Gandhi Zig-zags in an India of Mutual Hindu-Muslim Mistrust

As he begins his third year in power, Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister of India, is a harried man. Trouble after trouble has visited his government in the last six months.

Last Thursday in Parliament, he again denied that he or his family had received any kickbacks from a $1.3-billion gun deal the government concluded last year with Bofors, a Swedish company. All opposition parties, important members of the ruling Congress Party, a large section of the press and public think the deal is shady. For the first time, public propriety has become a No. 1 issue in the world’s largest but none-too-clean democracy.

While enjoying unaccustomed success last week with the agreement between India and Sri Lanka that settled the bitter war between Tamils and Sinhalese, Gandhi elsewhere is confronted by mounting problems.

Violence in Punjab is on the rise. Suspected Sikh terrorists last week killed five Hindus in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar; Sikh gunmen also killed three other Hindus and two Sikhs were shot dead. The killings raised to 615 the number of deaths in Punjab related to ethnic violence.

What can tear apart the little social peace that remains in the land is the fervent revival of old antagonisms between the two largest religious communities in India: the Hindus and Muslims.

Their antagonisms are centuries old. Both past clashes were sporadic, spontaneous and of short duration. Now they are bloodier, well-planned, more destructive and they last for months. Parts of Old Delhi have been under police curfew for more than two months.

The historic city of Meerut in North India, which saw the first war of Indian independence in the 19th Century, witnessed a bloody riot in spring, with 23 persons killed and property worth millions of rupees destroyed. Violence soon spread to Delhi and other towns. In the past 18 months, 60 major and minor instances of Hindu-Muslim violence have occurred in the largest state of the union, Uttar Pradesh, killing more than 200 people and leaving more than 1,000 injured; hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless and jobless.

The canker of communal violence has now spread to the countryside. In May armed clashes between Hindus and Muslims happened in places that had never experienced such things before. Violence broke out between the members of the two communities in some villages of the western state of Maharashtra. The issue was water. But it could be anything--the potential for rural violence is high. Immediate provocations are trivial: A scrap over rickshaw fare, a salacious gesture by a man of one community toward the girl of another community or plain rumor. Anything can touch off a major clash these days. Fear and hate grip many.

Gandhi’s government cannot be entirely blamed for the state of affairs; he has no magic wand for dissolving centuries-old enmity. Saul Bellow, in “Herzog,” writes that Americans seldom trust people in high offices. Indians foolishly do. Of course, through better intelligence-gathering and swift action, the scale of violence in many places could have been limited. But the problem is deeper.

Sensitive and dexterous handling is needed to tackle volatile Hindu-Muslim relations. The government has shown neither. In the last year, on many issues, Gandhi has faltered; zig-zags, deviations and abrupt reversals have characterized his policy. Gone are the purpose and direction he gave the country in his first year in power.

An abrupt policy reversal on the Muslim issue last year has cost him dearly. By enacting a piece of legislation called the Muslim women bill, Gandhi has lost the support of progressive and liberal-minded Muslims plus the Hindus. The bill legally binds Muslim women to seek justice on matters of marriage, divorce and alimony only within the cannons of Muslim religious laws. A Muslim woman who wishes to seek redress under the more just Indian civil code, patterned after the Anglo-Saxon civil code, is now legally prevented from doing so. Democratic India denies a Muslim woman the freedom to choose a legal system she prefers.

Initially, Gandhi was clearly for giving such a choice to Muslim women but later, under pressure from Muslim zealots, he retreated. The result is the alienation of liberal Muslims from the Congress Party, a rift within the party on the communal issue and the resentment of the Hindus who have long been wanting a uniform civil code for all Indians.

The Hindus of the large Hindi-speaking areas of north and central India are as angry as the liberal Muslims. They believe the government is too soft on the Muslims. As one Hindu leader put it, “Does any country give so many privileges to a minority as we do to the Muslims?”

Electoral arithmetic would demand that Gandhi and his party come to terms with the new religious assertiveness of the Hindus of the Hindi belt. Their support is why the Congress Party remains in power. But the party may be on the political decline, even in the Hindi belt; last month the Congress Party suffered a crushing defeat in the northern Hindi-speaking state of Haryana.

Appealing to the Hindu voter along religious lines is always a delicate and difficult task. The Indian state is built on the principle of secularism. The word is a misnomer, for the Indian state is not opposed to religion as is the Soviet state. Here it simply means separation of politics from religion. The Congress Party since the days of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru has made secularism the cornerstone of the country’s constitution.

Hostility to Pakistan, however, has great electoral appeal for Hindus. Pakistan is an ideal surrogate for the Hindu hostility toward the Muslims. Indira Gandhi understood this well. Before her assassination in October, 1984, she skillfully exploited the Hindu-Muslim tensions at home by focusing outside, presenting Pakistan as the arch foe, out to undo Indian unity. No doubt she had good reasons to be fearful of the Pakistani military regime but her exaggeration of the threat was partly a policy of wooing the Hindus.

Her son seems to have reverted to his mother’s policy. Rajiv Gandhi began well by extending a hand of friendship to Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Without sacrificing India’s security interests, he was prepared to explore ways of cooperating with Pakistan. The movement toward peace was abandoned in mid-1986, partly because of Pakistan’s intransigence on the nuclear issue. Pakistan is determined to be a nuclear power, and perhaps so is India. But the policy of living in peace with its neighbors was also given up for domestic reasons. When things are bad at home, Pakistan-baiting is always useful. This is what Gandhi did at a recent public rally, sounding as crusty as his mother .