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  Then there were the inestimable advantages of underdevelopment. In a country as vast, as multilingual, as illiterate, and as poorly served by communications as India, national name recognition is not easily achieved. Once attained, it is self-perpetuating; for any rival to catch up on decades of Nehru-Gandhi dominance is virtually impossible. The public mind has, since the heady days of the onset of independence, identified the family with Indian nationalism. It is a perception that gives any member of the dynasty a headstart over anyone else. Even Sanjay’s teenage son, Feroze Varun Gandhi, whose mother, Maneka, is a bitter opponent of the Congress Party, is spoken of as a future political leader.

  Nor can we forget the negative reasons for the lack of viable alternatives to the dynasty: Nehru’s failure to groom a successor, Indira’s ruthless elimination of rivals, and the desiccation of the Congress under her into a complacent instrument of dynastic despotism (there were no intraparty elections in the Congress for two decades: all the officebearers were appointed by Indira, Sanjay, or Rajiv). If the Congress could not produce a convincing alternative, the opposition parties’ collective failure has been worse: on three of the four occasions when the electorate has allowed them to supplant the dynasty, the non-Congress governments have collapsed in a partisan scramble for office. Rajiv’s successor, the ostensibly colorless P. V. Narasimha Rao, surprised India as much as the world by leading a stable Congress government through its full term (1991-1996). But as the 1996 elections halved the Congress’s parliamentary majority and its future seemed less and less certain, the calls arose again for Sonia Gandhi to take her rightful place at the helm of the party.

  And so the mystique glows on. Sonia overcame her reluctance and took power; after some initial mistakes, notably in misjudging her support in Parliament when she brought down the first BJP government, she became increasingly assured in her leadership of the party. Her son Rahul, smart and charismatic like his father but with far more grassroots experience, became a skilled political operative in the family’s traditional political base of Rae Bareli and Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. Talk of his ascending to ministerial office or taking on more senior responsibilities in the party mounted; by the time the next elections are due in 2009, he would be almost the age his father was when Rajiv was thrust into the Prime Ministry in 1984. And that is not all. As early as at Rajiv’s funeral, the correspondent of the London Sunday Times could not resist praising the “dry-eyed fortitude” of the “so appealing” Priyanka Gandhi, “composed, dignified and beautiful in her grief.”

  A novelist, seeking to tell the story of Sonia Gandhi, might be forgiven for seeing a fairy-tale element in the narrative. Beautiful foreigner comes to strange new land and marries handsome prince. They enjoy years of bliss, until the prince is obliged, in painful circumstances, to take over the kingdom and discovers the harsh realities of ruling a turbulent realm, culminating in the unspeakable tragedy of his own murder. The queen retreats into silence and mourning, until the insistent supplications of her courtiers compel her to emerge and once again take the destiny of the kingdom into her hands. Bliss to triumph to tragedy to triumph again — a classic tale: I should have begun this paragraph with the words “Once Upon A Time.

  And yet — there is a twist in the tale. For the queen, offered the crown on a brocade cushion, turns it down. She prefers to remain behind the throne, walking with the common peasantry, rallying the people but leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers. They don’t write fairy-tales like that, not even for the woman once dubbed in the Piedmont the “Cinderella of Orbassano.”

  The story of Sonia Gandhi is remarkable at every level, and the fairy-tale metaphor barely begins to scratch the surface of its extraordinariness. But which is the most important story? That of the Italian who became the most powerful figure in a land of a billion Indians? That of the reluctant politician who led her party to an astonishing electoral victory that not even her own admirers could have foretold? That of the princess, used to privilege, who became a national symbol of renunciation? That of the parliamentary leader who rejected the highest office in her adoptive land, one she had earned by her own hard work and political courage? That of the woman of principle who demonstrated that one could stand for the right values even in a profession corroded by cynicism and cant? That of the novice in politics who became a master of the art, trusted her own instincts and discovered she could be right more often than her jaded rivals could ever have imagined?

