INDIRA'S TARNISHED LEGACY
Omvedt, Gail
Indira's Tarnished Legacy BY GAIL OMVEDT It feels as if the earth has been removed from under our feet, as if we as a nation are suspended in mid-air with nothing to lean on." So commented the...
...Twenty per cent will feel it...
...India seemed to fall into shock, transfixed with the memory of Gandhi's courage in ruling a turbulent country of almost 800 million...
...And now the pogroms, organized by gangsters and fueled by religious hatred, may force moderate Sikhs to reconsider their future in "Hindu India...
...Some called this socialism, but India more closely followed a "national-populist" path of Third World development...
...asked a textile worker the morning after...
...Knots of residents would form to read the blazoned headlines, but the city's mood was neither angry nor mournful...
...After Jawaharlal Nehru's death in 1964, shops closed immediately and "housewives sat sobbing in their kitchens as they tried to cook," I was told...
...over the issues of ecology, civil liberties, education, and nuclear weapons...
...This time, stores closed only in the evening, when they had to, and during the whole aftermath I did not see one person cry...
...To be sure, new social movements have relieved the bleak political landscape...
...A relatively secular, broadly based, progressive national movement had transformed the nation...
...Such a course spells further impoverishment and marginalization for the majority...
...When local laborers in Punjab won higher wages, hundreds of thousands of peasants were imported from semi-starving villages and eastern states to work in the fields India began independence with much hope, despite the trauma of partition and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (who was not related to Indira...
...textile employees shouted when leftist party leaders suggested a one-day work stoppage to mourn Gandhi's murder...
...It matters little to the average citizen that India's overall development can be favorably compared to, say, China's...
...He held out as much promise as any in the motley gang of possible competitors, and he has the advantage of being a unifying symbol...
...Songs, street plays, festivals—all represent new forms of working-class, lower-caste, and even feminist culture...
...The central government's authoritarian handling of the Akali Dal party's demand for greater autonomy merely emboldened Sikh fundamentalists...
...Rajiv Gandhi may hold things down for a while, with the help of the police and his blood ties, but a vacuum keeps expanding, and the forces of violence and division threaten to fill it...
...among agricultural workers and women...
...The fundamentalists view Vedic Sanskritic brahmanism— an original phase of the religion—as the core of Hinduism, just as, one of its proponents wrote, white culture stands at the center of America's heritage...
...The fragmented non-communist opposition, repeatedly trying and failing to unite, possesses no greater reputation than the Congress Party for honesty and ability—and less for political vision...
...At the same time, the pressure to compete globally has intensified calls to increase "modernization," automation, and export production...
...The anti-Sikh pogroms, organized by gangsters and fueled by religious hatred, may force moderate Sikhs to reconsider their future in 'Hindu India' Indians face a crisis of culture and identity...
...as cottage-industry laborers who sit in their homes doing rag sorting, cigarette rolling, lace making, carton assembly, and other types of piece-rate work...
...These exploited workers turned out to be among the most violent in the anti-Sikh attacks...
...The Punjab countryside is wracked by turmoil...
...But these spurts of energy are not coalescing into a powerful alternative vision that can make itself felt on a national scale...
...tion—in the downtown business district, among textile worker tenements, and through the acres of crowded apartment complexes inhabited by government employees—I was struck by the apparent coolness, even indifference, of the people...
...We are heirs to the oldest spiritual tradition in the world, proclaims this movement, and though we are tolerant of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims, none shall take advantage of our tolerance...
...The two major pro-Moscow communist parties, as well as the smaller regional leftist groupings, differ from the mainline entities only in relative honesty and discipline...
...With 80 per cent below the poverty line, and this woman promising so many reforms and doing nothing, why should they feel something...
...They took revenge in horrible fashion, killing thousands...
...But despite the diversities of religion and language, caste and class, there has been little evidence of separatism...
...In the more isolated regions, such as the poor and largely tribal areas of central India, residents perceive "development" as a process that takes away their land to make room for enclaves of steel factories and mines—in which outsiders find jobs...
...Life will go on without Indira Gandhi as it did with her...
...About 90 per cent of the people toil in the "unorganized," or informal, sector: as poor peasants and daily-wage agricultural laborers...
...The strikers failed, but they were made more militant by the experience...
...But the expected economic breakthrough never arrived...
...in the fields of science and medicine...
...The Congress Party has squandered the legacy of its nationalist era on corruption and power plays...
...But after thirty-seven years, the result is disappointing: a polarized economy, a conflict-ridden political structure, and ambivalent and antagonistic cultural pressures...
...The remnants of the extra-parliamentary Naxalites—India's fragmented Maoists—also continue to work in militant pockets, but with the same lack of coherence...
