But in Delhi, the Emergency left a particularly violent imprint through the astonishing rise to power, during this period, of Indira’s adored eldest son, Sanjay. The first of Delhi’s political bad boys, he was one of those dangerous patriots who love the idea of their country but hate its reality. He was plagued by nightmares of filthy, exponentially reproducing masses, and he longed to destroy, to root out, and to impose hygiene and order. Twenty-nine years old in 1975, balding, and with a curled mouth that seemed to display some dark and disturbing sensuality, Sanjay suddenly became his mother’s closest adviser, and indeed began to enact, of his own personal will, major social policies. It is a sign of what dizzying extraordinary powers Indira Gandhi had managed to win for herself that her son, who held no political position of his own, was able to depend on such obedience from his coterie of powerful sycophants
In Delhi, he launched a major programme of slum demolition, which delighted the ambitious vice chairman of the Delhi Development Authority, Jagmohan Malhotra. Malhotra sent bulldozers to demolish the slums of Old Delhi, producing a stream of 700,000 refugees who settled in the south and east of the city (where they would encounter a fresh wave of merciless demolition in the mid-2000s). But this upheaval was rendered all the more traumatic because these people were also especially targeted by Sanjay’s other big scheme of male vasectomy. Administered through public servants, such as policemen and school teachers, who were required not only to go through the operation themselves, but also to deliver prescribed numbers of men for vasectomy every day if they wanted to keep their jobs and receive their salaries, this immediately turned into a brutal and arbitrary process whose burden fell disproportionately on the poorest and most powerless.
Among the poor Muslims of Old Delhi, these two schemes together brought back perennial fears that the purges of 1947 would one day be taken to their completion, and the tension escalated into the most terrifying battles between communities, police, demolition vehicles and vasectomy squads. The Indian state, which had arisen, in part, out of outrage against the excesses of the British against ordinary citizens, seemed to have parted its cloak to reveal some genocidal organ of its own — and there was thenceforth no level of sickness and cruelty where the imagination could not reach, especially where the poor were concerned.
But it was by no means only the poor who were targeted by Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilisation scheme. It was supposedly a universal programme that was compulsory for all men who had already had three children or more, and some of the first people to whom it was applied were those to whom the government had easiest access: its own employees. Bureaucrats, policemen, school teachers — these people too were obliged to fall in line, often in so crude a way that the state was totally discredited, along with all its opinions about such private matters as childbearing.
For many of these middle-class families who had given themselves to the Nehruvian ideal and who sought out work as servants of the state, the imposition of male vasectomy represented another kind of disappointment with the entire national project. In north India, especially, where men were still trying to escape the emasculations, real and figurative, of the partition thirty years before, this symbolic castration by the very state in which they had taken refuge, to which they had pledged their life energies, rankled deep.
• • •
On 31 October 1984, prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, who shot her thirty times as she was taking a walk in her garden in the heart of bureaucratic Delhi. The bodyguards surrendered to arrest: one was immediately shot dead; two more were imprisoned in Tihar Jail where they were later hanged.
In the 1977 election, Mrs Gandhi had been voted out of government to be replaced as prime minister by Morarji Desai, who now stood for the Janata Party, which had been newly constituted as an anti-Emergency coalition. But India’s first ever non-Congress government quickly collapsed amid infighting, and in the elections of 1980, Indira Gandhi took the country back under the banner, no longer of helping the poor, nor really of any big idea save that of her own power. This power, however, required some positive manifestation. Indira needed to produce economic growth to retain her legitimacy, and her economic policies took a marked shift to the right. She surrounded herself with new business-friendly advisers, deregulated key commodities such as cement and sugar and took a big loan from the World Bank to boost productivity.
But her enterprise was beset by adversity. Indira’s major source of personal strength, her son Sanjay, who was now a member of parliament himself, was killed shortly after the election while flying loops over Delhi in his private plane. She found herself embattled in the states, where parties catering to caste identities, religious ideals and hopes of regional autonomy were everywhere on the rise. A generation after Independence, Indian politics had grown beyond one-party federalism towards what some would call a more genuinely democratic variety, and Indira Gandhi found herself adopting strong-arm tactics to maintain the power of the centre.
Nowhere was this battle more serious than in Punjab, where demands for territory and autonomy had been growing under the leadership of the vehement and well-organised Akali Dal party. In order to divide the Akali Dal’s support, Indira Gandhi supported the agitations of the ultra-Orthodox break-away leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. But it soon became impossible to check the rise of Bhindranwale, who made increasingly overt calls for the armed liberation of Punjab from Hindus and from Delhi, and before long the Congress had a major problem on its hands. In 1981, a senior journalist who had been critical of Bhindranwale was assassinated. Bhindranwale was arrested, but at the cost of the death of several of the civilians who gathered to prevent it; widespread rejoicing broke out in Punjab when he was released three weeks later for lack of evidence. The central government had become hated and discredited, and in the wildness of 1980s politics no tactic, including political assassination, was disallowed to the leader who would take it on.
Terrorist acts became more and more persistent, and in 1984 Mrs Gandhi decided to take military action. Bhindranwale and his fighters took refuge in the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where they built up a great arsenal of arms and defences. On the night of 5 June 1984, several regiments of the Indian army stormed the temple. A huge battle ensued which resulted in the death of Bhindranwale and hundreds of his men.
Ramachandra Guha writes:
The Golden Temple is ten minutes’ walk from Jallianwala Bagh where, in April 1919, a British brigadier ordered his troops to fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians… The incident occupies a hallowed place in nationalist myth and memory; the collective outrage it provoked was skilfully used by Mahatma Gandhi to launch a countrywide campaign against colonial rule. Operation Blue Star differed in intent — it was directed at armed rebels, rather than a peaceable gathering — but its consequences were not dissimilar. It left a collective wound in the psyche of the Sikhs, crystallizing a deep suspicion of the government of India. The Delhi regime was compared to previous oppressors and desecrators, such as the Mughals, and the eighteenth-century Afghan marauder Ahmad Shah Abdali. A reporter touring the Punjab countryside found a “sullen and alienated community”. As one elderly Sikh put it, “Our inner self has been bruised. The base of our faith has been attacked, a whole tradition has been demolished.” Now, even those Sikhs who had previously opposed Bhindranwale began to see him in a new light. For, whatever his past errors and crimes, it was he and his men who had died defending the holy shrine from the vandals.43