Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

Author: Komireddi, KS

• India is a tremendous force for peace and non-violence, at home and abroad. It is a land where the idealist and the intellectual

• The author of this unabashed ode to India, the great poet Iqbal, had not actually seen the world beyond the subcontinent when he published it at the beginning of the twentieth century;

• What I was wearing was a Nehru topi, not the taqiyah, the Islamic prayer cap. My father, who had deposited me at this madrassah for a lofty reason—to inoculate me against sectarian temptations in later life—did not know the difference, and had bought me a hat made popular by India’s notoriously godless founding prime minister.

• Murad had never seen a hundred-rupee note, or sat in a car, or been to the cinema. But he thought my life was grim when I told him that my family never celebrated Divali because my father thought it was vulgar.

• He gestured at the crush of people sleeping on the pavements under the smoky black sky illuminated by festive flares and thrust a hundred-rupee note into my hand. It will be less insulting to these people if you burn this right now, he said. Divali was dead for me.

• A year into this life, my father, determined to grant me ‘exposure’ to new experiences, began making arrangements to send me to the Indian school in Afghanistan.

• A year into this life, my father, determined to grant me ‘exposure’ to new experiences, began making arrangements to send me to the Indian school in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s successes foiled those plans.

• It was owned by a Muslim family originally from Tehran, but its Sanskrit name, Panchsheel—the five principles of peaceful coexistence negotiated by Nehru with China in the 1950s—memorialised an epoch that had long ago vanished.

• Founded in the city of Nagpur in 1925 by a Hindu physician whose family had fled religious persecution in Muslim-ruled Hyderabad, the RSS ascribed India’s history of conquests by Muslims and Europeans to the weakness of Hindus.

• It gave Indians an outstanding Constitution without, as Ardeshir Palkhivala put it, ‘the ability to keep it’.

• P.V. Narasimha Rao, the prime minister of India when the mosque was pulled down, grew up in a village not far from Hyderabad. Murad still felt wounded by the betrayal of ‘our man’.

• What was the position of Muslims in India? Were they wanted or not? Where else could they go? These questions had an extra special relevance for Hyderabad,

• The clamour for India’s division originated in the anxieties and prejudices of the subcontinent’s decaying Muslim elites. Having lost their privileges after India fell to the British, they pitched for a state of their own as Britain’s exit from the subcontinent loomed.

• Jinnah had begun his political career as a proponent of interfaith collaboration in India’s struggle against British colonial rule. But cruelly thwarted on the nationalist stage by Gandhi, he morphed into the classical demagogue

• But cruelly thwarted on the nationalist stage by Gandhi, he morphed into the classical demagogue

• Its human cast was composed of the Nizam’s vassals—implacably sadistic feudal lords belonging to the Reddi and Velama castes—and landless serfs emaciated by centuries of servitude.

• There are Indians who have mourned the passing of the Nizam’s rule. No matter that, in addition to slavery, the Nizam presided over a system of rigid religious segregation.

• Nizam used the taxes extracted from his etiolated subjects to advance a generous subvention to the insolvent government of Pakistan, which might otherwise have collapsed within days of its inception.

• He ordered a halt to the export of metals to the rest of India and banned Indian currency in Hyderabad.

• His mujahideen, meanwhile, led by a man called Kasim Rizvi and calling themselves Razakars, rampaged through towns and villages terrorising civilians.

• It would have been inexpressibly cathartic for the people exposed to the Razakars’ ravages had India, upon liberating Hyderabad, placed the Nizam on trial.

• The secular Indian state’s arrival in Hyderabad began with three irremediable mistakes. First, the failure to hold the Nizam and his government accountable for their crimes against humanity; second, the failure to protect Muslim civilians; third, the suppression of the official report commissioned by Nehru which chronicled in chilling detail the subsequent massacres of Muslims.

• India’s Hindus never had to make that choice. Its Muslims did.

• Congress, once the revered engine of India’s freedom movement, was in the late stage of its slow metamorphosis into a sump for Nehru’s parasitical progeny to luxuriate in.

• Political victories by Hindu nationalists, heightening Muslim insecurity, made it easier for Pakistan to exploit them; and Pakistan’s penetration into India lent credence to the Hindu-nationalist claim that Muslims were a fifth column.

• Just as Hyderabad began attracting international attention as India’s Silicon Valley in the 1990s, the old city gained notoriety in the intelligence community as an entrepot of Pakistan-sponsored radicalism.

• In India, complains a character in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel English, August, ‘from washing your arse to dying, an ordinary citizen is up against the government’.

• Islam, said the men who claimed to be scholars of the faith, conferred upon husbands the right to cast aside their wives without providing for them; and the government, by recognising and defending the rights vested in Muslim men by their faith, was proving its secularity.

