Election Results Indicate 1996 Will Be a Critical Year for India

By M.M. Ali

The 1995 elections held in several Indian states have created further confusion at the federal level in India, where the Lokh Sabha (lower house of parliament) polls are scheduled for next year. The Congress party that has ruled the country virtually unchallenged for almost 45 years now faces an organized political opposition.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been elected to power in key states like Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Janata Dal has formed governments in Bihar and Karnataka. The Samajwadi Party stays on in Uttar Pradesh. The All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham (AIADMK) rules Tamil Nadu. The Communists remain entrenched in West Bengal. The Telegu Desham Party has captured Andhra Pradesh. The capital city of Delhi also has gone to the BJP. Congress has hung on in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa in the heartland, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Ilaryana in the north, Assam in the northeast, and, precariously, in Kerala in the south. If parliamentary election patterns follow those in the states, any leader who commands around 40 parliamentary seats may have a say in the formation of the next government in New Delhi, because projections are that no single party is likely to gain an absolute majority.

This means that the age of rule by intimidation is over for the Congress party. If it is to survive as a national political entity, it has to follow the route of compromise and accommodation to seek out political partners. This will be harder after the 1994 and 1995 Congress losses in state elections. Regional leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav in U.P. and Laloo Prasad Yadav (no relation) in Bihar, N.T. Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh, Jayalalitha Jayaram in Tamil Nadu and Jyoti Basu in West Bengal all have emerged as figures to be reckoned with, along with L.K. Advani and Attal Behari Bajpayee of the BJP, Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena and V.P. Singh of the Janata Dal. Meanwhile, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao has a very divided Congress party to lead and can no longer hope to dominate the scene by capitalizing on his foreign investment card alone.

Dissatisfaction with the Congress program is articulated by liberal political pundit Rajni Kothari, who wrote in the Indian Express of April 15: "Is it just going to mean building up piles of foreign exchange and external debt, wholly unmindful of growing social corrosion on the one hand and social amnesia on the other? The Congress Party's historic betrayal lies in accepting major distractions from the fundamental challenge of poverty and destitution, building a secular polity and being always mindful of the concerns and anxieties of minorities."

Well-meaning Kothari still is not willing to acknowledge that secularism was a convenient Congress slogan and the veneer to cover the underlying Hindu mindset that is the esssence of India. Others do not have any such compunctions. Now they will even join hands with avowed right-wing religious parties like the Vishwa Hindu Parisbad (VHP) or the openly militant Shiv Sena, which made a point of provoking India's large Muslim minority by demolishing the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992.

The age of rule by intimidation is over for the Congress party.

There is no shortage of Congress leaders who would like to supplant Narasimha Rao's leadership. It will be interesting to see if the National Front that was loosely assembled for the 1991 elections can be revived now that each component is a powerhouse in itself. The opposition ranges from the VHP and Shiv Sena on the extreme right to the Communist Party on the other end of the spectrum.

If political negotiations cannot produce a coalition government at the center, the Hindu religious parties will try once again to whip up a national frenzy to exploit. Another Ayodhya may be staged. Vishwa Hindu Parishad has announced plans to demolish mosques at Mathura and Kashi. Such actions are being programmed to coincide with the general elections in 1996. The Rashtriya Sevak Sangh chief, Prof. Rajendra Singh, has thrown his party's full support behind the VHP plans.

Communal tension already has been built up by Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena demanding that "Muslim infiltrators" be thrown out of Bombay—a city that only three years ago experienced widespread communal killings. These unfortunate tactics, it seems, will become part of the campaign as voters in the world's largest democracy, where assassinations have vied with elections as a means of changing national leaders, prepare for parliamentary elections in 1996.

Elections in Kashmir?

With clouds of political uncertainty growing more ominous each day for the Congress, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao is trying to deliver on his promise to hold elections in the Indian-held part of Kashmir. Tired of the fighting between his ministers, Rao took personal charge of the administration of Kashmir a year ago. He appointed a Group of Ministers (GOM) from his own cabinet to advise on the disputed territory. In the year since the GOM was established, however, it has seldom met and has not initiated a political process, which is what the prime minister had hoped the GOM would do. Ironically, the three ministers from Kashmir in the Narasimha Rao government—Mrs. Shiela Kaul, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Salman Khurshid—have been ignored. Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leaders who were released from jails also have shown no inclination to be part of any New Delhi-sponsored initiative. The protests, marches and killings continue unabated in the Valley.

