Ten mega blunders since 1947

India's botched Moments

Men and events, wrote Karl Marx famously over 150 years ago, occur in history as if twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Some decisions that occurred post-1947 modern India, could be considered worthy fits in this category that the German philosopher and thinker espoused.

It may be tempting for modern-day analysts and historians to sit on judgment, from the benefit of hindsight, to say that the course of the decisions could not have been any other way, the nuances and the circumstances under which they were taken suggest that they could not be regarded as anything but decisions taken without adequate due diligence and sound advice, without taking into account its future or even immediate ramifications and ultimately too cavalier in approach.

While official historians are naturally wont to apply a different spin, the sordid saga of India going to the United Nations over Kashmir in 1947 remains a soft underbelly which continues to fester. Should India have waited for its troops to push back the tribal raiders into Pakistan territory instead of approaching the world's largest mediating body? Ultimately when it came to the debate at the UN, the Pakistani representative was very well informed as compared to the Indian, who had simply not done his homework and was frequently caught napping.

Similarly, opinion on 1984's Operation Bluestar remains divided on how it should have been handled but certainly conventional wisdom has it that Indira Gandhi allowed Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale far too much time in the Holy Temple and took it to a point where storming the sanctum sanctorum became a necessity – even in the public eye. In the process, a community was alienated.

The ill-fated attempts of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) to restore order in the pearl island of Sri Lanka for close to 32 weeks between 1987 and 1990, fall into this very special category. The troops were sent in at the request of the local government and ordered out by the same government, minus a few thousand men and a reputation which has since then taken a lot to retrieve.

By far, the decision to release home minister Mufti Sayeed's daughter Rubaiya after her kidnapping in 1989 marks the point where India started to lose its battle against terror. It was seen as a soft state unable to protect its citizens and a country which was willing to negotiate no matter how unreasonable the demand.

It found its apotheosis in the shameful Kandahar hijacking in 1999, a national humiliation heaped upon an inept government and a shrill media which, unwittingly, found itself backing demands of the hijackers. For most observers though for an airplane to take off from Amritsar with hijackers on board will be symbolic of the gross capitulation that an independent sovereign country with the world's second largest standing army had been subjected to without a single shot being fired. Till date, leading members of the then NDA government continue to debate on their versions of how things panned out.

The decision on Shah Bano was a desperate game plan to catch minority votes, instead it turned into something else – a tacit backing for revivalist Muslim leaders whose reactionary mindset managed to alienate vast sections of poor and disadvantaged members of the community. In the end, it led to Congress losing its critical support in the 'cow belt', something it is now desperate to win back.

The natural corollary to Shah Bano was re-opening the locks at the disputed Ayodhya site by the Congress government in 1989 in a last ditch attempt to snatch back the so-called 'Hindu' vote. It remains a milestone for one single reason: it catapulted the BJP into national prominence, as a party devoted to the cause of 'Hindus'. Whatever Congress had in mind when it decided to go in for removing the controversial locks in Ayodhya, it gave the saffronites the raison d'etre to go the whole hog in pursuit of an agenda which the ruling party wrongly calculated as theirs.

The infamous Emergency, too, falls into this historic clap trap. While the suppression of human rights and censorship were relatively new things for democratic India, Emergency has since then become the byword for political repression and dictatorship. More than three decades after it was lifted, Congress spokespersons continue to apologise for the excesses committed during that 21-month period.

Would Jyoti Basu have changed the course of Left politics in India at a time when he had the opportunity to become prime minister in the mid-1990s and was thwarted in his attempts by his party members? While it remains a matter of speculation for India's 'what-if' specialists, the latest poll disaster in West Bengal suggests that it may not have been a bad idea to put Basu in the hot seat.

The Congress party abstained from offering any comments on the blunders, perhaps for good reason.

(In pics: Arundhati Roy in Kashmir; Jayaprakash Narain; VHP workers atop Babri Masjid; Taliban militants in a huddle in Kandahar; Rajiv Gandhi seconds before a suicide bomber blew him up; Jawaharlal Nehru; Indira Gandhi )

1. Emergency: The dark years

India was put under a state of Emergency on June 25, 1975 to March 21, 1977 by the President of India Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, upon the advice of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She was bestowed with the power to rule by decree and for 21 months, all civil liberties and elections were suspended. Press freedom was curtailed and censorship imposed.

