India.
The rise of a Hindu majoritarian party in the 1980s and 1990s again highlighted the difficulties of democratic “majority rule” in a country with distinct minority populations. This had been at issue in debates of seat reservations and separate electorates before 1947. In the 1990s it reemerged as the VHP and BJP provoked riots over the Babri Masjid and as the BJP came to power in 1998. The beginning of the 21st century saw Hindutva’s organizers sanctioning communal violence in Gujarat (2002) on a scale of ferocity (if not numbers) that rivaled partition violence.
In the 1990s, however, strong low-caste and Untouchable political movements arose in northern India. The parties added a new dimension to Indian political contests as politicians (particularly in the BJP) had to balance demands from their mainly upper-caste supporters against the possibility that low-caste and Untouchable voters (more than half the population) might vote against them. An unexpected Congress Party victory in the 2004 central government election, even as the BJP touted economic gains that, it claimed, had left “India Shining,” suggested that rural Indian voters might nolonger be content to subsidize urban prosperity at their own expense.
V. P. Singh and the OBCs
V. P. Singh’s Janata Dal coalition took office in 1989, but only with the aid of 85 seats from the BJP. Whereas the BJP wanted to organize (Hindu) Indians into a cohesive Hindu majority, Singh’s party, a coalition of smaller socialist and peasant-oriented groups, had pledged itself to help lower-caste communities in their struggle against the Hindu upper castes. Singh had committed 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).
From the early 1950s Indian officials had repeatedly considered actions to improve the economic and social conditions of communities 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 1978 the Janata government, under Morarji Desai, 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 identified “3,248 castes or communities 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). It recommended reserving 27 percent of civil service posts for these communities, reservations that would have 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.)
No action was taken on the Mandal report until 10 years later when Singh’s government came to power. Believing that positive discrimination would improve the conditions of OBCs (who were among Singh’s strongest supporters) and that intercaste conflict 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. “We want,” he 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, 338).
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 fire. Legal challenges postponed the implementation of the Mandal reforms for several years. The 27 percent reservations were finally put into effect in 1993, long after Singh’s government had fallen. By then the Indian economy had already begun its dramatic
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 difficult 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 recommendations, 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 campaing; they could then use Singh's opposition to the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign as their justification 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 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.
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991 left Congress without a Nehru-Gandhi family leader for the first time since independence. Even so Congress (I) 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– ), who had been foreign minister in both Indira Gandhi’s 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 governments in Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. In Uttar Pradesh 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 Ramjanmabhoomi 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, a Harvard- and London-educated economist, as finance minister. Singh made severe cuts in government spending and devalued the Indian rupee in return for several billiondollars 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 inflation rate, which weakened Rao’s coalition government severely.
Within five years, however, Manmohan Singh’s economic program was being hailed as an economic miracle. India’s economy grew as much between 1991 and 1996 as it had in the previous 40 years. Foreign investment totaling more than $10 billion poured into India, and exports grew by 20 percent per year. Western companies long banned in India—Pepsico, IBM, Xerox, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened businesses in urban centers. The city of Bangalore flourished as India’s computer science and software center. By the end of 1995 inflation 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 1991 victory in Uttar Pradesh 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 stalemated 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 failure to act to the general reluctance of the already-weak prime minister, Rao, to interfere with a popular Hindu movement.) Within
five 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 Muslim homes in Ayodhya were burned. The BJP later officially 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.
Rioting began in Ayodhya during the mosque demolition and continued through December and January in north Indian cities. On some occasions 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 first 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 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 flee 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 difficulties 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 criticized for failing to defend the mosque, ordered the arrest of six prominent Hindu nationalists, among them Advani and the head of the VHP, on charges of inciting communal violence. Rao’s government banned the RSS, the VHP, and the Bajrang Dal, sealed their offices, and prohibited any further activities. The Congress (I) imposed president’s rule in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh, dismissing all their BJP state governments.
But Rao’s coalition government was already weak, and his determination to punish participants in a popular Hindu cause had only a limited duration. All the Hindu nationalist leaders were released by mid-January 1993. Fewer than 4,000 Sangh Parivar participants were arrested nationally, among them 1,500 RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal members in Uttar Pradesh and almost 1,000 in Madhya Pradesh. Within weeks of the center’s orders banning the Sangh Parivar groups, state courts began to modify them. In 1993 the Delhi High Court lifted the ban on the RSS and Bajrang Dal (while maintaining it on the VHP for two years because of its members’ inflammatory speeches). By January 1993 the Allahabad High Court was allowing Hindu worshippers to enter the mosque grounds to view images in the makeshift temple there. A nationwide opinion poll in January 1993 showed that among north Indians more than 52 percent approved the mosque’s demolition. In south India, in contrast, only 17 percent approved the demolition, while 70 percent approved the arrest of the BJP leaders and the banning of their organizations.
