Walsh J.E. A Brief History of India

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

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During the late 1980s Gandhi’s government also tried unsuccessfully

to intervene in the civil war of Sri Lanka, an island off the southeastern

coast of India. In 1986 war had broken out between the island’s two

largest communities, the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil/

Hindu minority. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), funded

covertly by Hindu supporters in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, were

demanding a separate Tamil eelam (nation) in the north and east of the

island. In July 1987 Sri Lanka’s president, Junius Richard Jayewardene

BHOPAL DISASTER

n December 3, 1984, just before the Indian elections, a gas

tank at a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, Madhya

Pradesh, burst, spreading a combination of lethal gases through a city

of 1 million people. The Bhopal gas explosion was the worst industrial

accident in world history. Between 7,000 to 10,000 people died within

three days, some immediately, some shortly after from illness or from

injuries in stampedes as people tried to escape. Amnesty International

has estimated that at least an additional 15,000 people died between

1985 and 2003 from the aftereffects of exposure, bringing the total

death toll to well over 20,000.

The plant had been built in 1977 and operated under a joint agree-

ment between the multinational corporation Union Carbide and its

local Indian afﬁ liate, Union Carbide India Ltd. Union Carbide denied

responsibility for the accident but ultimately settled all lawsuits by

paying $470 million to the Indian government. The Indian govern-

ment used the compensation payment to distribute settlements of

up to $2,000 to some individuals injured by the accident and unable

to work. As a result of a Supreme Court order, the ﬁ nal dispersal of

funds was made only in 2004. At a torchlight vigil on December 3,

2009, to mark the 25th anniversary of the disaster, activists demanded

action on still pending Indian and U.S. criminal cases against former

Union Carbide executives. Newspaper reports noted that the water

and soil surrounding the disaster site remain contaminated causing

birth defects, cancer, and other chronic diseases among the 30,000

people still living in areas around the factory.

Source: Amnesty International. “Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal Disaster 20

Years On” (2004). Available online. URL: www.amnesty.org/er/library/info/

ASA20/015/2004. Accessed February 10, 2010.

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

(1906–96), signed the Indo–Sri Lanka Peace Agreement with India,

allowing the Indian army to enter northern Sri Lanka as a peacekeep-

ing force. From 1987 to 1990 the Indian army fought against the Tamil

Tigers, losing almost as many soldiers as the guerrilla group and ﬁ nally

withdrawing in 1990 without having achieved a resolution.

V. P. Singh’s Anticorruption Campaigns

Although Gandhi had based his 1984–85 election campaign on his

personal reputation for incorruptibility (“Mr. Clean”), between 1987

and 1989 his government was besieged with charges of corruption.

The most damaging charges came from Vishwanath Pratap (V. P.) Singh

(1931–2008), Gandhi’s defense minister and the former chief minister

of Uttar Pradesh. Singh found evidence that kickbacks had been paid

by the Swedish ﬁ rm Bofors to gain a 1986 $1.3 billion government

weapons contract. Gandhi forced Singh to resign in April 1987 and sub-

sequently expelled him from the Congress (I) Party. Singh founded a

new opposition party, the Janata Dal (People’s Faction). It was modeled

on the earlier Janata coalition and founded with the hope that it, too,

could use allegations of corruption to topple a government.

In the by-elections of 1988 voters defeated Congress in four out of

six state elections: Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat, and Uttar

Pradesh. By 1989, in an effort to win Hindu votes, Gandhi’s government

allowed the VHP to hold a foundation ceremony for the proposed new

temple at the Babri Masjid site. Nevertheless, in the November 1989

general elections, in which more than 60 percent of India’s more than

498 million registered adults voted, Congress (I) lost its majority in

Parliament, winning only 197 seats of 529 seats in the Lok Sabha (down

from its 1984 tally of 404 out of 515). The National Front, meanwhile—

composed of Singh’s Janata Dal and four minor parties—won 143 seats

in the Lok Sabha. Singh became prime minister with support from the

various communist and socialist parties and with 85 seats from the BJP.