Earlier, a case of fraud and misuse of state machinery filed by Raj Narain against Indira Gandhi in the Allahabad high court found her guilty of abuse of power during her poll campaign. Her election was declared null and void. The court also banned Indira for six years from contesting any election. She responded by imposing Emergency.

There were mass protests held by leaders like Jayaprakash Narain, Raj Narain, Morarji Desai and others. The protesting opposition leaders were put behind bars without any formal chargesheet and there were many cases of political excesses like bulldozing tenements and forcible sterilisation.
The Emergency ended on March 21, 1977 and fresh elections were called. The Congress lost heavily, winning only 153 seats out of total 542, while the Janata Party got 295 seats.

Kuldip Nayar, Columnist, journalist and Emergency detainee:

The greatest damage Indira Gandhi had done through the imposition of Emergency was the erosion of moral values in politics and other democratic institutions. That trend, unfortunately, has not been reversed so far. That was a dark night when we nearly lost our hard-earned freedom. Indira became a law unto herself. The press was gagged. Close to one lakh people – from top political leaders to ordinary people – were detained without trial. A chapter of authoritarian and extra-constitutional rule began with Indira and her son Sanjay Gandhi calling the shots.

2. Kashmir: No-gain game

The accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir to India was signed by the Maharaja on October 26, 1947. It was supported by National Conference, the largest political party of the state. This Instrument of Accession was the same as the ones executed by 560 princely states in India. Moreover, this Instrument of Accession was accepted unconditionally by Lord Mountbatten. There was no complication until Pakistan sent tribal invaders (October 1947) and then their regular troops (May 1948) into Kashmir. It was January 1, 1948 when India referred the J&K issue to the UN Security Council. The wound continues to fester as Kashmir remains a bone of contention between India and Pakistan.

Lt Gen (Retd.) Raj Kadyan, Former Deputy Chief of Army:
 
We lack a strategic culture in India and this has led to a complete lack of vision. Consequently, there is no integration of military power into the state policy. This was nowhere as conspicuous as in the case of J&K. This issue has become a sore. There was no reason to call for third party intervention when we were claiming that J&K belonged to us, which was rightly so as Maharaja Hari Singh had already signed the Instrument of Accession. Once this issue was referred to the UN, we were equated with the aggressor Pakistan.

3. Bluestar: Operation Blues

One of the biggest political blunders in modern history of India was Operation Bluestar (June 3 to 6, 1984), the military operation on the Golden Temple, the sanctum sanctorum of the Sikhs, at Amritsar. Ordered by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, it aimed at flushing out separatist Sikhs, led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who were amassing weapons in the temple and had made it their headquarters. The operation took place on the day of a religious congregation of the Sikhs on the martyrdom day of the fifth Sikh Guru, Guru Arjun Dev, who had founded the Golden Temple and many innocent pilgrims were killed. Troops of the Indian Army stormed the Temple with tanks and armoured vehicles. The military assault brought the entire Sikh community, including the moderates and the liberals, together in a united denouncement of the act.

Kanwar Sandhu, Veteran journalist and defence expert:

Operation Bluestar was definitely a political and military blunder of unimaginable proportions. The decision to use the army to storm the Harmandir Sahib Complex in Amritsar was born out of miscalculation and panic... In fact, it was after the operation that the situation really got out of hand and incidents of violence were stepped up. The killing of Mrs Gandhi and the violence that followed widened the chasm between the Sikh community and the Indian State.

4.Shah Bano case: Silly season

Shah Bano's place in history is assured. And so is that of the monumental blunder that the Rajiv Gandhi government, with its brute majority in Parliament, committed in 1986. The Supreme Court had ordered the payment of alimony to the 62-year-old divorced mother of five from Indore. The verdict sparked off a debate across the country over whether the country's civil law should take precedence over the Muslim Personal Law in a case of this nature.