The rise of a Hindu majoritarian party in the 1980s and 1990s again highlighted the difficulties of democratic “majority rule” in a country with distinct minority populations. This had been at issue in debates of seat reservations and separate electorates before 1947. In the 1990s it reemerged as the VHP and BJP provoked riots over the Babri Masjid and as the BJP came to power in 1998. The beginning of the 21st century saw Hindutva’s organizers sanctioning communal violence in Gujarat (2002) on a scale of ferocity (if not numbers) that rivaled partition violence.
In the 1990s, however, strong low-caste and Untouchable political movements arose in northern India. The parties added a new dimension to Indian political contests as politicians (particularly in the BJP) had to balance demands from their mainly upper-caste supporters against the possibility that low-caste and Untouchable voters (more than half the population) might vote against them. An unexpected Congress Party victory in the 2004 central government election, even as the BJP touted economic gains that, it claimed, had left “India Shining,” suggested that rural Indian voters might nolonger be content to subsidize urban prosperity at their own expense.
V. P. Singh and the OBCs
V. P. Singh’s Janata Dal coalition took office in 1989, but only with the aid of 85 seats from the BJP. Whereas the BJP wanted to organize (Hindu) Indians into a cohesive Hindu majority, Singh’s party, a coalition of smaller socialist and peasant-oriented groups, had pledged itself to help lower-caste communities in their struggle against the Hindu upper castes. Singh had committed 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).
From the early 1950s Indian officials had repeatedly considered actions to improve the economic and social conditions of communities 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 1978 the Janata government, under Morarji Desai, 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 identified “3,248 castes or communities 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). It recommended reserving 27 percent of civil service posts for these communities, reservations that would have 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.)
No action was taken on the Mandal report until 10 years later when Singh’s government came to power. Believing that positive discrimination would improve the conditions of OBCs (who were among Singh’s strongest supporters) and that intercaste conflict 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. “We want,” he 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, 338).
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 fire. Legal challenges postponed the implementation of the Mandal reforms for several years. The 27 percent reservations were finally put into effect in 1993, long after Singh’s government had fallen. By then the Indian economy had already begun its dramatic
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 difficult 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 recommendations, 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 campaing; they could then use Singh's opposition to the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign as their justification 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 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.
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991 left Congress without a Nehru-Gandhi family leader for the first time since independence. Even so Congress (I) 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– ), who had been foreign minister in both Indira Gandhi’s 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 governments in Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. In Uttar Pradesh 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 Ramjanmabhoomi 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, a Harvard- and London-educated economist, as finance minister. Singh made severe cuts in government spending and devalued the Indian rupee in return for several billiondollars 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 inflation rate, which weakened Rao’s coalition government severely.
Within five years, however, Manmohan Singh’s economic program was being hailed as an economic miracle. India’s economy grew as much between 1991 and 1996 as it had in the previous 40 years. Foreign investment totaling more than $10 billion poured into India, and exports grew by 20 percent per year. Western companies long banned in India—Pepsico, IBM, Xerox, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened businesses in urban centers. The city of Bangalore flourished as India’s computer science and software center. By the end of 1995 inflation 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 1991 victory in Uttar Pradesh 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 stalemated 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 failure to act to the general reluctance of the already-weak prime minister, Rao, to interfere with a popular Hindu movement.) Within
five 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 Muslim homes in Ayodhya were burned. The BJP later officially 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.
Rioting began in Ayodhya during the mosque demolition and continued through December and January in north Indian cities. On some occasions 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 first 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 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 flee 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 difficulties 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 criticized for failing to defend the mosque, ordered the arrest of six prominent Hindu nationalists, among them Advani and the head of the VHP, on charges of inciting communal violence. Rao’s government banned the RSS, the VHP, and the Bajrang Dal, sealed their offices, and prohibited any further activities. The Congress (I) imposed president’s rule in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh, dismissing all their BJP state governments.
But Rao’s coalition government was already weak, and his determination to punish participants in a popular Hindu cause had only a limited duration. All the Hindu nationalist leaders were released by mid-January 1993. Fewer than 4,000 Sangh Parivar participants were arrested nationally, among them 1,500 RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal members in Uttar Pradesh and almost 1,000 in Madhya Pradesh. Within weeks of the center’s orders banning the Sangh Parivar groups, state courts began to modify them. In 1993 the Delhi High Court lifted the ban on the RSS and Bajrang Dal (while maintaining it on the VHP for two years because of its members’ inflammatory speeches). By January 1993 the Allahabad High Court was allowing Hindu worshippers to enter the mosque grounds to view images in the makeshift temple there. A nationwide opinion poll in January 1993 showed that among north Indians more than 52 percent approved the mosque’s demolition. In south India, in contrast, only 17 percent approved the demolition, while 70 percent approved the arrest of the BJP leaders and the banning of their organizations.
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