The threat of
Hindu communalism buses had their turbans set alight and replaced on their heads, others were beaten up and in many cases doused with petrol and burnt alive. In a few isolated cases even women were not spared.
By the afternoon of November 1, the rioting, killing, arson and looting had
The Indian people will go to the polls on December 24, after what has been one of the worst outbreaks of communalist violence in the country's history, following the death of Indira Gandhi.
The new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, declared the elections for that date in order to cash in on the sympathy vote. It can be confidently predicted that the Congress (I) Party will achieve a comfortable majority of the seats. A swing of between 6 to 10 per cent would give them a land-
It is unlikely that the honeymoon period with the new government will last long. The basic problems of Indian society will not be solved by the new regime and the communal card will be used by this government as it was under the last.
All the tensions and pressures which have created an endemic political crisis of the Indian state will rapidly resurface.
The death and destruction which followed
Gandhi, in which over 1,000 people lost their lives, the role of Hindu communalism which has been whipped up clearly against the minority populations. And yet there were many incidents of
Hindu-Sikh cooperation also. Out of a population of 730 million, Hindus form 80 percent.
In the following article our correspondent describes the situation in the country and gives a first response to the tragic events that have taken place.
M. NAVID
At 9:16 a.m. on the morning of October 31, two Sikh security guards pumped
16 bullets into the body of the Prime
Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, as she was making her way from her residence in Safdarjung Road, Delhi to the adjacent lawns of her office where she was to be interviewed by the British actor Peter Ustinov and his television crew.
Her bullet-ridden body was taken to the
All India Institute of Medical Sciences where the doctors fought an ultimately futile battle to save her life. She died the same afternoon at 2:23 p.m.
Gandhi's assailants had clearly acted in retaliation for "Operation Bluestar," the army assault on the Golden Temple on
June 3 which resulted in the death of
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and many of his closest supporters who had turned the holiest of Sikh shrines into a fortress.
In addition, extensive damage was done to the Akal Takth, the temporal seat of the five high priests who constitute the highest body of spiritual and religious authority for the Sikh community. Most ordinary Sikhs were justifiably embittered by this assault.
But if "Operation Bluestar" was an avoidable tragedy which only compounded the alienation of Sikhs from the government and the majority of Hindus who had supported the action, this act of revenge was yet another tragic mistake which, as events soon confirmed, was to drive a deeper wedge between Sikhs and the rest of the nation.
What followed was the politically most serious communal riot and carnage since
8 the assassination of Mrs showed up very the Partition of 1947. (1) The politics of assassination are rarely, if ever, the way to resolve basic political and social prob lems. All too often such actions prove to be politically counter-productive in the extreme. For this, if for no other reason, Mrs Gandhi's assassination has to be strongly condemned. The political repercussions of such an act should have been apparent to anyone with a modicum of political sensibility. Indeed it is possible that the assailants did not act merely out of short-sighted revenge, but as part of a wider conspiracy which was well aware of the likely consequences and which sought to precipitate just the kind of situation that was to develop
In any event, the question of motivation and possible conspiracy is of secondary importance to the objective impact of the assassination, immediate as well as long-term. The announcement of Mrs Gandhi's death on the afternoon of October 31 was met with genuine and widespread grief throughout the country. The response of the Sikh community was more complex. If many Sikhs in Punjab welcomed the news of her death, most of those outside Punjab were subdued in their responses out of fear of the possible reaction because the assassins were Sikhs. If some Sikhs (including a few expatriates) openly celebrated her demise, this number was wildly exaggerated and became grist for the rumour mills and justification for the unjustifiable and obscene acts that were to follow.
Starting in and around the area where Mrs Gandhi was hospitalised, mobs of young males - lumpens, right-wing students, sons of shopkeepers and others spread to all parts of Delhi, not just the wealthy housing estates of the south which had been the initial battleground. News of similar acts, though on a lesser scale, began to come in from other states like Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu, Kashmir and West Bengal. The killings were much more limited in the last two states. Trains travelling in the north, west and central parts of the country were stopped at and between stations by organised hoodlums and spontaneously embittered villagers, to pull out Sikhs and murder them.