• When the police staged token arrests, a close relative of mine immediately offered to dispatch a team of lawyers to defend the assailants. The relative abhorred what had been done to Nasreen. But the only way he knew to uphold the ‘secularism’ he had internalised in his youth was by deferring to

• The relative abhorred what had been done to Nasreen. But the only way he knew to uphold the ‘secularism’ he had internalised in his youth was by deferring to people who claimed to be tribunes of their religious communities.

• Striving to buy communal harmony in this way, India left its Muslims behind while forcing its Hindus

• Striving to buy communal harmony in this way, India left its Muslims behind while forcing its Hindus to modernise.

• Such comforting certitudes were upended only a few years later when a repentant Hindu priest, captured by India’s National Investigation Agency, volunteered a shattering confession: that the attack at Mecca masjid had been one of several staged by a militant Hindu group which, he said, was intimately connected with the parent body of the BJP.

• Narendra Modi was the newly appointed chief minister of Gujarat when this happened. He was asked by a foreign reporter if he had any regrets. Yes, he told her. He wished he had handled the news media better.

• I was mutinying, he said, against my ‘secular’ upbringing with my belated obeyance of Hindu dietary laws. I wanted to reply, in a spirit of mischief, that I’d gladly eat beef if he would eat pork.

• I was mutinying, he said, against my ‘secular’ upbringing with my belated obeyance of Hindu dietary laws. I wanted to reply, in a spirit of mischief, that I’d gladly eat beef if he would eat pork. But he was the wrong audience for such a joke. So I told him the truth. My time at the madrassah, though fleeting, had become a formative experience for me.

• That’s when Murad said: ‘I seriously thought about becoming a terrorist.’ He could have, he said. The old city swarmed with agents fishing for recruits.

• ‘Save your penis.’ That was the cry heard across northern India during the darkest months of dictatorial rule that engulfed the world’s most populous democracy between 1975 and 1977.

• Measured purely by his excesses, Sanjay Gandhi was in many respects India’s Ceausescu.

• Within two hours of Nehru’s death, Gulzarilal Nanda was sworn in as his interim successor. And possibly for the first time in living memory, the Indian who wielded the greatest clout was not a priest or a sage or a prince or a soldier, but a lower-caste Tamil politician called K. Kamaraj Nadar.

• The source of Kamaraj’s king-making authority was his job. He was the president of the Congress Party.

• In 1937, a year after he was elected president of Congress for a second time, a Calcutta magazine carried a widely-circulated article urging Indians to be wary of Nehru. ‘Men like Jawaharlal,’ it warned, ‘are unsafe in democracy.’ Nehru, the piece cautioned, ‘calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person.

• In 1937, a year after he was elected president of Congress for a second time, a Calcutta magazine carried a widely-circulated article urging Indians to be wary of Nehru. ‘Men like Jawaharlal,’ it warned, ‘are unsafe in democracy.’ Nehru, the piece cautioned, ‘calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person. A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy.’ The author of this remarkable essay, published under a pseudonym, was none other than Nehru himself.

• When Zulfi Bhutto, Pakistan’s ambitious foreign minister, flew to Delhi as Islamabad’s representative at Nehru’s funeral, so unimpressed was he by Shastri that he returned home and pressed his boss, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, for mischief in Kashmir. Nehru had come so thoroughly to define India to outsiders that without him, Zulfi felt, India was ready for conquest.

• For India, which under Nehru had failed to thwart a Chinese invasion, the war with Pakistan afforded an opportunity for redemption and self-renewal.

• After magnanimously relinquishing control of Pakistani lands, Shastri—an abler and more decisive administrator than Nehru—died unexpectedly. Ayub had come to venerate the Indian premier’s integrity and despise his own foreign minister. Remorseful, he offered himself as a pallbearer

• ‘Do you think any of them,’ she said, referring to her colleagues in Congress, ‘could hold this thing together?’ By ‘this thing’, did the prime minister mean the Congress Party, inquired the interviewer. ‘I mean India,’ she replied.

• In her haughty self-regard and easy contempt for others, Indira was typically Nehruvian.

• Kamala Kaul, the bride selected for Jawaharlal, was exquisitely beautiful but possessed none of the refinement prized by her in-laws. It was a disastrous union. Immersed in nationalist politics, Jawaharlal cruelly neglected her.

• It was a disastrous union. Immersed in nationalist

• It was a disastrous union. Immersed in nationalist politics, Jawaharlal cruelly neglected her. His sisters mercilessly mocked her. Indira, the only child Kamala bore, grew up bitterly resenting her father’s family.

• Kamala, lonely in the crowded palace, found comfort in the companionship of a young freedom fighter called Feroze Gandhi.

