Internal security | Architecture of violence

No major nation ever writes its history without traumatic passages penned in blood and cordite, but outside of wars, it’s perhaps rare for one decade to contain events of such a cataclysmic nature, that too on such disparate fronts, all of them leaving profound and lingering effects. From assassinations to riots, bomb blasts to social conflagrations, the 1985-95 phase held India in a miasma of dread intense even by its sanguinary standards. Here’s a limited doomscroll:

Kanishka bombing, June 23, 1985: A documentary or two and one dark comedy, all in Canada. Besides that, “the world’s deadliest act of aviation terrorism until September 11” has received a lot of amnesia. All 329 people on board were killed when Khalistani terrorists blew apart Air India Flight 182 in mid-air. After a prolonged trial with meagre returns—one conviction—the attack has receded to become a point of diplomatic contretemps between India and Canada.

Punjab terrorism, 1985-95: The Sikh massacre of 1984 casting a long shadow behind it, the decade was bookended by two assassinations—Akali leader Harcharan Longowal (1985) and ex-CM Beant Singh (1995)—with nearly 200 targeted Hindu killings on buses/trains, and Operation Black Thunder, in between.

IPKF war, 1987-90: India was sucked willy-nilly into this blunder, a peacekeeping operation that turned into a prolonged, morally grey combat in the Lankan jungles that left all sides bleeding. There would be hell to pay, beyond the 1,100-plus body bags.

Kashmir insurgency, 1987: The Kashmir ‘problem’ was born as a riddle four decades earlier, and spent time germinating while India toggled between cynical denialism and blissful ignorance. A rigged state election in 1987 blew the cover, and inaugurated one of the most serious armed insurgencies India has seen.

Roop Kanwar’s sati, September 4, 1987: It only took a village in Rajasthan to turn India’s clock back by centuries. An 18-year-old, widowed after eight months, went up on her husband’s pyre, hundreds watched. Thousands still approve of the act—to the point of veneration.

Rajiv Gandhi assassination, May 21, 1991: The IPKF misadventure was to exact its last, grisly toll in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur, as an LTTE suicide-bomber became the former PM’s cruel tryst with destiny.

Babri Masjid demolition, December 6, 1992: Over the years, its proponents gamed the law cannily and eventually subsumed it. But they began by cocking a snook at it. Even the Ayodhya verdict of 2019, which ceded the land to the temple, called it an “egregious” violation.

Babri-linked riots/Bombay blasts, 1990-93: The 16th century mosque demolished in Ayodhya was only a symbol for a long-drawn, sanguinary rite of revanchism, with thousands of sacrificial lambs across India. The riposte from the don Dawood Ibrahim left scars that lingered for decades to come.

Mandal and Mandir. It’s perhaps no coincidence that they appeared together in history, this double helix on which contemporary India’s political genetic code is inscribed. The old ‘Congress consensus’ had petered out into platitudes; its big tent, which once held all contraries, had collapsed. Around the peripheries of the nation, insurgencies were asserting regional separateness. But these were insurgencies within the main body of the nation—expressing a bristling anger at not being sufficiently accommodated and articulated within the master narratives.

Mandal came as the will to freedom from a long social and economic apartheid. The caste elite felt not a little holy terror at the thought of the ‘undeserving’ getting a place at the table and disturbing the fine china. Their young added career anxieties to caste hauteur. The blend was inflammable, literally—Rajeev Goswami was only the more photographed one to turn into a pyre. The extinguishing of hate is still incomplete, even if, grudgingly, there’s a greater acknowledgement that what they saw as innate merit was just inherited social capital. Mandal’s greater success is still in the political sphere, where it drew lines in the sand that came to be sacrosanct.

Protagonists of the Mandir, meanwhile, insisted on something else being held sacrosanct. Ideas of the sacred, they said, had been kept out of the secular polity that India became after Independence. Ayodhya was chosen as the place of its reclamation. The air had been made conducive for a contemplation of the miraculous: beginning 1987, a television serial on the Ramayana story had millions transfixed. In real life, L.K. Advani replayed the ashwamedha yagna, letting his rath run across India. It drew legions, seduced by the thought of dismantling a history of trauma, one that was perhaps all the more real for being mostly imagined. Euphoria equalled dysphoria in a zero sum game.