At the same time there were innumerable instances of Hindu fellow passengers in trains hiding Sikhs at risk to their own lives and of Hindu neighbours on housing estates doing the same. This was the one bright spot in a saga of brutal communal and politically motivated violence. Had it not been for such humanistic solidarity, the death toll would undoubtedly have been higher. It was only in the late afternoon or evening of November 1 that the government decided to call in the army to restore order in the capital and up and down the country. This was a criminal delay since actual deployment and prop erly organised patrolling in riot-affected areas would take another one to two days. This was particularly true of the capital and its immediate environs which in normal peacetime has no significant army presence in or around it. Divide and rule
Why this delay? First, the civilian authority hesitated to publicly declare its inadequacy and inability to control events by calling in the army. Secondly, the funeral of Mrs Gandhi was deliberately staged so as to become an international media event with the attendance of all sorts of foreign dignitaries. Too much emphasis on the need for army rule in the capital might have dissuaded many foreign visitors from coming. In fact, the decision to hold Mrs Gandhi's funeral three days after her death instead of immediately within a day was unforgivable creating as it did unnecessary tension as she lay in state.
Calling in of the army early on was made all the more imperative because of British rule in India, a partition of the country was created along religious lines. There was a Muslim majority in Pakistan.
International Viewpoint 24 December 1984
Rajiv Gandhi at his mother's funeral (DR)
the and mayhem.
Muslim or Sikh.
to limit, let
Out of a 30,000-
The Sikh police party.
in the
Sikh families,
Thus, instead of the ment by villagers.
first days of supplies.
of Sikhs with about large in camp necessities
Even the ing to their homes.
must go on.
India as a whole.
It would be abso-
This
9
Muslim riots of recent years can be at- of Bhindranwale or from the deliberate weaker than that of the society as a
Whole, but its deterioration in this sense has now been sharply accelerated.
Communalism represents the biggest threat to the body politic not only because it means greater the tendencies towards a break up of the and of the drift towards a
"strong," more authoritarian state, thus undermining the bourgeois democratic character of Indian society.
this does not immediately result in a generalised authoritarian system of rule, it does mean the extension of selective repression, growing enclaves of strict military control and administration (e.g
Punjab today) and systematic erosion of various democratic rights, through
But it is the directly communal consequences and implications that are the most serious. The chances of a future carnage and massacre of Sikhs not necessarily through communal riots, through direct repression by the state is now frighteningly high. Such a carnage would be on a scale as to make what happened already look like a picnic. complex of factors leading to such a terrible outcome have now powerful dynamic.
The alienation of the ordinary Sikh and Hindu from each other is now deeper than ever before and this in spite of the fact that the bonds that link Hindus and Sikhs in everyday life are deeper and more complex than those between Hindus and Muslims. This closeness, for example, has not prevented carnage on a scale which rivals, even though it does not exceed, the scale of the worst riots that have taken place between Hindus and Muslims since independence.
Indeed, the Hindu-Sikh problem is today more acute and dangerous in its implications than the Hindu-Muslim conflict. For one thing, the Muslim population is much greater, around 13%, and it is dispersed in significant concentrations throughout the country. Sikhs by contrast are less than 2% of the population and barely outnumber Hindus in their home state of Punjab. Elsewhere they are an even more insignificant minority and are also much more dispersed. capacity to unite and resist communal assaults outside Punjab is limited
There is another important reason why the Hindu-Sikh conflict today constitutes a more serious phenomenon than the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict. ultimate logic of minority communalism (Sikh or Muslim) leads to separatism (Khalistan [the demand for a separate Sikh state] or Pakistan). has already come into existence. worst riots between Hindus and Muslims were associated with Partition. quent Hindu-Muslim riots have never come close to that scale of horror and carnage. Indeed, many of the Hinduthe problems created by increasing integration (2) of Muslims into
Indian society, such as growing economic competition between sections of the two communities. The logic of growing Sikh communalism, a newer phenomenon is,
Khalistan and this adds a nattional and more dangerous and frightening dimension to the Hindu-Sikh problem.