  For years in the 1990s and after the turn of the century, the party of Nehru and Indira Gandhi sat at the margins of governance, a prop rather than a pillar of the polity of independent India. As it leads a coalition government today, the Congress once more seems poised to reassert its standing as the natural party of governance, with the prospect one day of another Gandhi at the helm. Sonia Gandhi’s stewardship of the party, many believe, aims to assure just that. And yet the woman now starring as the custodian of the legend of the dynasty knows only too well that fairy tales, like Hindu myths, don’t always have a happy ending.

  3

  Unity, Diversity, and Other Contradictions

  From the Milk Miracle to the Malayali Miracle

  My wife, Tilottama, and I have twin sons, born in June 1984. Though they first entered the world in Singapore, and though the circumstances of my life have seen them grow up in Switzerland and then the United States, it is India they have always identified with. Ask them what they are, and that’s what they’ll tell you: they’re Indian. Not “Hindu” not “Malayali,” not “Nair” not “Calcuttan,” though they could claim all those labels too. Their mother is herself half Bengali and half Kashmiri, which gives them further permutative possibilities. They desire none. They are just Indian.

  Yet they found themselves traveling back with us annually to visit (and in their case, often to spend two to three months in) an India in which that answer began to seem less and less adequate. As they began to take notice of the political world around them, they learned of a mosque destroyed, of a trust betrayed, and of the flames of communal frenzy blazing again across the land. The week before our departure for India in December 1992, a howling mob of Hindus tore down a disused mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, that they claimed had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Communal violence erupted across the country as a result of this wanton act of destruction. Headlines spoke of riots and killing, Hindu against Muslim, of men being slaughtered because of the mark on a forehead or the absence of a foreskin. This is not the India my wife and I had wanted our sons to inherit.

  In the early 1990s, India’s political culture underwent a change. It was not the kind of change that a traumatic event like the Emergency brings about. The Emergency suspended the rules of the polity and so demonstrated their value, but at the same time it was an event so sharply defined and distinct that the end of the Emergency also ended the threat it posed to the national consensus on governance. The change that occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century was not an event but a process. Arguably, though, it was an event — the destruction of the mosque — that was emblematic of the process. The real change involved something intangible, if as pervasive as smog. It was a change in the dominant ethos of the country, in the attitudes of mind that define what it means to be Indian.

  My generation grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in the simple insight I described in chapter 1: that the singular thing about India was that you could only speak of it in the plural. This pluralism emerged from the very nature of the country; it was made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history. There was simply too much of both to permit a single, exclusionist nationalism.

  We were brought up to take this for granted, and to reject the communalism that had partitioned the nation when the British left. In rejecting the case for Pakistan, Indian nationalism also rejected the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. We never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had
established a state for the Muslims, what remained was a state for the Hindus. To accept the idea of India you had to spurn the logic that had divided the country.

  This was what that much-abused term secularism meant for us. Western dictionaries defined secularism as the absence of religion, but Indian secularism meant a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state. Religion was too pervasive in the popular culture for unreligion to become public policy, despite the open agnosticism of Nehru. But the notion that religion had no place in public policy was easily accepted in India, where the distinction between God and Caesar had been enshrined since time immemorial. In the traditional caste system, the priestly Brahmin class had its own unchallenged monopoly of matters metaphysical, while the kingly Kshatriya caste went about the physical business of ruling and fighting. (True, medieval India was less effective at keeping religion out of governance. Some Muslim kings tried to make their religion into public policy by taxing the idolaters they didn’t behead; yet the most successful rulers among them were those who publicly praised the Lord but kept their fervor dry.)

  Sanctified by tradition or not, the India born in 1947 firmly separated temple and state. Independent India was a country for everyone, since it had emerged from a struggle for freedom in which secularism was integral to nationalism. Secularism in India did not mean irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist parties like the Communists or the southern Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) found unpopular among their voters; rather it meant, in the Indian tradition, pluri-religiousness. In the Calcutta neighborhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the chant of the mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwara reciting verses from the Granth Sahib. Their coexistence was paradoxically made possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians were committed to what we so inappropriately called “secularism.”

