Indian politics over the past decade makes the case for a revisionist history of the republic. The success of the Sangh Parivar in imposing a communal common sense on Indian politics should encourage us to review India’s republican past in the light of Narendra Modi’s ascendancy. We should ask why our democracy, built on the simple majorities of a first-past-the-post system, took so long to become majoritarian.

The question is a provocation because it implies that democracies left to themselves will build political majorities around a dominant ethnic identity. It suggests that the principle of majority rule will turn the members of nominal demographic majorities into self-aware majoritarians. This is a large claim, too large for a magazine article; what we can do here is look at India in the context of South Asia to understand how our neighbours answered this question. We might then be able to place India in a range of regional responses to the temptation of majoritarianism, grounded in the history of post-colonial South Asia.

The standard Indian response to its South Asian neighbourhood has been an assertion of exceptionalism that contrasts India’s formal commitment to secularism with its neighbours’ adoption of state religions relatively early in their political journeys. In this framing, South Asia is a misleading geopolitical term that forces secular India into the smelly company of smaller majoritarian states.

India is not yet a formally majoritarian state, but given the current state of its political institutions, unsympathetic critics might argue that it only ever was a formally secular one. The reasonable position might be to accept that India was pluralist in an imperfect way, which was more than its neighbours managed, but remained susceptible to the political appeal of majoritarianism. What helped the Indian political system hold out for as long as it did and why did it finally succumb?

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Post-colonial South Asia pioneered a style of unfraternal democracy that prefigured the recent illiberal turn in many countries across the world. The work of imagining the subcontinent’s nations had to be done in the presence of the colonial state. The process was hurried and contested and was cut short by the priorities of the Raj. The constitutions that these new nations gave themselves used the language of liberalism to paper over arguments about representation and identity. With India and Pakistan (and later Bangladesh), these arguments ended in partition with its attendant consequences: ethnic cleansing, near-genocidal violence, and memories radioactive with the long half-life of communal resentment.

Majoritarian turns in India’s neighbours

Of India’s neighbours, Pakistan was established as a Muslim state. Its experiment with democracy was brief; the Pakistani military captured the state by the mid-1950s and never relinquished its self-appointed role as the guardian of the Islamic republic. The Muslim supremacy inherent in the notion of a Muslim state was elaborated by Pakistan’s civilian politicians and generals as they tried to shore up the ideological foundations of a predatory, semi-feudal state.

General Zia-ul-Haq, through his Hudood ordinances, made Islamism the common sense of Pakistani politics and created a state debauched in equal parts by religious bigotry and a parasitic military. The spectacle of Imran Khan, born again as an Islamist revolutionary taking on Pakistan’s military establishment and its civilian proxies is a drama about democracy but it is a play where only Sunni Muslims have speaking roles.

Sri Lanka, the best of South Asia’s democracies, a literate, middle-income state, with civic amenities and standards of public hygiene alien to its neighbours, began its long descent into majoritarian madness in 1956. Solomon Bandaranaike passed the Sinhala Only Act, replacing English with Sinhala as the sole official language, effectively shutting Sri Lanka’s Tamils out of the country’s bureaucracy. The related anti-Tamil pogrom in 1958 was directly responsible for Tamil alienation and the demand for a separate state. This led to three decades of civil war between an avowedly majoritarian Sinhala state and an ideologically secessionist Tamil movement.

In Bangladesh, nationalists liberated themselves from the hegemony of a non-Bengali Pakistani establishment and tried briefly to create an inclusive nationalism that included Bengali Hindus. Of Bangladesh’s two main parties, the Awami League professes secular inclusion while the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is committed to a Bangladeshi variant of Pakistan’s doctrine of Muslim supremacy. Paradoxically, Bangladesh’s constitution designates Islam as the state religion but upholds the principle of secularism. The net result is an inconsistent majoritarianism. The size of Bangladesh’s Hindu population has steadily declined since 1971.

Myanmar’s junta, like Pakistan’s, has sought legitimacy by presenting itself as the defender of the faith, in this case Buddhism. Its majoritarians, like Sri Lanka’s, used the bogey of the enemy within to violently purge the Muslim Rohingyas from Rakhine province. Ironically, Myanmar’s transition to something approaching democracy earlier this century precipitated the violence. Erstwhile “liberals” like Aung San Suu Kyi became implacable majoritarians, complicit in this ethnic cleansing because there were more votes in Buddhist chauvinism than in liberal principles.