The ground for communal carnage in the future has been made more fertie by the spread of communal attitudes among the ordinary Sikh and Hindu. Re cent events have added their own significant impetus. It is important to understand that one can be sincerely against communal riots and still be communal or harbour many communal attitudes.
same Sikh or Hindu who would never dream of killing someone - indeed, who goes out of their way to protect their neighbour — can still contribute to a general climate of opinion which greatly facilitates communal leaders, lumpens or insecure youths of the middle and lower classes who perceive participation in riots as an effective expression of frustrations have other more fundamental Thus the ordinary Hindu in north
India who may shake their head at the "excessive" massacre of Sikhs and indeed have protected their Sikh can also feel that to some extent "Sikhs they got for killing our prime minister." Or that "we Hindus have been tolerant for too long. We have been pushed around too much. Look at what Bhindranwale did to Hindus in Punjab and where were the majority of Sikhs then? "It's time they got a taste of their own medicine. Maybe secularism is not worth it and we are better off having a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu state)."
There is, of course, no rational basis for such feelings. But they are as deep and as widespread as they are because such attitudes feed and flourish on a partial and selective vision of events and socthe fact that Bhindranwale killed almost as many Sikhs as Hindus in Punjab, or that he never succeeded in provoking indiscriminate mob against Hindus is forgotten. The idea that the Hindu giant (85% of the population)
"pushed around" is frankly Indeed the ultimate logic of majority eommunalism (Hindu communalism) is in a sense more dangerous because it leads not to separation, but to the massive repression and domination of
The ordinary Sikhs outside of Punjab feel more insecure than ever before. Their bitterness towards the central government and its failure to prevent or control the rioting is deeper than ever, justi
But their communalist attitude expresses itself in an unwillingness to condemn their own communal organisations and leaders with the same force, or to reflect in a way which can recognise and acknowledge the failure of the Sikh masses to strongly dissociate themselves from the murderous tactics communal politics of the which has organised the Morcha (movement) in Punjab.
In sum, communal attitudes among both Sikhs and Hindus are more deeply entrenched and widespread than ever before. It is in the nature of communalism that it should make religion the most important unifying factor when in an objective sense it is not and cannot ever be.
Class, caste, regional and ethnic loyalties are generally much more important because they correspond much more closely to common objective needs. Sikh, Hindu and Muslim workers have much more in common with each other than each of them has with their co-religionists of a higher class or caste. Yet it is the success of communalism that such fundamental under a false sense of religious unity.
Hindu 'Rashtra'?
The beneficiaries of such a development in India today are the active and conscious communal forces among Sikhs and Hindus. The false, unattainable and unjustifiable goal of Khalistan will not attract greater support among Sikhs.
Such an objective cannot be supported by revolutionaries because Sikhs do not constitute a nationality let alone an oppres sed nationality. Nor, despite their very real secular and to a more limited extent, religious grieyances, has Sikhism been an oppressed religion. be supported, not because "Indian unity" is some mythical ideal that must be preserved but because Khalistan does not correspond to the objective interests of the oppressed classes among Sikhs. thermore, it is simply not attainable. The Indian state is too powerful and will not ultimately hesitate to unleash the most brutal repression of Sikhs to "preserve the Indian union." Nor, contrary to the expectations of many Khalistanis will Pakistan commit suicide; that is, go to war with the powerful Indian state in order to help Sikhs carve out a Khalis tan. Islamabad is not above utilising the Hindu-Sikh divide for its own purposes and in order to make things difficult for New Delhi. But there is a definite limit to their support to Khalistanis.
On the other side, the idea of a "Hindu Rashtra," the goal long propagated by the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh - National Volunteer Corps), one of the strongest and most deeply rooted of Hindu communal forces, will now have correspondingly greater resonance among the Hindus of north and central India, parts of western India among Brahmins elsewhere. (3)
International Viewpoint, No 60, October 1, 1984.
The RSS was established in 1926, and was an organisation designed to provide the shock troops for Hindu communalism. carried out acts of arson and sabotage designed to demoralise the minority community.