...In the "advanced" state of Punjab, economic growth has also engendered frustration...
...Besieged by contradictory messages in the traditional and modern media, they ask, "Who are we...
...Over the last decade, embittered peasants and workers have organized against dams, against commercial plantations, against "development...
...industrial development has stagnated, and the polarization of farming has produced the highest rate of landlessness in India...
...The fundamentalist force Gandhi encouraged eventually got out of control...
...They have taken root in tribes and low castes...
...The violence was greatest where the alienation between Sikhs and Hindus was most intense—in the North, especially in New Delhi...
...as construction workers on roads and dam-building projects, most often for contractors who hold them in debt bondage...
...The process of mutual alienation seems to be spiraling upward...
...The nation today appears headed down the road that Brazil, Mexico, and other countries took years ago...
...Punjab was only a sparkpoint...
...Because it did so with a moderately democratic political system, it became one of the most successful Third World countries...
...In contrast, the majority in Bombay and other parts of western India did not feel the ground shifting under their feet...
...It was also sadly predictable that pogroms would envelop the Sikhs—not because of the spontaneous fury of a citizenry deprived of its leader, but because the deterioration of Indian politics has given scope to the fanatics...
...Sikh farmers rode the waves of the Green Revolution, and some Sikhs have found success in commerce...
...And though India had avoided the debt trap, it took out the biggest loan in the history of the International Monetary Fund...
...She was hailed as a leader of the nonaligned nations, as an anti-imperialist...
...One answer comes in the form of resurgent, militant Hinduism—India's new religious Right...
...The carnage, an Indian friend said, called to mind the slaughter of royal slaves that followed an ancient king's death...
...They form a vast, marginalized, and increasingly volatile segment...
...Such advocates of change face the energy of the 20 per cent, its development plans, and the ideological power of aggressive Hinduism—none of which can improve the lives of most Indians...
...The Hindutva sees India's claims to a leading role in South Asia (and, indeed, in the Third World) in terms of akhand Bharat, a Hindu empire stretching from Afghanistan to Burma...
...When local laborers won higher wages, hundreds of thousands of peasants were imported from semi-starving villages and eastern states to work in the fields...
...as migrant workers who travel thousands of miles for seasonal harvests...
...m THE PROGRESSIVE / 33...
...Some of the other religions are now highlighting their own links to a past older than the Vedic one...
...But although her death may not lead to a major political conflagration, it did expose the underlying crisis of Indian society...
...The government launched full-scale development, emphasizing self-reliance by restricting foreign investment and the growth of domestic capital, linking heavy industry with attempts to strengthen agriculture and small-scale industry, constructing an infrastructure, and building a state-owned industrial sector...
...It remains weak, however, when compared to the well-financed, organized, and spreading forces of militant Hinduism (which, in turn, feed fundamentalism among minority religions...
...Their program for development reads much like the Congress Party's...
...They acquiesced in Rajiv Gandhi's induction into power...
...Combined with defiance of caste restrictions, marriages of love, and fights against superstition, it amounts to a movement...
...What did she ever do for us...
...A pattern of indifference hangs over the tumult, and the nation drifts between dreams of development and fits of disillusionment...
...Many Indians saw the assassination as a kind of retribution, for Gandhi had promoted the Sikh extremist leader Bhin-dranwale as a political counter to the moderate Akali Dal party, which she could not defeat electorally...
...When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980 after the post-Emergency interlude, the government began liberalizing restrictions on monopolies and multinationals...
...their families are kept in the villages...
...In the absence of effective political solutions, the forces of economic and cultural division keep engulfing the nation in crisis...
...He was one of 250,000 textile employees who struck for eighteen months in 1982-1983...
...How did we get here...
...Revivalist Hinduism, racist and elitist in essence, is making India's smaller neighbors nervous and intensifying divisions within India itself...
...So commented the Times of India, the country's biggest daily, hours after Indira Gandhi was assassinated...
...Even India's Left appeared ready, for a moment, to forgive Gandhi's domestic repression and remember only her willingness to resist American bullying...
...But walking the streets of Bombay in those first few days after the assassinaGail Omvedt is an American free-lance writer living in India...
...Though that industry is India's oldest and biggest, most of its workers live in cramped dormitories, where they must sleep in shifts...
...What matters is the structure of the Indian economy: The industrial apparatus—largely state-owned and technologically sophisticated—employs but a tiny proportion of the working population...
...The recent bloodshed was, in most cases, carried out by small bands while crowds looked on, afraid to intervene (even when police were present) because the murderers had connections high up in the ruling Congress Party...
...The main drive is for more democracy, more autonomy—freedom from power, protection from encroachment, not the aspiration to build a new nation...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