Generalisations about the timing of India’s majoritarian turn are tricky unless you were at the sharp end of it, but it can be reasonably said that explicit bigotry against minority populations was not respectable within the metropolitan middle class till the early 1980s. This is not to say that minorities were not the targets of communal violence or discrimination before that, but merely to note that bigotry in big cities was covert, not proud.

Till then Indian politics had not gone too far down the Sri Lankan or Pakistani road. There were several reasons for this, not all of them connected to superior political virtue. First, the Congress’s political rhetoric had been built around inclusive rhetoric designed to head off separatism and later, partition. From Naoroji to Nehru, the Congress invented a Noah’s Ark nationalism, designed to keep all of India’s human species aboard a single vessel. Pakistan was a near-fatal blow to this project, but it survived in independent India as a way of keeping the country together. The Congress’s prestige as the party of anti-colonial nationalism and Nehru’s standing as the leader of that party helped colonial pluralism survive into the early republican era as chivalry. Less high-mindedly, the Congress’s electoral arithmetic made Muslims a valuable part of its political coalitions.

Second, India was much harder to polarise than Sri Lanka or Pakistan because of its size and diversity. Take the matter of language. When Ceylon passed the Sinhala Only Act, it disqualified an entire class of Tamil civil servants at a stroke. Initially the act did not even grant Tamil official standing in Tamil areas, nor did it keep English on as an official language. In the Indian case, the instatement of Hindi as one of the two official languages was balanced by deference to the size of the Indian population that spoke a continent’s worth of other languages. Also, despite the best efforts of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the heterogeneity of Indian Hindus made it hard to mobilise them under slogans like “Hindi, Hindu, Hindusthan”.

1984 in Delhi, and a year earlier, the 1983 massacre of Muslims in Nellie, Assam, constituted grim landmarks in India’s modern history, partly because of the size of these pogroms and partly because of their locations. The Nellie massacre was the culmination of a longstanding Assamese grievance that the demography of Assam was being transformed by Bangladeshi “infiltration”. The parallels with the violence inflicted on the Rohingya are precise and instructive. The massacre of Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s assassination was historically significant not only for the scale of the horror but also for the brazen complicity of the state and the stark fact that this pogrom occurred in the capital of the republic, not the marches of a frontier province.

The ability of state and non-state actors to kill minority populations and then politically profit from the violence was an inflection point in the history of Indian democracy. The leaders of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) who were responsible for the Nellie violence became the elected rulers of Assam. The Congress won an unprecedented majority on the back of the Delhi killings. India’s grand old party, stewarded by Nehru’s grandson, ran an advertising campaign that dog-whistled about Sikh taxi drivers and helped the party win an infamous victory. It taught majoritarian parties a lesson in impunity that they were quick to learn. The organised killing of Muslims in Mumbai in the winter of 1992-93 and then in Godhra in 2002 would not have been possible without the precedent of 1984.

Ideological vacuum

What changed in the early 1980s? A plausible answer is that the developmental path chosen by the Congress had run its course. Every other modernising Asian economy had followed the model of Meiji Japan: an initial commitment to light industry to create jobs for underemployed rural workers, universal education for a modern workforce, and trade. India chose autarky and what Ashoka Mody in his book, India is Broken, calls the “temple” model, a reference to Nehru’s vision of dams, central research institutes, and heavy industry as the temples of modern India. When the model failed in its principal responsibility—creating job for India’s millions—and India’s economy hit the buffers in the 1960s and 1970s, the failure discredited the policy architecture of the Nehruvian state with its emphasis on planning, non-alignment, and secularism.

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The task of reimagining India was ceded by default to the Sangh Parivar, which filled India’s ideological vacuum with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the hectoring promise of a Hindu Rashtra. Even the liberalisation of the economy, for which the Congress could and should have taken credit, was hijacked by Modi’s Gujarat, which was successfully sold as liberalisation’s most successful avatar.

Bigotry isn’t destiny

Over the last decade, Modi has shown that death and development, discrimination and targeted welfare (branded as the Prime Minister’s personal generosity), nationalism and nafrat can consolidate election-winning blocs of voters who are appreciative of Modi’s largesse and galvanised by the idea of an enemy within. The furore created by Hindu residents of gated localities when Muslim professionals try to buy into these neighbourhoods is a sign of the popular traction that Hindutva has achieved. These are non-state actors, and this is apartheid from below.