International Viewpoint 24 December 1984
The momentum of migration of Sikhs to and Hindus out of Punjab is growing. This is an extremely dangerous development because if it gathers force, it will lead to a de facto Khalistan-type situation which will then provoke the government into an all-out effort to forcibly subordinate Punjab and reduce its "independence" from the rest of India, that is physically repress Sikhs. riots there had been a steady trickle of Hindus leaving Punjab. They have more reason today to feel insecure because of the expectation of a "Sikh backlash" at some time in the future.
Today Sikhs outside Punjab have been shaken as never before. Their sense of being a vulnerable minority is stronger than ever before. To be among "their own kind" in Punjab must seem the logical and natural thing to do, the "safer"
at least for each individual Sikh family, even if the collective outcome of such accumulated individual migrations would prove disastrous for Sikhs
UNDERTAKING
Rioting Hindus in the Punjab earlier this year (DR)
sharp disillusionment among Sikhs out danger than the potential danger of a "Sikh backlash" in Punjab after the recent riots, as news begins to circulate among Punjab's Sikhs of what has happened elsewhere (Punjab is under army rule with tight censorship) the alienation and resentment between the two comunities will grow, only tempered by the fact that some Hindus also went out of their way to save many Sikhs. The in Punjab, when it comes, is not likely to take the form of Sikh mobs on indiscriminate rampage against Punjabi Hindus, but the form of an escalation of terrorist killings of individuals. If in fact the former were to occur, the consequences can easily be individual terrorist killings might be sufficient to initiate a pattern of future Hindu-Sikh riots that parallels the Hindu-Muslim situation. The events of October 31 to November 4 mark the first time in the history of Hindu-Sikh relations that there has been such mob violence and rioting.
The Sikh community has no leadership capable of stemming the rising tide of communalism. The leaders have proved utterly bankrupt in the recent crisis. The leaders, although have issued statements from prison condemning the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, dissociating Sikhs as a community from the act of two misguided individuals, calling on the government to fulfil its responsibilities to protect Sikhs and assuring it of its full support in this task during this period of acute crisis, and called on the Sikhs in Punjab to refrain at all costs from any retaliation. Instead, this leadership did nothing. It remained silent.
In their absence, effective leadership of the Sikhs has been in the hands of the principal religious leaders, the five high priests of the Akal Takth in the Golden Temple. One of the more positive outcomes of the recent riots has been the ternational Viewpoint 24 December 1984 side Punjab with this leadership for their shameful and criminal role during the crisis. Jathedar Kripal Singh, the head priest, first issued a statement condemning the murder of Mrs Gandhi and then soon after retracted this statement "clarifying" that while the assassination was a tragedy he neither condemned nor supported it. Furthermore these leaders indulged in absurd politicking (which could have been left to later) at a time when the most urgent need was to save Sikh lives by cooling tensions and bringing the rioting to a halt, by demanding that the government fulfil its responsibilities and assuring it of all support in this task from the Sikh community at this
Today the leadership of the Sikh community is in a complete mess. It is unable to provide any perspective of what to do in Punjab or of how to stop the growing dynamic which is polarising the two communities, the migration in and out of Punjab, and all the other factors which presage a possible massacre of Sikhs in the not too distant future.
On the other side of the communal fence, Hindu communalism has become more powerful than ever.
more aggressive and overt communal ideology of the RSS and its political front organisation, the BJP (the Bharantija danata Party) and the basic communal perspectives of the other bourgeois opposition parties, it is the ruling Congress (I) that is the driving force of Hindu communalism today. This is something that traditional leftists (the CPI, the Communist Party of India, and the CPM, the Communist PartyMarxist (5)), have failed or refused to
There are obvious distinctions to be made between the RSS-BJP which talks overtly in terms of a Hindu Rashtra,
Congress (I) which maintains the language of secularism and national-
Nevertheless, the Congress (I), simply by virtue of holding power at the level of central government and in the various states, represents a greater actual
"Hindu fascism" as embodied by the RSS-BJP.
