India (14 page)

Mahajan was a Maharashtrian Brahmin, a clever campaigner, a canny social manipulator and a financial wizard, adept at drawing in money from multifarious sources for the party and reputedly for himself too. Despite being an RSS man, he was known for having an extravagant life. He managed to position himself at the strategic heart of the party as the fixer, the dealer, the nexus without whom no essential political decision could be taken. In 2006—only months after Vajpayee had tapped him as the probable new leader of the party—Mahajan’s brother walked into his sea-facing Mumbai apartment one morning and shot him with a pistol, before going to the nearest police station and saying what he had done. The nation was astonished by the fratricide of this prominent political leader, which appeared to be the result of a family and possibly a marital dispute. In the aftermath, Mahajan’s son, Rahul, was seen on television gently comforting his mother and sister while his father passed away in hospital. In the presence of Vajpayee, Advani, the leaders of the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Shiv Sena, Rahul Mahajan lit the funeral pyre while buglers played the Last Post and priests chanted Vedic prayers.
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Plans were made to draft the young man into a political career—but he turned out to be a less than ideal boy. A month later, the evening before going to immerse his father’s ashes in the Brahmaputra, Rahul Mahajan settled into the Jacuzzi in his father’s sprawling official residence, a short drive from the prime minister’s house. With him in the bathroom were his father’s secretary, Bibek Moitra, and several bottles of champagne. Later, they came out and had a small party accompanied by a bag of cocaine.
Mahajan vomited, staggered and asked his friends (some Nigerian and Kashmiri drug dealers) what was up with the coke—had they given him bad stuff? Then, in a scene that might have come from
Pulp Fiction
, it transpired the cocaine had been cut with heroin. The household servants had to be woken up and Mahajan and Moitra were taken to the nearby Apollo hospital, where Moitra died.

The debacle was reported initially as a case of food poisoning. Mahajan’s uncle, another BJP politician, announced bizarrely that his nephew had taken no drugs: “The quantity of cocaine shown in the medical tests was within permissible limits, which can be found in any human being.”
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The Indian media covered this story as if it were a glamorous but sordid tale of drug use in high society, but it was a great deal more than that: the Hindu son of a leading figure of the Hindu party, hours before he was to perform one of the most important tasks of any Hindu man’s life—scattering his father’s ashes—was partying in a thoroughly un-Hindu way and engaging in the sort of behaviour that the moral police of Hindutva liked to decry as decadent and foreign.

Rahul Mahajan claimed to remember nothing about what had happened and was married off a month later to his childhood sweetheart, in an attempt to set him straight. He had a quick marital break-up before appearing on
Big Boss
, the Indian version of
Big Brother
, where he was seen flirting with Monica Bedi, a failed starlet and gangster’s moll who had been arrested with Abu Salem, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. He went on to make the TV reality show
Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega
—“Rahul Will Take Home the Bride”—in which a gaggle of desperate-looking girls from all over India competed to marry him. The winner, a “Gladrags” model named Dimpy Ganguly, married Rahul Mahajan three days after the death of the uncle who had murdered his father.
³¹

The other politician who had sent Advani’s chariot on its journey was Narendra Modi. He was a different quantity, an ascetic Gujarati from a poor background who had started out with the RSS. His father ran a railway station canteen in Vadnagar. Dynamic and witty, Modi rose quickly through the BJP and became chief minister of Gujarat, an industrialized western state with strong connections to Mumbai. Business people admired his straightforward and efficient style, his effective management of the bureaucracy and his programmes for improved village health and electrification. In early 2002, a train of Hindu pilgrims was stopped at Godhra station reportedly by a Muslim mob and set on fire, killing fifty-nine people. In response, organized Hindu gangs took revenge on Muslims across central Gujarat; families
were dragged out of their homes, cut to death and burned; mosques and Muslim dargahs, or shrines, were destroyed. Through all this, the police stood by in many places and did nothing, following orders from above. Around 2,000 people were murdered, and little effort was made to prosecute the killers or the organizers of the slaughter. Narendra Modi made no expression of regret, and focused on the victims of the attack on the train, implying that the Muslims deserved what had come to them. Vajpayee’s government in New Delhi did not dismiss Modi as chief minister—in fact he later returned to power with a fresh electoral mandate.

