A parliament is a legislature, especially in those countries whose system of government is based on the Westminster system modeled after that

of the United Kingdom. The name is derived from the French parlement, the action of parler (to speak): a parlement is a discussion. The term came to mean a meeting at which such a discussion took place.[when?] It acquired its modern meaning as it came to be used for the body of people (in an institutional sense) who would meet to discuss matters of state
There were 18,000 candidates for 4,500 seats, 497 of which were in the Lok Sabha, during the first general elections. One-hundred-and-seventy-six million Indians, 85 per cent of whom couldn't read or write, formed the electorate. There were 2,24,000 polling booths and as many policemen pressed into service. Symbols were used on ballot papers for voters who couldn't read. When the results came in, the Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru had swept into power winning 364 of the 489 seats in Parliament Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/1952-first-lok-sabha-elections/1/155506.html Lok Sabha is composed of representatives of the people chosen by direct election on the basis of the adult suffrage. The maximum strength of the House envisaged by the Constitution is 552, which is made up by election of upto 530 members to represent the States, upto 20 members to represent the Union Territories and not more than two members of the Anglo-Indian Community to be nominated by the Hon'ble President, if, in his/her opinion, that community is not adequately represented in the House. The total elective membership is distributed among the States in such a way that the ratio between the number of seats allotted to each State and the population of the State is, so far as practicable, the same for all States.

The Rajya Sabha (Hindi: ) or Council of States is the upper house of the Parliament of India. Rajya means "state,"[4] and Sabha means "assembly" in Sanskrit.[5] Membership is limited to 250 members, 12 of whom are chosen by the President of India for their expertise in specific fields of art, literature, science, and social services. These members are known as nominated members. The remainder of the body is elected by the state and territorial legislatures. Terms of office are six years, with one third of the members retiring every two years. The Rajya Sabha meets in continuous sessions and, unlike the Lok Sabha, is not subject to dissolution. The Rajya Sabha has equal footing in all areas of legislation with Lok Sabha, except in the area of supply, where the Lok Sabha has overriding powers. In the case of conflicting legislation, a joint sitting of the two houses is held. However, since the Lok Sabha has twice as many members as the Rajya Sabha, it would normally hold the greater power in such joint sessions. Only three joint sessions have been held; the last one was for the passage of the anti-terror law POTA in 2002. The Vice-President of India (currently, Hamid Ansari) is the ex-officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. The Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, who is elected from amongst its members, takes care of the day-to-day matters of the house in the absence of the Chairman. The Rajya Sabha held its first sitting on 13 May 1952.[6] The Vidhan Sabha (Hindi: ) or the Legislative Assembly is the lower house (in states with bicameral) or the sole house (in unicameral states) of the provincial (state) legislature in the different states of India. The same name is also used for the lower house of the legislatures for two of the union territories, Delhi and Pondicherry. The upper house in the six states with a bicameral legislature is called the Legislative Council, or Vidhan Parishad. Members of a Vidhan Sabha are direct representatives of the people of the particular state as they are directly elected

by an electorate consisting of all adult citizens of that state. Its maximum size as outlined in the Constitution of India is not more than 500 members and not less than 60. However, the size of the Vidhan Sabha can be less than 60 members through an Act of Parliament, such is the case in the states of Goa, Sikkim and Mizoram. The Governor can appoint 1 member to represent the Anglo-Indian community if he or she finds that community to not be adequately represented in the House. Each Vidhan Sabha is formed for a five year term after which all seats are up for election. During a State of Emergency, its term may be extended past five years or it may be dissolved. It can also be dissolved if a motion of no confidence is passed within it against the majority party or coalition.

The first prime minister of independent India was Jawaharlal Nehru, who held office from 1947 until his
death in 1964. Apart from a short period of two years from 1975-77, when an internal emergency was imposed by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and constitutional liberties were suspended, India has been a thriving parliamentary democracy. For a capsule political history of India in the post-1947 period, readers are invited to turn to the Independent India section of this site, where they will also find other specialized articles, as well as the Current Affairs section of MANAS, where readers will be able to find articles on selected political and social phenomena of recent years.

India acquired independence on 15 August 1947 though sections of the country were carved out
and stitched together to create another new country, Pakistan. The institutional road to independence was perhaps laid down by the Government of India Act of 1935, where the gradual emergence of India as a self-governing entity had first been partly envisioned. Following India's independence in 1947, the Constituent Assembly deliberated over the precise constitutional future of India. On 26 January 1950, India became a Republic, and the Constitution of India was promulgated. Jawaharlal Nehru had become the countrys first Prime Minister in 1947, and in 1952, in the countrys first general election with a universal franchise, Nehru led the Indian National Congress to a clear victory. The Congress had long been the principal political party in India, providing the leadership to the struggle for independence, and under Nehrus stewardship it remained the largest and most influential party over the next three decades. In 1957, Nehru was elected to yet another five-year term as a member of the Lok Sabha and chosen to head the government. His regime was marked by the advent of five-year plans, designed to bring big science and industry to India; in Nehru's own language, steel mills and dams were to be the temples of modern India. Relations with Pakistan remained chilling, and the purported friendship of India and China proved to be something of a hoax. Chinas invasion of India's borders in 1962 is said to have dealt a mortal blow to Nehru.

Nehru was succeeded at his death on 27 May 1964 for a period of two weeks by Gulzarilal
Nanda (1898-1998), a veteran Congress politician who became active in the non-cooperation movement in 1922 and served several prison terms, principally in 1932 and from 1942-44 during

the Quit India movement. Nanda served as acting Prime Minister until the Congress had elected a new leader, Lal Bahadur Shastri, also a veteran politician who came of age during the Gandhiled non-cooperation movement. Shastri was the compromise candidate who, perhaps unexpectedly, led the country to something of a victory over Pakistan in 1965. Shastri and the vanquished Pakistani President, Muhammad Ayub Khan, signed a peace treaty at Tashkent in the former Soviet Union on 10 January 1966, but Shastri barely lived to witness the accolades that were now being showered upon him since he died of an heart attack the day after the treaty was signed. Shastris empathy for the subaltern classes is conveyed through the slogan, Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer, which is attributed to him and through which he is remembered at Vijay Ghat, the national memorial to him in New Delhi in the proximity of Rajghat, the national memorial to Mohandas Gandhi.

On Shastris death, the Congress was once again engulfed by an internal struggle. Gulzarilal
Nanda once again served as the acting Prime Minister, again for a period of less than a month, before being succeeded by Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter. By the late 1960s, Indira Gandhi had engineered a split in the Congress, as the only means to ensure her political survival, and the Congress party, which with every passing year was losing something of its shine, now went into a precipitous decline. In 1971, India crushed Pakistan in a short war that also saw the birth of Bangladesh, and Indira was now at the helm of her powers. But the Congress was now a mere shadow of its former self, and as domestic problems mounted and popular movements directed at Indira Gandhi began to show their effect, she resorted to more repressive measures. An internal emergency, which placed almost the entire opposition behind bars, was proclaimed in May 1975, and only removed in 1977; and the same opposition, which hastily convened to chart its strategy, achieved in delivering the Congress party its first loss in national elections. This government, serving various political interests and led by the victorious Janata Party, which had been formed out of various opposition parties, lasted a mere three years. It was led by the controversial Gandhian and Congress stalwart, Morarji Desai, for two years, and for another year by Chaudhary Charan Singh (1902-1987), who came from a Jat farming community with roots in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The Lok Sabha or Lower Assembly never met during Charan Singhs Prime Ministership and the political alliance crumbled. Indira Gandhi rode a spectacular wave of victory in 1980. But she did not live to complete her term: shot by her own Sikh bodyguards, who sought to avenge the destruction unleashed upon the Golden Temple, the venerable shrine of the Sikh faith, by Indian government troops given the task of flushing out the terrorists holed in the shrine, she was succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi, in late 1984.

In the December 1994 Lok Sabha elections, Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party won a
landslide election. But Rajivs premiership was to be marked by numerous political disasters, and Rajivs own name was tainted by the allegation that he had received huge bribes from a Swedish firm of Bofors, manufacturers of a machine-gun for which the Indian army placed a large order. His own finance minister, V. P. Singh (1931-), once a Indira Gandhi loyalist who had been picked by her in 1980 to serve as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, was to turn against Rajiv; and in 1989, V. P. Singh led the Janata Party to an electoral rout over the Congress. However, the revived Janata party mustered only 145 votes, and it had to take the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by L. K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, in order to form a government. It is at this juncture that India truly entered the era of coalition

governments. V. P. Singh would soon be brought down by two disputes: one over the status of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque that Hindu militants claimed had been built over the Ram Janmasthan [birthplace], and the second over the recommendations of the Mandal commission pertaining to quotas for various elements of Indias underprivileged masses. On 7 November 1990, by a vote of 356-151, V. P. Singh lost the confidence of the Lok Sabha, and some days later Chandra Sekhar (1927-), with the support of Rajiv Gandhis Congress, was sworn in as the next prime minister. However, Congress withdrew its support in March 1991, and elections were called in May.

On 21 May 1991, as intense electioneering was taking place, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by
a Sri Lankan suicide bomber. The mantle of Congress leadership fell on the veteran P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921-2004), who led the party to triumph, even as the BJP raised the number of its seats in Parliament from a little over 80 to 120. On 6 December 1992, acting in defiance of Supreme Court orders, Hindu militants destroyed the Babri Masjid, and so initiated one of the most intense crises in Indias post-independent history. Rao weathered many a storm, and presided over the liberalization of the economy -- the architect of which was Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister and, since 2004, the Prime Minister of India. But Rao could not keep the BJP and its friends in check. In the general elections of 1996, the BJP emerged as the largest party, but its 194 seats were not enough to give it a working majority in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, and Atal Behari Vajpayees first government lasted a mere twelve days. A 13-party coalition of the United National Front and the Indian left was brought into power, and Deve Gowda, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, was raised to the office of the Prime Minister; but after less than a year in office, he resigned and was succeeded by Inder Kumar Gujral, whose main contribution in office was to bequeath the Gujral doctrine a reference to his genuine attempts to mend Indias relations with its South Asian neighbors, based on the principle that as the largest country, India could afford to be generous, and did not have to require reciprocity for all its munificent actions.

But Gujrals government similarly lasted less than a year; and in the general elections of
February 1998, the BJP emerged again as the single largest party, this time with 200 seats. Vajpayee was invited to form a government, and did so with a coalition of several parties, including the AIADMK, led by Jayalalitha. Nothing that the BJP did was so ripe with consequences as the decision to turn India into a nuclear state with a series of nuclear tests in May 1998. The coalition, not unpredictably, broke down; but the general elections of September 1999, in which the BJP again emerged as the single largest party, and the Congress had a poor showing at the polls, despite being led by Sonia Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru dynasty, were to reinforce the impression that regional parties and politics have fundamentally altered the state of Indian politics. Under Vajpayee, the BJP presided over the countrys destiny until 2004, even though it was becoming inescapably clear that the dominance of any one party is no longer a foregone conclusion and that coalition politics appears to be the way of the future. Many commentators were rightfully alarmed by various ominous developments that transpired during the BJPs years in office, such as the coercive Hinduization of the country, the inability of the state to guarantee the rights of religious minorities, and other obvious manifestations of an utter disregard for human rights, such as state-sponsored killings in Kashmir, the north-east, and elsewhere, or the oppressions unleashed upon Christians and women. On the other hand,

Vajpayee and the BJP are not only credited with having administered a crushing blow to Pakistans adventurism on the Himalayan mountain tops at Kargil, but with having spearheaded a rapid expansion of the Indian economy.