V. P. Singh and the OBCs

But whereas the BJP wanted to organize (Hindu) Indians into a cohe-

sive Hindu majority, Singh’s party, a coalition of smaller socialist and

peasant-oriented groups, had pledged itself to help lower-caste commu-

nities in their struggle against the Hindu upper castes. Singh had com-

mitted his party, if elected, to attend to the “special needs of the socially

and educationally backward classes” by immediately implementing the

1980 Mandal Commission reforms (Jaffrelot 2003, 337).

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Janata Dal supporter. This villager from western Uttar Pradesh squats in front of a wall bear-

ing a poster for the Janata Dal in the 1989 election. The man pictured in the poster is Ajit

Singh, son of Charan Singh, whose peasant constituency supported the Janata Dal coalition.

(courtesy of Philip Oldenburg)

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

From the early 1950s Indian ofﬁ cials had repeatedly considered

actions to improve the economic and social conditions of communi-

ties that were neither Untouchable nor tribal but were, nevertheless,

extremely poor. The means for improvement was to be the extension

of government reservations to the “Other Backward Classes,” or OBCs,

as these communities were called. In 1979 the Janata government,

under Morarji Desai, had appointed B. P. Mandal, a low-caste leader, to

head a commission to review the issue. At the time, OBC communities

held only 12.5 percent of central government jobs. The 1980 Mandal

Commission Report subsequently identiﬁ ed “3,248 castes or commu-

nities comprising 52.4 percent of the population of India, roughly 350

million people” who should be given preferential treatment in order to

improve their economic and social conditions (Brass 1994, 251).

No action was taken on the Mandal report until 10 years later when

Singh’s government came to power. Believing that positive discrimina-

tion would improve the conditions of OBCs (who were among Singh’s

strongest supporters) and that intercaste conﬂ ict might damage the

growing popularity of the BJP’s Hindu nationalism, Singh announced

in August 1990 that the Mandal recommendations were going to be

implemented. The implication of this decision was that 27 percent of

all jobs under the direct control or inﬂ uence of the central government

would be reserved for people from OBC communities, a reservation

that raised quotas for government and public-sector employment to

almost 50 percent. (In absolute terms, however, the number of jobs

reserved for OBCs would have totaled slightly more than 55,000.) “We

want,” V. P. Singh said in an interview at the time, “to give an effective

[voice] here in the power structure and running of the country to the

depressed, down-trodden and backward people” (Jaffrelot 2003, 339).

Mandal Protests

Opposition to the reforms from upper-caste Hindu communities was

widespread and dramatic. In North India, upper-caste students and

professors at such schools as Delhi University organized opposition

to Mandal. More dramatic were the attempted suicides of a number of

young people. Graphic news magazine coverage reported the efforts of

more than 300 young upper-caste students to kill themselves, 152 by

setting themselves on ﬁ re. Legal challenges postponed the implementa-

tion of the Mandal reforms for several years. The 27 percent reserva-

tions were ﬁ nally put into effect in 1993, long after Singh’s government

had fallen. By then the Indian economy had already begun its dramatic

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256

recovery, opening new private-sector jobs for upper-caste employment

and dampening opposition to the reservations.

Mobilizing for Hindutva

The majority of the BJP’s support in 1990 (as today) came from the

upper castes, so Prime Minister Singh’s decision to implement the

Mandal reforms put the party, as part of the Janata Dal coalition, in a

difﬁ cult position. L. K. Advani was a BJP member of Parliament from

New Delhi, where a number of suicides and attempted suicides had

taken place. According to him, “Parents used to come to my place daily:

‘Why are you supporting this government? Withdraw your support!’ ”

(Jaffrelot 1996, 416). The BJP could not support the Mandal recom-

mendations, but neither could it afford to alienate 52 percent of Indian

voters. The BJP leaders chose to move aggressively to support the VHP’s

new Ayodhya campaign; they could then use Singh’s opposition to the

Ramjanmabhoomi campaign as their justiﬁ cation for withdrawing from

his government’s coalition.

After months of unsuccessful negotiations with Muslim groups and

Singh’s government, the VHP had declared that construction of the Ram

temple at Ayodhya would start in October 1990. In September of that

CASTE IN THE INDIAN CENSUS

he Census of 1931 was the last Indian census to publish statistics

on caste. After 1947 government ofﬁ cials rejected caste catego-

ries as too divisive. Information on religious communities continued

to be collected, but the only data collected on caste was information

on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. From the 1950s, however,

all commissions that studied the Other Backward Classes (OBCs)

issue pointed out the need for caste statistics. During the 1980s’ and

1990s’ debates on the Mandal Commission reservations, Untouchable

and OBC leaders charged that the “government unwillingness to col-

lect caste data [was] a deliberate move to preserve the status quo.”

Nevertheless, as late as the Census of 2001 caste information was still

not included in census tabulations.

Source: quotation from Sundar, Nandini. “Caste as Census Category: Implications

for Sociology.” Current Sociology 48 (2000): 117. Available online. URL: http://csi.

sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/48/3/111.pdf. Accessed February 10, 2010.

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

year Advani began a 6,200-mile rath yatra from the Somnath temple in

Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh to demonstrate BJP support for the

Ayodhya campaign. In October the BJP announced it would withdraw

from V. P. Singh’s government if the government attempted to stop the

temple movement. Singh at that point ordered the chief minister of

Bihar to arrest Advani in Bihar, halting his procession before it could

reach Ayodhya. With Advani’s arrest the BJP withdrew its support from

the coalition government, new elections were called for May–June

1991, and construction plans were halted.

End of a Dynasty

By May 1991 Singh’s government had collapsed, and Rajiv Gandhi

was campaigning for reelection in Tamil Nadu. A young woman,

later thought to be a member of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, bent at

his feet in a traditional gesture of respect and exploded a bomb con-

cealed around her waist, killing herself, Gandhi, and 16 bystanders.

In the aftermath of Gandhi’s death, the Congress Party found itself

for the ﬁ rst time without an adult heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

Congress (in one form or another) had governed India for more than

40 out of the 44 years since independence, and Nehru or his progeny

had ruled the governing Congress Party for all but two of those 40

years. For better or for worse India had become a mature modern

democratic state under the joint tutelage of the old nationalist party

and the Nehru-Gandhi family.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, both Indian political parties and

Indian voters had changed. Congress, which had so easily dominated

elections during the early years after independence, had lost much of

its grassroots base during the centralizing regimes of Indira Gandhi

and her son Rajiv. In addition, according to many political observers,

Indian politics had become increasingly fragmented and regionalized

over the decades after independence. Up to 1967, Congress had con-

tained within itself the most important political factions in the country

and had dominated elections in the various states. But the 1967 elec-

tion marked the end of Congress dominance in state governments, and

10 years later the eighth national election (1977) marked the end of

Congress dominance even at the center.

During the 1980s Congress became just one among an endlessly

proliferating series of combining and dissolving political parties. Parties

formed and dissolved as their leaders (and their aggregates of support-

ers) switched allegiances or left one coalition to join another. Few par-

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258

ties had deﬁ ning ideologies by the 1980s—the Communists in Bengal

and Kerala and the Jana Sangh–BJP–RSS network being major excep-

tions. Voters, too, were now more willing than in the republic’s early

years to switch from party to party.

Even with Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991 and no

Nehru-Gandhi family leader for the ﬁ rst time since independence,

Congress (I) still won 220 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, achieving

a plurality that enabled it to form a coalition government with the

support of Tamil Nadu’s non-Brahman DMK party, Muslim League

representatives, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or

CPI (M). P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004), who had been foreign

minister in both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s governments

became prime minister.