• Kamala, lonely in the crowded palace, found comfort in the companionship of a young freedom fighter called Feroze Gandhi. Their closeness sparked rumours of an affair.

• Kamala, lonely in the crowded palace, found comfort in the companionship of a young freedom

• Kamala, in any case, soon died of tuberculosis and Feroze transferred his affections to Indira.

• Celebrities in the freedom movement, the Nehrus came increasingly to regard themselves as a native nobility. ‘The Nehrus had become so much a part of our national history,’ Indira’s aunt, Krishna, wrote in her memoir, ‘that the Indian people seemed to feel that we belonged to them, which in a sense we did.’

• And Jawaharlal Nehru—the original beneficiary of the custom of hereditary succession in colonial India’s pre-eminent democratic movement—can hardly be absolved of the charge of instituting dynasticism in democratic India’s ruling party.

• Nehru’s closest colleagues in Congress, from Kamaraj to Shastri, openly acknowledged that he was grooming Indira to be his successor.

• The man who in the colonial period had observed that ‘logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person’ was, in the republican era, capable of rationalising frequent departures from his avowed beliefs

• In Kerala in the south, he engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected Communist government. In Kashmir in the north, he presided over an anti-democratic farce. In Nagaland to the east, he authorised the bombing of Christians who had had the temerity to demand from India what India had sought from the British.

• In Kerala in the south, he engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected Communist government. In Kashmir in the north, he presided over an anti-democratic farce. In Nagaland to the east, he authorised the bombing of Christians who had had the temerity to demand from India what India had sought from the British. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, an extraordinarily repressive piece of legislation enacted by parliament in 1958 to grant impunity to agents of the state dispatched to stamp out insurgencies in India’s peripheries, embodied Nehru’s ruthless resolve to preserve the Indian union at any expense.

• The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, an extraordinarily repressive piece of legislation enacted by parliament in 1958 to grant impunity to agents of the state dispatched to stamp out insurgencies in India’s peripheries, embodied Nehru’s ruthless resolve to preserve the Indian union at any expense.

• Congress was the laboratory in which Indira tested the limits of her power. If she could make Congress bend to her will, she could subjugate India.

• And so when it came time to elect a new president

• And so when it came time to elect a new president of India, in 1969, she prompted her party’s elected lawmakers—who made up the bulk of the electoral college—to vote against Congress’s official candidate because he was not her choice.

• The president of the Congress Party recorded mournfully in his diary that, having been ‘brought up by a father who was always grooming her for the prime ministership’, Indira was incapable of tolerating dissent.

• When handed a notice of expulsion from Congress, she engineered a split in the party and expelled the so-called ‘old guard’ represented by Kamaraj and his cronies.

• Four hundred and fifty acres of fertile land were secured for Sanjay’s car-manufacturing plant in 1970. Families scratching a living from them were displaced. Sanjay promised to produce 50,000 small cars within a year. Five years later, he hadn’t delivered even one.

• In 1973, shredding convention, she appointed a junior (and pliant) judge as the Chief Justice of India.

• India’s maiden Solicitor General emerged from retirement to decry the ‘blackest day in the history of democracy’.18 But the prime minister could survive the backlash: she had come to be revered, since defeating Pakistan in 1971, as a semi-divine figure.

• It was a holocaust precipitated by West Pakistan’s unwillingness to honour the results of the first free election, swept by East Pakistan, in the Islamic Republic’s history. Zulfi Bhutto, the loser in the vote, refused to accept the outcome—and the army, egged on by the feudal megalomaniac, went on a murderous splurge.

• America, dependent on Pakistan to make inroads into Mao’s China, ignored the piling dead bodies and warned India to keep out. Indira, to her credit, spat at Nixon and Kissinger, and aided the Bengali rebels.

• The painter M.F. Husain rendered her as the deity Durga riding a tiger.

• Pakistani generals blamed an ‘Indo-Zionist’ plot for their defeat.

• Newspapers in the Islamic state, echoing Bhutto’s characteristically self-pitying lamentations, bemoaned that this was the first time in a thousand years that Hindus had won against Muslims.21 This summation would have struck the officers whom Indira sent into battle as odd—because none of them was a Hindu. India’s air marshal, Idris Latif, was a Hyderabadi Muslim; the commander of its ground forces in East Pakistan, J.S. Aurora, was a Sikh; the chief of the Indian armed forces, Sam Maneckshaw, was a Parsi; and J.F.R.