In provincial elections held in several states in late 2003, the BJP registered impressive triumphs
and the party leadership was led into thinking that, in calling for early elections, it could consolidate its gains with a magisterial showing in national elections. The BJP waged a campaign on the slogan of India Shining, trumpeting the emergence of India as a major power. However, the Indian electorate once again showed that it was not to be taken for granted, and the BJP and its allies lost to a coalition headed by the Congress party. [See Indias Moment: Elections 2004.] The Fourteenth Lok Sabha convened on 17 May 2004 and Manmohan Singh (1932-) assumed the office of the Prime Minister at the head of what is known as the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. The UPA is supported by the Left Front, a coalition of parties headed by the CPM, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

The Partition of India

The partition of India is a signal event in world history, not merely in the history of the Indian subcontinent. British rule became established in eastern India around the mid-eighteenth century, and by the early part of the nineteenth century, the British had tightened their grip over considerable portions of the country. The suppression of the Indian revolt of 1857-58 ushered in a period, which would last ninety years, when India was directly under Crown rule. Communal tensions heightened in this period, especially with the rise of nationalism in the early 20th century. Though the Indian National Congress, the premier body of nationalist opinion, was ecumenical and widely representative in some respects, Indian Muslims were encouraged, initially by the British, to forge a distinct political and cultural identity. The Muslim League arose as an organization intended to enhance the various -- political, cultural, social, economic, and religious -- interests of the Muslims. The bulk of the scholarly literature on the partition has focussed on the political processes that led to the vivisection of India, the creation of Pakistan, and the "accompanying" violence. Numerous people have attempted to establish who the "guilty" parties might have been, and how far communal thinking had made inroads into secular organizations and sensibilities. Scholarly attention has been riveted on the complex negotiations, and their minutiae, leading to partition as well as on the personalities of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Azad, Patel, and others, and a substantial body of literature also exists on the manner in which the boundaries were drawn between India and Pakistan, on the western and eastern fronts alike. (In general, however, the partition in the Punjab has received far more scholarly attention than the Bengal partition.) There has been much speculation about the role of the British in hastening the partition, and Gandhis inability to prevent it; indeed, some Hindu ideologues have even suggested that, whatever his stated opposition to the bifurcation of India on religious grounds, Gandhi is more properly viewed as the Father of Pakistan rather than the Father of the Indian nation. Whatever the "causes" of the partition, the brute facts cannot be belied: down to the present day, the partition remains the

single largest episode of the uprooting of people in modern history, as between 12 to 14 million left their home to take up residence across the border. The estimates of how many people died vary immensely, generally hovering in the 500,000 to 1.5 million range, and many scholars have settled upon the nice round figure of 1 million. There is nothing nice or comforting about this somewhat agreed-upon figure, and it is interesting as well that few scholars, if any, have bothered to furnish an account of how they came to accept any estimate that they have deemed reasonable. We know only that hundreds of thousands died: in South Asia, that is apparently the destiny of the dead, to be unknown and unaccounted for, part of an undistinguished collectivity in death as in life. In recent years, the scholarly literature has taken a different turn, becoming at once more nuanced as well as attentive to considerations previously ignored or minimized. There is greater awareness, for instance, of the manner in which women were affected by the partition and its violence, and the scholarship of several women scholars and writers in particular has focussed on the abduction of women, the agreements forged between the Governments of India and Pakistan for the recovery of these women, and the underlying assumptions -- that women could scarcely speak for themselves, that they constituted a form of exchange between men and states, that the honor and dignity of the nation was invested in its women, among others -- behind these arrangements. Earlier generations of scholars hardly bothered with oral histories, but lately there have been a number of endeavors to collect oral accounts, not only from victims but on occasion even from perpetrators. These accounts raise important questions: should the partition violence be assimilated to the broader category of genocide so widely prevalent in the twentieth century? or was the violence of the partition something very different, a kind of uncalculated frenzy? was it really a time of insanity? can the partition justly be differentiated from the bureaucratized machinery of death installed by the holocaust perpetrated against the Jews? why do we insist on speaking of the violence as merely "accompanying" the partition, as though it were almost incidental to the partition? There was a time, not long ago, when scarcely any attention was paid to the partition. Perhaps some forms of violence and trauma are better forgotten: the partition had no institutional sanction, unlike many of the genocides of the twentieth century, and the states of Pakistan and India cannot be held accountable in the same way in which one holds Germany accountable for the elimination of Europes Jews or Soviet Russia accountable for the death of millions of peasants in the name of modernization and development. It is also possible to argue that the partition theme gets displaced onto other forms of expression. But it can scarcely be denied that now, more than ever, it ha has become necessary to adopt several different approaches to the partition, taking up not only the questions covered in the more conventional historical literature - the events leading up to the partition, the ideology (indeed pathology) of communalism, and the immediate political consequences of the partition -- but also the insights offered by film, literature, memoirs, and contemporary political and cultural commentary. Of course, the consequences of partition are there to be seen: India and Pakistan continue to be embroiled in conflict, and Kashmir remains a point of contention between them. The psychic wounds of partition are less easily observed, and we have barely begun to fathom the myriad ways in which partition has altered the civilizational histories of South Asia. If the partition appeared to some to vindicate the idea of the nation-state, to others the partition might well represent the low point of

the nation-state ideology. Will the people of South Asia ever leave behind their partitioned selves? THE DEATH OF AN EMPIRE Ashis Nandy [Published in Sarai Reader, no. 2 (2002), pp. 14-21.] For a commentary, see Vinay Lal, Partitioned Selves, Partitioned Pasts, on this website.

Independence did not come to South Asia as a single, identifiable event in 1947, though that is way most South Asians like to remember it. The slow, painful process of dismantling British India began with the great Calcutta riots and ended with the genocide in Punjab. I was nine in 1946 and relatively new to Calcutta. Even at that age I could sense that the people around me had had enough of shock and trauma. First, there had been the fear of Japanese bombing in the last days of the war, which had taken my mother, my younger brother and myself to a quieter city in the nearby state of Bihar, while my father had stayed back to work at Calcutta. The bombing was nothing to write home about, but it created tremendous panic all around and there was an exodus from Calcutta. Now we were back at the city, the war was over, and freedom was round the corner. But for a small outbreak of plague in 1946, Calcutta was limping back to normal. Then there was the famine of 1942, precipitated by British war-time policies. Its memory was still fresh and Calcutta wore the scars of it. People no longer died of hunger in public view, but begging and fighting for food with street dogs near garbage bins was not uncommon. The memory of thousands of people slowly dying of hunger, without any resistance or violence, often in front of shops full of edibles, was still fresh in the minds of the Calcuttans. Most victims were peasants, many of them Muslims. They died without ransacking a single grocery, restaurant or sweetmeat shop. Whoever thought they would fight like tigers when it came to religious nationalism? A religious massacre was the last thing we were prepared for. My father was a secretary of Calcutta YMCA and we stayed in a YMCA campus that had enormous lawns. Right in front of the building was a slum of poor non-Bengali Muslims from UP and Bihar, part of the large immigrant work force that kept the Bengali city alive. Everyone used to call them upcountry Muslims then. We could look into the households in the slum from our third floor apartment windows and see housewives cooking their meals and children playing. Beyond the slum were a couple of lower-middle and middle-middle class Bengali Hindu localities and, beyond them, another large slum of upcountry Muslims, Raja Bazaar. But unlike the next-door slummodest, namelessthat slum was notorious as a den of criminals. In our slum, we used to know many of the residents by face. Some of the welfare work of the YMCA were meant for them and that also made them obsequious and friendly. As the tough negotiations for transfer of power began to heat up and communalise the political atmosphere, in front of our eyes the slum dwellers turned into active supporters of the Muslim League. They began to fly the green flag of the party and, sometimes, take out small processions accompanied by much frenzied drum beating . Many of the enthusiasts were middle aged and looked very poor and innocuous in their tattered clothes, even while shouting

aggressive, martial slogans. Their new-found politics did not change our distant but friendly social equation with them. We, the children, were not afraid of them, and when we teased them, they smiled. They would passionately shout their slogans and we the kids would reply in our tinny voices: Kanme bidi, muhme pan, Ladke lenge Pakistan. In any case, their fierce slogans seemed totally incongruous with their betel-nut chewing, easy style. On August 16, our domestic help told my mother that while walking to our place through the slum, she had seen some of the residents assembling and sharpening knives and sticks. As this was not as uncommon sight during Mohurram, she felt they were preparing for some religious procession. She did not even know that the Muslim League had declared a Direct Action Day in support of its demand for Pakistan. No one took the declaration seriously till, suddenly in late morning, before our unbelieving eyes, Calcutta exploded. Mobs that had collected in front of the slum began to beat up Hindus; in the distance we could see houses being set on fire and looted. That was my first exposure to the politics of slums in South Asia and rioting as a crucial component of that politics. The YMCA building had a high wall separating it from the middle-class Hindu localities to its right. The workers at the YMCAgardeners, guards, cooks, both Hindus and Muslims--quickly put up ladders there and brought in the frightened residents. In no time, there were about 200 families on the lawns. The main door of the building was closed. That effectively contained violence in the immediate neighbourhood. But the streets belonged to the mobs. I could see in the mobs familiar faces, now trying to look very heroic. But they also seemed to have found a chance to give petty greed a new ideological packaging and a new, a more ambitious range. They would beat up the Hindu passers-by, depriving them of their money and watches and, in one or two cases, even knifing them. The radio worsened things. Being government-controlled, it gave censored news. Though even that was fearsome, few believed what they heard. They relied on even more fearsome rumours, specially since, in other respects, the information given over the radio did not fit what they themselves were seeing. These rumours further intimidated the residents of mixed localities, and minorities began to move out of them, ghettoising the city even more. We also found the police openly partisan. Within two or three days the Hindus had organised themselves and begun to counter-attack. Earlier they were a majority but only theoretically. Thanks to the riots, they began to see themselves as part of a larger formation and, for the first time, we were treated to the spectacle of a Hindu nation emerging in Calcutta. The lower caste musclemen and the criminal elements, apart from castes with low-status vocations such as butchers, blacksmiths and fishermen, and even up-country Hindus, Sikhs and Nepali Gurkhas, previously considered social outcasts or outsiders, became the heroic protectors of middle-class, sedentary, upper-caste Bengali Hindus. What the Hindu nationalists could not do over the previous one hundred years, the Direct Action Day had done. Many years later, when I read that international wars created nations, it did not sound a clich. I knew exactly what it meant. There was a neighbourhood football club, Badurbagan Sporting Club, which occasionally used to visit the YMCA to play friendly matches with us. Usually it was football, but sometimes cricket and basketball, too. They always were a much better team and defeated us virtually every time, except in basketball. We had a natural advantage in basketball, because they did not play it much. But they were also an exceedingly friendly lot and we used to love their company. The members were mostly in their teens and they all belonged to the Hindu neighbourhood diagonally opposite our home and sandwiched between two non-Bengali-speaking Muslim

communities. The riots turned the club into a new kind of formation. They became the protectors of their community and some of them openly and proudly turned into killers. The community, too, began to look at them as self-sacrificing heroes. Such new heroes mushroomed all over Calcutta, The reprisals they visited on the Muslims was savage. We saw an old Muslim driving a horse-drawn carriage being literally stoned to death. It was a devastating experience. Even when such gory events did not take place, we were not allowed to forget the riots. I remember that for days an old woman sat every day for hours on the footpath in front of our home and cried for her son who had died in the violence. The YMCA building now had to house, on another floor, a huge number of Muslim families. Strangely, there was no hostility between the communities within the building, among either the riot victims or those serving them. My father, showed remarkable courage all through those days. A couple of times he even faced was threatened with death. Twice, he was shot at, once when he had aggressively asked the police to be firmer with the rioters. Indian police had not yet been toughened up by their encounters with militants of all hues and could still be relied upon to miss. The family, however, was traumatised. The bloodshed and the cruelty affected everyone, but above all my father and younger brother Manish. They did not eat for days and were visibly depressed. My mother proved sturdier. She cried a lot but also kept life going. On the other hand, when my father fell seriously ill after a few weeks, the doctors diagnosed the illness as induced by that depression. Ours was not the only family so affected. We were Christians and could perhaps, to that extent, take a slightly more distant, non-partisan, moral position. But our names did not give any clue to our faith and my parents used to be very nervous when we brothers walked to our school just round the corner. Later on, when I heard accounts of the riots from my friends, they sounded roughly similar. Only most of them sounded terribly partisan. They claimed on behalf of their newly-defined community, simultaneously and incongruously, that they were the worst victims as well as the clear victors in the battle of faiths. The riots would not have stopped easily in Calcutta but for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He undertook a fast unto death in one of the worse-affected localities of the city. No one thought the fast would work. Some of our elders in school were openly sarcastic. But it did work. In fact, it electrified the city. The detractors, of course, continued to say that had he not fasted, the Muslims would have been taught a tougher lesson. But even they were silenced by the turn of events. One person who moved closer to Gandhi at the time was H. S. Suhrawardy, leader of the Muslim League and Chief Minister of Bengal. In many ways, he had precipitated the riots, not perhaps because he wanted a blood bath, but because his constituency was mainly immigrant nonBengali labourers, the lower-middle classes, and the lumpen proletariat. This support-base was a potent political force but always volatile and uncontrollable, always waiting to be hijacked for violent causes. Suhrawardy had to depend on them and on his populist and demagogic skills because he was an aristocratic, Urdu-speaking Bengali leader coming from an illustrious, cultivated family that had no knowledge of the predominantly peasant community of Bengali Muslims. His credentials for being a leader of Bengali Muslims were never foolproof. Bengalis may not like this, but he had picked up some of his mobilisational strategies from the militant nationalist leader and Bengals mythic hero, Subhash Chandra Bose. My suspicion is that he wanted a controlled mayhem, to show his political power to the British authorities, the