The flattening of Gaza and the West’s active complicity in the violence remind us that a state celebrated as an oasis of liberal democracy can, when its geopolitical stars align, be granted a licence to kill. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the systematic devastation of Tamil areas in Sri Lanka are reminders that quasi-democratic and formally democratic south Asian states can resort to genocidal violence and get away with it. This can happen here; it has already happened in the neighbourhood.

It doesn’t have to happen here, though. The general election earlier this year showed us that bigotry isn’t destiny. The history of India after 1984 also teaches the lesson that the ability to imagine a community and convey that vision to a national audience is a political superpower. It is not a coincidence that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement prospered around the time that network television joined Indians into a national communion. The BJP’s early mastery of social media gave it a head start in setting the republic’s agenda. Till India’s opposition parties create a satvik vision of India to counter the Sangh Parivar’s tamasik fever dream, monstrous violence within the scaffolding of our democracy will remain a real prospect.

Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi.

“They are in flames, they’reall burning!” screamed the man running by, his turban askew and his face blackened with ashes and cinders. Like an apparition from a dark fantasy, he crossed the road and continued in his flight, without a glance backward.

I came to an abrupt halt. I had set out on foot from home as on many a day, headed for my friend Damandeep’s house. But today was unlike any day ever before, after the assassination of the Prime Minister by her Sikh bodyguards. In the days following October 31, attacks that targetedthe Sikh community had begun in the capital. Gangs were still roaming the streets of Delhi, looking for Sikhs to punish and loot. This was one of the survivors, escaping in any way possible. The Sikh man’s fear and expression of dread were further reminders of the perils ahead.

To my dismay, Daman had declined when I urged him to leave his house for some days. There was his elderly grandmother to consider, besides his sense of pride and conviction that he would not be harmed in that locality in north Delhi, Vijay Nagar. Somehow the family had survived till today while staying indoors. Now there was a murmur in the wind that enough was enough, and that the time had come for decisive action. Even as deployment of the armed forces was further delayed, and the death toll climbed, mobs were moving into areas that had been calm till now.

The streets were mostly empty, as I once again began to slowly make my way across from the University area. Columns of smoke still ascended high in the air on every side, remnants of systematically planned arson attacks on Sikh businesses and homes.Sikh men were being burned,tyres placed around their necks and ignited with petrol, witnessed by the fleeing survivor. The city seemed strange, unrecognisable, as it reverted to violence reminiscent of the Partition era. While I was too young to have memories of that time, I had heard tales of atrocities shared by my father, who had migrated from west Punjab in 1947.

I carried a lathi as I strode onward. I’d had a fine teacher at the dojo where I studied judo. We had been instructed in the basic techniques of stick fighting, always with the proviso that the weapon was only to be used in self-defence. Grappling with this philosophically was difficult for me, especially given my background as a bit of a brawler during my schooldays. Sensei had spent hours conveying the roots of martial arts thinking, which I eventually grasped, or so I hoped. In the process I’dworked through some of the edginess of my adolescent years.

I had no clear idea of what awaited me at Daman’s home. Fellow feeling had drastically eroded with the build-up of tension in Punjab. Now there was an omnipresent sense of fear and apprehension in the city. Assumptions held dear since childhood no longer carried weight. The sense of inadequacy returned from time to time, as the body reminded me of its frailty. What could an individual do in the circumstances, given the spread of virulent hatred in recent times, enveloping even those who had seen such emotions playing outin earlier times. And such “righteous” emotion could so easily become the justification for widespread violence and law-breaking, with patronage from the highest level. Even so, the imperative to keep walking in the chosen direction remained with me, impossible to ignore.

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Law enforcement or military oversight was conspicuous by its absence. Were all Sikhs now to be designated enemies of the state, targets of misplaced ire? It was difficult to fathom the abrupt change of outlook towards the community, always regarded as sharing ties of kinship, which had not come about overnight. I inhaled the acrid smell of burning rubber, and flinched at the sight of wisps of hair and beard blown about by the wind. Just a few days had elapsed; the city had metamorphosed into a necropolis.