For opponents of the BJP, this was incontrovertible evidence the party was showing its true, fascist colours. Advani responded that “the events in Gujarat in 2002 were an aberration in an otherwise consistent record of harmony.”
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All of this suited Modi, who became a nationally acknowledged figure, a self-constructed anti-hero.

Placed in the context of other riots and pogroms that have taken place in India since independence, the official response to what happened in 2002 in Gujarat was wholly familiar. People in authority had decided a mob should be given free rein to take revenge, and they allowed lower-level officials to facilitate the act; afterwards, when it was over, nobody would admit the horrible reality of what had happened. Almost nothing was done to help those who had suffered, and nobody in authority was punished. Similarly, in 1979 in Marichjhapi, an island in the Sunderbans in West Bengal, communist cadres had set upon lower-caste Bangladeshi settlers with the support of the police, burned and looted huts, raped women and murdered several hundred people, throwing their bodies into the river—Jyoti Basu, the veteran communist chief minister, did not express regret. In 1984 after the organized murder of Sikhs, the Congress party acted as if it had never taken place, and embraced and promoted some of those who were accused of the killings. Politicians behaved in this way because they could.

Might the BJP metamorphose into a party of the centre-right, a competent alternative to Congress, or was it still too busy trying to reinvent the dim past? I talked to some of its activists, seeking to get to the nub of what they believed. A conversation with the BJP president, Rajnath Singh, went nowhere: a former physics lecturer, he discoursed on integral humanism and humanity’s integration, and I was none the wiser. I tried Ashok Chowgule, who had been emailing me for years, seeking to put across another point of view to a global audience. He was a vice-president of the hardline
organization the VHP and an admirer of V. S. Naipaul. We met for lunch at the Cricket Club of India. Afterwards, I met a well-heeled Mumbai editor who said (speaking of Chowgule, not Naipaul), “His wife comes to parties, very well dressed, but he says
all these things.
” This response—the reference to the clothes, as if a member of the VHP could not possibly have a spouse who wore designer outfits—was part of the unexpressed divide in Indian politics, the idea that the promoters of Hindutva were socially inferior to the Nehruvians. Certainly they could be rough: I had been in a roadside eatery in rural Maharashtra some weeks earlier when a load of buses stopped in the dusty yard outside. The lead bus had a banner across the windscreen:
SHIV SAINIK CONVOY ON WAY HOME—MARATHA RESERVATIONS
. The demonstrators had been to a rally at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park in favour of reservation of jobs for Marathi speakers. The eatery had a “no buses” policy. So these sons of the soil beat up the guard in his down-at-heel uniform, pushed other members of staff and threatened to break up the place with their batons.

Chowgule had brought me some books by Kalidasa, the Sanskrit writer. He was proud that Sanskrit literary culture had spread around the world during earlier centuries, from Afghanistan to what was now Indonesia, and saw it as an undervalued Indian achievement. We sat overlooking the cricket pitch. He had been raised in Kolhapur and sent to England in the 1960s to study economics at Bristol University.