While several Muslim intellectuals advocated a better deal for divorced Muslim women, the Rajiv Gandhi government passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, undermining the SC ruling that had the potential of guaranteeing alimony as a matter of right for all divorced women in the minority community. This move by the Congress, coupled with the unlocking of the Ram Janmabhoomi 'temple' in Ayodhya to appease the majority community offset the accusation that the grand old party was promoting pseudo-secularism in the country, precipitated a rightwing movement that eventually catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party to power.

Firoz Bakht Ahmed, Columnist and education activist:

There’s no doubt that the Shah Bano imbroglio was one of the biggest blunders to affect Indian Muslims. It was owing to the community’s misled and rudderless leadership that paid mere lip service inside the Parliament and cried itself hoarse outside it. It was seen as blatant political dalliance with Islamic laws by the Muslim community in India. The Congress Government, panicky in an election year, caved in under the pressure of the orthodoxy. It enacted the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. The most controversial provision of the Act was that it gave a Muslim woman the right to maintenance only for the period of iddat (about three months) after the divorce, and shifted the onus of maintaining her to her relatives or the Waqf Board. The Act was seen as discriminatory as it denied divorced Muslim women the right to basic maintenance which women of other faiths had recourse to under secular law.

5. IPKF in Lanka: Sitting ducks

In the wake of the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord signed on July 29, 1987 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President JR Jayewardene, an Indian military peace-keeping contingent was sent to the trouble-torn island nation. The arrival of the IPKF was expected to be the first step towards a resolution of the Lankan civil war. LTTE, which wasn't made a party to the accord, laid down arms but only reluctantly.

Violence erupted again soon enough and left behind deep scars. India began the process of withdrawing its peace-keeping force from Sri Lanka in 1989 after Vishwanath Pratap Singh took over as PM and the newly-elected Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa made a formal request. The last IPKF contingent left the island in March 1990. A little over a year later, India suffered the biggest casualty of a war it could have stayed out of: Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by an LTTE
suicide bomber.

GD Bakshi: Major General (Retd)

The Sri Lankan intervention was a wrong war in the wrong strategic direction at a wrong time when Pakistan was pursuing the US Jihad in Afghanistan and was busy acquiring strategic depth in South West Asia. Ex Brasstacks had raised sub continental temperatures and the US was keen to divert India towards the Indian Ocean Region so that Pakistan was left free to shape the strategic space bordering Central Asia. The war ended up pleasing no one. The Tamils were alienated. The Sri Lankans were upset and wanted the IPKF out. Despite its enormous sacrifice and successes, the IPKF was surprised at the frigid reception back home. The whole fiasco occurred due to a lack of clarity in overall aims and objectives. Foreign interventions must specify clear cut objectives. There was a total lack of coordination and synergy between various wings of the government.

6. Rubaiya abduction: Blood is thicker...

On December 8, 1989, the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front abducted 23-year-old Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Rubaiya, the youngest of the leading politician's three daughters, was a medical intern at the Lal Ded Memorial Women's Hospital in Srinagar.

The young woman was kidnapped by the militants within five days of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed taking charge as home minister in the Vishwanath Pratap Singh government at the Centre. The militants demanded the release of five of their associates, including Sheikh Abdul Hameed, the self-styled JKLF “area commander” and Ghulam Nabi Butt, younger brother of late Maqbool Butt. The other three were Noor Muhammad Kalwal, Muhammed Altaf and Javed Ahmed Zargar, the Pakistani national who was later involved in the hijack of IC-814 to Kandahar, where the then National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government did not exactly cover itself in glory.

DC Nath, Former Special Director, IB:

A personal issue was given precedence over national interest just because Rubaiya Sayeed happened to be the daughter of the Union home minister. In the bargain, the security of entire nation was jeopardised leading to serious long-term consequences. The decision became a precedent and emboldened other anti-national elements. Let me also add that the decision of the government to release the militants was taken against the advice of the security people.