Rumours about Sikh terrorists poisoning the water supply had begun to circulate. I understood that this was a canard, deliberately spread to reinforce growing distaste for the Sikhs, while strengthening the case for reprisals. Then there were the functionaries in bush shirts moving about from colony to colony with official records, including the census records. The mobs were quick to follow in the wake of these sinister figures wearing sunglasses. Hard to countenance, in the city in which I had grown up and found my way, despite hardships and our family’s initial financial insecurity as former migrants.

It was as if the tarmac road posed an impediment to movement forward, as it mirrored such dark thoughts. It would have been so much easier to follow father’s advice to remain at home until the danger had passed. But as I was well aware, it was not my family or community that was at risk. And Daman was a beloved friend, after all; our shared memories reached back to childhood days of truancy and mischief,leavened bySardarji jokes which Daman was the first to laugh uproariously at. Daman’s father and his family too had been uprooted from west Punjab, from a village not far from their family hometown, Bhera.

Perhaps it was the shared history of displacement that had initially brought us together. There was the mystery of the silence about those days of terror and flight across the Wagah border, a silence rarely broken in either family. As young friends we had tried to piece together a partial understanding about the past, reading the stories of Manto, Bedi, Ismat and others. In these stories, we had glimpsed the descent into depravity at the time, as well as the occasional glimmer of hope. Was the reluctance to confront the ghosts of the Partition era one of the reasons for the repeated flaring up of such emotions and the tendency to use violence to settle scores with the imagined enemy? Minority groups had been on the receiving end previously. Now it was again the turn of the Sikh community.

As I neared the gullies near Daman’s home, the changes wrought in the last few days became apparent, with barricades and uncollected garbage strewn around the area, the first the aftermath of majority paranoia and the other an outcome of civic breakdown. The municipality had forsaken any responsibility for trash collection, and the task of maintaining a level of civic cleanliness, weak at best, had been abandoned altogether. Those who were assigned such jobs, often from the Dalit community, were not to be seen. Not surprising, given the dreadful reports coming out of places like Trilokpuri, where Sikhs who had converted from lower castes lived in large numbers. The attacks were concentrated on such areas, and on somemiddle-class colonies at the outset.

Now the outliers were being sought out in a systematic way. Although there had been reports about the courageous peace marches conducted by the Nagarik Rahat Samiti, with its base in Lajpat Nagar, the tide was yet to turn.

As I skirted the piles of rubbish I kept a lookout for signs of trouble. It was early in the day, and the mobs seemed to prefer the evening now that the more obvious targets had been torched and looted. The lane in Vijay Nagar where Daman lived was a cul-de-sac, his home almost at the end. It was a relief to be there at last, to see the house securely locked from inside. There were no identifiers that might mark the religious identity of the occupants, but I was well aware of the ugly mood that prevailed, making it impossible for Sikhs to escape detection, especially if they were longtime residents.

I took up a position next door where I could get a clear view of the entrance to the house. No need to alert Daman and his family, who must already be extremely anxious. The modest dwelling was two stories high, with a small garden in front. The landlord lived on the top floor but had been away for some time. The garden was carefully maintained, despite the perennial shortage of water in the capital city, with a few rows of desi gulab, not yet in season.

A scene from Delhi during the anti-Sikh riots of November 1984. The picture shows buildings which were set on fire by mobs.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Archives/ GAMMA

My solitary vigil continued through the day. I had never experienced such silence in the big city before this, barring the sound of war cries from afar, and the occasional explosions coming from gas cylinders once the fires invaded the kitchens from which the occupants had fled or had been brutally evicted. I found a place of shade under the awning of the neighbouring house’s verandah, locked for now, even as the November sun beat down through the long afternoon. I had long since ceased to think about food and drink, all attention consumed by the slightest movement in my field of vision. Sensei had trained us students well in the arts of meditation and concentrated attention. There was consciousness of the body, the rhythm of breathing and exhaling, and with this an awareness of the surroundings in minute detail. There were sparrows playing,although diminished in number, and kites wheeled ominously high in the sky as they celebrated the surfeit of carrion that had come their way. Scattered clouds drifted slowly above this secluded neighbourhood, while the stench from the nearby ganda nala was unmistakable when the wind direction changed.

Who knew that such innocuous colonies designed for the resettlement of refugees from the west Punjab region would one day become killing fields? It was difficult to wrap my mind around the transformation of such colonies into places of risk and danger for those I had grown up regarding as close confidants, like Daman. He always had a stubborn streak, the Surd never backed down in fights in the schoolyard. Later, our group had even faced down goons who had come from their haunt in nearby Chandrawal to rig college and university elections. But this was a different situation, unprecedented for both of us, as if we had entered a nightmare from which there was seemingly no waking.

