Vajpayee and nostalgia

Joshua Loo

Supplement №3, Volume II

Consider the funeral of a Nehru-Gandhi or equivalent in stature. The police lathi charge¹ the crowds, almost reflexively—rarely is there a threat. The army do not need to dirty themselves by obstructing the crowds, and instead march in front and behind the cortège, where former associates gather; slogans are raised in honour of the departed. Then, the pyre; Hindu almost always—all three Nehru-Gandhis and Gandhi were, after all—the departed’s ashes are then scattered in the appropriate river.

Vajpayee’s death and funeral remind us, as those funerals might have, many of the pathologies of modern India. It appears that several articles prematurely reported his death.² The media’s epistemic fragility is not inherently worse in India than in any other state, for the same factors prompt it—a desire to attract consumers, cut-throat competition to be the first, cost-cutting, and a public who do not appear to discriminate even when faced with the consequencies of their tendencies to choose those at the forefront of such unhelpful trends. It is thus that Arnab Goswami et al. manage to turn what might have taken a column inch or two into sensational stories lasting many minutes—‘this happened, now, for more on this, our correspondent vaguely related to this…[the correspondent greets the anchor]—indeed, this has just happened, a stunning victory for…’ (at this point the political party supported by the television channel, normally the bjp, is mentioned, followed by a similar tautologic interview). However, because announcers have taken to emulation of Goswami, who obtains respite from shouting by occasionally letting his interviewees speak for a moment, but have no interviewees, they must pause, thus elongating the process further. Thus column inches produce double or triple the number of logorrhœic minutes. Even Doordashan, once home to sedate state-approved monologues, has changed. Only All India Radio’s news bulletins³ have remained largely unchanged.

A number of other claims also circulated. Arvind Kejriwal, Aam Admi Party (aap) Chief Minister of Delhi was accused of celebrating his birthday immediately after Vajpayee’s death;⁴ in reality, he stopped his birthday celebrations immediately after hearing the news. The Prime Minister was accused of smiling when visiting the hospital in a picture that was later shown to have been taken in a visit a few hours before.⁵

Yet there is more. In Aurangabad, Syed Mateen Sayyad Rashid, an All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (aimim, or mim) corporator was beaten for opposing a condolence motion. He has now been arrested under §§ 153, 153a and 294 of the Indian Penal Code (ipc).⁶ Cases under §§ 323, 506 and 147 have been registered against the Bharatiya Janata Party bjp corporators who thrashed Rashid, but no arrests have been made so far. Samjay Kumar, an assistant professor at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, is said by regional news channels to have been dragged out of his house before being stripped and thrashed.⁷ Swami Agnivesh, an activist best known for his opposition to bonded labour, was beaten outside the bjp’s headquarters, where Vajpayee’s body lay in state.⁸ There have also been incidents at Jawaharlal Nehru University (jnu).⁹

It is tempting to view these incidents as part of a broader anti-democratic malaise. In January, four justices of the Supreme Court held a press conference, in which they attacked the allocation of cases by the Chief Justice, Dipak Misra.¹⁰ Shashi Tharoor alleges that a bjp victory in coming Lok Sabha elections would cause India to become a ‘Hindu Pakistan’, incurring the wrath of at least one barrister, who has dragged him to the Calcutta High Court.¹¹ The Communist Party of India (Marxist)—cpi (m)—says that ‘[t]hese four years of Modi Government has seen[sic]…severe undermining of institutions of parliamentary democracy and independent constitutional authorities[sic]’¹², whilst the Communist Party of India (cpi) say in a draft political resolution that ‘[a]lmost all the democratic constitutional institutions including Parliament are being down-graded. To destroy the basic ethos of Constitution and our secular democratic polity, worst form of authoritarianism is being practiced.[sic]’¹³ Rahul Gandhi, President of the Congress Party, says that the bjp are ‘attacking the Constitution.’¹⁴

The media cannot escape scrutiny either. A Cobrapost investigation ‘expose[d] many Indian media houses willing to peddle Hindutva¹⁵’ for money.

It is certainly true that India has seen significant change since present ministry took office in late May 2014. Of the most recent state elections, the bjp’s National Democratic Alliance (nda) has won over 20, and the rest 11. In the nine years since the establishment of the Unique Identification Authority of India (uidai)¹⁶, over 90% of the population have registered for an Aadhaar number¹⁷; the Planning Commission that wrote the notice on its establishment has now been abolished.

