. A 22-year-old Bharatiya Jana Sangh worker from Mangalore called Vishwanath was brought in with his back paralysed. Advani wrote pamphlets under the name “A Detenu” which were distributed illegally:
A Tale of Two Emergencies
compared the methods of Adolf Hitler and Indira Gandhi, and
Anatomy of Fascism
suggested her talk of discipline was a smokescreen for the concentration of state power in the hands of a single group. Meanwhile, scraps of news reached the prisoners,
in one case via leaflets that were dropped from an aeroplane and fluttered into the compound. They announced a forthcoming appearance by Sanjay Gandhi. Advani noted in his prison diary: “One of them reads: ‘If you miss this rally, you will be missing the unfolding of a new chapter in the history of the nation.’ ”
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Despite detention without trial and instances of torture, the Emergency was conducted with restraint compared to similar crackdowns in neighbouring countries. It always felt like a temporary solution. The strength of opposition and the instinctive Indian dislike of dictators, stemming from the tendency to believe in several possible solutions rather than a single answer, meant the prospect of an end was never out of sight. Unlike in Pakistan, the army in India had never had the political prestige needed to seize power. The most worrying moment came when a document was circulated at the end of 1975 proposing permanent constitutional change: power would pass to the president, the judiciary would be made subordinate to the executive and the fundamental rights detailed in the Indian Constitution would in effect be abolished.
³
The response to this proposal was so strong, with the Bar Council of India calling an emergency meeting to say it would lead to the destruction of democracy, that Mrs. Gandhi and her loyal ministers backed down.

“When I was picked up from the hostel,” said Advani, “we were all surprised. It was a shocking thing for an MP to be arrested. Only a week or so before my arrest, an astrologer had said it was foretold in the stars that I would be facing two years in exile.” Today in his eighties, Advani looked in remarkably good health. As a staunch follower of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS—a pro-Hindutva organization which gave rise to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, now called the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP—he was a believer in restraint and self-discipline. He followed a strict diet and never ate more than was necessary; I noticed each entry on his blog ended with the injunction: “If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!”

L. K. Advani’s view of the world was formed by his experience of partition. Unlike many of his generation in the RSS, he was not from a higher-caste Maharashtrian or north Indian background. His family were Amils from Karachi in Sindh in the far west, with links to the vaishya, or trader, community. In retrospect, he liked to stress the pious, syncretic culture in which he had been raised, with Muslims and Hindus attending the same shrines and fighting foreign invaders together in earlier centuries. He went
to a Catholic school where there was one Muslim boy in his class. At his childhood home, the family “deity” was the Sikhs’ holy book, the Guru Granth Saheb. He said he had joined the RSS because he was impressed by its patriotism.

In 1947, things fell apart—Karachi was now in Pakistan, and L. K. Advani had to depart. He was homeless, and would need to make his way in the world. “I came to Delhi. The contacts I had made in the RSS were the nearest thing I had to a family there. Previously I had been to Indore, Ahmedabad and Nagpur for training and had watched Hindi films, which I loved, but I couldn’t speak the language too well. I knew some words of Hindi but could not read or write it. I was a pracharak, an old-timer who lived on the subsistence of the RSS.” He spent his days touring the north, trying to establish roots for the organization. After the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi—whom Advani had admired for his ascetic qualities—he and numerous other RSS workers were arrested because the killer had tangential links to the organization. Like later political murders in India, it achieved the opposite of its objective: the killing made people turn against the perceived philosophy behind the assassin, and the Hindutva movement would for decades be tarred as violent and extremist. (Similarly, after Indira Gandhi was murdered, the campaign for a Sikh homeland was suppressed in a counter-insurgency campaign that left tens of thousands dead; and Indian sympathy for the Tamil Tigers—which had never been very strong in the first place—evaporated after Rajiv Gandhi was blown up by a suicide bomber; it took until 2009 for the Tamil Tigers to be annihilated, but this was inevitable from 1991.) The RSS continued, a conservative brotherhood organization which held regular camps where its members saluted each other and paraded in baggy khaki shorts. There was even such a thing as the “RSS honeymoon,” when bride and groom, in an inoculation against Western decadence and purportedly un-Indian values, would set off on a holiday after their wedding accompanied by the groom’s extended family.

How did Advani cope with the long decades of obscurity? Did he believe the Hindutva philosophy would ever gain mass political support? “No, no, no, I never thought we would form a government in New Delhi. For a long time it seemed we would not come to power, and would only remain a pressure group, with influence in one or two states. In a country as vast and pluralistic as India, an ideological party seemed unlikely to succeed at the centre. I wrote so at the time. It was the same for the communists.” Did he lose hope or his temper? “I’ve read Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and
Influence People
. I know there is no point in trying to force people to change their mind. You have to do it in other ways. It was in the 1970s, at the time of the Emergency, that I saw we might band together with other parties. I saw we might be able to succeed.”
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For forty years, Hindu organizations rested on the fringes of the political mainstream. Advani and Vajpayee worked and plotted, hoped and waited, alert for the moment when Congress could be displaced as the natural party of government. In 1984, in the election that brought Rajiv Gandhi to power, the BJP returned only two MPs out of 542 in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament: a decade after that, the BJP was becoming the most important force in Indian politics. A perfect storm of events shot the Hindutva movement to the centre of national life. The Gandhi family seemed to have disappeared; middle-class shopkeepers and business people were ever more unimpressed by the stifling web of controls and regulations instituted by successive Congress governments, and by their willingness to manipulate communal politics for political gain. The BJP worked with this popular sense: Advani called the Congress interpretation of secularism an “allergy to Hinduism.” A hugely successful television series of the Hindu epic the Ramayana produced a coincidental feeling of non-sectarian religious excitement. L. K. Advani took note of this and, despite being a displaced Sindhi from a very different religious tradition, harnessed the power of Lord Ram in northern India. Acting on the advice of Pramod Mahajan and Narendra Modi—two rising stars of the BJP, both born since independence—he set off on a rath yatra, or chariot trip, from the temple at Somanatha to the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, where a mosque had been built on the orders of the first Mughal emperor, Babur. They would erect a Ram Mandir, a temple to Ram.