• Newspapers in the Islamic state, echoing Bhutto’s characteristically self-pitying lamentations, bemoaned that this was the first time in a thousand years that Hindus had won against Muslims.21 This summation would have struck the officers whom Indira sent into battle as odd—because none of them was a Hindu. India’s air marshal, Idris Latif, was a Hyderabadi Muslim; the commander of its ground forces in East Pakistan, J.S. Aurora, was a Sikh; the chief of the Indian armed forces, Sam Maneckshaw, was a Parsi; and J.F.R. Jacob, the brilliant strategist who captured Dhaka and forced Pakistan to surrender, was Jewish.

• Urban India sought comfort in atavistic fantasies. Travelling in Delhi, Ved Mehta was met with ‘constant talk about the glories of ancient India—about how the Hindus in Vedic times travelled around in “flying machines”, talked to each other on “skyphones”, and constructed “bridges of stones” spanning oceans’.

• Before the decision was read out, the presiding judge was offered half a million rupees and promised a seat on the Supreme Court. Officers from the Intelligence Bureau harassed him and his staff. Astonishingly, no inducement or threat worked.

• The Supreme Court stayed the lower court’s decision, but Sanjay was by now worn out by the pretence of respect for legal restrains on power. State transport vehicles were requisitioned illegally to bus in tens of thousands of people from neighbouring states to put on a pro-Indira spectacle in Delhi.25 The judge in Allahabad was ritually denounced as a clandestine Hindu nationalist.

• And Sanjay began mastering a manual on press

• Sanjay began mastering a manual on press censorship procured from the Philippines.

• On 25 June 1975, Indira’s advisers, having hastily pored over a copy of the Constitution borrowed that morning from the library in Parliament House, drafted an ordinance declaring a state of internal emergency to maintain the ‘security of India’, which they said was ‘threatened by internal disturbances’.

• One evening, they learnt that Sanjay and his friends were ‘conferring’ with two women in a nearby hotel. They forced their way into Sanjay’s suite and implored him to call off the demolition. Sanjay remained silent. One of his goons shrieked: ‘I give you exactly five seconds to get out of this room.’

• As urban India was subjected to Sanjay’s prettification programmes, rural India was put through a more intimately degrading form of terror. Forced sterilisation was by far the deadliest exercise undertaken by the government during the Emergency.

• The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had periodically shared with Delhi their fears about an uncontrolled rise in India’s population levels.

• In villages, men abandoned their houses and lived in the fields to evade capture by roving sterilisation squads. The terror was banalised into bureaucratic routine.

• Soon enough, obtaining even the most rudimentary government services required people to show documents attesting to their sterilised status, giving rise to an enormous demand for fake certificates.

• Buses and billboards were plastered with ‘stray thoughts of the prime minister’ exhorting Indians to work hard alongside slogans extolling the Great Leader (‘Courage and Clarity of Vision, Thy Name Is Indira Gandhi’).

• Foreign journalists were expelled. ‘In ten years of covering the world from Franco’s Spain to Mao’s China,’ Newsweek’s India correspondent wrote, ‘I have never encountered such stringent and all-encompassing censorship’.

• Trailed by an entourage of reporters and cameramen, Sanjay, like his Korean compeer Kim Jong-Il, materialised everywhere and dispensed curt instructions to engineers, doctors, bureaucrats and other professionals on how to do their jobs.

• Even Research and Analysis Wing, India’s foreign intelligence agency, was co-opted by Congress to dig up dirt on people perceived to be Indira’s opponents

• If the religious pluralism of this pro-Sanjay triune—a Muslim, a Parsi, a Sikh—was a testament to the health of Indian secularism, the doggerel flowing from its pens was sufficiently obsequious to make even Corneliu Vadim Tudor, balladeer in Ceausescu’s court, blush with embarrassment.

• Indira’s rule is periodised today as the summit of Indian ‘socialism’. This is bizarre. There was no redistribution of wealth during the Emergency—only the usurpation of power.

• When a travelling American journalist asked a member of the Oberoi family, India’s top hoteliers, for her opinion of the Emergency rule, she replied: ‘Oh, it’s wonderful. We used to have terrible problems with the unions. Now when they give us any troubles, the government just puts them in jail.’

• In one of the most unexpectedly courageous speeches in parliament—which functioned as a rubber-stamp—Krishan Kant, a Congress backbencher, dismantled the myth of ‘socialist’ Indira: ‘No privileges of the privileged classes are being touched,’ he said on the floor of the house. ‘They have been reassured. There is going to be no nationalisation of textile and sugar industries … On the other hand, the emergency will come down on the workers, on students, the intelligentsia, and the fixed-income groups. I would like to ask my friends if this is really a swing to the left or whether it is not in fact a swing to the right?’42

• Socialism, like much else, was a meaningless catchword camouflaging the gangsterisation of Indian politics, initiated by Sanjay, at the very highest levels.

• Zail Singh, a Punjabi politician who distinguished himself by once sprinting to pick up Sanjay’s sandals when they slipped from the crown prince’s feet, went on to serve as India’s president.