“It was a very dreary place, but I enjoyed my studies. After that I went to business school in Cleveland, Ohio, for two years but found U.S. society to be more shallow. I came back to join our family business—we do shipbuilding and owning, industrial-explosives manufacture, iron ore, some cement manufacture. As a child, there was no dispute we were from a Hindu tradition. To be pro-Hindu doesn’t mean you are anti-anybody. One of my best friends at school was a Christian, and there were Muslims too. When I was a kid, you never saw anyone in a burqa, but now you see it all the time because of the international Wahabi movement. During my childhood in Kolhapur, Muslims would go to the mosque and to the Shivling [a phallic symbol of Shiva], and Hindus would go the other way, from the Shivling to the dargah. They were not dressed any differently from us. The Muharram procession was a big event, but now the mullahs have said it mustn’t happen.”
³³
It was true there had been a change in relations since his childhood. By the 1970s, about half a million Indians, many of whom were Muslim, were working in the Middle East. They brought money and a new religious feeling to India, having developed a sense of commonality with other Muslims
while living abroad. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, small groups of bearded, traditionally dressed young men began to propagate the idea of Islamic revival in Bombay, which in turn revived Hindu fears of Muslim fanaticism that had been largely dormant since the 1950s.
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“The big event in my political life was when Rajiv Gandhi turned out to be such a disappointment—instead of a modernizer, he was concerned with patronage, old economics and the Shah Bano case, which took rights away from Muslim women to appease the leaders in that community.
³⁵
I went to an informal gathering of a Hindu organization on Nepean Sea Road in 1990: they spoke of resurgence, of bringing back our traditions and culture. I joined the VHP. Ram Rajya, the rule of Lord Ram, is just rule. The pub culture of England is not something we need. We have to talk about our ancient culture, our history, our sciences, and admit that the Aryans arose in India and the Vedas arose here. We were not some nomadic tribe. The Marxists who write about India are trying to eradicate all that history, to say our great past leaders were misguided patriots or mountain rats. These people are the reference point for Indians and foreigners who want to understand about India. It’s the same with newspaper and magazine editors—they are all influenced by the same thinking. When I was young, we did not have the television, we used to read more widely and when the elders were talking we were listening. My children don’t agree with all I say.”

So it was not an unfamiliar experience: the parent, growing older and wondering why the young had different ideas. I asked Ashok Chowgule about what had happened in Gujarat, and he took the same line as Narendra Modi, focusing exclusively on the victims of the train attack. “After that, riots took place, and Hindus and Muslims all died. Violence is bad, but your objective should be to prevent the train being surrounded. If Congress wants to take up the issue of Gujarat, they should also take up what happened to the indigenous Hindus who were driven out of their houses in Kashmir.” It was a circular argument. He continued: “Hindus do not have the chance to represent themselves. If there is a conference on Hindu nationalism, no Hindu nationalists will be invited. If a Hindu leader is killed it won’t be reported, but if a Christian nun is raped it will be. It’s part of the programme of trivializing our civilization.”
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We were back to the idea that the majority of Indians were victims, and “true” Hindus were misrepresented. It was incorrect to say the murder of a Hindu leader would not be reported: the Indian media were vigorous and indiscriminate in their willingness to report stories of political violence.

I felt this affable, successful industrialist had a sense of Hindu victim-hood that was theoretical, rather than lived. His comments about the Marxist or post-Marxist tendency among historians were understandable, although slightly out of date. It seemed as if seeing his country in this way was for him a means of making people bond in a potential, abstract, mythic way. The Hindutva movement was too important a force to dismiss it only as ignorant bigotry, as most liberal commentators tried to, but every time I sought to move beyond this and understand it better, I came up against the irrational. In each of the last five general elections, the BJP and its allies have picked up around 100 million votes, and yet they have persisted with a view of the future that is rooted in a faraway past, arising from the historical imagination.

Take the BJP national election manifesto for 2009, which suggested ancient India grew volumes of rice which outshone even the bogus statistics used during Mao’s Great Leap Forward:

—and so it continued, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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Twenty tons per hectare! Australia today has the highest rice yields in the world at 10 tons per hectare, using intensive agriculture in lush conditions. This slice of the manifesto reminded me more than anything of a conversation with a literary type from Madhya Pradesh some years back, one of India’s official writers. He told me, without a smile, that people in ancient times in India had aeroplanes. How did he know? Having studied the Vedas, it was clear to him they had sufficient knowledge to have made them. Why were there no remains of the Vedic aeroplanes? “They hid them in caves” was his answer.