Thus, in the Bhiwandi riots of May-June 1984 in Bombay (6) the massacre of Muslims was largely the responsibility of the Shiv Sena and the Congress (I), not the RSS. Today it would be impossible to convince any Sikh and understandably so, that while the RSS is communal the Congress is essentially secular — not when the organisation of the recent carnage was undertaken by Congress (I) leaders. What is more, these murderers in the Congress (I) party will not be brought to book or punished by the coterie of top leaders surrounding the new prime minister and head party, Rajiv Gandhi. At best these murderers may be denied a ticket for the coming elections. Rajiv Gandhi and his club of "computer boys" are even less capable than Mrs Gandhi of overhauling and cleaning the party of its criminal and to establish a long-term personal dominance within the party that the new prime minister has yet to emulate. deed, the deepening communalism of the Congress (I has to be justified, endorsed and covered up. Thus, Rajiv Gandhi, in his maiden public speech as prime minister, indirectly condoned the communal outbreak when he declared, regarding the death of his mother, that when a giant falls there are bound to be tremors. It is also, above all, the Congress (I) which can provide Hindu communalism with the most effective garb of nationalism. Thus a future massacre of Sikhs in Punjab would be justified as necessary in order to prevent the emergence of Khalistan and to preserve the "unity and integrity of the nation."
Akali Dal, founded in 1920, is a party composed essentially of Sikhs
The Communist Party of India was founded in 1928. The Sino-Soviet split in 1961 created different factions inside the party. An important section of the base left to form the CPI-M.
See IV, No 57, July 16, 1984.
11
pect that would then be resisted with in- The CPI and CPM are unable or unwilling
He was followed on the same platform by another Congress (I) leader who launched - obviously with official approval — a tirade against the recently published finding of two Delhi based liberties organisations which accused by name a number of Congress (I) leaders of organising and fomenting the riots.
It is precisely this growing communal character of the Congress created a dilemma for organisations like the RSS which now have an extremely ambivalent attitude towards the Congress (I). On the one hand the RSS can have no quarrel with the Congress's increasingly which indeed they endorse and support. On the other hand, support for the Congress (I) weakens its own front organisation, the BJP, in which there is already a
"liberal" minority led by Atal B. Vajpayee which wants the BJP to dilute its strongly Hindu ideology in favour of a more "national" image, and the majority which sees the bonds tying the BJP to the RSS as indissoluble.
But the fact remains that the RSS is increasingly lending its support to the Congress (I), further testimony, if it were needed, of the role played by the Congress (I) today. The RSS attitude to the recent riots expressed another ambivalence. The RSS did not condone the riots but opposed them, declaring that Sikhs were in fact an integral part of the Hindu faith and historically its frontier guards for a 1,000 in fact, Sikhism emerged in the middlate; This is historically inaccurate; the fifteenth century.
However, the point is that the RSS preferred to adopt a more subtle communalism denying the separate religious identity of Sikhs. Why this approach? In effect the Pan-Hindu ideal of the RSS pushes it to try and incorporate minorities like the Sikhs, Buddhists, Sindhis even as it excludes the biggest minority, the Muslims. Were its pan-Hindu ideal to exclude Sikhs then this would undermine another of its principal goals - an "Ak-
For an Undivided India. While Muslims can theoretically be packed off to Pakistan, where would the Sikhs go if they are to be excluded from a
Nevertheless, the RSS can be fied that the idea of a Hindu Rashtra enjoys increasingly greater popularity. It is of course no solution. Indeed this growing pressure must be strongly combatted. A Hindu Rashtra solves none of the fundamental problems of poverty and social and political inequality. It would not only be fatal for the minorities like Sikhs, Muslims and Christians that make up 15% of the population, but disastrous for Hindus themselves. Quite apart from the fact that the oppressed classes and castes among Hindus would gain nothing, such an outcome would greatly accelerate centrifugal tendencies leading to the break up of the country.