It is not clear what the ruling party intend to do with their hegemony. Civil service reform is in the air: recent proposals include lateral entry to the Indian Administrative Service for Joint Secretaries¹⁸, and the allocation of cadres after foundational courses¹⁹. They certainly, however, desire to retain it (perhaps unsurprisingly).

Most recently, five intellectuals were arrested in coördinated raids across India. It was alleged that they were plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister, and that they had extensive links with banned Maoist groups.^20,21 In a pleasing show of judicial vitality, however, the Supreme Court has moved them from police detention to house arrest.²²

It must, however, have been with little hope that those few dissidents remaining near the end of Emergency continued to avoid normalisation. After all, neither from from the public sphere nor any of the branches of government had sustained and effective opposition arose. It was Gandhi’s decision to call elections, which she then lost, that caused her to lose power. Sonia Gandhi, her daughter in law, in an interview with New Delhi Television (ndtv), said that, at heart, she was a ‘democrat’; Emergency must, therefore, have felt somewhat intolerable to her. Regardless, it seems probable that Emergency could quite easily have continued, if not for some combination of liberal sensibilities and overconfidence. The distribution of authority in Modi’s India can provide little comfort to the victims of its ideology, for it also reduces the risk of such miscalculation.

Suppose that this hypothesis is true. Three interpretations in view of Vajpayee are open to us. Vajpayee may, first, have actively worked in the opposite direction. However, he may, second, have little relation to them, or, even, third, have instigated changes in the opposite direction.

The second possibility can be discounted immediately, from first principles. Vajpayee was the Prime Minister. Let us take press freedom as an example. Press freedom exists when the press are not unduly pressured. Inaction, therefore, is almost always positive; we worry about governmental action, because that suggests undue influence. Ergo, if Vajpayee did nothing, he must have been a rather good Prime Minister for press freedom. The same logic applies in the case of political dissidence, tribal, caste, and environmental activism, religious freedom, and so on. If he did nothing, the first interpretation of Vajpayee’s legacy is true. If he did very much, either the first or third must be true. In no case can the second be true.

The first view appears to be that of the Indian establishment. Bhavna Vij Aurora wrote in Outlook²³ that ‘[i]n an era when a conciliatory tone is seen as a sign of weakness, Vajpayee rose above the rest to emerge as the biggest consensus builder’; supposedly, he had a ‘benign inclusivity’. On Kashmir, ‘even …Modi was forced to acknowledge in his Independence Day Address that the best solution lay in the three powerful words enunciated by Vajpayee’—‘“Kashmiriyat, Insaniyat and Jamuriyat”’—which ‘managed to disarm even the hardliners among the separatists’. But it is also mirrored in other parts too. The cpi (m), for example, wrote²⁴:

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) expresses its grief at the death of former Prime Minister Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Shri Vajpayee had a distinguished political career in parliament, in government and as Prime Minister of India.

As a political leader he commanded respect of all sections.

The cpi wrote²⁵:

The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India expresses its deep-felt condolences at the passing away of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at 5.05 p.m. at the All India institute of Medical Sciences on August 16, 2018. He was admitted to the AIIMS as his health deteriorated on June11 following a urinary tract infection.

He has been suffering from a lower respiratory tract infection and kidney-related ailments.

He was the first non-Congress prime minister to complete a full five-year term in office. He was earlier Prime Minister once for 13 days and another time for 13 months. He entered politics in the 1940s and was a highly respected leader loved by one and all. He was fondly called Atalji. He tried to rule on consensus. Atalji’s death is a loss to the nation.

The Party sends its condolences to his family members.

There are a number of common themes in these tributes; it is probably worth reading a few more²⁶, individual synpopses of which would not be particularly useful. In this view, the most important aspects of Vajpayee’s rule were, first, an increase in economic and mlitary strength—in particular, nuclear tests conducted and roads constructed at his behest are considered, second, his political credentials—his desire for compromise, his ability to unite different groups, and so on, third, good character—he is variously a ‘poet’, ‘gentle giant’, and so on, and, fourth, his political competence. Over the three Vajpayee ministries, a sufficient number of events must have occurred to provide ample evidence for all these assertions, at least taken in isolation.

But that is not all that there was to Vajpayee. It is easy to overlook the darker tendencies of the Indian state under his rule, but it is also unwise.

