Gandhi's assassination and India's 'democracy'

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The May 21 assassination of India's former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has shaken that country's people and the world of politics. Gandhi was assassinated on the campaign trail while seeking to regain the prime minister job he lost 18 months earlier.

With Gandhi's death, the political dynasty that ruled India for all but six of 44 years appears to have come to an end. Hoping to capture the sympathy vote, the Congress Party's top leadership immediately chose Gandhi's Italian-born wife, Sonia Gandhi, as party president. But she declined.

Erosion of "democracy"

No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the assassination. But many possibilities have been mentioned: Sri Lankan Tamil separatists, Sikh militants, Hindu fundamentalists, and even the CIA. No one, however, believes it was the act of a madman. Gandhi and the Congress Party and India's ruling class have too many enemies.

Gandhi's assassination reflects more than the end of an era. It is the continued erosion of India's capitalist democracy—one based on impoverishment of its people, attacks on ethnic rights, and deepening exploitation of its farm and working population. It explains why Sikhs in New York City cheered the news while President Bush and British Prime Minister John Major expressed deep concern about India's stability.

India is a country of 850 million people, second in world population only te China. It is multilingual, multi-ethnic, and includes most major religions of the world, with Hinduism being dominant.

At the time of its independence in 1947, India was presented by imperialism as the largest secular democracy in the world. After the Chinese revolution in 1949, India was presented to other Third World underdeveloped countries as the viable capitalist alternative to communism.

Yet India never lived up to its billing. Its birth was violent. The British rulers had played a game of divide and rule, and by the mid1940s the independence movement was fractured down the middle. There were the secular but Hindudominated Congress Party and the Muslim League. Sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims at independence left one million dead, and millions more crossing borders to the newly independent Islamic Pakistan.

In 1948, a Hindu fundamentalist assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, the central driving force of the Congress Party, in New Delhi.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi's grandfather, became India's first prime minister. He died in 1964.

Less than two years later, in 1966, his daughter (Indira Gandhi) became prime minister. She ruled India with an iron hand, including a period of emergency rule in the mid-1970s. She was assassinated in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards after the army brutally attacked Sikh militants in their holy shrine, the Golden Temple, in Amristar, Punjab.

Two months later, Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress Party to a landslide election victory. He served as prime minister until 1989.

Behind downfall and crisis Rajiv Gandhi's downfall, and the growing instability in India, is tied to a number of factors. One was government corruption, symbolized by a crooked arms deal with the Swedish company Bofors. A layer of the government bureaucracy and a new middle class were getting fat—as the people suffered. Gandhi also took steps to open up the Indian market to foreign interests in this period.

Others include the rise of sectarian violence and struggles for national rights by many of India's ethnic minorities. Hindu fundamentalism is on the rise. Some 80 percent of all Indians are Hindus. They demand that Hindu culture be protected and that India become a Hindu state. Muslims have been violently attacked.

Sikhs, a very small religious group but a majority in the rich agricultural state of Punjab, are pushing for more control of that state. Sikh separatists have been active since the early 1980s pressing for an independent country for Sikhs.

The Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir is in open rebellion against the central government. Its state government was dismissed in 1990, and the region has been under virtual martial law since early 1991.

In one of the poorest states, Assam, a number of ethnic and linguistic separatist movements exist. That state government was also ousted in November 1990.

The state government of Tamil Nadu, where Gandhi was killed, was dismissed by the central government in January 1991. Tamils are sympathetic to the plight of their cousins in neighboring Sri Lanka.

Initially, the press speculated that the bomb which killed Gandhi was placed by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (they later denied the charge). Gandhi had sent troops to Sri Lanka in 1987 to help end a civil war there between the Tamils and the majority Sinhala-dominated regime. The Tamil rebels initially backed the India's intervention but later fought the Indian troops. The Indian army was finally forced out of Sri Lanka 30 months later.

More than 150 people died in election violence the week before Gandhi's assassination. The elections so far have been India's bloodiest, with hundreds of deaths reported during the polling that began May 20. Malik Mil The schism between haves and have-nots is widening. In 1985, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the World Bank reported 420 million Indians, 55 percent of the population, as "poor" (that is, having an income of less than $30 a month) and 250 million, 33 percent, as "extremely poor" (with an income of less than $23 a month).

This compares to China's 20 percent as "poor" and 8 percent as "extremely poor." India's literacy rate is 36 percent; China's 77 percent.

It is capitalism's failure in India that lies behind its social and political crisis today. Gandhi's assassination thus was a byproduct of that reality.