While the Congress) government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao has dismissed the Uttar Pradesh state government of the right-wing Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), arrested BJP leaders, pledged to rebuild the mosque and placed a ban on certain Hindu communalist organizations, its hands are far from clean in the matter. RAGHU KRISHNAN — December 8, 1992 turbulent waters of economic liberalization, the Congress wants to harness the BJP's political authoritarianism, aggressive Indian nationalism, economic liberalism and social base among the rural and urban nouveaux riches to full effect.
While distancing itself from the BJP's more fanatically anti-Muslim tendencies - for fear of alienating the support of the country's Muslim elites and jeopardizing India's relations with the Muslim world - the
Congress has shown that it is not averse to playing this card either.?
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring Muslim state of Pakistan, the assault on Ayodhya has provided some much-needed breathing space for the embattled government of Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was facing rising protests led by the opposition Pakistan
People's Party of deposed Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto.
Sharif was quick to call a "day of mour- Sharif was m to call 6doc.
ning and protest" on December 8, which was marked by outbursts of violence directed at the country's Hindu minority. There have been similar scenes in Bangladesh.
The West is showing greater concern than usual over recent events in India — primarily out of fear that the government's neo-liberal programme of economic reforms may be thrown into doubt.
The spectre of the Emergency
The Congress Party — the only genuinely all-India party — is eager to overcome its chronic crisis of rule. With the emergence of an openly Hindu communalist party as a major player, with the frenzy of greed, corruption and gangsterism that have infected Indian life in the course of the "modernization" of the past decade - and with the repression that has greeted mushrooming working class protests against the reforms -the real threat is the eventual imposition of an authoritarian civilian regime like that of the Emergency period of 1975-77.
At that time, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi - invoking the supposed threat from the Hindu far-right - declared Emergency Rule and carried out a repression directed primarily at the trade union movement and the left.
Emergency Rule or not, the authoritarian drift of Indian politics continues unabated. * 1. On November 16, the Supreme Court released its decision on the Mandal Report, largely upholding the 1990 legislation. The decision was followed by violent anti-Mandal protests throughout the north. The Hindu International Edition, November 28, 1992. 2. The BJP has waged an aggressive campaign for the expulsion of Bangladeshi migrant workers, particularly the Muslims. Not to be outdone, the Congress central government sent the army into a New Delhi slum in the middle of the night, where they packed 132 Muslims into a truck and shipped them off to Bangladesh. When it was later discovered that they had in fact been legal residents in India who had come from Pakistan, they were allowed to return. "Operation Pushback", Economic and Political weekly, November 7, 1992. cal Weekly, November 7, 1992
U PON taking power in Uttar Pradesh and three other northern states in the 1991 elections, which also made it the official opposition in the Lok Sabha (the national parliament), the BJP leadership toned down its militant Hindu fundamentalist stand - in an attempt to make itself a "respectable"
candidate for power at the centre.
But faced with sagging popularity in the states it governs, internal divisions, and the spectre of the Hindu extremist Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) pushing its own mass base to the right, the BJP joined its Hindu extremist allies in striking a belligerent posture over Ayodhya.
At the end of October — right in the middle of the third round of protracted government-sponsored talks on the dispute - the VHP declared December 6 to be a kar seva, a call to its thousands of cadres to descend upon the mosque site.
One week later, the talks broke down, and those hoping for a peaceful outcome to the conflict were told to rely on Congress attempts to assuage the Hindu extremists and to pursue the matter through the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, the VHP and the semi-fascist RSS carried out a nationwide campaign to ensure maximum participation at the Ayodhya kar seva; they expected a turnout of one million of their supporters.
Whatever the celestial pretensions of the VHP's saffron-clad holy men may be, the Ayodhya dispute has served an eminently political and social function in the recent period, for the BJP as for the Congress Party and their largely wealthy and upper caste social base. In the fall of 1990, the BJP made a triumphant entry onto the political scene with a 4 for the construction of a new temple at country-wide mobilization to collect bricks
Ayodhya. In the violence that accompanied the campaign several hundred Muslims were killed.
The campaign was an obvious response to the decision two months earlier of the then
Janata Dal government of Prime Minister
V.P. Singh to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Report — which prescribed a system of "reservations" (quotas) for certain areas of public sector hiring, for a large part of the country's lower caste population not already covered by such legislation.
### Upper caste backlash
The legislation sparked an uproar among the Hindu high and intermediate castes. The BJP and Congress led a violent anti-Mandal agitation by upper caste students fearful that Mandal would further exacerbate their employment woes. The BJP calculated that a campaign around the Ayodhya issue - which had received scant attention beforehand — would prolong the anti-Mandal agitation on another front, galvanizing the Hindus against the Muslims behind an upper caste leadership, increasing the BJP's political fortunes, and in the process nipping lower caste hopes and self-organizing efforts in the bud Much to the satisfaction of the Congress, the anti-Mandal and Ayodhya agitations quickly brought down the Janata Dal government, and tied up the Mandal legislation in the Supreme Court.! The Congress has gone to great lengths to avoid annoying the BJP and its supporters. On the one hand, its state of protracted internal crisis — deepened by last year's assassination of Rajiv Gandhi — has made it highly vulnerable to the BJP's forward march, having already lost three key states to the BJP's control. On the other hand, as it plunges into the
International Viewpoint # 241
December 21, 1992
ANGOLA
Angolan voters opt for lesser evil ANGOLA has seen a renewal of hostilities after the holding of legislative and presidential elections which handed José Eduardo dos Santos and his ruling MPLA (People's Liberation Movement of Angola ) a victory over Jonas Savimbi's UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). UNITA forces have recently taken the city of Uige, 300 kilometres north-east of the capital Luanda, adding it to the list of regions now under their control.
On December 2, after weeks of unfrutiful talks with UNITA, the new MPLA prime minister, Marcolino Moco, released a proposal for a new government which would give five ministerial posts to UNITA, including the defence portfolio. UNITA has also been offered two posts in the Military High Command.