Outlook is possibly the best publication in India. Its articles are detailed and well-written—an increasingly rare tendency in a media environment that appears to have stolen all the worst aspects of the Anglo-American tabloid press and subtracted copy-editing. It appears to be far less afraid than other publications of publishing controversial stories and criticising government policy. It also seems to have a slightly stronger connexion to the truth than some other publications—it may be that the smaller size of its staff causes it to be slower, and therefore reduces the frequency with which it is caught out, but, whether deliberately or not, accuracy is the principal beneficiary. In the middle of the third Vajpayee ministry, Outlook published a story about corruption in the Prime Minister’s Office (pmo). India has a famously corrupt reputation. It is not clear when this started, for administration in India used to be the preserve of largely British civil servants, and Sir Cyril Radcliffe managed to get through his set of Reith lectures without sounding obviously two-faced whilst maintaining that, after a series of reforms, the Imperial Civil Service seemed to be moderately honest, but the scandals surrounding V.K. Krishna Menon are one plausible candidate.²⁷ For reasons that are not entirely clear, the pmo took great exception to the article, and commenced a series of income tax raids on the owner of Outlook. Whatever one says about the Congress Party, they seem to have managed not to show the truth of allegations against them by launching raids on hostile media outlets. Vinod Mehta, then editor of Outlook, responded characteristically sardonically: ‘[g]overnment officials are compounding their folly by lying through their teeth. Sadly, even the lies are incompetent.’²⁸ Eventually, they gave in; the interrogations became too much, as Ajith Pillai recounts in The Wire²⁹. It is difficult to believe that Vajpayee was not involved.

=-1The story that caused so much distress to Vajpayee was titled ‘Rigging the pmo’³⁰. It is clear that corruption reached the very heart of the government, at least during the third Vajpayee ministry. According to the article, the Telecoms ministry was bypassed by a ‘Group of Ministers’ charged with overseeing liberalisation³¹ in that sector. ‘What makes the GoM [group of ministers] unique is that it clears decisions despite objections from the ministries concerned.’ These questionable organisational practices seemed to be linked to a series of dubious decisions elsewhere: ‘the provision of counter-guarantee for the Reliance group’s Rs 20,000-crore Hirma power roject in Orissa’³², ‘direct dealings with power firms and international financiers’ instead of ‘competitive bidding’, a ‘decision piloted by the pmo to allow Fixed Service Providers to provide mobile services through wireless telephony’, the two beneficiaries being ‘Reliance and Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd.’, clearance of a ‘$1-billion[sic] Oman fertiliser project…which involves India purchasing 1.65 million tonnes of urea at a mandated price for the next 15 years’, despite ‘serious reservations’ from the ‘finance ministry and Public Investment Board’, who argued that ‘India was not in any pressing need[sic] to expand its urea utilisation’, charges whose effective realise was that the government paid ‘in instalments for a facility’ that a private company had constructed ‘for its own export and import activity’—a suspicious subsidy, and so on. To whose benefit, one might ask, were these decisions? It seems apparent that these were not intended to increase organisational efficiency and thus streamline fundamentally beneficial programes for the people of India; rather, they were to the benefit of industrialists—the ‘Hinduja brothers’, Reliance, et al. At the heart of these allegations were three bureaucrats: Brajash Mishra, the Principal Secretary to Vajpayee, N.K. Singh, an official in the pmo, and Ranjan Bhattacharya, Vajpayee’s son-in-law.

In a story two months later, Outlook doubled down on the accusations. It seems that the construction of roads also involved corrupt practices. ‘In one stretch—Panagarh to Palsit in West Bengal—the lowest bid was, strangely, Rs 600 crore, even though the Infrastructure Development Finance Company had estimated the cost to be Rs 250 crore. What makes the NHAI deal lucrative is that the firms are paid in full under the annuity scheme and do not have to recover their investment through charging tolls.’

All were implicated. Ranjan and the pmo appeared to give an ‘extra push’ to a road construction programme. ‘The Rs 20,000-crore fast-track Hirma power project being put up by Reliance is the other in which a finance ministry bureaucrat says Bhattacharya has shown particular interest. On the question of counter-guarantee, the PMO had been pushing the Reliance case. Says a former bureaucrat who till recently held a key economic post in the Vajpayee government, “Interested lobbies are very clever. They go through Ranjan. There is a base law in logic. If it rains, then some grass will sprout. If the grass has sprouted, there is the probability that it has rained.”’