The BJP, which had campaigned aggressively on Hindutva and Babri

Masjid issues, became the second largest party at the center, with 120

seats. The party had losses in regional elections in Bihar, Haryana,

and Maharashtra, although it maintained control over state govern-

ments in Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. In Uttar

Pradesh, however, the BJP won the elections and formed the next state

government.

Globalization of India’s Economy

Even as the Mandal crisis grabbed headlines and the VHP’s Ramjan-

mabhoomi campaign gathered support, the Congress (I) government

of 1991 authorized the liberalization of India’s economy. The United

States’s Persian Gulf War in 1991 had caused oil prices to rise in India

(and worldwide), sending food prices higher and forcing many Indians

working in Gulf states to return home unemployed. When India

almost defaulted on its international debt in 1991, Prime Minister

Rao appointed Manmohan Singh (1932– ), a Harvard- and London-

educated economist, as ﬁ nance minister. Singh made severe cuts in

government spending and devalued the Indian rupee in return for

several billion dollars in World Bank and IMF loans. He aggressively

courted foreign investment and cut bureaucratic restrictions on foreign

businesses. The short-term effects of these changes were an increase in

unemployment and a 15 percent inﬂ ation rate, which weakened Rao’s

coalition government severely.

Within ﬁ ve years, however, Manmohan Singh’s economic program

was being hailed as an economic miracle. India’s economy grew faster

in the years between 1991 and 1996 than it had in most years after

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EARLY WESTERNIZING REFORM (1798–1879)

Indian independence. Foreign investment totaling more than $10

billion poured into India, and exports grew by 20 percent per year.

Western companies long banned in India—Coca-Cola, Pepsico, IBM,

Xerox, Kentucky Fried Chicken—opened businesses in urban centers.

The city of Bangalore ﬂ ourished as India’s computer science and soft-

ware center. By the end of 1995 inﬂ ation had fallen to below 6 percent

per year and urban middle-class Indians were experiencing a surge in

prosperity. Meanwhile the contrast between the 30 percent of India’s

population experiencing the new prosperity and the 30 percent of the

population who were landless laborers and urban slum dwellers was as

stark as at any time in the past.

Demolition of the Babri Masjid

The BJP’s Uttar Pradesh victory left the party caught between its role as

a state government (whose voters wanted stability and order) and its

commitment to Hindu nationalism (whose supporters wanted the Babri

Masjid razed and the Ram temple built). The situation remained stale-

mated through 1991 as negotiations between the VHP, the Congress

(I) central government, the Uttar Pradesh government, and Muslim

protest groups failed to reach any agreement. In October 1992 the VHP

announced that construction would start on December 6. The Supreme

Court declared the construction illegal and the Rao government moved

195 paramilitary companies into the Ayodhya region. At the same time

armies of VHP kar sevaks (volunteer workers) from different parts of

India began to converge on Ayodhya. By December their numbers were

estimated at 150,000.

On December 6, 1992, with Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and

numerous other RSS and VHP leaders present, volunteers broke into the

Babri Masjid grounds and began to dismantle the mosque. Neither the

state police nor the central government’s paramilitary forces attempted

to stop them. (Observers later attributed the central government’s fail-

ure to act to the general reluctance of the already-weak prime minister,

Rao, to interfere with a popular Hindu movement.) Within ﬁ ve hours

the three domes of the mosque had fallen and the building was in ruins.

A temporary temple for Hindu religious images was constructed on

the mosque site by the kar sevaks. As the demolition was under way

volunteers attacked press crews and local Muslims and burned Muslim

homes in Ayodhya. The BJP later ofﬁ cially described the events as an

“uncontrollable upsurge of [a] spontaneous nature” (Jaffrelot 1996,

455), but some observers at the time thought Sangh Parivar leaders had

planned the demolition in advance.

CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

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260

Rioting began in Ayodhya during the mosque demolition and contin-

ued through December and January in North Indian cities. On some occa-

sions riots were started by Muslims protesting the mosque demolition;

more often they were sparked by Hindu nationalist victory celebrations

and aided by complicit local police. In the ﬁ rst week after the demolition

1,200 people were killed, most in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh,

and Madhya Pradesh and somewhat fewer in Delhi and Rajasthan. In

TWO BJP LEADERS

al Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee are often presented

as holding opposing positions within the BJP and RSS hierarchies:

Advani the “hard-liner” versus Vajpayee the “moderate.” Yet the two

men had worked together in the Jana Sangh and the BJP for years

without major ideological disagreements. Their more recent differ-

ing political stances, some observers suggest, are more tactical than

substantial.

Vajpayee (ca. 1924– ) was born in Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh.

He had earned an M.A. in political science at DAV College in Kanpur

before dropping out of law school to join the RSS as a swayamsevak (vol-

unteer) in the early 1940s. A dedicated pracharak (preacher) Vajpayee

was assigned in the 1950s to organize and develop the Jana Sangh party

along RSS lines. He became general secretary of the Jana Sangh in Uttar

Pradesh during that decade, was ﬁ rst elected to Parliament in 1957, and

served as foreign minister in the Janata government in 1977. He helped

found the BJP in 1980 and was its ﬁ rst president before being replaced

by Advani when the BJP’s election results proved disappointing. In 1992

he was one of the few Sangh Parivar leaders to denounce the Babri

Masjid demolition. In 1996 and again in 1998 he became prime minister

in BJP coalition governments.

Like Vajpayee, Advani (ca. 1929– ) also rose through the RSS

ranks. Born in the port city of Karachi in Sindh, he joined the RSS

in 1942, becoming a pracharak in the Karachi RSS in 1947. During

Partition Advani and his family (along with 1 million other Sindhi

Hindus) ﬂ ed to India. In India Advani worked for the RSS in Rajasthan

and then in New Delhi, becoming secretary of the Delhi Jana Sangh

in 1958, president of the national Jana Sangh in 1973, and minister

of information and broadcasting in the Janata government of 1977.

Advani was also one of the BJP’s founders and became its president

in the late 1980s as the party turned from accommodation to a more

militant political stance.

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

Bombay rioting lasted into January 1993, instigated by Shiv Sena and BJP

activists and aided by police. Shiv Sena processions chanted “Pakistan

or kabristan” [Pakistan or the cemetery], a reference to where Muslims

should now go (Jaffrelot 1996, 459). In Bhopal a week of riots led by

Bajrang Dal and VHP activists forced almost 17,000 residents (two-thirds

of them Muslim) to ﬂ ee to refugee camps.

In Bihar there was little violence. The state’s OBC chief minister, Laloo

Prasad Yadav (1948– ), had demanded quick action from local district

magistrates and police. Outside the North Indian Hindi belt, riots were

fewer and less deadly: 73 people died in Karnataka, 35 in West Bengal,

100 in Assam, 12 in Kerala, 12 in Andhra Pradesh, and two in Tamil

Nadu.

If the Ayodhya demolition showed the potency of Hindutva issues, it

also created new difﬁ culties for a BJP that wanted to present itself as a

responsible political party. Advani resigned as leader of the opposition

in Parliament and Kalyan Singh as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Atal

Bihari Vajpayee, a BJP leader who was not in Ayodhya on December

6, 1992, described the demolition as his party’s “worst miscalculation”

(Jaffrelot 1996, 457). The Congress (I) prime minister, Rao, widely

Demolition of the Babri Masjid, 1992. Volunteers of the RSS and related Hindu national-

ist groups climb onto one of the three domes of the Babri Masjid after breaking into the

mosque grounds on December 6. In hours the ancient Muslim house of worship had been

razed to the ground.

(AP/Wide World Photos)

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