• In Punjab, Sanjay and Indira patronised an illiterate Sikh preacher called Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. His extremism, they believed, would neuter the Akali Dal, an ethno-religious party. Instead, their sponsorship of the obscurantist sant, generating a climate ripe for radicalism, spawned a crisis that destroyed Punjab and devoured Indira.

• Her decision to call the vote has posthumously been ascribed to some vestigial commitment to democracy lurking in her Nehru blood. In reality, she was driven to it by the report of a Delhi think tank that assured her easy victory.45 Re-election would instantly purge the taint of dictatorship attached to her name in the West.

• Her decision to call the vote has posthumously been ascribed to some vestigial commitment to democracy lurking in her Nehru blood. In reality, she was driven to it by the report of a Delhi think tank that assured her easy victory.

• Her decision to call the vote has posthumously been ascribed to some vestigial commitment to democracy lurking in her Nehru blood. In reality, she was driven to it by the report of a Delhi think tank that assured her easy victory.45 Re-election would instantly purge the taint of dictatorship

• But as Indians delivered their verdict at the ballot booth in 1977, thirty years of uninterrupted rule by the Congress Party came to a crashing end.

• She had expelled Krishan Kant from Congress for warning her in parliament that ‘when you stifle the flow of information to the people in this country, you are blocking the channel of information to yourself’.

• It was India’s forsaken multitudes—whose suitability for democracy was repeatedly questioned and whose disenfranchisement high-mindedly rationalised away by the country’s post-colonial elite—who resuscitated the republic.

• One of the first major acts of the ideologically kaleidoscopic regime that replaced Indira was to pay the defenestrated prime minister the compliment of imitation by dismissing a series of Congress-ruled state governments by invoking emergency provisions in the Constitution.

• You could go to the Kaaba and doubt the omnipotence of Allah, but you could not be a member of Congress and question the paramountcy of the Gandhis.

• Who could forget his visit to Andhra Pradesh, in 1982, soon after being installed by his mother as the party’s general secretary? The chief minister of the state, Tanguturi Anjaiah, a Dalit, went to receive him at the airport. In this, he was following the custom instituted by Sanjay. But Rajiv, who considered himself ‘modern’, took great umbrage and exploded with invective. The chief minister had endured a lifetime of vicious abuse at the hands of upper-caste Hindus, many of whom still considered physical contact with him spiritually defiling

• Who could forget his visit to Andhra Pradesh, in 1982, soon after being installed by his mother as the party’s general secretary? The chief minister of the state, Tanguturi Anjaiah, a Dalit, went to receive him at the airport. In this, he was following the custom instituted by Sanjay. But Rajiv, who considered himself ‘modern’, took great umbrage and exploded with invective. The chief minister had endured a lifetime of vicious abuse at the hands of upper-caste Hindus, many of whom still considered physical contact with him spiritually defiling. But being berated in late life by a man who looked half his age broke him. He began to shed tears.

• Who could forget his visit to Andhra Pradesh, in 1982, soon after being installed by his mother as the party’s general secretary? The chief minister of the state, Tanguturi Anjaiah, a Dalit, went to receive him at the airport. In this, he was following the custom instituted by Sanjay. But Rajiv, who considered himself ‘modern’, took great umbrage and exploded with invective. The chief minister had endured a lifetime of vicious abuse at the hands of upper-caste Hindus, many of whom still considered physical contact with him spiritually defiling. But being berated in late life by a man who looked half his age broke him. He began to shed tears. Rajiv called him a ‘buffoon’ and drove away.3

• Rajiv’s behaviour, enraging the Telugu-speaking people of Andhra who felt collectively belittled, resulted in the formation of a powerful sub-national party that swept Congress out of power in the largest state in southern India.

• Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the preacher sponsored by Sanjay and Indira in the hope of undercutting the organised Sikh party in Punjab—the Akali Dal—had grown over the years into an untameably lethal beast.

• It would reduce non-Sikhs within the Sikh state to second-tier citizens, institute a religious hierarchy of citizenship within the union, threaten the rights of non-Hindus in other states, prod other ethno-religious communities to demand what the Sikhs had, and lead ultimately to the Balkanisation of India.

• So Indira met the Akalis halfway. Using the accepted convention of reorganising India along linguistic lines, she carved out portions of Punjab to create the state of Haryana on the somewhat dubious grounds that most people in the new state were not speakers of Punjabi.

• Indira met the Akalis halfway. Using the accepted convention of reorganising India along linguistic lines, she carved out portions of Punjab to create the state of Haryana on the somewhat dubious grounds that most people in the new state were not speakers of Punjabi. Haryana’s birth left a Sikh majority in Punjab, but with a substantial non-Sikh minority.