It may be objected that Vajpayee’s reign saw significant economic growth. But so too did the Singh and Rao ministries, for which there is little nostalgia. It was the perceived manner in which this growth was achieved that seems to matter to the nostalgic.

In 2002, widespread communal violence that plausibly would be better classified as a pogrom or even ethnic cleansing took the lives of several hundred Hindus and several thousand Muslims.³³ A train ‘carrying back from Faizabad (Uttar Pradesh) nationalist Hindu activists who had travelled to Ayodhya to build a temple dedicated to the god Ram on the ruins of the Babri Masjid’^34,35 was attacked in Godhra³⁶. The passengers ‘chanted Hindu nationalist songs and slogans throughout the entire voyage, all the while harassing Muslim passengers. One family was even made to get off the train for refusing to utter the kar sevaks’ war cry: “Jai Shri Ram!” (Glory to Lord Ram!) …a Muslim shopkeeper was also ordered to shout “Jai Shri Ram!” He refused, and was assaulted until the kar sevaks turned on a Muslim woman with her two daughters. One of them was forced to board the train before it started going again.’ Then the violence escalated: ‘one of the passengers pulled the emergency chain. …[T]he train came to a halt in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood[sic] inhabited by Ghanchis, a community from which many of the Godhra street vendors hail. Anywhere from 500 to 2,000 of them, depending on the sources, surrounded the coach occupied by the kar sevaks and attacked it with stones and torches. Coach S-6 caught fire, killing 57 people.’³⁷ Despite the spontaneous nature of the murders, Modi declared that it was a “pre-planned violent act of terrorism”; he further ‘called together police officials at his home and gave them orders not to put down the Hindus who would inevitably react to the Godhra attack’. Vajpayee attempted to remove Modi from his post, but failed.

It is not clear what Vajpayee’s true views on communal relations in India are. But this is man who said of Muslims that wherever they ‘are living, they don’t want to live in harmony’—‘[t]hey don’t mix with the[sic] society’, and ‘are not interested in living in peace’. Of the Gujarat riots, he asked ‘[w]ho lit the fire?’, ignoring the rôle of the state in the orchestrated escalation of violence that occurred.³⁸ Even more disturbing is his rôle in the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In December 1992, 150,000 Hindu nationalists assembled near the Babri Masjid, allegedly the site of the birth of Lord Ram. After someone climbed onto the mosque and waved a saffron flag (a Hindutva symbol), the crowd assembled proceeded to break through a police cordon and destroy the building. Thus began several months of communal violence that took the lives of perhaps two thousand Muslims and Hindus.³⁹ Vajpayee said in an interview on ndtv broadcast a little while after the demolition that ‘what happened…was very unfortunate’—‘it should not have happened’. A video taken before the demolition shows that Vajpayee delivered a speech to the assembled kar sevaks (Hindu nationalists).

Sharp stones are emerging from the ground …the ground will have to be levelled…if a yagya begins, there will have to be some construction.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. …I have been instructed not to visit Ayodhya and I shall abide by this. I have no wish to visit the court and get tried in any case.

These are curious remarks. They are quite clearly in tension, possibly terminal, with Vajpayee’s remarks on ndtv. Certainly, they are not the words of a man who would regret ‘construction’. But even a rôle as ambiguous as this must be regarded as ignoble in an affair so sordid.

Crucial to the image that the bjp presently projects is the idea that it alone, amongst the hodgepodge of rising regional parties (the tmc, dmk, aidmk, and so on) and falling national parties (the Communists and Congress), represents competence and order. This is why it arrests intellectuals on the charge that they are ‘urban Naxals’⁴⁰. It is also the motive for recent moves to replace currency, supposedly intended to reduce money laundering and achieve a number of other changing objectives. Also crucial is the propagation of the narrative that it is only the bjp who operate cleanly. They were helped in this respect by the incompetence of the Congress Party before the 2014 General Elections. It is inescapably the case, however, that Vajpayee, now in death a key part of bjp propaganda, was neither clean and competent nor capable of maintaining order—either that, or he played a deliberate part in the instigation of communal violence at and after the events of Ayodhya. What is more surprising and unfortunate is that so many others have repeated this revisionist view of his legacy.