Re-examining the Kashmir Question

Unofficially, Indians and Pakistanis have been meeting in the presence of some former British and American officials to "discuss" bilateral and regional issues "including the Kashmir dispute." Such a private meeting was held recently in New Delhi. Among those attending were Frank von Hippel, former arms control adviser to President Clinton; Robert S. McNamara, former U.S. defense secretary and retired president of the World Bank; Munir Ahmed Khan, former chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission; Niaz Naik, former foreign secretary of Pakistan; and retired Pakistani army General K.M. Arif. Brahma Chellaney, a research associate of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, helped organize the meeting. This group is known as the Shanghai Initiative, since its first meeting was held in that Chinese city early in 1994. The meetings were funded by the W. Alton Jones Foundation of Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Ploughshares Fund of San Francisco. Another such initiative that has involved several meetings in recent years is known as the Neemrana Dialogue, named after the Neemrana Fort Palace Hotel just off the Delhi-Jaipur highway, where that group met for the first time in October 1991.

Reports that have emerged from these unofficial meetings indicate that a lot of ground is covered by open and uninhibited discussions. However, as yet no concrete proposals have resulted. Many of the participants still are closely connected with their governments, which have been fully briefed on the meetings. Semi-official U.S. think tanks like the U.S. Institute of Peace also are responsible for arranging meetings.

That such divergent groups are willing to talk without preconditions is in itself a positive sign. It is possible such discreet dialogues may break the ice and find a way to resolve the volatile Kashmir issue peacefully. What were at one time very hush-hush arrangements now are being reported carefully in the Indian and Pakistani press. Whether such reporting will generate a climate conducive to open debate of sensitive issues, only time will tell. The constant political rhetoric that comes out of New Delhi and Islamabad certainly does not help.

Who Are Afghanistan's Taliban?

According to Indian press reports, Gen. Abdur Rasheed Dostam has threatened to form an independent state of "South Turkmenistan" if the Taliban ("the seekers"), the newest armed force on the Afghanistan scene, attack his strongholds in northern Afghanistan. This is an added twist to the already increasingly confused situation in Afghanistan, which has experienced physical devastation at several hands over the past 14 years.

Dostam is an Uzbek who was at one time the right-hand man of Najibullah, the last communist head of state, who fell from power after the Soviets left Afghanistan in disgrace. Dostam abandoned Najib and helped Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Tajik militia leader from the north, to enter and occupy Kabul. Later Dostam shifted loyalties and allied his force with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pushtoon leader who had marched to the gates of Kabul from the south. Now he appears once again to be looking for his own niche in the light of new realities created by the emerging Taliban.

It is reportedly a 25,000-to-30,000-man, largely Pushtoon force of mysterious origin that emerged around Khandar in the southern part of Afghanistan near Pakistan, and quickly swept everything before it until it reached the outskirts of Kabul. Militia leader Hekmatyar, who had engaged in merciless exchanges with Ahmad Shah Masoud's troops around the capital city of Kabul for nearly three years, faded away before the new Pushtoon militia. However, in its first encounter with Masoud's troops, the Taliban were driven back, out of artillery range of the capital.

Who are the Taliban? The simplest answer is that they are young Afghans, some of them veterans of the years of Afghan fighting, who have taken it upon themselves to end the multi-sided Afghan civil war. Some observers point a suspicious finger at Pakistan or Iran or Saudi Arabia. Others unconvincingly describe a distant foreign hand behind the Taliban.

Many of them grew up in refugee camps inside Pakistan or Iran and received education and military training as well at the madrasas (Islamic schools) in make-shift facilities. A lot of clandestine U.S. aid went into the running of these madrasas to train future mujahideen during the 1980s to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.

Nancy deWolf Smith of the Wall Street Journal, who spent September of 1994 with the Taliban, wrote on Feb. 22, 1995: "Already, the media myth-making machine is spewing alarming reports...of the Taliban...That's scary stuff. But it's not true...Taliban may be the best thing that has happened to Afghanistan in years...Taliban are trying to reclaim their country on behalf of the millions of other Afghans who share their frustration and anger."

According to the Los Angeles Times of the same date, "in opium-producing areas of Afghanistan where they have taken power, the Taliban reportedly have torched poppy fields and executed drug traffickers."

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's decision to hand over Charsyab, his stronghold outside Kabul, to his fellow Pushtoons of the Taliban without resistance may have been a calculated move to let the Taliban undertake the work (destruction of Ahmad Shah Masoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani now entrenched inside Kabul) he started and also win the goodwill of the Taliban, who do not have a known outstanding leader among them. They are reportedly run by a shura (council) of 22 members, and half a dozen young stalwarts on the front line have issued statements from time to time. The significance of the movement, therefore, depends largely on whether they can break through the Rabbani-Masoud forces now controlling Kabul, an event that seems increasingly unlikely.

M.M. Ali is a professor at the University of the District of Columbia.