Indian National Congress, and the Muslim League leadership. It turned out to be a full-scale massacre. Suhrawardy, however, was a man of courage. Journalist Nikhil Chakravarty once told me how, once he joined Gandhi's peace effort, Suhrawardy confronted rioting mobs unarmed and singlehanded in his distinctive patriarchal style. I remember him visiting our place once or twice to meet my father who also was a part of the peace effort. Just when the riots began to subside, came in reports of communal violence from East Bengal. Once again, rumours and hear-says made matters worse. Whatever semblance of sanity had survived the Calcutta massacre, disappeared after the stories of Noakhali and Sylhet reached other parts of eastern India. Calcutta was too tired to react, but parts of Bihar did. Looking back, Calcutta riots reconfirmed that while the poor as a class may not be prone to bigotry, urban slums are often the first to embrace compensatory or defensive ideas of a generic community offered by fanatics and demagogues. The slums are the natural bastions of people with broken community ties and nostalgic memories about faith grounded in such ties. When they develop new loyalties in the cities, there is touch desperation in these loyalties and a different kind of ardour associated with them. These new loyalties are, then, systematically endorsed by fearful, prosperous members of the same community, themselves unwilling to risk their lives, but willing to fight for their faith to the last slum dweller. The great Calcutta riots, everything said, could not match the communal carnage in Punjab. The eastern Indians were not martial enough to push things to their logical conclusion. After the first few frenzied days, the battle of faiths in Calcutta took the shape of communal riots one sees in South Asia nowadays. It became a dirty war of attrition in which the slums and the criminal gangs began to play an increasingly larger role. Stabbing an unaware member of the other community became the preferred mode of warfare. I still remember the widowed mother of two teenaged school children who were Calcutta being an impersonal, diverse city, there was lesser scope there for neighbours turning against neighbours as happened in Punjab. (Though even in Punjab, we are now finding out in the course of a study, the breakdown of neighbourhoods and communities was not complete as many previously suspected.) In Punjab, communal violence reached the interstices of the villages society, something that had happened in Bengal only in pockets, in places like Noakhali. There is now enough evidence to show that while the framework of violence in both Bengal and in Punjab was supplied by religious nationalism, it allowed enough play for various forms of anomic and psychopathic behaviour. In many instances, old foes settled scores and greedy relatives exploited their own families. Once the Punjab violence begun, all other instances of violence paled into insignificance. The violence in Bengal and Bihar were brutal, but it had taken place partly outside span of vision of the media and middle-class consciousness. The upheaval in Punjabwith its forty-mile long caravans, thousands of abducted women, spectacular self-destructiveness, and large-scale ethnic cleansingwas something for the whole world to see. Urvashi Butalia, a feminist publisher who herself belongs to an affected family, has recently described, in painful detail, instances of selfdestruction that would have done credit to hardened Samurais. Gandhis India had dominated the news channels for more than two decades during Indias struggle for freedom. Now, that freedom was being born in a blood bath that retrospectively justified the imperial theory of the likes of Winston Churchill who believed that India, left to itself, will dissolve in anarchy and violence.

On a conservative estimate, half a million died in Punjab, another half a million in Bengal; ten million were uprooted. But the victims did not find a voice in even some of the most sensitive writers of their community. In Bengal, one of the two main killing fields, there is only a defensive, nostalgic return to the idea of less violent, ecumenical East Bengal. Except in a couple of films of Ritwik Ghatak--where the tragedy is recognised but fitted in a rather pathetic, prewar version of Marxism--there has been no effort to confront the depth of the tragedy. In Pakistan, the partition is officially seen as a victory and the uprooted as mohajirs, those who have left their homeland for the sake of their faith. But even there few have actually talked of the sacrifice; it is seen as a natural by-product of the division of spoils after the demise of British India. The only person to break through the massive wall of silence and capture something of the culture of violence, particularly the element of necrophilia that had crept into it, was Saadat Hassan Manto, a writer who had been for years a script writer for popular, commercial cinema at Bombay. In his bitter, self-mocking short stories one senses the true dynamics of the tragedy the near-complete breakdown of communities and neighbourliness, the psychopathic and sadomasochistic components in the violence, and costs of violence paid not only by the victims but also by the perpetrators. In the aftermath of the carnage, the millions of ordinary people caught in the hinges of history and pushed into new and, in many ways, strange countries, acquired a new identity. The 1940s introduced into the South Asian public life a new actor, the refugeethe uprooted, partly deracinated, embittered victim who knew suffering and had seen the transience of social ties, betrayal of friends, and the worst of human depravity, his own and that of others. Politics in South Asia was never to be the same again. The South Asian refugee, like refugees everywhere, retained and transmitted to the next generation something of the personality and style of the exile. That personality and style has allowed forms of creativity of which only the psychologically homeless are capable. But they have also brought into the regions public life the shrewd, ruthless entrepreneurship of robber barons and the politics of anomie. There is almost no systematic psychological study of survival and homelessness produced by the partition in South Asia. One of the very few available is a modest Ph. D. dissertation turned into a book, Uprooting and Social Change, by an American sociologist, Stephen Keller. It suggests that those uprooted by the partition riots are not only more aggressive in their professional and public life, but also within their families. They are more distrustful of others and, having a greater sense of invulnerability, more willing to operate at the margin of law. Perhaps here lies a clue to the apparent success with which the Punjabi refugees, as compared to their Bengali and Bihari counterparts, have picked up and re-arranged the fragments of their splintered lives, in India as well as Pakistan. They seem to fulfil all the psychological preconditions of the entrepreneurial person, as psychologists like David C. McClelland used to define the personality type in the 1960s. The Bengalis in most cases had not seen the worst; for most of them, Noakhali was hearsay. The exchange of population in eastern India was a slow bleeding wound; it was not a one-time ethnic cleansing which affected each and every family. Half of the pre-Partition Hindu population still remains in Bangladesh and in West Bengal the Muslim population is now higher than what it was in pre-Partition days. On the other hand, the proportion of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistans Punjab and of Muslims in Indian Punjab is nearly zero today.

South Asia has many things to celebrate fifty-five years after its de-colonisation. Strangely enough, one of them is the reasonable amity in which religious communities have lived in the region. Pakistan cannot take much credit for that, for after 1947, there is virtually no minority left in that country. But Bangladesh and India, despite all ups and downs, have not done too badly, despite the record of the partition riots. In India, where more data are available, this is easier to demonstrate. The total number of persons killed in the country since independence is less than one-seventh of those killed in car accidents and one-twentieth of those killed urban crime in the United States during the period, a country which has one-third the population of India. Five months after the sensational destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992, by a party claiming to speak on behalf of all Hindus, the party responsible for the destruction lost eight out of the nine State assembly seats in the district in which the mosque was located. All the constituencies had a majority of Hindu voters. A recent all-India survey shows that a majority of Hindus opposed that vandalism. But South Asia still seems unprepared to face the genocide that accompanied the birth of Independent states in the region. And these memories, disowned and carefully banished, regularly return to haunt the political culture of the South Asian societies. The past can be historicised and, thus, anaesthetised. But that is no guarantee that it will not return, like Sigmund Freuds unconscious, unless the new generations of South Asians are willing to painfully work through it. Partition violence cannot read only as a record of what some people did to others, for it is the repressed record of what the South Asians did to themselves. The region will have to learn to give that violence priority over even the moment of freedom, for only by working through the memories of that violence can it acquire the right to celebrate its decolonisation. See also on MANAS: Ashis Nandy Bibliography Ashis Nandy, Colloquially: excerpts from The Defiance of Defiance and Liberation for the Victims of History: Ashis Nandy in Conversation with Vinay Lal, in Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures: The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations of Ashis Nandy, ed. Vinay Lal (Delhi: Oxford, 2000) Ashis Nandy: An Intellectual Profile

Cultural Politics of the National Flag

by Vinay Lal [Different versions published as "[The] National Flag: Status and Symbol", Hindustan Times (October 1995) and as "Idolatry of the national tricolour", Indian Express (17 January 1996).] There are certain moments in the cultural and political life of a nation when the national flag comes into prominence. Every Indian is aware that the Prime Minister unfurls the national tricolor from the ramparts of the Red Fort every Independence Day on August 15, and indeed the observance of January 26th as Republic Day goes back to 31 December 1929, when Jawaharlal Nehru hoisted the flag of the Indian National Congress, gave a call for purna swaraj, and asked

people to observe January 26 as independence day. Most recently, the cremation of Beant Singh reminded us that the honored dead are honored with the flag, and that if the national flag is attendant upon the birth of a nation, it equally accompanies in death those whose lives are construed as being symbolic of the nation. Along with the national anthem, the national flag is supremely and specially iconic of the nationstate. It is understood that the honor and integrity of the nation are captured by the flag, and as the history of every country shows, the national flag is uniquely capable of enlisting the aid of citizens, giving rise to sentiments of nationalism, and evoking the supreme sacrifice of death: in every respect, the national flag commands, not merely our respect, but our allegiance. Thus it is that last year, when the then Miss Universe, Sushmita Sen, was taken on a triumphant parade through the streets of Delhi, the manner in which her carriage displayed the national flag was found to be offensive. Attached to the back of her carriage, in direct defiance of the regulations stipulated in the Flag Code-India, the national flag appeared to have been compromised and demeaned; indeed, it appeared as though Sushmita Sen had rendered it into an item of consumption. Though Sen could, under the laws of the land, have faced fines and imprisonment, her own iconic significance, as the reigning beauty queen of the world, and as a supposed paean to the glory of modern Indian womanhood, was scarcely to be underestimated, and was shown at that moment to be hardly less than the iconic significance attached to the flag. The flag has once again come into the news. In a highly significant ruling on September 21st, the Delhi High Court directed that the Flag Code-India, which governs the use and display of the National Flag, could not be so interpreted as to prevent an ordinary citizen of India from flying in a respectful manner the National Flag from the premises of his or her business or residence. In any case, the Flag Code, ruled the Court, was not to be construed as law, and its contravention could not be enforced unless, of course, such contravention came within the purview of either the Emblem Act or the Prevention of Insult to National Honour Act. Most Indians can scarcely have been aware that they were forbidden, apparently under pain of punishment, to fly the national flag from the premises of their residential or office buildings, and it is just as unlikely that the proverbial 'man on the street' will view the judgment of the Delhi High Court as of any consequence to him. But this is no small victory for the Indian citizen, when we consider that a very significant chapter of the history of the independence movement was woven around the hard-won struggle of Indians to fly the flag of their choice. The present flag is, to a considerable degree and certainly in essence, the flag to whose design none other than Mahatma Gandhi lent his hand, and which the Congress was to adopt in 1921. Writing for Young India on 13 April 1921, two years after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Gandhi observed that the red in the flag represented Hindus, the green stood for Muslims, and that the white represented all other faiths; the spinning wheel in the middle of the flag pointed to the oppressed condition of every Indian, just as it evoked the possibility of rejuvenating every Indian household. Gandhi did not think that the matter of the national flag trifling; as he was to put it, "A flag is a necessity for all nations. Millions have died for it. It is no doubt a kind of idolatry which it would be a sin to destroy." If the Union Jack could evoke immeasurably strong sentiments in English breasts, was it not necessary that all Indians "recognize a common flag to live and to die for"?

Gandhi's flag, as it was known to English officials, was with some modifications formally adopted by the Congress in 1931 as the National Flag, and this flag in turn became the basis, with the substitution of the wheel on the capital of Asoka's Sarnath Pillar for the charkha, for the National Flag chosen by the Constituent Assembly in July 1947. In the meantime, between 1921 and 1947, a war of attrition developed between Indian nationalists and government officials over the right to fly the Gandhi or Congress flag. Indian nationalists found that hoisting the flag invariably attracted the wrath, and often the vengeance, of British officials, and usually the flag was ordered to be brought down. Only once, at Bhagalpur in 1923, did the district official assent to a rare compromise, when he consented to have the Congress flag flown alongside the Union Jack, albeit at a lower height! This invited the reprimand of the Government of India and the British Cabinet, who wished to make it clear "that in no circumstances should the Swaraj or Gandhi Flag be flown in conjunction with even below the Union Jack." The more usual response was to have men and boys who defiantly carried the Congress Flag whipped, and during the civil disobedience movement of 1930-33, boys as young as 8 years old were given 10-30 stripes each for this purported offense. A six-month long "Flag Satyagraha" in Nagpur in 1923, in which a good part of the national leadership participated, led to the withdrawal of prohibitory orders on the use of the Congress Flag. Thus, when we consider the arduous effort with which Indians established their right to fly their flag, it is all the more extraordinary, disturbing, and deplorable that, in independent India, the state should have arrogated this right to itself and turned it into a privilege. It is fitting that the judiciary should now have restored this fundamental right to Indian citizens. However, as in all matters, the ruling of the Delhi High Court cannot be construed simply as a cause for celebration. All too often, the national flag in most countries has been the pivot around which sentiments not merely of nationalism but of jingoism, hatred, and racial exclusivism have been fostered, a most telling example of which was the war against Iraq in 1991, when Americans, most of whom (the 'educated' not excepted) were unable to locate Iraq on a map, foolishly huddled around their flag. In some other countries, again most notably the United States, an offensive and extravagant patriotic sensibility leads the public to an indiscriminate and excessive display of the flag even during times of peace. One can only hope that Indians will prevail upon themselves to display a more judicious and restrained attitude towards the flag. There may also well be a time, in the very near future, when the Indian parliament and judiciary will have to deliberate in an altogether different manner on the status of the flag. Is the burning of the National Flag protected under the Constitution as an expression of free speech, or must such an act invariably be constituted as an offense punishable under law? In the cultural and political semiotics of nationhood, the National Flag is bound to occupy an increasingly important place.

Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) was the only child of

Kamla and Jawaharlal Nehru. She spent part of her childhood in Allahabad, where the Nehrus had their family residence, and part in Switzerland, where her mother Kamla convalesced from her periodic illnesses. She received her college education at Somerville College, Oxford. A famous photograph from her childhood shows her sitting by the bedside of Mahatma Gandhi, as he recovered from one of his fasts; and though she was not actively involved in the freedom struggle, she came to know the entire Indian political leadership. After India's attainment of independence, and the ascendancy of Jawaharlal Nehru, now a widower, to the office of the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi managed the official residence of her father, and accompanied him on his numerous foreign trips. Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, She had been married in 1942 to Feroze Gandhi, who 1966-77 and 1980-84. She was assassinated in rose to some eminence as a parliamentarian and 1984. politician of integrity but found himself disliked by his more famous father-in-law, but Feroze died in 1960 before he could consolidate his own political forces. In 1964, the year of her father's death, Indira Gandhi was for the first time elected to Parliament, and she was Minister of Information and Broadcasting in the government of Lal Bahadur Shastri, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack less than two years after assuming office. The numerous contenders for the position of the Prime Ministership, unable to agree among themselves, picked Indira Gandhi as a compromise candidate, and each thought that she would be easily manipulable. But Indira Gandhi showed extraordinary political skills and tenacity and elbowed the Congress dons -- Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, and others -- out of power. She held the office of the Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977. She was riding the crest of popularity after India's triumph in the war of 1971 against Pakistan, and the explosion of a nuclear device in 1974 helped to enhance her reputation among middle-class Indians as a tough and shrewd political leader. However, by 1973, Delhi and north India were rocked by demonstrations angry at high inflation, the poor state of the economy, rampant corruption, and the poor standards of living. In June 1975, the High Court of Allahabad found her guilty of using illegal practices during the last election campaign, and ordered her to vacate her seat. There were demands for her resignation. Mrs. Gandhi's response was to declare a state of emergency, under which her political foes were imprisoned, constitutional rights abrogated, and the press placed under strict censorship. Meanwhile, the younger of her two sons, Sanjay Gandhi, started to run the country as though it were his personal fiefdom, and earned the fierce hatred of many whom his policies had victimized. He ordered the removal of slum dwellings, and in an attempt to curb India's growing population, initiated a highly resented program of forced sterilization. In early 1977, confident that she had debilitated her opposition, Mrs. Gandhi called for fresh elections, and found herself trounced by a newly formed coalition of several political parties. Her Congress party lost badly

at the polls. Many declared that she was a spent force; but, three years later, she was to return as Prime Minister of India. The same year, however, her son Sanjay was killed in an airplane crash. In the second, post-Emergency, period of her Prime Ministership, Indira Gandhi was preoccupied by efforts to resolve the political problems in the state of Punjab. In her attempt to crush the secessionist movement of Sikh militants, led by Jarnail Singh Bindranwale, she ordered an assault upon the holiest Sikh shrine in Amritsar, called the "Golden Temple". It is here that Bindranwale and his armed supporters had holed up, and it is from the Golden Temple that they waged their campaign of terrorism not merely against the Government, but against moderate Sikhs and Hindus. "Operation Bluestar", waged in June 1984, led to the death of Bindranwale, and the Golden Temple was stripped clean of Sikh terrorists; however, the Golden Temple was damaged, and Mrs. Gandhi earned the undying hatred of Sikhs who bitterly resented the desacralization of their sacred space. In November of the same year, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, at her residence, by two of her own Sikh bodyguards, who claimed to be avenging the insult heaped upon the Sikh nation. Mrs. Gandhi acquired a formidable international reputation as a "statesman", and there is no doubt that she was extraordinarily skilled in politics. She was prone, like many other politicians, to thrive on slogans, and one -- Garibi Hatao, "Remove Poverty" -- became the rallying cry for one of her election campaigns. She had an authoritarian streak, and though a cultured woman, rarely tolerated dissent; and she did, in many respects, irreparable harm to Indian democracy. Apart from her infamous imposition of the internal emergency, the use of the army to resolve internal disputes greatly increased in her time; and she encouraged a culture of sycophancy and nepotism. At her death, her older son, Rajiv Gandhi, was sworn in as head of the Congress party and Prime Minister.

Rajiv Gandhi
At a Glance...

HISTORY & POLITICS

Independent India Partition of India Death of an Empire (Ashis Nandy) Partitioned Selves... Partition of IndiaBibliography Democracy & the

Indian Polity Cultural Politics of the National Flag Indira Gandhi Rajiv Gandhi Sonia Gandhi Lal Bahadur Shastri Abul Kalam Azad Sardar Patel Sweets and Cricket Bhopal Indians and the Guiness Book of Records Anti-terrorist legislation Indian History Bibliography

ANCIENT INDIA MUGHALS AND MEDIEVAL INDIA GANDHI SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS BRITISH INDIA

Rajiv Gandhi, born in 1944, served as the Prime Minister of India

CURRENT AFFAIRS

from 1984 to 1989. The first son of Indira and Feroze Gandhi, Rajiv HINDU RASHTRA attended Cambridge University, where he met and married Sonia. He was not a man of any unusual academic achievements or other distinctions, and appears to have had few ambitions until the death of his brother Sanjay in 1980. The following year, his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, appears to have induced Rajiv, an airline pilot, to enter politics. He stood successfully for election in 1981 and became a political adviser to his mother. After her assassination in 1984, Rajiv succeeded her as head of the Congress party, and was sworn in as Prime Minister of India. Rajiv, rather keen on preparing India for the twenty-first century, collected his buddies and cronies around him, and sought to increase Indian investments in modern technology. His "vision" of India, insofar as he had one, was that of a technocrat, and his policies did little to eradicate or diminish poverty and the vast inequities of power and wealth which are to be found in Indian society. Like his mother, he could not contain the political problems afflicting India, and found refuge in international entanglements and commitments. He committed the so-called Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka in an endeavor to help the government there to eradicate militants agitating for a separate Tamil homeland. His period in office was marred by scandals and allegations of corruption on so huge a scale that he undoubtedly lost the election of 1989 partly on account of the public perception that he had received "kick-backs" from a Swedish company manufacturing Bofors machine-guns. The Congress suffered an electoral defeat. His successor, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, could not hold office for very long, and Rajiv started campaigning in earnest in 1991. It was while he was on this campaign in South India that a bomb explosion took his life; even his body could not be pieced together. As he had named thousands of buildings and institutions after his mother and brother, so his wife, Sonia Gandhi, has named everything after her dead husband. Unlike his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, or even his mother, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv appears to have been singularly lacking in intellectual attainments, and his interventions in Parliamentary debates were notoriously prosaic and dull. His years in office cannot be described as having contributed in any healthy way to the political life of the nation, and the precipitous decline of the Congress party can also be attributed to his inept handling of party affairs, and the encouragement he gave to those willing to do his bidding.

Sonia Gandhi
Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. She was born Sonia Maino in 1946 near Turin, Italy, to a working-class family, and spent her childhood in that region. Her connection with India developed when she met Rajiv Gandhi, the elder son of Indira Gandhi, at a language school in Cambridge, England. They were married in 1968, and Sonia settled in India with her husband. Rajiv worked as a pilot in Indian Airlines, and only his brother Sanjays death in 1980, in a plane crash, changed the course of his life. He entered into politics, apparently with immense reluctance, a decision that is said to have made Sonia exceedingly unhappy: she is on record as having said, "For the first time, there was tension between Rajiv and me. I fought like a tigress -- for him, for us and our children, above all, for our freedom." Sonia Gandhi was seldom seen in public, and led a very "private life";

indeed, the 1984 assassination of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, did comparatively little to make her more visible. Some people thought that, in emulation of some supposed timeless Indian tradition, Sonia Gandhi preferred to remain by the sidelines, content in her roles as wife, mother, and -- to some degree -- official hostess. Her aversion to politics has been described by Tariq Ali, who recounts that Sonia is said to have stated that she would have rather seen her children beg than enter into the maelstrom of Indian political life. However, the assassination of her husband in 1991 paved the way for Sonias entry into public limelight, and senior members of the Congress party, alarmed at the partys declining popularity, sought to revive their fortunes by encouraging her to take an active part in politics. They might have thought that, once the Congress had been restored to popularity, Sonia could be marginalized. She resisted membership in the Congress, indeed the offer of the presidency of the party for several years, but eventually joined the Congress party in 1997. She became party president in 1998, thereby becoming the fifth member of the Nehru clan -- following Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi -- to hold this important post. The following year, in the general election, she was finally elected to a seat in the Lok Sabha, though the Congress suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls. While she was praised for having saved the Congress party from utter extinction, at the same time the partys continuing misfortunes through the end of 2001 were secretly, and sometimes openly, attributed to Sonia; but if she was construed as a liability, the pathetic state of the Congress party, a previous incarnation of which was the mainstay of the Indian independence movement, can be adequately judged from the fact that the Congress partys other leaders most likely thought that without her they would be condemned to complete oblivion. Sonia Gandhi was strident in her criticism of the slow investigation of the inquiry around her husbands assassination, and made no secret of her opinion that her husbands opponents and other ill-wishers were determined to keep the truth from the public. It has been argued, not without reason, that her own entry into politics might have been motivated partly by the desire to keep allegations of widespread corruption in the last few years of Rajivs prime ministership from becoming proven public facts. In the event, numerous other controversies have dogged her entry into Indian politics. Her opponents in the BJP and other Hindutva organizations, in particular, pointed to her foreign origins, and pressed forth the unsavory suggestion that a country willing to be ruled by a "foreigner", that too a woman, was evidently wanting in its masculinity and pride. Sonia acquired Indian citizenship in 1983, and questions have been raised why she took "so long" to acquire Indian citizenship. Since the Indian constitution, moreover, does not preclude people who have acquired citizenship by naturalization from holding the highest offices in the land, Sonias entry into politics became the pretext for offering the suggestion that a constitutional amendment would be required. In these controversies, as they are described, Sonia Gandhis opponents have looked exceedingly foolish and nationalistic. It is scarcely surprising that Hindu nationalists should look to the United States, which forbids its presidency to anyone not born in the country, as the example that India should emulate. One would have thought that, in this matter as in most others, the United States sets the standard not for freedom or liberality of interpretation but for jingoism and provincialism. If loyalty is in question, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 is unequivocally clear: it does not allow foreigners to acquire Indian citizenship unless they have renounced their other

allegiance. Of course, if the advocates of Hindutva are inclined to see adherents of Islam, who have been in India for over 1,000 years, as "foreigners", one should not be surprised that the same predictable and pedestrian argument should have been deployed against Sonia Gandhi. These advocates of Hindutva have invested less in India than did someone such as Annie Beasant, an Irish woman settled in India who was an ardent advocate of Indian self-rule. Had Sonia Gandhis opponents riveted on the fact that she has brought no distinct ideas, no imagination, indeed not an iota of new energy into Indian politics, they might have been more effective and less nauseating. To say this is not to gainsay the fact that as a politician, Sonia has learned the tools of the trade, and her decision in late 2002, to not host, on account of the "suffering caused to the people in several drought-affected states and in riot-hit Gujarat", the traditional part iftar party held as a mark of communal amity and friendship with Muslims during the month-long Ramzan, must be deemed at least in part as the gesture of a pragmatic politics. Whatever Sonia Gandhis eventual political fortunes, her own political presence is not calculated to breathe fresh life into Indian politics, though it may well be the training ground for the next generation of Nehrus.

Lal Bahadur Shastri Lal Bahadur Shastri (born 1904) succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister of India in
1964. Though eclipsed by such stalwarts of the Congress party as Kamaraj (the Kingmaker) and Morarji Desai, Finance Minister in Nehru's government, Shastri emerged as the consensus candidate in the midst of party warfare. He had not been in power long before he had to attend to the difficult matter of Pakistani aggression, as represented by India, along the Rann of Kutch; and though a cease-fire under the auspices of the United Nations put a temporary halt to the fighting, the scene of conflict soon shifted to the more troubled spot of Kashmir. While Pakistan claimed that a spontaneous uprising against the Indian occupation of Kashmir had taken place, India charged Pakistan with fomenting sedition inside its territory and sending armed raiders into Jammu and Kashmir from Azad Kashmir. Shastri promised to meet force with force, and by early September the second Indo-Pakistan war had commenced. Though the Indian army reached the outskirts of Lahore, Shastri agreed to withdraw Indian forces. He had always been identified with the interests of the working class and peasants since the days of his involvement with the freedom struggle, and now his popularity agree. But his triumph was short-lived: invited in January 1966 by the Russian Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, to Tashkent for a summit with General Muhammad Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan and commander of the nation's armed forces, Shastri suffered a fatal heart attack hours after signing a treaty where India and Pakistan agreed to not meddle in each other's internal affairs and "not to have recourse to force and to settle their disputes through peaceful means. Shastri's body was brought back to India, and a memorial, not far from the national memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, was built to honor him. It says, in fitting testimony to Shastri, "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" ("Honor the Soldier, Honor the Farmer"). He is, however, a largely forgotten figure, another victim of the engineering of India's social memory by Indira Gandhi and her clan.

Abul Kalam Azad

by Rahil Khan Though he remains an icon of secular nationalism in modern-day India, Azad was actually born in Mecca in 1888 and lived there till he was about seven. His father Khairuddin, a scholar-sufi originally from Calcutta, was persuaded by his Calcuttan disciples to return back to that city. Under the strict tutelage of his father, Azad continued his Islamic studies, though the young prodigy resented the restrictive and authoritarian manner in which this syllabus was taught; therefore, on his own, Azad secretly cultivated a taste for Urdu books and Persian poetry and even learnt to play the sitar. Around this time he also experienced a revulsion against the pirworship of his fathers disciples and a diminished desire to succeed his father as pir. By the time he was thirteen, Azad had become totally disillusioned with his Islamic training and found solace in the modernist writings of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. However, the rationalism of Sir Syed only ended up reinforcing the boys earlier doubts about religion and Azad fell into a period of atheism which, according to him, lasted from the age of 14 to 22. During his later teenage years he seems to have come into close contact with the Hindu revolutionaries of Bengal. A combination of brief travel to the Middle East and his Arabic reading also exposed him more deeply to the reformist ideas of Sheikh Abduh of Egypt and the uncompromising nationalism and anti-imperialism of Mustafa Kamil. After this period of spiritual homelessness, Azad, by the end of 1909, had an emotional/mystical experience that renewed his faith in religion and galvanised his personality in a dramatic way. Following this conversion, Azads career really began to take-off in 1912 with the appearance of his Urdu journal Al-Hilal. Using breathtaking language, the journal simultaneously preached pure Islam and Indian independence. Through his particular interpretation of Islam, Azad sought to bring Indian Muslims onto the platform of the freedom movement and to work in cooperation with Hindus who were already there. Despite his earlier admiration for Sir Syed, Azad was a harsh critic of the loyalist politics of Aligarh University. Contrary to what is stated in certain types of historiography in India and Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim cooperation was not something that the Maulana adopted out of expediency or after his eventual meeting with Gandhi. Though the journal was ambiguous about specific methods of cooperation and post-Independence political arrangements, Hindu-Muslim unity was a sentiment he had been partial to from very early on in his life. This is evident in his poignant 1910 essay on the broadminded Sufi saint Sarmad. However, there was a revivalist tone to Al-Hilal which critics would later say inadvertently reinforced communal consciousness among certain Muslims, even though the rhetorical devices had been used to arouse Muslims out of political lethargy. When World War I broke out in Europe, the British government, viewing the journal as seditious, expelled Azad from Bengal and placed him under internment in Ranchi for three and a half years. A few weeks after his release, he met Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi for the first time; he accepted Gandhis program of non-cooperation and became the first prominent Muslim in India to declare himself an ally of the Mahatma. The massacres at Jallianwala Bagh had set all Indians afire, but Indian Muslims too in 1920 were greatly perturbed by the British governments handling of the Turkish empire and the Khilafat during the War. In consultation with Azad, Gandhi persuaded the Congress to make the demand for the protection of the Khilafat a part of

the national demand for freedom. The overlapping relationship between the Congress and the Khilafat Conference ended up bringing Muslims in large numbers to the freedom movement. By 1921 Hindu-Muslim unity in the country seemed to be at an all-time high, and Azad was soon arrested. Yet this solidarity, while impressively achieved, proved to be a short-lived; upon his release in 1923, the country was passing through a particularly strong wave of communal rioting. In addition to other important factors, Muslims were shocked out of their reverie because of the Turkish governments move to abolish the Khilafat. The ambiguous results of the Khilafat Movement has provoked criticism from some latter-day historians over Azads attempts at fusing religion with politics. By unsystematically using Quranic arguments to support the Khilafat Movement and Hindu-Muslim cooperation, it has been suggested that Azad inadvertently cultivated identity politics among Muslims and allowed some of his ideas to be misconstrued by more communal interests. Azad came to realize that in politics he could only be guided by the general principles of his religion and his knowledge of Indian Muslim history, rather than through invoking specific textual injunctions. By this time, he was also increasingly becoming an active member on the Congress stage, and his mediating skills largely prevented a split in the party between constitutionalists like Motilal Nehru and non-cooperatists like Vallabhai Patel. Though he continued his efforts to bring various Muslim organizations in line with Congress and involved in the freedom movement, in 1928 serious differences arose between the Congress and organizations like the Muslim League and the Khilafat Conference over the Nehru report. Azad was forced to break ties with the latter two organizations. In 1930, the Congress declared complete independence as the goal of the national movement, and civil disobedience continued in vigour following Gandhis famous Salt March. Azad was imprisoned twice in a row during this period, and then released in 1936 along with the other Congress leaders. It was during these periods of imprisonment that the Maulana was able to complete the first edition of his famous Tarjuman al-Quran, his Urdu translation and commentary on the Quran. A second expanded edition was published during the 1940s. This incomplete translation and commentary would end up being his most definitive, though controversial, theological statement on how Indian Muslims could live out their religion in a religiously pluralist and politically secular environment. Hence, he articulated an Islam that was hospitable towards other forms of monotheism, especially Hinduism, and which placed emphasis on commonly held rules of righteous conduct. Though it was a landmark effort to inject a liberal ethos into Islam, the Tarjuman, unfortunately, did not have the overwhelming impact he hoped it would. The controversies that sprung up around this work, particularly from members of the ulema that were supporting him politically, dried up any inspiration in him to carry out the larger task of comprehensive religious reform and reinterpretation. Following the passing away of M.A. Ansari in 1936, Azad became the most prominent Muslim in the Congress. By 1939 he was elected President of the party, though he was not the first Muslim to occupy that position. During the thirties the Muslim League had been gaining steam under Jinnah, and given special impetus because of grievances against certain Congress elected provincial governments. Azads presidential address at the Ramgarh session of the Congress in 1940 occurred just a few days before Jinnahs historic Pakistan Resolution, and, in addition to

articulating the point of view of the nationalist Muslims, became a classic statement on Indian secularism and a refutation of the two-nations theory. Unfortunately, in addition to being caught in the cross-fire between Hindu and Muslim communalists, Azad by then had become subject to a trenchant campaign of criticism by influential Muslim political opponents. Many members of the religious and modern educated classes who earlier in his career had respected him and his religious ideas eventually turned against him because of this vilifying propaganda. Though he was capable of stirring large crowds with his brilliant oratory when called upon to do so, Azads pride and good manners kept him from publicly countering his detractors, and his intellectual and aristocratic nature kept him from reaching out directly to the Muslim masses when such an intervention was needed. Azad was imprisoned for a fifth time in 1940, following a limited campaign of civil disobedience, and released a year later. By 1942, and following the more comprehensive Quit India Movement, he, along with the other Congress leaders, was imprisoned again. Upon his release in 1946, Azad remained Congress President throughout the War years. During his presidency, he tried to encourage Congress to come to terms with certain Muslim fears and to make some concessions with the League to avoid splitting the country; but both Jinnahs singlemindedness and certain Congress mistakes prevented any settlement from occurring. The Maulana reluctantly relinquished the Congress presidency in 1946, hoping that this would open an avenue between the Congress and the League; the latter party had refused to acknowledge a Muslim presence within the former one. He kept out of the coalition government formed that year, but in 1947, at Gandhis urging, he became Minister of Education. Azad had been totally opposed to Mountbattens plan for dividing the country, but by March of that year, Partition had become an inevitability; the polarization within the interim government, formed between the Congress and the League, and the rising communal violence throughout India had become too much. Though, like Gandhi, he was forced to accept Partition, he could never reconcile himself to it and was totally heartbroken by the event and its bloody aftermath. Following Independence, he would hold the post of Minister of Education for ten years. Though he was not a particularly effective administrator, he did perform some important services such as cultivating technical, adult, and womens education, and an academy of literature, as well as opposing the ejection of English as a national language. As in earlier years, he could not project the mystical piety of, say, a Baba Farid needed to draw the Muslim and Hindu masses to him; but his belief in religious pluralism and the need for a humanistic outlook broadened even further, and he openly identified parallels between Vedantic and Sufi thought in some of his addresses. His last years were marked by sadness and loneliness, a consequence of a life lived so individualistically. Abul Kalam Azad died in 1958 of a stroke and was buried in a dignified corner in Old Delhi near the Jama Masjid. It is a great irony that, while possessing a thorough Islamic training, Azad ended up espousing a secular nationalism informed by personal religious sensibilities, while his opponent Jinnah, a modernist with a minimal religious upbringing, ended up vying for a separate Muslim state informed by purely political considerations.

Sardar Patel

Sardar Patel was one of Mohandas Gandhis closest associates, and he organized and led several satyagrahas during Indias struggle for freedom from British rule. When India achieved independence in 1947, Patel became Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, and he presided over the most difficult task facing the nascent nation-state, namely the integration of over 500 princely states into the Indian Union. Vallabhbhai Patel was born in Nadiad in present-day Gujarat in 1875. He completed his schooling in the local area and subsequently, in his 30s, he went to Britain; like many of his generation of political leaders, he qualified as a barrister. Patel returned to India around the same time as Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, on the eve of World War I, and the two met shortly thereafter. Patel joined Gandhi in representing the weavers in the dispute with millowners in Ahmedabad in 1918, and he played a pivotal role in helping to redress the grievances of peasants in Kheda district. "I will say", wrote Gandhi in his autobiography, "that without the help of Vallabhbhai Patel, we should not have won the campaign. He had a splendid [law] practice, he had his municipal work to do, but he renounced it all and threw himself in the campaign." Patel was charged in 1928 with leading the difficult satyagraha at Bardoli, where again the colonial state was attempting to exact heavy taxes from an impoverished peasantry, and he acquitted himself brilliantly. In 1931, Patel was elected President of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi reposed great confidence in him through the three decades of their friendship. Gandhis assassination on 30 January 1948 at the hands of Nathuram Godse left Patel bereft of the guidance of "Bapu", his political mentor and the "Father of the Nation". [See also Vinay Lal, "'He Ram': The Politics of Gandhi's Last Words".] Patel was immensely shaken up and his own death, in late 1950, may have been hastened by the anxiety he experienced after Gandhis death. The prevailing representations of Patel dwell almost exclusively on his political achievements, and it is not surprising that three generations of Indian school children have known Patel as the "Iron Man of India". Everyone recognized his steely determination and pragmatism, and nowhere was this more visibly on display when, as Home Minister and Minister of States, he took decisive action to consolidate the Indian Union and authorized police action to merge Hyderabad into India. It has been suggested by some people that if Patel had been placed in charge of Kashmir, a "problem" which Nehru sought to tackle himself both as Prime Minister and as Minister of External Affairs, the crisis in Kashmir would have been resolved in Indias favor a long time ago. Though a staunch Hindu, Patel had a keen appreciation of the syncretic culture of India, and he recognized that India had furnished a hospitable home to adherents of various religions over the centuries. Patel contributed very substantially to the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly, and it has not always been recognized that the protection and privileges guaranteed to minorities in the Indian Constitution under Articles 29 and 30 owe much to the vigilance of Patel. Indeed, Patel, unlike some other Hindu leaders, was insistent that the right to proselytize should be recognized as part of the right to freedom of religious worship. With respect to the position of Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious communities in India, Patel wrote that "it is up to the majority community, by its generosity, to create a sense of confidence in the minorities, and so also it will be the duty of the minority communities to forge the past . . ." His criticism of the use of violence to resolve political disputes bears a sharp contrast with the use of violence by religious extremists in India in recent years. In 1949, an idol of Lord Ram was surreptitiously

installed in the precincts of the Babri Masjid; writing to Govind Vallabh Pant, then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, on 9 January 1950, Patel encouraged him to prosecute violators of the law and perpetrators of violence. "I feel that the issue is one which should be resolved amicably," wrote Patel, "in a spirit of mutual toleration and goodwill between the two communities. . . . such matters can only be resolved peacefully if we take the willing consent of the Muslim community with us. There can be no question of resolving such disputes by force." Patel desired nothing more than that the Indian nation-state should persevere and flourish. Nehrus biographer, S. Gopal, admitted that Patels "major concern was national unity." Patel is still remembered as one of principal architects of Indian independence and one of the shapers of modern India. His devotion to the idea of the nation-state also points to the limitations of his thinking; unlike Gandhi, Patel could not think beyond the nation-state, and he was incapable of offering the critique of modernity that Gandhi pioneered. Nor did Patel have the kind of farreaching and complex views of science, industrial civilization, masculinity, or a whole host of other subjects on which Gandhi pondered for a considerable portion of his life. The characterization that has sometimes been used of Gandhi, namely that he was a doer rather than thinker, is in fact far more apposite of Patel. In recent years, Patels name has been abused and degraded by those who purport to act in his name, or who pretend that, since Patel was a staunch Hindu, he tolerated the neglect if not mistreatment of Muslims. It is true that even in his own lifetime, there were rumors, particularly at the time of partition, that Patel was not sufficiently attentive to the plight of Muslims, and that he did not do enough in his capacity as Home Minister to ensure their safety. This view rests largely on rumors and innuendoes, since Patels own writings, including his correspondence, lend little if any support to the representation of him as a Hindu communalist. Gandhi himself never believed any of these rumors and, indeed, held Patel to the highest standards. Some people even held Patel ultimately responsible for the assassination of Gandhi, and he is alleged to have not done enough to unearth the conspiracy to murder Gandhi after the initial plot of 20 January 1948, where police were able to hold Madanlal Pahwa captive, was foiled. Gandhis "love for Muslims", in the language of his most ferocious opponents, is thought, on the communalist reading, to have left the Sardar unhappy. But just how far the Hindutva appropriation of Patel, the consequences of which still remain to be unraveled, has gone can be seen in the disturbing fact that the murderous Narendra Modi, the butcher of Gujarats Muslims, is gone on public record as having described himself as the "Chote Sardar" [small Sardar]. Unless one engages in a careful, hermeneutic, and dialectic reading of Patel, the iron man who became one of the eminent followers of the preeminent practitioner and theorist of nonviolence, he too will disappear into the pantheon of martial Hindu heroes and the bottomless well of Hindutva chicanery. Introducing Terrorism Much attention has been focussed over the last two decades on the problem of terrorism, its threat to international peace and security as much as the sovereignty and integrity of nations, and its obscene repudiation of norms of civilized conduct. The supposed inexplicability and unpredictability, if not irrationality, of terrorism are prominently captured in one of the very first incidents by which it was catapulted into modern-day consciousness. On a summer day in 1972,

three commandos of the Japanese Red Army, wielding Czech submarine guns, fired at Puerto Rican passengers about to embark on an Air France flight leaving from Lod airport in Israel. These Japanese commandos, though constituting themselves into a self-proclaimed 'army', were not acting on behalf of Japan or any other nation-state, nor did they have any particular grievances against Puerto Ricans, and the aircraft might just as well have been British Airways or (the now defunct) Pan Am. It was perhaps clearly understood throughout the world that this attack at once sought to undermine Israeli territorial sovereignty and rivet the world's attention on Palestinian claims to a homeland, but what of the victims? What was to be gained, other than a symbolic and largely impotent challenge to the hegemony of Western states, by a violent communication of the view that the very presence of a person on Israeli soil constituted an endorsement of Israeli's legitimacy and therefore rendered that person liable to punishment as an 'ally' of Israel? And what kind of blow could the Japanese Red Army, sworn to opposing the nexus between the military, traditional elites, and capitalists in Japan, have dealt to the evil empire of international capitalism when ironically their very operation merely demonstrated that borders exist only to be rendered permeable and that, much as the advocates of capitalism would argue, goods respect no boundaries? The terrorist attack at Lod Airport appeared, in any case, to underline the international character of terrorism and its arbirtrainess in its mode of selecting victims. The incident signalled the emergence of a new form of conflict, the contours of which have been delineated in innumerable studies. The International Association of Chiefs of Police, at its meeting in 1974, applied a very simple definition to 'terrorism': it was described as "a purposeful human activity primarily directed toward the creation of a general climate of fear designed to influence, in ways desired by the protagonists, other human beings, and through them some course of events." The Nazis in Germany and in their acquired territories, the Indonesians in East Timor, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and other regimes were certainly engaged in "purposeful human activity" designed to create a "general climate of fear" that would render their subject populations totally subservient to the ruling orders, but terrorism has not generally been associated with entire regimes or other large collectivities on the scale of a nation-state. The inadequacy of this definition in setting out what precisely constitutes the particularity of terrorism was soon to lead to attempts at somewhat more exact distinctions. "Terrorism is the use of criminal violence to force a government to change its course of action", argues one American counter-terrorist expert, while in the view of another expert (and they are legion), terrorism is "highly visible violence directed against randomly selected civilians in an effort to generate a pervasive sense of fear and thus affect government policies." According to the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, a piece of legislation in the United Kingdom dating to 1984, "'terrorism' means the use of violence for political ends and includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear"; in a more elaborate and precise form, exhibiting the anxieties about real and imaginary foes with which nation-states are as riddled as other preceding forms of government, this definition was to appear in Title 22 of the United States Code, Secion 2656 f (d), where terrorism is said to mean "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." There are, it has been said, as many definitions of terrorism as there are terrorists, but there is certainly widespread agreement that terrorists must not be allowed to have a free hand. A special

American task force "on combatting terrorism", in its 1986 report to the Vice President of the United States, enumerated the various measures that could be taken to meet the threat of terrorism. It recommended the tightening of airport security, greater cooperation between intelligence and police agencies all over the world, the development of specially trained forces to handle incidents of terrorism, and so forth. Similarly, a report published by the U. S. Congress's Office of Technology Assessment, entitled Technology against Terrorism (1991), explains how technology is being rendered into the hand-maiden of counter-terrorist activity. Then there is 'international law', to be made use of as powerful nations see fit: most recently, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom were able to enforce, through the vehicle of the United Nations Security Council, mandatory sanctions against Libya for its alleged sponsorship of the terrorist bombing in 1988-89 of two civilian aircraft, Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772. Incidents of international terrorism, however, are quite insignificant in relation to domestic terrorism, or the terrorism in many countries that is associated with secessionist movements or guerrilla groups that aim at a radical restructuring of the society and economy of their country, and here the measures taken to contain terrorism are much less uniform, running the gamut from torture of suspected terrorists to the acknowledgment, by way of negotiation, that terrorist groups may be voicing the aspirations of a significant portion of the population. Nonetheless, most of the measures adopted fall generally under two headings: intervention of the armed forces and anti-terrorist legislation. In Peru, for example, President Fujimoro suspended constitutional government on 5 April 1992 from the point of view of providing the armed forces of the country with virtually unchecked powers to hunt out and eliminate guerrillas belonging to the Maoist Peruvian Communist Party, otherwise known as Sendero Luminoso, "The Shining Path". The use of the army in India to combat terrorism has been even more widespread: if "Operation Bluestar" (1984) was aimed at weeding out Bhindranwale and his followers in the movement for Khalistan from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, to be succeeded some years later by "Operation Night Dominance" as signifying the final endeavor to take the night back from the terrorists, and "Operation Bajrang" was launched with the intention of eliminating the problem of militancy in Assam, numerous un-named armed operations continue to remain in effect in Kashmir, Punjab, and North-east India. Despite the use of armed forces, however, it is in fact principally through legislation that the threat to terrorism has been sought to be minimized, not only in India but in other democracies as well. Democracies purportedly have an instrinsic relationship to the 'rule of law', and legislation appears to be the most consistent and least oppressive of all the measures that democracies can employ to secure themselves against threats internal and external. But is legislation intrinsically democratic? The answer to that cannot be in the affirmative, for discrimination on one or more grounds has, until quite recently in most countries, including such democracies as the United States, received the blessings of the law. As the very appeal of any legal system must necessarily reside in the promise it holds out of offering justice that transcends the contingencies of class, privilege, race, sex, and so on, even the most brutal regimes, the Nazis being a case in point, have attempted to ensure their survival, longevity, and attraction to their subjects by purporting to subscribe to the 'rule of law'. Might it not be the case that, precisely because legislation appears to be more 'democratic' a mode of equipping a nation-state with an arsenal to combat terrorism, it obfuscates its own terrorism? To entertain these and other related considerations, I propose to turn in due course to a more detailed analysis of three societies which, confronted by

the problems of terrorism, have an extensive array of anti-terrorist legislation: Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and India. Legislation to Combat Terrorism (i) General Considerations Owing to the nearly world-wide dimensions of the threat posed by terrorism, many states have recourse, should that be requisite, to anti-terrorist legislation and other counter-terrorist measures. The response in democratic countries has varied from the mere enumeration, as in Australia and New Zealand, of terrorism as a grave security risk to the creation, as in India and the United States, of special offices for the coordination of counter-terrorist activity. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act of 1979 added terrorism to espionage, sabotage, and subversion as a security risk, as did the amendment, in 1977, to the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Act (1969). These measures may well be enough in countries where terrorism has posed no immediate threat, but would scarcely have sufficed to contain the kind of terrorist movements, nourished by the ideology of anti-capitalism, that flourished in Italy, Japan, and the former West Germany, and would indeed be entirely impotent today in countries such as India and Sri Lanka, which are beset by secessionist or irredentist movements that have taken an extremely violent turn. In addition to legislative measures that states have adopted to counteract terrorism within their boundaries, there are numerous provisions in international law for the prevention and control of terrorism. Such measures have been necessitated by the fact that, as is commonly said, "terrorism knows no boundaries". Terrorists might operate from one country, be funded by a second, and strike at a third. The complexity of terrorism is underlined by the fact that although the United States has been relatively free of terrorist incidents, Americans have been the most common victims of terrorist attacks in numerous countries, and to a lesser degree this is also true of the subjects of countries in Western Europe. Domestic legislation to contain terrorism clearly cannot be of avail in these and other instances, and it is for this reason that over the last twenty years many international protocols, extending from those that stipulate how hijacking of civilian and military aircraft is to be dealt with under the law, to those that bind states to accord protection to diplomatic personnel, have become enshrined in law. Though one must undoubtedly be critical if not contemptuous of the designation by the United States and European powers of Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Syria as 'terrorist states' that must be compelled, whether by sanctions or the use of force, to follow norms of conduct to which the international community has sworn its allegiance, there can be no doubt that the problems posed by terrorism must perforce be of particular concern to democracies. Antiterrorist legislation is generally characterized by its extraordinary nature: that is, the legislation endows the state with powers not conferred under the normal law of the land, and while such legislation may not necessarily be immune from judicial review, the judiciary itself is asked to assist in the speedy prosecution of detained suspects. Most commonly this has entailed the establishment of special courts, as in India, Italy, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka, where the usual safeguards attendant upon the prosecution of suspects under the ordinary criminal law of the land might be curtailed. For instance, although the ordinary courts in India are bound to throw out evidence which has not been obtained in accordance with the country's Law of Evidence, a law so sensitive in principle to the right of suspects that even the United States