• The violence ceased to be viewed by Delhi as a simple police matter when support for Bhindranwale’s terror in the form of weapons and training began pouring in from across the porous border.

• Kuldeep Singh Brar, the officer leading the mission—code-named ‘Operation Blue Star’—was a Sikh who abhorred Bhindranwale for ‘converting the House of God into a battlefield’.

• Blue Star was a disaster. Hasty in conception and reckless in execution, it canonised a psychopath as a martyr in the minds of once-vacillating Sikhs by the manner in which it dispatched him.

• Indira, like Benazir Bhutto, was devoured by the ogre she fostered.

• Indira was secular to the marrow. She married outside her faith and forced through an amendment to insert the word ‘secular’ into India’s self-definition in the Constitution’s preamble. It is possible that Indira might have deployed religion in the future if her hold on power appeared to be in peril (she had also smuggled ‘socialist’ into the Constitution, and she was self-servingly flexible about what that word implied).

• For a generation of Indians shaped by India’s Partition in the name of religion, her resolute undoing in her final days of what she perceived to be discrimination on religious grounds raised her up in their hearts and minds when she was gone.

• Congress, whose moral authority after the Emergency rested entirely on its claim to being the bulwark against ‘communal forces’ in the country, maintained a conspiratorial silence for three days as Delhi burned.

• Violent mobs acquire a momentum of their own, but they do not form impromptu: they coalesce around some tangible idea.

• Violent mobs acquire a momentum of their own, but they do not form impromptu: they coalesce around some tangible idea. And when intent is established—killing a specific group of people, or pulling down a place of worship—the mob must be armed, directed to the target and supervised

• What happened in Delhi in the aftermath of Indira’s assassination was a pogrom—an organised slaughter abetted by the state

• When Rajiv finally acknowledged, two weeks later, the blood spilled all around him, he used a clarifying metaphor: when a big tree falls, he said, the earth shakes a little.

• Asked in 2014 if he felt any sorrow for the death of Muslims in 2002, Modi replied: if ‘someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind,

• Asked in 2014 if he felt any sorrow for the death of Muslims in 2002, Modi replied: if ‘someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not?’18 The answer outraged liberal commentators in Delhi. Yet hardly anybody seemed to recall that Modi was only echoing the phrase used by Rajiv’s government to explain the outbreak of violence against Sikhs: ‘even when a baby or a cow is killed in an accident, the anguish of the mob is discernible.’19 1984 was the most violent year since Partition, and the eighties was the decade of gruesome communal rioting.

• Asked in 2014 if he felt any sorrow for the death of Muslims in 2002, Modi replied: if ‘someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not?’18 The answer outraged liberal commentators in Delhi. Yet hardly anybody seemed to recall that Modi was only echoing the phrase used by Rajiv’s government to explain the outbreak of violence against Sikhs: ‘even when a baby or a cow is killed in an accident, the anguish of the mob is discernible.’

• The answer outraged liberal commentators in Delhi. Yet hardly anybody seemed to recall that Modi was only echoing the phrase used by Rajiv’s government to explain the outbreak of violence against Sikhs: ‘even when a baby or a cow is killed in an accident, the anguish of the mob is discernible.’

• And yet what happened in Delhi, the seat of the union government, was sui generis. Congress’s claim to being the guardian of Indian secularism was in tatters. When elections were announced, the RSS, sworn foe of Indira, campaigned for her son, who refused to disavow their support.

• The surrender began with Rajiv’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision in 1985 upholding the right of Shah Bano Begum, a Muslim divorcee, to a meagre maintenance from her ex

• India’s Constitution, drafted in the aftermath of Partition, sought to reassure the Muslims who refused to go to Pakistan by preserving for them a separate civil code.

• Four decades on, the Supreme Court quickened the secular aspiration of the Indian Constitution by voiding the mullahs’ prerogative to determine the fate of Shah Bano by recognising her entitlements as a full citizen of the state.

• Rajiv, however, sank into despondency. Muslim ‘leaders’ were inundating him with threats to pull their support from Congress if he did not intercede on behalf of the ‘community’.

• But crippled by what one shrewd member of his cabinet called ‘a peculiar sense of political insecurity’,21 Rajiv refused to engage directly with ordinary Muslims and huddled instead with his political advisers to locate a painless way to placate reactionaries who called themselves, with no evidence, the authentic representatives of Muslim citizens.

• Congress’s defeat in the Assam state elections that year intensified the anxieties of the prime minister and his coterie. Convinced that the result was the upshot of the crisis generated by the Shah Bano case, the government drafted and rushed through parliament the Muslim Women’s bill, a craven piece of legislation which liberated Muslim husbands—who could take up to four wives and discard them on a whim by chanting ‘talaq’, or divorce, three times in accordance with the laws of Islam—from the obligations of maintenance post-talaq, and shifted the responsibility for the upkeep of penurious divorced Muslim women to their families and charities.