For a Hindu Rashtra would mean in effect the dominance of the Hindi speaking north over the rest of India, a prosferocity by its regional victims. It is worth noting in this respect that the recent riots and certainly the killings of Sikhs were essentially confined to the Hindi speaking heartland of India though the grief over Mrs Gandhi's death was na-
The example of non-secular Pakistan
An Islamic, avowedly non-secular Pakistan as it was created in 1947 meant in effect the dominance of the Punjabi speaking part of west Pakistan. Which in turn led to the break away of Bengali east Pakistan in 1971 and to growing hostility and resistance of Sind and Baluchi counter-nationalism in the west. A Hindu Rashtra would be the prelude to the balkanisation of India. Anti-communal front
Objectively speaking, communalisation of Indian society and of the state represents the single greatest danger facing the country. Combatting this communalism is the major priority for this period in Indian history. How is
There is not a single bourgeois political force that can claim to be essentially secular and non-communal let alone anti-
The communist left, the CPI and CPM although not above playing communal politics as part of the electoral game are fundamentally secular. But their ability to present themselves as an alternative pole in the struggle against communalism is decisively vitiated by their adherence to the view that the ruling Congress (I) for all its "authoritarianism" is a secular alternative to the communal RSS-BJP.
This stems partly from their misguided understanding of the role of the Congress during the national freedom movement, and partly from their assumption that the national bourgeoisie is secular, and it is above all the Congress (I) that represents this national bourgeoisie. It fails to realise that this national bourgeoisie is principally committed to preserving the national market, that is the nation, and in the face of a Sikh communalism gravitating towards Khalistan will fully endorse a communal onslaught against Sikhs by the "secular" ruling party in or-
#preserve the nation." and CM perspective can condone and justify such an outcome; it can do nothing to prevent it.
Thus both the CPI and CPM mourned the death of Mrs Gandhi as the passing away of a truly nationalist and secular figure willing to stand up to internally destabilising forces like the Khalistanis who are aided and abetted by foreign reactionary forces, for example American imperialism whose most courageous and principled opponent on the world scale is of course the Soviet Union, to which both parties are now very close. Incidentally, the USSR has been consistently putting pressure on the CP and CM to support the "progressive" Congress (I).
to recognise that the real danger comes not from the possibility of a Khalistan emerging, but of a genocide of Sikhs in Punjab by the Indian state as communal forces on both sides become strengthened and the two communities polarised.
Thus the CPI and CPM hailed the "smoothness" of the changeover in Congress and government leadership and committed itself to strengthening the forces standing for "the unity and integrity" of the country, even as it seeks to electorally oppose the Congress (I) in the com-
All of which makes the task of setting up a nationwide anti-communal front which opposes the communalism of all bourgeois parties absolutely vital. This is something that will have to be built from scratch through the coming together of individuals and groups able to recognise the acute communal danger and the absence of any political force capable of combatting it effectively.
Such a front (initial efforts have been launched in places like Delhi and Bombay) must necessarily be independent of existing political parties, including the CPI and CPM. It must develop a programme which provides hope and perspectives to minorities like the Sikhs and Muslims. Such a front must demand that the murderers of the Congress (I) be brought to trial and punished the Congress (I) has ordered a major probe into the assassination of Mrs Gandhi but not into the behaviour of its own members and leaders during the recent riots). Only this will serve to reassure the Sikh community somewhat and to expose to a larger audience the fact that the Congress (I) is the driving force of Hindu communalism.
Such a front must vigorously oppose the Khalistanis and the Akali Dal brand of Sikh communalism. It must vigorously
Hindu and Muslim comthe dangers inherent in the concept of
It must oppose the growing trend of migration in and out of Punjab. It must oppose the government's systematic and conscious attempt to reduce the numbers and proportion of Sikhs in the police and armed forces. It must challenge the flawed official sec ideology inherited from the national movement which does not sufficiently separate affairs of religion from affairs of the state.
Such a front must concretise specific demands around each one of perspectives and agitate vigorously around them. Only such a many-sided and collective opposition to all communalisms can offer the promise of a better future and a leap backward from impend ing insanity. The creation of such a front is the prime responsibility of this period and must be undertaken by all radical, progressive and revolutionary forces in the country. The Inquilabi Communist the Indian section of the Fourth International, commits itself firm-
International Viewpoint 24 December 1984