What causes in this instance nostalgia for Vajpayee is a broader tendency to romanticise the past. This is why liberals dream of Nehruvian times, Hindu nationalists dream of the time before the arrival of the Muslims, and regional movements dream of their zeniths. Such nostalgia is natural in a polity whose every moment has been so profoundly unsettling. Partition most likely killed between two hundred thousand and two million.⁴¹ There are countless cases of abuse of authority: civil servants, police officers and soldiers rape, torture and abduct with impunity. Six years ago, 3,000 died per day of hunger.⁴² The situation at independence must have been even worse. When more than six decades after liberation from British imperialism the state still failed to prevent deaths from starvation it is difficult to have hope that these fundamental problems will be resolved. Thus a past is selectively constructed of carefully selected elements—Nehru’s Anglophilia, the genius of Vedic civilisation, or the genesis of the Tamil language, and comes to dominate particular political strata.

It is also appropriate, therefore, to reëvaluate the idea that India presently suffers from a unique anti-democratic malaise. To suggest that the political situation at present of India is unique is profoundly ahistorical. Post-1947 India has known, and almost certainly will continue to know political hegemony. The most obvious objection is in the very vocabulary of those who decry the present situation: it is ‘a new Emergency’, ‘as bad as Emergency’, a ‘reminder’ thereof, and so on.

India today still rests on the administrative framework of the Raj. This is apparent in the Indian Administrative Service, which operates on the same basis as the Imperial Civil Service that preceded it. Just as the post-nominal letters i.c.s. stood for the social system that produced the men who staffed it, the balance of force that ensured that those men could wield absolute authority, and the constitutional absurdities that allowed them to proceed in good conscience, so too do the letters ias, save that there are more quotas and women. The same army intervenes in troubled areas to keep down rebellion. The same police lathi charge trade unionists in the cities, and even urban liberals protesting the lack of state action to halt rape, as seen in 2012. The change is that the lathis are occasionally replaced with water cannons, a few more lines of Kipling’s poem now refer to brown and not white men, and that such action now can be prosecuted without offending the consciences of the bourgeoisie, for they are done in the name of an ‘Indian’ instead of ‘foreign’ state. The same Indian Penal Code, containing provisions against ‘sedition’, ‘blasphemy’ and homosexuality (under the infamous § 377), applies. British justice is inherited in the form of preventative detention.

Under Nehru a personal devotion to the family was created that paved the way for Emergency. Even habeas corpus rights were suspended.⁴³ Regionalism has largely given way to dictatorship—political violence in West Bengal⁴⁴, Kerala⁴⁵, Tamil Nadu⁴⁶ and so on mirrors arrests orchestrated by the bjp.

The complicity of the Congress Party in violence against Indian Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi is also well-documented.⁴⁷ What is now forgot is the coercive manner in which the Union of India whose politics it came to dominate for perhaps five cumulative decades was established—the process of Hyderabad’s accession⁴⁸, for example, shows that a dependence on coercion continued till after independence.

Vajpayee was neither much better nor much worse than other Indian politicians. As a person, he may well have mellowed on his journey from Ahodhya to 7, Race Course Road. What he represents is a fundamentally empty ideology, saved only by a ‘pragmatism’ that managed to embed a little normative content capable of preventing a total slide into a Hindutva hell. The nostalgia that presently causes his veneration will probably be of little import—Modi et al. are capable of drawing crowds too without resorting to appeals to a previous generation of leaders. His death was regrettable, but was most likely a good one. He was not, for example, assassinated. At his funeral he was surrounded by Chief Ministers and a Prime Minister from his own party. The India he departs increasingly meets the demands he made of it—militarily and commercially it strengthens not so much because of any deliberate policy as because of a progression engendered by the removal of Nehruvian restrictions. He died peacefully in an Indian hospital, treated by Indian doctors who quite possibly attended Indian universities.

That fundamentally empty ideology, however, seems to promote collective decision-making in a manner that the Congress Party never will so long as it remains dependent on the Nehru-Gandhis. Vajpayee, as adept in coalition as in navigating the currents of the Sangh Parivar’s internal politics, perhaps made the single largest individual contribution to its political ascendancy. This loss of fallibility can only be to the cost of the victims of the Indian state, whose only salvation is often its fast-disappearing incompetence; by rendering the bjp a viable national political force, it may also be Vajpayee’s principal legacy. There may, however, come a day when the Indian state becomes capable of serving its citizens more than by accident—then, perhaps, the iron frame may become of use.