  Throughout the decades after independence, the political culture of the country reflected these “secular” assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 82 percent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, two of India’s first five presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices and chief justices. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi traveled abroad in the tense months before the 1971 Bangladesh War with Pakistan, the Council of Ministers was chaired by a Muslim, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed; during that war, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim, Air Marshal (later Air Chief Marshal) Latif. (The 1971 war was a triumph for Indian secularism as much as for the force of arms: the army commander was a Parsi, General Sam Manekshaw, the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh, General Jagjit Singh Aurora, and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal, Major General J. F. R. Jacob, was Jewish.)

  Yet the India I visited in December 1992, just after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, no longer seemed to cherish that ethos. My family and I arrived the week after the demolition of the Masjid, when the echoes of the riots that followed had not yet begun to fade. We were in India during the horrors of the butchery that followed in Bombay, when at least some police connived as Hindu mobs attacked Muslims: indeed, I was visiting the office of the then editor of the Times of India as the bulletins were coming in of the murder and carnage taking place in what we used to think of as India’s most cosmopolitan city. But India has survived violence before, and I had no doubt it would do so again. What I was unprepared for, even in the aftermath of Ayodhya, was the communalization of political discourse that I encountered, not only in the mass rallies and assaults, but in the living rooms of middle-class India. Educated people uttered thoughts that once they would not have considered respectable to formulate, let alone express.

  In dozens of conversations in Delhi and Calcutta I heard the soon-familiar litany: Muslims are “pampered” for political ends (“look at the Shah Banu case and Muslim Personal Law” — the Indian term for laws on matters concerning worship, marriage, inheritance, and divorce); Muslims have four wives and are outbreeding everyone else (“soon they will overtake the Hindus”); Muslims are disloyal (“they set off firecrackers whenever Pakistan beats India at cricket or hockey”). Often such sentiments were expressed by people who had close professional or personal relationships with individual Muslims. But it was never Mohammed X or Akbar Y they objected to; what had occurred was the demonization of a collectivity. The national mind had been afflicted with the intellectual cancer of thinking of “us” and “them.”

  It was no consolation that such prejudices were only superficially held, and rarely stood up to much probing. I tried to argue the point at first, but found it almost too simple to do so. The Rajiv Gandhi government’s action on the divorced Shah Banu was pure political opportunism; it was a sellout to Muslim conservatives, but a betrayal of Muslim women and Muslim reformers. Why stigmatize the community as a whole when many among them, too, lost out in the process? In any case, Personal Law covers only marriage, inheritance, and divorce; how does it affect those who are not subject to it? Even if some Muslims have four wives — and very few do — how does that increase the Muslim population, since the number of reproductive women remains unchanged? And by what statistical projection can 115 million Muslims “overtake” 700 million Hindus? If a handful of Muslims are pro-Pakistani, how can one label an entire community? Surely the family of the former Indian cricket captain Mohammed Azharuddin (or, for that matter, those of the nation’s numerous Muslim hockey stars) isn’t setting off firecrackers to commemorate Indian defeats by Pakistan? I never got straight answers to these questions, only a verbal shuffling of feet. But communalism thrives in the absence of specifics, and thriving it certainly seemed to be.

  The sad irony is that India’s secular coexistence was paradoxically made possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus. It is odd to read today of “Hindu fundamentalism,” because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages — French and Persian among them — the word for “Indian” is “Hindu.” Originally, Hindu simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But, as noted, the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word Hindu did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.

  Hinduism is thus the name others applied to the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu; there are no compulsory dogmas.

  I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home (and my father moved a dozen times in his working life) always had a prayer room, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devout parents. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer room wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me to join him; he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of your maker you choose to worship. In the Indian way, I was to find my own truth.

  Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism (of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgment of its limitations — and with the realization that the world offers too many wondrous mysteries for which science has no answers). And I am happy to describe myself
as a believing Hindu, not just because it is the faith into which I was born, but for a string of other reasons, though faith requires no reason. One is cultural: as a Hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. Another is, for lack of a better phrase, its intellectual “fit”: I am more comfortable with the belief structures of Hinduism than I would be with those of the other faiths of which I know. As a Hindu, I claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. As a Hindu, I subscribe to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single holy book.

  Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a “true path” that they have missed. This dogma lies at the core of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father [God], but by me” (John 14:6), says the Bible; “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet,” declares the Koran — denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of salvation or paradise. Hinduism, however, asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths.