Hindustan Times

Dhrubo Jyoti

Dipankar Ghose

A weapons scam breaks, unprecedented in its scale and impact. Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated, aged 46. A rath yatra marks a turning point for a nation.

Bofors, Janmabhoomi, an assassination: 5 key moments

<h2 style="text-align:center;">Bofors breaks</h2><p>By the 1980s, independent India had seen a slew of scams of varying sizes and forms. Yet when news broke in 1987 that government functionaries allegedly received kickbacks for the procurement of Swedish field guns, it was unlike any scandal that had come before — both in scale and political impact. Newspaper reports accessed leaked classified documents to unveil an investigations by Swedish authorities into the alleged kickbacks. Allegations included the flouting of norms, and money exchanged using middlemen, including at the highest levels of government.</p>

<p>The scandal made an overnight star of then defence minister VP Singh, who would go on to join the Janata Dal and become prime minister in 1989. It would hobble the government of Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi, which had secured the largest parliamentary majority in India’s political history just three years earlier. It would hurt the Congress’s chances in the 1989 election (though its emergence as the single-largest party shows that the impact was likely more limited than estimated at the time). More importantly, the case would taint the Congress with the whiff of corruption for years to come.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Janmabhoomi becomes a movement</h2><p>The dispute between Hindu and Muslim groups over a controversial site in Ayodhya — where the 16th century Babri Masjid stood on a spot that Hindu seers claimed was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram — had simmered since the 1850s, but gained momentum during the tumultuous second half of the 1980s.</p>

<p>Some trace the resurgence of the dispute in modern times to the day that an embattled Rajiv Gandhi opened the locks of the Babri Masjid in 1986, seemingly attempting to assuage Hindu groups after bowing to Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case. But the high noon of the movement came when BJP leader LK Advani announced a nationwide rath yatra in 1990, embedding the party in the heartland. The BJP jumped from two seats in the 1984 general election to 85 in 1989. In a decade, it was in power in Delhi, even as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement went on to shape the nation’s politics and the demolition of the Masjid in 1992 cast a shadow on independent India’s commitments to secularism and the rule of law.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Mandal takes effect</h2><p>If the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was one strand of the politics that defined the chaotic coalition years, the churn around the recommendations of the Second Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission – also known as the Mandal Commission, after its chair, BP Mandal – was the other.</p><p>When the VP Singh government chose to bring the report, submitted in 1980, out of cold storage and implement reservations for Other Backward Classes in August 1990, it immediately created a powerful new electoral bloc that fuelled the rise of a clutch of regional parties that leaned on large, dominant groups in the heartland, and forever marginalised the Congress.</p>

<p>Sparking violent protests by upper-caste students and activists, the report also whittled away at the power of upper-caste communities even as the spoils didn’t quite reach the most marginalised groups. By building OBCs as a potent demographic, the Mandal Commission report had far-reaching political ramifications, especially in the 1990s, in addition to the social transformation it engendered. Whether in countering Hindu nationalism (Mandir vs Mandal) or creating a new vocabulary around OBC political mobilisation, Mandal’s electoral salience remains relevant.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated</h2><p>The 1991 elections had just begun. After the first phase, Rajiv Gandhi – who had been out of power for two years then – travelled to Tamil Nadu to campaign for the Congress. On May 21, 1991, he landed in Chennai before travelling to Sriperumbudur. There, among a melee of followers, a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) blew herself up, killing Gandhi and 14 others. The assassination threw the country into chaos. This was the second prime minister assassinated in less than a decade (the first being Rajiv Gandhi’s mother Indira Gandhi, in 1984).</p>

<p>The elections were briefly postponed. There was turmoil in the Congress. Yet poll analysts later noted that a wave of sympathy buoyed the otherwise moribund party close enough to the majority for PV Narasimha Rao to run a workable minority government for five years and deliver on watershed economic reforms. Gandhi’s death also caused churn in Tamil Nadu politics. But its biggest impact was on the Congress, which stumbled in the absence of a Nehru-Gandhi family scion, before Sonia Gandhi took the reins.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">The Vajpayee government falls</h2><p>When Atal Bihari Vajpayee walked into Parliament on May 27, 1996, he knew that his government was on the verge of collapse. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had only 161 members in the 543-member House, far short of the 272 mark. Efforts to cobble together a coalition by roping in smaller parties had failed. Vajpayee rose to speak and at the end of a 40-minute speech, resigned, thus drawing his 13-day government to a close. Yet his stature as a national leader only rose, thanks largely to the graceful speech, which framed his resignation as a stand against messy compromises in coalition politics.</p>

<p>By the time the succeeding United Front government collapsed two years later, Vajpayee’s ability to net votes had increased, and his charismatic personality ensured that smaller political parties didn’t stay away from the BJP, allowing the party to form governments in 1998 and 1999.</p>