7. IC-814: state bows down

A decade almost to the day since the infamous Rubaiya Sayeed abduction case, an Indian Airlines flight IC-814 which was on the way to Delhi from Kathmandu, was hijacked by five armed militants. In the course of the hijack drama that lasted about a week, the NDA government committed goof-ups after embarrassing goof-ups, eventually caving in meekly to the hijackers' demands. Three jailed militants – Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Shaikh and Maulana Masood Azhar – were set free and escorted by foreign minister Jaswant Singh to Kandahar where the plane stood parked and surrounded by Taliban fighters. The plane, with 176 passengers on board, had inexplicably been allowed to fly out of Amritsar to Lahore, from where the hijackers commandeered the aircraft to Dubai before heading to Kandahar. Owing to the government's eventual abject capitulation, India was saddled with the image of a "soft state", a tag it hasn't been able to shrug off to this day.

Vinay Kumar, Associate Editor, The Hindu:

The hijack crisis lasted for seven days and what transpired in that week only exposed chinks in India’s security establishment and its inability to deal firmly and sternly with such a situation. The hijack showed knee-jerk response of India as even the crisis management group took time to meet and in the absence of a clear-cut, firm strategy, the hijacked plane was allowed to take off from Amritsar. Lack of clear command structure and a wavering political leadership did not wake up to the threat and it also prevented crack commandos of the National Security Guards (NSG) from scrambling to Amritsar and storming the aircraft. It would have probably resulted in the loss of some innocent lives but the drama would have ended in less than a day.

8. Singur: Left of the field

The Indian Left has lurched from one blunder to another over the years. But no folly was as damaging as the one that the Left Front government in Bengal, during its seventh straight term in power in the state, committed by forcibly acquiring land from the farmers of Singur and handing it over for Tata's proposed Nano plant. Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, out in the wilderness after the 2006 poll debacle, pounced on the opportunity and launched an agitation against the Left Front government's ill-advised move. The state government had actually inked the deal with Tata well before the 2006 state Assembly elections but kept the agreement under wraps until the Left front registered a thumping victory in the polls, winning 235 of the 294 seats. Five years on, Mamata turned the tables on the Left with an equally thumping election victory, ending 34 years of Left rule in Bengal.  


9. Ayodhya: Trouble unlocked

To counter the Opposition's rising crescendo against the Congress party's alleged minority appeasement policy in the wake of Rajiv Gandhi's handling of the Shah Bano case, the government sought to placate the Hindus by opening the locks of the Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya, where deep distrust was sown in the minds of people. This move stoked the fire of communalism across the country and sparked a sharp Hindu-Muslim divide that, in 1992, culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid by VHP and Bajrang Dal activists with senior leaders of the BJP providing active support. India was never the same again!

Radha Viswanath, Senior journalist:

The removal of the locks in Ayodhya was a policy of short-term appeasement. The country is still paying the price for that historic mistake. It is significant that even during all this, some of the senior members of the ruling party had advised Rajiv Gandhi to rethink the decision. It was because of the appeasement policy that the Ayodhya dispute is still pending in court.


10. Jyoti Basu: Left out

When the Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav went to meet Jyoti Basu during his last days, he expressed his regret that the veteran Communist leader was prevented by his own party from becoming the Prime Minister of the United Front government at the Centre in 1996. "Had the veteran Marxist become PM, he would have set an example for other leaders to follow," Yadav had said.

On his part, Basu had himself earlier termed the decision of the CPM politburo not to join the government as a 'historic blunder'. He could have been the first Communist to become India's PM but the majority in the politburo nixed that possibility. Today, the Marxists are out in the cold – the left is in power in one state, Tripura, – and fast hurtling down the path of self-destruction. The seed was probably sown in 1996. 

Jayanta Ghoshal: Senior journalist:

Would Jyoti Basu have been a success as PM? Would his stature have ensured a full stint or would he have ended up the way IK Gujral did, eventually dumped by the Congress? These questions are hypothetical. The fate that befell Charan Singh, who became PM with Congress support, would have been seriously evaluated by the politburo before it decided to stay out of the United Front government. Members of the politburo would also have felt that the Congress would never allow a Marxist PM to push his economic agenda in the long run. But those in the third front still believe that India would have taken a different course had Basu taken over as PM.