• A Muslim minister in Rajiv’s government resigned in disgust at the prime minister’s cowardice. The only Indians who rejoiced were hidebound Muslim men and Hindu nationalists

• A Muslim minister in Rajiv’s government resigned in disgust at the prime minister’s cowardice. The only Indians who rejoiced were hidebound Muslim men and Hindu nationalists. Rajiv’s prostration preserved the male privileges of the first and lent credence to the claim of the second that Congress secularism as enforced by the state, essentially a form of ‘appeasement’ of Muslims, was effectively anti-Hindu.

• Having disenfranchised Muslim women in order to propitiate Muslim men, he hastened to mollify aggrieved Hindu nationalists by allowing them to lay the foundations for a future temple inside the Babri mosque by ordering the gates of the building, sealed explicitly to prevent communal flare-ups, to be opened.

• Having disenfranchised Muslim women in order to propitiate Muslim men, he hastened to mollify aggrieved Hindu nationalists by allowing them to lay the foundations for a future temple inside the Babri mosque by ordering the gates of the building, sealed explicitly to prevent communal flare-ups, to be opened. The mosque became the symbol, in Hindu-nationalist propaganda, of India’s millennium-long subjugation by Muslims.

• Hindu nationalists, a negligible force in mainstream politics until then, claimed parity with Congress. Muslims, understandably, became livid. So Rajiv atoned at the next available opportunity—not by forcing Hindus out of the mosque but by imposing a pre-emptive roundabout ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses because it was deemed offensive by Muslim zealots even before it had been published.

• What remained of Rajiv’s prestige was devoured by a major corruption scandal when credible allegations surfaced that he may have been aware of the massive kickbacks received by Indian officials on a defence contract placed by the government in 1986 with the Swedish armaments manufacturer Bofors.

• The absence of internal democracy in Congress meant that Rajiv could not be removed. Instead of accountability from the prime minister, what India witnessed was the repeated shakeup of the cabinet; an open confrontation with the president, who threatened to dismiss Rajiv’s government; and the demotion of Vishwanath Pratap Singh, a minister with a cast-iron reputation for integrity, because he was looking too closely into allegations of graft.

• V.P. Singh, eventually sacked by his paranoid prime minister, left Congress and floated his own political front with Arif Mohammed Khan, the young minister who had resigned from the government in protest of Rajiv’s betrayal of Shah Bano.

• The prime minister’s decision, against the backdrop of his dissolving domestic prestige, to threaten Sri Lanka with military action on behalf of that island’s Tamil separatists should have revived his fortunes.

• But this show of force produced the opposite result. Dispatched by Rajiv to safeguard the peace accord Colombo reluctantly signed, Indian troops came under attack from the Tamil rebels.

• Sri Lanka became India’s Vietnam, a bleeding ground that claimed too many lives because the cost of extraction came to be equated with loss of pride.

• It was this democratic fragmentation, rather than Rajiv’s lip-service to the republic’s foundational values, that complicated the BJP’s effort to consolidate the electorate

• It was this democratic fragmentation, rather than Rajiv’s lip-service to the republic’s foundational values, that complicated the BJP’s effort to consolidate the electorate under the standard of religious solidarity.

• But on a pan-Indian level, Hindu nationalists were the principal beneficiaries of Congress’s collapse. They carried to voters their pledge to heal the Hindu pride injured by Muslim invasions by constructing a temple to Lord Rama on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

• What remained of the secular character of India after the slaughter of Sikhs and the cascade of concessions by Congress to competing communal claims was now on the line. Muslims abandoned Rajiv. Hindus who wanted Rama Rajya had more authentic alternatives on offer. Having started with the biggest parliamentary majority in Indian history, Rajiv led Congress to its second defeat. Hindu nationalists, accounting for two seats in 1984, returned with eighty-five members of parliament.

• Eight hundred people had already been killed in political clashes when, on 21 May, a Tamil suicide bomber from Sri Lanka assassinated Rajiv Gandhi at a campaign stop in Tamil Nadu, triggering a fresh burst of bloodshed and renewing questions about India’s ability to survive.

• The barren rhetoric of economic self-reliance and political non-alignment could no longer conceal the republic’s bleak reality. Here was a colossus of a country that compelled its enterprising middle-class citizens to make fifty trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer.

• The barren rhetoric of economic self-reliance and political non-alignment could no longer conceal the republic’s bleak reality. Here was a colossus of a country that compelled its enterprising middle-class citizens to make fifty trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer. Did you want a telephone connection? That could take anything from six months to three years. Did you want to buy a car? The waiting period for the Morris Oxford knock-off ran up to twenty-two months.

• It is now de rigueur to credit Manmohan Singh, who became finance minister in 1991, with India’s rapid metamorphosis. But in a country where economic isolation was an inviolable ideological axiom, putting Singh’s prescriptions into action was a distinctly political challenge.

• And yet if Nehru ‘discovered’ India, it can reasonably be said that P.V. Narasimha Rao reinvented it.

• When Indira dismissed Rao’s government and summoned him to Delhi, he was over fifty but sufficiently pragmatic to grasp the secret of survival in Congress: never display autonomous drive or initiative.

• Every plausible successor to Rajiv had an equally powerful adversary within the party. By a process of elimination, Rao, who was not even on the ballot in the general election, emerged as the consensus candidate to ‘carry forward’ Rajiv’s legacy.

• Every plausible successor to Rajiv had an equally powerful adversary within the party. By a process of elimination, Rao, who was not even on the ballot in the general election, emerged as the consensus candidate to ‘carry forward’ Rajiv’s legacy. No one knew, of course, that Rao had authored an anonymous article castigating Rajiv as an

• Every plausible successor to Rajiv had an equally powerful adversary within the party. By a process of elimination, Rao, who was not even on the ballot in the general election, emerged as the consensus candidate to ‘carry forward’ Rajiv’s legacy. No one knew, of course, that Rao had authored an anonymous article castigating Rajiv as an arrogant, insecure force of destruction.

• Before the party could fathom his unanticipated ruthlessness, Rao unleashed the unthinkable upon them. He plucked Manmohan Singh from the University Grants Commission and appointed him finance minister. Ten days later, acting on Singh’s advice, he devalued the rupee by 8.7 per cent against international currencies. In less than forty-eight hours, he devalued it again.

• Desperate maladies call for drastic remedies,’ Rao told his compatriots as he announced an austerity programme, much of it devised by the IMF and Singh.

• ‘Desperate maladies call for drastic remedies,’ Rao told his compatriots as he announced an austerity programme, much of it devised by the IMF and Singh.

• India, he explained, had just recovered from a debilitating balance of payments crisis which had left it without adequate ‘foreign exchange to import even such essential commodities as diesel, kerosene, edible oil and fertiliser’. His solution was to cut the ‘fat in government expenditure’, deregulate industry and emancipate the private sector, pull down the barriers to foreign investment, provide tax concessions to private corporations, slash subsidies to farmers and curb labour activism.

• The National Herald, the party’s newspaper, complained that Rao and his finance minister wanted nothing more than to give ‘the middle-class Indian crispier cornflakes [and] fizzier aerated drinks’.

• The National Herald, the party’s newspaper, complained that Rao and his finance minister wanted nothing more than to give ‘the middle-class Indian crispier cornflakes [and] fizzier aerated drinks’. ‘That,’ the paper asserted, ‘could never have been the vision of the founding fathers of our nation.’

• Dozens of senior Congress members beseeched Sonia to take over Congress and rescue the country.9 Rao’s

• Dozens of senior Congress members beseeched Sonia to take over Congress

• Backbenchers and the cabinet dealt with, Rao began cultivating the BJP. Heading a minority government, he feared a floor-test in parliament. He frequently invited L.K. Advani, the BJP’s president, to dinner at his residence.

• Rao, napping as the mosque was being demolished, dismissed all four BJP-run state governments in India when he woke up. He banned Hindu religious organisations, threw Advani in prison and made a solemn pledge to rebuild Babri. Addressing the nation over the radio, he warned Indians of the ‘grave threat’ now faced by the ‘institutions, principles and ideals on which the constitutional structure of our republic has been built’.

• The promise of a violent release for the resentments and confusions incubated by Hindus’ unresolved feelings about their history is what gave Hindu nationalism its visceral appeal.

• The airbrushing of the pre-colonial past was intended to deny ammunition to all those who cited the creation of Pakistan to intensify their clamour for a Hindu rashtra.

• Medieval India, despite all the evidence of its methodical disfigurement, was depicted in schoolbooks as an idyll where Muslims and Hindus coexisted in harmony and forged an inclusive idea of India which the British came and shattered

• Such a thesis was always going to struggle against the overwhelmingly contradictive evidence—from the ruins of Hindu liturgical buildings to the ballads of dispossession passed from generation to generation—arrayed against it.

• was the mission of ‘secular’ historians and public intellectuals of India to locate mundane causes for carnage by religious zealots. And when those reasons could not be found, they papered over the gruesome deeds of the invaders with nice-nellyisms and emphasised their good traits.

• A standard history textbook written for Indian schoolchildren by Romila Thapar follows up the admission that the