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A SURVEY conducted by a team of political analysts presented on an
Indian television channel the other day revealed that the mid-term
elections due to be held there in March will fail to produce a national
party strong enough to bring stability to the country - a matter which
is of direct concern to Pakistan.
It was largely because of Mr Inder Kumar Gujral's lack of stable
political support while heading the United Front government that led to
his ambivalence on the conduct of a meaningful dialogue with this country,
after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's commendable initiative.
While initially Mr Gujral appeared confident that he would be able to
start negotiations with the Kashmiri freedom-fighters, he backtracked on
his intention to do so after a visit to the occupied state. He obviously
did so because he realised that as the head of an unstable 13-party
coalition government, he could not take any decisive step in breaking
away from New Delhi's traditional position in the matter.
The tensions which have plagued South Asia for years and the lack of
mutual trust between Pakistan and India are largely due to the unstable
political conditions. It is unlikely that Pakistan's efforts to
rehabilitate its economy could produce much concrete results without a
degree of normalisation in bilateral relations with India. The prospects
of any significant reduction in defence expenditures of New Delhi and
Islamabad will also continue to be discouraging so long as the bilateral
relations continue to be in the state that they are. However, the
mathematics of party positions in India make it obvious that neither the
Congress, nor the United Front nor the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can
expect to be in clear majority in the next Lok Sabha. As such, coalition
governments appear to be the destiny of India for the time being. The
fact that though the Congress and United Front are unreservedly
committed to a secular polity, the Hindu revivalist ideology of the BJP
makes the environment for secularism not too promising.
If India's past experience with coalition governments is any indication
the future prospects cannot be regarded as promising. A coalition
government headed by the veteran Charan Singh after the breakup of Mr
Moraraji Desai's government in 1979 lasted only a month. Another headed
by V.P. Singh, regarded as one of the cleanest and most balanced
politicians in India, lasted barely a year. Yet another coalition prime
minister, Chandra Shehkar, who was believed to have the support of the
late Mr Rajiv Gandhi, collapsed in four months. H.K. Deve Gowda, heading
a 13-party coalition, the United Front, described as "mother of all
coalitions" by some political observers, also had to yield place to
Gujral within a matter of months.
A senior Muslim politician, Wasim Ahmad, who is a member of the Upper
House of India's parliament, Rajya Sabha, has expressed the view that
coalitions cannot work without a national party at the centre.
That India's President, K.R. Narayanan, would have no option but to
dissolve the Lok Sabha and call for fresh elections became clear after
13 constituents of the United Front, representing 160 members of the
parliament made it clear that they would not support another coalition
led either by the Congress or the BJP. They also conveyed as much
individually to President Narayanan by letter shortly after Gujral
submitted his resignation.
According to Indian media reports, the Andhra Pradesh chief minister,
Chandrababu Naidu, who was said to have played a key role in getting the
160 members to send their individual letters to the President, candidly
said: "For 17 months the United Front has fought unitedly, on the basis
of certain moral values and principles (but now) we have resigned and no
one can either use us or claim the support of our MPs..."
There is a feeling in the Indian capital that after Gujral submitted his
resignation to the President on November 28, the Congress did not expect
the parliament to be dissolved and reportedly started garnering support
of some United Front constituents in the hope of forming a new
government. However, the Indian President on December 4 dissolved the
parliament and announced that fresh elections would be held at the
latest by March 15. Election Commissioner G.V.G. Krishnamurthy later
announced that polls would be conducted between the third week of
February and the first week of March. He also announced that elections
in occupied Kashmir (and parts of Himachal Pradesh) would be deferred
due to "climatic conditions."
The fall of the United Front government was precipitated by the
disclosures of the interim recommendations of the Jain Commission in
regard to Rajiv Gandhi's assassination on May 21, 1991 in the little
known town of Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. The Commission held the Tamil
Nadu party, DMK, guilty of "close proximity" to the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who have been waging an ethnic war against the
Sinhalese in Sri Lanka for the past several years with support from a
section of the Tamil population of Tamil Nadu.
It was LTTE's cadres who killed Rajiv Gandhi. Parbhu Chawla, executive
editor of the widely circulated Indian news-weekly India Today was the
first journalist to gain access to the Commission's report and his
journal carried an extensive report on it in its issue of November 17 -
about a week before the report became the cause of tensions within the
United Front government. The United Front government, headed by Gujral,
had in it three ministers representing the DMK and the Congress demanded
their ouster. To this Gujral did not agree.
The 5,280-page Jain Commission report comprising its interim findings
held the Tamil Nadu chief minister, M. Karunanidhi, and the DMK,
squarely responsible for abetting Rajiv Gandhi's murderers. Justice
Jain, head of the Commission, also named several other political
luminaries for facilitating Karunanidhi in his support to LTTE to a
smaller or greater degree.
According to Chawla, the Jain Commission report emphasises the political
antagonism between the DMK government of Tamil Nadu and Rajiv Gandhi.
The report apparently maintains that Karunanidhi, shortly after taking
over as Tamil Nadu's chief minister in January 1989, signified that his
government would favour "the perpetuation of the general political trend
of indulging the Tamil militants on the soil and the tolerance of their
wide- ranging criminal and anti-national activities." Karunanidhi also
apparently made it known that LTTE activities of arms smuggling,
abduction of Indian citizens and officials and intimidation of the law
enforcement machinery were to be "tolerated."
In his report, Justice Jain has also insinuated that the National Front
government, headed by V.P. Singh, in 1989-90 had knowledge of the
DMK-LTTE activities but did not take "effective steps" to check them.
The report in fact goes on to say that even though V.P. Singh paid "lip
service" to the importance of Rajiv Gandhi's security, he should have
considered the matter with greater seriousness and far-sightedness. The
report also blames another former prime minister Chandrashekhar for not
providing Rajiv Gandhi "the nature and quality of the security service
under the circumstances prevailing." The Commission seems to regard
Karunanidhi's involvement as virtually beyond doubt and recalls that
Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, who was home minister in V.P. Singh's regime, had
cautioned the Tamil Nadu chief minister about "the worsening situation
in the state."
The prospects of fresh elections in India, as usual, is a matter of
particular concern to the Muslim voters of that country. The arrest of
5,000 Muslims in the state of Tamil Nadu following the bombing of three
trains on the anniversary of the demolition of Babri Masjid is extremely
ominous.
Indian Muslims, regardless of their political affiliations, generally
feel unhappy at New Delhi's failure to rebuild the mosque at its
original site, as promised at the time by the then prime minister, P.V.
Narasimha Rao, and at the lack of any meaningful steps to punish the
Hindu militants responsible for the outrage.
It is not without significance that the revivalist Hindu party, BJP
which has never quite distanced itself from the more militant Vishwa
Hindu Parishad and Shiv Sena, has been making a conscious effort to
mollify prospective Muslim voters. In its own rather convoluted logic,
it would want Muslims to believe that the party, despite its promotion
of Ram Rajya, would be able to make India truly secular.
However, the choice before the Indian Muslims is not easy. They have
been repeatedly let down by the Congress, and the Janata Dal and the
United Front have also not done enough to give them a sense of real
security. Prof Mushirul Hasan of Delhi's Jamia Millia, who is a strong
protagonist of a secularist polity among Indian Muslims, has in a recent
study welcomed the trend of a "secular discourse" among his
co-religionists which has been in evidence since the Babri Masjid
tragedy. He points out that at the Muslim Intelligentsia Meet in January
1992, Indian Muslims placed their leaders and "self-appointed champions"
in the dock and stressed that the door of Ijtihad was not closed.
Prof Hasan believes that there is a growing realisation among Indian
Muslims that the community's salvation does not lie in the hands of the
present leaders. He expresses the hope that the followers of Syed
Shahabuddin and Imam Bukhari of Delhi's Jama Masjid would not remain
insensitive to "the wider needs and impulses of their own community."
Even an orthodox Muslim scholar, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, has expressed
views to the effect that the Muslims should not become too sentimental
about the state of Urdu in India. Prof Hasan has quoted him as saying
that the "pro-Urdu campaign is a sign of the desire (on the part of
Muslims) to remain static, whereas learning regional languages is a sure
sign of progress."
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