For all but three years since independence, Indians who were taught that democracy would produce a fair and competent government elected Nehru and his heirs. No matter how downtrodden a person was-a Bihari Harijan abused by a cruel landlord or a Muslim denied a place in a predominantly Hindu society-he or she could take that grievance to the ballot box. India was regarded-and regarded itself-as a model for developing nations. Jaded American diplomats rolled their eyes through lectures at the United Nations from representatives of “the world’s largest democracy- " To the United States, high-minded India could often seem hypocritical at best, a geopolitical threat at worst: while New Delhi helped to found the nonaligne movement, it also bought billions of dollars’ worth of Soviet arms. Washington favored India’s enemy, Pakistan, in exchange for aid in such cold-war endeavore as the Afghan resistance.
Ultimately the patina of modernity that Nehru tried to stretch across India’s divides began to wear thin. Western ideas never uprooted the religious schisms which remained so widespread among India’s 844 million people-and the Nehrus themselves seemed to betray the democratic faith, Indira Gandhi split Nehru’s Congress party in 1969 and began to remove anyone she considered even remotely threatening. She allowed her younger son, Sanjay, to create his own cult of personality. (His accidental death in 1980 aborted Indira’s plans to anoint him as her successor.) And in June 1975, to stifle political dissent and perpetuate her hold on power, she imposed a state of emergency, arresting more than 100,000 people in two years. In the elections of 1977, angry voters ousted Congress.
But by 1980, Indira and her party were back. This time, Indira borrowed the old British tactic of pitting the country’s communal rivals against one another. She built up extremists in Punjabto divide the Sikhs and keep Congress in power there. The militants turned Amritsar’s Golden Temple into an armed camp. When she sent in the Army in 1984, a massacre followed. A few months later she was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards, “Indira Gandhi was the one who began and encouraged the politics of violence,” says Venugopala Rao, a political columnist in New Delhi. “She had to pay for that with her own life.”
Rajiv Gandhi promised to cleanse Congress. But soon he was embroiled in the byzantine factional power games that had come to preoccupy the party. Rajiv, too, used force liberally to further his ends at home and abroad, sending troops to intervene in Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands and waging a brutal counter insurgency campaign against Muslim guerillas in Kashmir. Today the Congress party is riddled with corruption and leaderless. Fabian socialism was not, it turns out, the wave of the future. True, India’s sophisticated high-tech industries and (in some regions) productive agriculture show that it has more potential than Western stereotypes of vast misery would suggest. But it is poor and risks falling even further behind the rest of Asia because of its political leaders’ refusal to embrace market economics. Foreign investors still run afoul of high tariffs and protectionist regulations.
Today many Indians are turning their backs on the secular ideal and embracing extremist movements based on religion or caste, such as the Sikh extremists, Assamese separatists and the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist movement that staged a series of assaults on a disputed mosque at Ayodhya last year. “Religion is being used as a cloak for extreme right-wing authoritarian polities,” says Tariq Ali, the author of a book on the Nehru-Gandhi family. “It’s an Indian version of fascism.”
The death of Rajiv Gandhi could pave the way for the rebirth of his grandfather’s dream of a tolerant democracy if it allows new centrist leaders to emerge untainted by the past. India’s voters remain relatively sophisticated and traditionally resistant to the temptation of military rule. “What people in India have resented is the corruption of the democratic ideal,” says Prof Robert Bradnock of the University of London. Still, brokering a new set of rules that could somehow unite India’s disparate religions and regions seems too large a task for any mere mortal. India once had a saint to lead it: Mahatma Gandhi. He, too, was assassinated.