Supreme Court adverted to it with approval in its famous Miranda decision, special courts set up to try suspects on charges of terrorism are relieved of the obligation to dismiss evidence that may have been obtained by coercion, without a proper warrant, or by other means violative of the principles of due process. Thus, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, of which I shall have more to say later, even allows as admissible evidence presented in the form of audio or video cassettes (sec. 15). The introduction of extraordinary anti-terrorist legislation need not lead to suspension of habeas corpus and other fundamental rights promised in the constitution of a state. Yet, so long as the containment if not elimination of terrorism is sought by legislative measures and other acts of the state, usually strengthened executive powers, the question remains whether such legislation and other measures are not ultimately corrosive of the democratic fabric of the state and civil society. When the threat of terrorism is such that a state seeks to contain it by introducing progressively more repressive measures, or by rendering permanent legislation that was introduced purely to provide the state with temporary powers, does not the 'normalisation' of such techniques of repression bode ill for any democratic polity? To summon one instance of such 'normalisation' of extraordinary legislation, consider the case of India, which was recently taken to task by a Human Right Committee set up under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which India is a signatory. India's attorney-general was asked to explain why the National Security (Amendment) Act and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, though occasioned by an emergency, had not officially been proclaimed as emergency legislation in fulfillment of Article 4(1) of the Covenant. Moreover, if these acts were derogations from the covenant, as they appeared to be, given that they curtailed the right of assembly and sanctioned preventive detention without the right to judicial review, why were such derogations not approved by the Committee as specified by the Covenant? A different instance of such 'normalisation' is to be found in the history of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act of 1939, a measure introduced by the United Kingdom Government for a period of two years to meet the threat of IRA terrorism. Notwithstanding the act's "temporary provisions", the act was renewed annually until 1954, even though IRA terrorism had declined substantially by 1940, and was not to see a substantial resurgence until the 1960s. Though there is, then, a considerable history of anti-terrorist legislation in the twentieth century in numerous countries, India, Northern Ireland, and -- to a lesser extent -- Sri Lanka provide suitable cases for a comparative study of the political, social, historical, and legal aspects of such legislation. As is quite apparent, all three share a colonial past that is rather similar in many respects; in the case of Northern Ireland, the resolution of this past evidently has by no means been achieved, as the continuing problem of terrorism by the IRA, the INLA (the Irish National Liberation Army), and various Protestant para-military groups so vividly demonstrates. What is less obvious is that the legislation in India and Sri Lanka also partakes of the colonial past of these two countries, which in turn raises the question whether these countries may not have foreclosed their options when the decision was taken to combat terrorism through the adoption of extraordinary legislative measures. A second, and equally compelling reason, for considering India, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka in conjunction is that in all places terrorism has been fuelled by secessionism, separatism, and 'communal' hatred. Such terrorism, apart from its economic roots, has ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural dimensions that terrorism in the former West Germany and to a large extent in Italy lacked. The comparison between India and

Sri Lanka is a particularly telling one, when we contrast Sikh or Kashmiri separatism in predominantly Hindu and Hindi-speaking India with Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka, a country where the majority of the people are Buddhists, of purportedly 'Aryan' descent, and speakers of Sinhalese. On the other hand, a different historical perspective might suggest the close affinities between Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland as societies shaped and marked by an experience of plantation labor. It is to a more enlarged enumeration of the legal and political histories of antiterrorist legislation in Northern Ireland, India, and Sri Lanka to which I shall now turn. (ii) The Case of Northern Ireland The origins of extraordinary legislation to contain terrorism and other acts of violence directed against the state in Northern Ireland go back to the events of 1921, which witnessed the splintering of Ireland, the creation of the Irish Free State from twenty-six of the thirty-two counties that comprised Ireland, and the political union of six counties in Northern Ireland with England, Scotland, and Wales. To minimize the effects of the ensuing civil war, waged primarily between the forces of the Irish Free State and Irish nationalists seeking to undo the partition of Ireland, or (to put it another way) the political union of Northern Ireland with Great Britain, the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Acts were brought into force. These remained in effect from 1922 to 1940; in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, a war in which the Irish Free State proclaimed its neutrality, the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act was passed, and once it was clear that this legislation would suffice to meet the threat of separatist violence, the Special Powers Acts were allowed to lapse. In the Republic of Ireland, which succeeded the Irish Free State in 1937, terrorism posed no grave problems as it did in neighboring Northern Ireland. However, terrorists from Northern Ireland sought refuge in the Republic, and the violence in the north often threatened to spill over into the south. It is for this reason that a comprehensive set of measures designed to deal with terrorism, of which the Offences Against the State Acts constitute a major portion, were etched into the permanent law of the land in 1939. The more recent history of anti-terrorist legislation designed to alleviate the problem that terrorism in Northern Ireland poses for Britain shows a marked similarity to the history of previous legislative attempts. No sooner had the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill been introduced in Parliament on 19 July 1939 than IRA violence saw a dramatic upsurge: a hundred explosions took place over the next nine days, and this no doubt hastened the passage of the legislation, which secured the royal assent on July 28. By 1940 IRA violence had "petered out", but the Act remained in force until 1954. As one recent study of The Prevention of Terrorism Acts puts it, "the emergency had lasted approximately one year; the Act had lingered for just over fifteen -- a tour de force in legislative indulgence." Just as significantly, the legislation, which was intended to enable the authorities to curb the violence with more effective powers at their command, may have precipitated the violence. On the other hand, the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act in 1974 appears to embody a different causal relationship, for this reincarnation of the legislation can be directly attributed to two bomb explosions in Birmingham on November 21 of that year which left 21 people dead and 184 injured. Introducing the legislation in the House of Commons on November 25, the Home Secretary admitted that "the powers" that the Act proposed to confirm upon the police and the judiciary "are Draconian. In combination they are unprecedented in peacetime." He felt nonetheless that such powers were "fully justified to meet the clear and present danger". As in

1939, and here the histories most emphatically merge, the legislation was secured within a matter of days, virtually without either amendment or dissent. Despite the purportedly "temporary" nature of the Act, it was superseded by a new Act in 1976. In 1982, as a consequence of vociferous demand by the opposition, a review of the Act was carried out by Lord Jellicoe. A former head of the secret National Security Commission and one-time member of the elite Secret Armed Services, Jellicoe was scarcely likely to suggest that the government be divested of its powers, but even he was constrained to advise that the phrase "Temporary Provisions" be "removed from the title of the Act" as it "rings increasingly hollow". Only in this respect was Jellicoe's advice not followed: a new Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act came into force in 1984 and given a life of five years, subject to annual renewal. In 1989, to make the story complete, the act was again amended, and the following year it was renewed by a Parliamentary vote of 227 to 136. As this short review of the history of anti-terrorist legislation to combat terrorism in Northern Ireland suggests, such legislation is usually secured without adequate debate, much less dissent or amendment, and usually on the plea that in an emergency national security, as much as the life and property of the people, cannot be compromised. The supposed "reviews" cannot substitute for scrutiny by a standing Parliamentary committee: Jellicoe, for instance, was expressly forbidden from considering "whether or not we need the [Prevention of Terrorism] Act", and likewise Sir George Baker, given the task of carrying out a review of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1978, was provided with terms of reference which carried the acceptance "that temporary emergency powers are necessary to combat sustained terrorist violence". Purportedly of a "temporary" nature, such legislation is given a very long life, and rendered relatively immune from the kind of judicial review and parliamentary scrutiny that would have made its passage as the permanent law of the land difficult if not inconceivable. Secondly, as I have argued above, extraordinary legislation, far from having the effect of checking violence, might well have the effect of precipitating violence. The effectiveness of antiterrorist legislation can, at a more general level, be put into question. Although it is true that the passage of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Acts of 1974 and 1976 led to a decline in the number of terrorist-related incidents, acts of political violence were thereafter more carefully orchestrated. The transformation of the Metropolitan Police Bomb Squad, first established in 1971, into the Anti-terrorist Squad in 1976 indicates that the threat of terrorism could not be contained by the legislation of 1974. Indeed, between 1971 and 1984, when a new act came into being, terrorist-related incidents in Northern Ireland remained extravagantly high: 30,000 shootings, 7,831 explosions, 2,372 deaths, and almost 25,000 injuries. In further criticism of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, it can be said that it partakes of yet another kind of "legislative indulgence". Under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act [EPA] of 1973, the government already had available to it those very powers of preventive detention, summary arrest, and search without warrant with which it was subsequently empowered by the Prevention of Terrorism Act [PTA]. It has been argued that while the EPA is applicable to Northern Ireland, the PTA is directed primarily at terrorism in Great Britain; however, this obfuscates not only the significant overlapping between the two pieces of legislation, but also the consideration that the chief difference between the two resides in the fact that the EPA allows a greater license to the authorities than does the PTA, partly on the supposition that Britain with its allegedly great tradition of liberalism would never allow its

subjects to be subjected to draconian laws. Nor are EPA and PTA the only relevant pieces of legislation: The Immigration Act (1971) gave the government additional powers to prohibit the entry of suspected terrorists into the United Kingdom and likewise to exclude suspects. What justification could there have been then for the passage of legislation like the PTA which perhaps violated the fundamental postulate that new legislation is warranted only when there is demonstrable need? More significantly, we must consider that, as a consequence of the various Prevention of Terrorism Acts, what was once considered exceptional has come to be viewed as 'normal'. As one member of Parliament put it in the House of Commons debate on Lord Jellicoe's "review" of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, "the power to detain suspects for seven days, which produced a shock on both sides of the House in 1974, now hardly causes an eyelid to flutter." He spoke of the "insidious circular process in which draconian laws soften us up for similar laws which become the desired standard for further measures". The presence of extraordinary legislation, particularly over an extended period of time, not only weakens the normal law of the land, it also inures a people to the acceptance of vast powers that no democratic state should be allowed to wield with impunity. Does such legislation create conditions that, in the long run, are destructive of the fabric of a democracy, and are other options indeed foreclosed by the state's assumption of extraordinary and "draconian" powers? To help with our consideration of these questions, a brief perspective on anti-terrorist legislation in Sri Lanka and particularly India might well prove instructive. (iii) The Case of Sri Lanka Whatever abuses anti-terrorist legislation in the United Kingdom to combat terrorist-related activity in Northern Ireland may have lent itself to, these abuses are terribly compounded in the former colonies of Sri Lanka and India. As nation-states, both Sri Lanka and India are quite young: the former achieved dominion status in 1948 and became a republic in 1956, while the latter procured independence in 1947. Those 'constitutional' restraints which operate with more or less regularity in older democracies like the United States and Britain have been less rigorously observed in India, Sri Lanka, and other like countries. Both colonies had an extensive police apparatus under colonial rule, and indeed the long arm of the state was nowhere as long as in British India, where anti-terrorist legislation may have been introduced earlier than anywhere else in the world. In Sri Lanka anti-terrorist legislation is of comparatively recent vintage, having been introduced not, as is commonly supposed, in response to escalating violence originating in the demand by Tamil guerrilla groups, most notably the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for a separate Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka, but rather in an attempt to prevent the Tamil population from voicing its demands through democratic channels for an end to social and economic discrimination. Although it was not until 1983, when the Tigers under their leader Prabhakaran carried out a daring attack on an army convoy in Jaffna, that the situation was perceived to call for extraordinary legislation, emergency legislation conferring wide powers upon the government had been in effect since 1979. That year, the Sri Lanka Parliament adopted the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, as though to suggest that this act was comparable with the like-named legislation in the United Kingdom. In point of fact, as various observers have noted, the Sri Lankan law in 1979 was so fearsomely draconian that in some respects, for instance with respect to the power of the state to impose restriction orders on