Eventually the sun relented and began its descent to the horizon, obscured by high-rises and the urban sprawl. Now was the time for heightened vigilance in the gully leading up to the end of the street. As if following an infernal timetable, here came the forerunners, scouting the scene, with the mob behind carrying weapons like knives, makeshift sticks and chains and a few canisters of kerosene. At the end of the cluster of young and middle-aged men, were the specialists, directing the action.

No further need for concealment. I stepped out of the shade of the awning, taking the lathi, entered Daman’s wooden gate and stood on the path leading up to the entrance. The scouts were not far, and I could sense a flurry of communication reaching back to the end of the mob. One of the scouts at the head approached.

“Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“What are you doing here?”

“A friend’s duty.”

“Best that you leave now, friend.”

“Not going to happen. See this lathi? Another good friend. Now it is up to you to decide whether you wish to come one by one or all at once. Not a single person in this house is going to be hurt today, while I am still standing.”

“Leave now. This concerns us and the Sikhs. They will be taught a lesson today.”

“My lathi has taught a few lessons in its time, and I know how to wield it when the need arises. Come and test your strength, if you are so keen.”

The scout retreated to consult with the rest of the mob and the specialists at the back. I could hear the sound of animated deliberations, with some aggressive hand gestures accompanying the heated debate.

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Now was the moment of truth. I knew that I could not withstand a concerted onrush of purposeful attackers, even though I could take a few of them down. I steadied my breathing, focussing on the intake of air, poised on the balls of my feet, adrenaline beginning to pump in my veins. I held the lathi in the prescribed position, hands clasping wood in line with the discipline of stick fighting in which I had been trained. Was it worth it to this rag-tag lot moving around restlessly, the risk of injury or even death, with just one Sikh family as eventual reward for the effort? Mobs were made of hotheads as well as cowards, and the anti-Sikh violence had been orchestrated in a cold-blooded and vindictive fashion so far. The heated passions of a full-blown riot were missingand the violence was unidirectional. The question, this evening, was whether the balance would tilt one way or the other.

“Better quit now while you are still ahead. You have made your point, now go home, boss,” came from one of the middle-aged men in the front rank, looking uneasy with his distended paunch and holding his garden rake as tightly as possible.

“I am here to spend the evening with my friends, I am not going anywhere. Ever heard about the dharma of friendship?”

The group retired a few steps to confer again.

I heard the sound of the main door opening behind me. Glancing back, I saw Daman looking out. I signaled to him to stay within.

“I should be with you…” said Daman.

“Don’t come out now, it might provoke them. This is my concern. Remember my martial arts training. Think of your family.”

This exchange seemed to have been overheard by the nearest aggressors. The whispers became more agitated and the body language began to alter.

As I stood there facing the now uncertain participants in a would-be pogrom, there was a point of stillness, a quiet pool within. The assembled attackers, the loosely held weapons in their hands, and behind me the presence of Daman at his most vulnerable, all seemed to be at a strange, even uncanny distance, as if in another zone in time and space.

The mob began to melt away, wraiths in the twilight, and with this came a gradual restoration of a sense of the here-and-now. I began to feel the accumulated tiredness of hours of anticipation, of waiting for the conflict to come, deeper than muscle fatigue, rising to the surface.

Daman stepped out of the doorway, as if someone had freed him from an occult spell.

Notwithstanding this moment of respite, the realisation began to well up that unlike in a fairytale, in the wake of such attrition, time might never flow again in quite the same way. In the dim light cast by the overhead bulb across the dead end in Vijay Nagar, Daman’s gaze met mine. Neither of us spoke. 

The miasma from those days in November 1984 would suffuse our lives for many years to come. 

*This story is dedicated to my uncle, Sanjeev Rampal, who knows the tale’s origins well.

Tarun K. Saint is an independent scholar and anthologist. His interests include the literature of Partition, science fiction, and detective fiction. He is the author of Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (2nd edition, 2020), based on his doctoral dissertation. He edited Bruised Memories: Communal Violence and the Writer (2002) and co-edited (with Ravikant) Translating Partition (2001). He also co-edited Looking Back: India’s Partition, 70 Years On (2017), with Rakhshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta. He has most recently edited the two-volume Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction (2024).