suspects, it bore comparison with legislation then in force in South Africa. Where the British Prevention of Terrorism (PTA) Act allows preventive detention for only one week, the Sri Lankan PTA allows detention without the levying of charges for eighteen months; similarly, where the British PTA confers special powers only to combat "acts of terrorism", defined as "the use of violence for political ends", the Sri Lankan PTA confers powers of search, arrest, and seizure without warrant in connection with "any unlawful activity". The Sri Lankan Prevention of Terrorism Act does, in effect, confer carte blanche upon the forces of 'law and order', and indeed some of its provisions, such as the infliction of 20 years imprisonment for defacement of public notices, are nothing short of being fascist. It is not surprising that the Act also guarantees officers of the state immunity from prosecution for any action taken under the Act. Wide as are the powers that the Sri Lankan government has on account of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, this is not the only legislation of its kind in force. The Emergency (Miscellaneous Provisions and Powers) Regulations made under the Public Security Ordinance, the origins of which go back to the days of colonialism, empower the executive to arrest and detain suspects without charge, proscribe political parties, and ban publications. Regulation 15A, which dates to 3 June 1983, is susceptible to even greater abuse. This Regulation entitles police officers or other authorized persons to take possession of a dead body and determine the manner in which it is to be disposed. This Regulation was brought into force after the Jaffna Magistrate returned a verdict of homicide at the inquest into the death of K. T. Navaratnarajah, who died in army custody from numerous external and internal injuries inflicted by blows and weapons. By preventing an inquest from taking place, Regulation 15A can only encourage functionaries of the state in the belief that indiscriminate and retributory exercise of their power will remain unpunished. Sri Lankan legislation shows with greater clarity than anti-terrorist legislation in Northern Ireland and Britain how democratic norms are easily subverted on the plea that the state must be equipped to meet any emergency, especially one that appears to pose grave threats to national security. Although the Sri Lankan Prevention of Terrorism Act (1979) was promulgated while an emergency was officially in effect, and the emergency was lifted on December 27 of that year, the legislation was not removed, merely because Section 29 of the Act provided for the retention of the Act for "three years"; moreover, a subsequent amendment to the Act has given it an indefinite life. (iv) Anti-terrorist Legislation in India Far-reaching as anti-terrorist legislation in Sri Lanka is, it pales in comparison with the extraordinarily wide and, certainly for a democratic state, quite unprecedented array of powers with which the Indian government has armed itself in recent years. The pre-history of repressive legislation in India is a very complex one and remains largely unexplored; we can do little more than hint at it. To the British must go the dubious distinction of having introduced preventive detention in India as early as 1793. The East India Company Act of that year authorized the "governor of Fort William" and such other officers as he thought fit to "secur[e] and detain in custody any person or persons suspected of carrying on . . . any illicit correspondence dangerous to the peace or safety of any of the British settlement or possession in India . . ." The Company in Bengal subsequently enacted the Bengal State Prisoner's Regulation, which was to have a long life as "Regulation III of 1818". An extra-constitutional ordinance, opposed to all the fundamental liberties which the colonial state would later pretend to be bound by, Regulation III

provided for the indefinite confinement, for "reasons of State", of individuals against whom there was not "sufficient ground to institute any judicial proceeding". For the next hundred years, Regulation III was to remain the supreme weapon available to the government in its war against political violence, and its removal from the law books was to remain an insistent demand by Indian nationalists in the early part of the twentieth century. For more explicit anti-terrorist legislation going beyond preventive detention, we have to turn to the events of the twentieth century. Action by armed revolutionaries, characterized as 'extremists' and 'terrorists', with supposed links abroad inspired new and more draconian legislation between 1905-1914, and the advent of World War I served as a pretext for strengthening the forces of the state, of course in the name of 'national security'. In 1908, the government passed the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act and the Explosives Substances Act, and shortly thereafter the Indian Press Act, the Criminal Tribes Act, and the Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act. Although these pieces of legislation have not been etched into what I have called the pre-history of anti-terrorist legislation, the purported intent was to prevent 'terrorists' from calling public meetings, publishing material inciting the people to revolt, disseminating revolutionary literature, and so forth. In actual fact, as numerous studies have shown, the legislation was of such wide scope as to render suspect all political activity that was even mildly critical of the British Government of India, and it put an effective end to whatever freedom of expression the Indian press had been allowed. The exclusion from India of men harboring evil designs towards the Government of India, 'suspects' in the official vocabulary, was accomplished by the Foreigners Ordinance of 1914, which restricted the entry of foreigners into India. The 'foreign hand' theory, which is invoked with notorious monotony by the Indian state to the present day to account for the rise of secessionist and communal movements, owes its origins partially to this ordinance. Meanwhile, the Ingress into India Ordinance (1914) allowed the government to indefinitely detain and compulsorily domicile suspects, while the Defence of India Act (1915) allowed suspects to be tried by special tribunals sitting in camera whose decisions were not subject to appeal. Regulation III also continued to be available for the indefinite detention of suspects. As the Defence of India Act was to expire six months after the conclusion of the war, a new set of emergency measures for the detention and containment of 'terrorists' to meet what was termed the 'continuing threat' were planned by the Government of India. These measures were incorporated within the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, known to Indians as the Rowlatt Act after the name of the chairman of the committee that recommended the institution of this legislation. The government could not have known that the Rowlatt Act would become the occasion for the most widespread movement of opposition to British rule since the Rebellion of 1857-58 and indeed the springboard from which the movement for independence would be launched until India was to become irretrievably lost to the British. The Rowlatt Act provided for the trial of seditious crime by benches of three judges; the accused were not to have the benefit of either preliminary commitment proceedings or the right of appeal, and the rules under which evidence could be obtained and used were relaxed. Other preventive measures included detention without the levying of charges and searches without warrants. As the Rowlatt committee noted in its report, "punishment or acquittal should be speedy both in order to secure the moral effect which punishment should produce and also to prevent the prolongation of the excitement which the proceedings may set up."

The history of anti-terrorist legislation in colonial India by no means ends with the Rowlatt Act, but such of it as is here narrated suggests that much in the present legislation had already been anticipated. With the attainment of independence, there were anguished debates in the constituent assembly about whether preventive detention ought to be retained, or whether this was a measure that could not be maintained with adequate justification as the country was now no longer under the tutelage of a colonial power. With independence had come partition, and not only had extraordinary legislation -- such as the Punjab Disturbed Areas Act, Bihar Maintenance of Public Order Act, Bombay Public Safety Act, and Madras Suppression of Disturbance Act, all enacted in 1947-48 -- been required to deal with the problem of communalism, but also with "anti-social elements" who under the cover of religion had found the perfect pretext to settle old scores and commit mayhem. These were the reasons most commonly cited for the retention, both in the Constitution of India (Art. 22), and in the form of a Preventive Detention Act (1950), of preventive detention. No doubt too the colonial legacy could not be abandoned in its entirety in the first flush of freedom. The Indian state, however, has not been content with merely retaining the colonial infrastructure of repression, and indeed the last ten years have witnessed a flurry of legislation that, in many respects, is nothing short of being frightful. Terrorism in the Punjab, not all of it associated with the demand for a separate homeland for the Sikhs, has taken a toll of over 15,000 lives since 1980, and likewise there has been very heavy loss of life in Kashmir, where militants are contesting India's claim to Kashmir. Nor are these the only states where anti-terrorist legislation has been put into effect; large parts of the entire north-east are described by the government as being rife with insurrectionist activity, and Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram have all initiated legislation endowing the government with wide-ranging powers. Whatever the precise causal relationship of such legislation to the advent of terrorism, and whatever the role of Pakistan, as India claims, in fomenting political and social unrest in the Punjab and Kashmir, it is quite clear that some of India's extraordinarily repressive legislation was initiated well before insurrectionary terrorism was to make its mark. A case in point is the West Bengal (Prevention of Violent Activities) Act of 1970, which was inspired by the ambition to crush the Naxalite revolt, a movement of armed revolutionaries who sought the amelioration of socio-economic inequities through the use of violence, although one could point with even greater justification to the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (1971), a piece of legislation originating in the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and hatred between India and Pakistan that was to lead to war between the two countries in 1971. As one might expect, it is the secessionist movements of recent years that have occasioned the most forcible legislative response from the state. Nothing conveys better the extent of antiterrorist legislation in India than a mere, and by no means complete, enumeration of the acts passed with the consent of the Indian parliament over the course of the last fifteen years: Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (1978); Assam Preventive Detention Act (1980); National Security Act (1980, amended 1984 and 1987); Essential Services Maintenance Act (1981); AntiHijacking Act (1982); Armed Forces (Punjab and Chandigarh) Special Powers Act (1983); Punjab Disturbed Areas Act (1983); Chandigarh Disturbed Areas Act (1983); Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against Safety of Civil Aviation Act (1982); Terrorist Affected Areas (Special Courts) Act (1984); National Security (Second Amendment) Ordinance (1984); Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (1985, amended 1987); National Security Guard Act

(1986); Criminal Courts and Security Guard Courts Rules (1987); Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Rules (1986, amended 1987); and the Special Protection Group Act (1988). Although the intent of certain legislation is quite self-evident, as in the case of the AntiHijacking Act, which stipulates the penalties attached to the hijacking of aircraft, it is not clear what has been gained by the profusion of new legislation. Certain powers, such as those of preventive detention, search and arrest without warrant, and restriction of the movement of suspects, have long been available to the state, while the provision under the new laws for "speedy trials", were it to be open to unhampered judicial scrutiny, would be found to abrogate fundamental constitutional rights. What are the consequences for a democratic polity of such legislation and what are the abuses to which such legislation must necessarily lend itself? Such abuses have been so widely documented by civil rights groups, the People's Union for Civil Liberties and the People's Union for Democratic Rights among them, and other international bodies -- Amnesty International and Asia Watch, to name two -- that their detailed enumeration is no longer necessary. However, an analytical understanding of the issues at stake has, it appears, largely evaded us, and it is to these larger questions that I shall now turn briefly. The Place of Anti-terrorist Legislation in Democracies The purportedly temporary nature of anti-terrorist legislation is a fiction. Anti-terrorist legislation, as I hope has reasonably been shown, is more easily put in place than removed. This is as true of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Acts in England and Sri Lanka as it is of certain pieces of legislation in India. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), which was passed by the Indian Parliament on the grounds that it gave the government enhanced powers to deal with threats posed to national security owing to strained relations between India and Pakistan, remained on the law books until 1978, nearly seven years after the termination of the war with Pakistan. Moreover, by the 39th Amendment to the Constitution of India, MISA was placed in the 9th Schedule to the Constitution, thereby making it totally immune from any judicial review on the ground that it contravened the Fundamental Rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution. The history of MISA illustrates a second caveat that democracies should perhaps take heed of if they are not to be thrown in greater peril than the peril from which draconian legislation is presumed to rescue them. Legislation is designed with one intent in mind, and is often used to serve an altogether different end, and nowhere is this more true than of anti-terrorist legislation or other like legislation secured in the name of 'national security'. Thus MISA, far from curbing terrorist activity, and making India safe from its real and imagined foes, became the central piece in Mrs. Indira Gandhi's single-minded agenda to stifle all dissent, howsoever legitimate, against her authoritarian rule. MISA made India wholly unsafe, not for her purported enemies, but for Mrs. Gandhi's critics, as the two-year period of the emergency between 1975 and 1977, which saw the suspension of fundamental constitutional rights, was to show so dramatically and painfully. All laws are subject to abuse, but laws intended to be employed against terrorists are notoriously susceptible of manipulation by functionaries of the state, be they army officers, policemen, bureaucrats, or jail wardens. As the usual safeguards are put in abeyance, there is less effort to ensure that procedures are in compliance with the law, and immunity from judicial scrutiny encourages functionaries of the state to use anti-terrorist legislation to initiate personal vendettas. The problems, however, are much more serious than this. Consider, for example, the Terrorist

and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1985, otherwise known as TADA. Although the Indian Government indubitably faces violent opposition by armed militants advocating separatism, TADA has been used in areas such as Gujarat, which are not threatened by secessionist or terrorist movements, to crush legitimate, usually non-violent, political activity among students and workers. The largest number of arrests under TADA have been made, not in the Punjab or Assam, but in Gujarat. Similarly the elite Central Industrial Security Force, which was created and empowered by special legislation to protect major industrial undertakings from terrorist or otherwise violent attacks, has often been employed to suppress trade union activity. The sheer illegitimacy, and not mere abuse, of this legislation is suggested by the fact that only 434 of the 52,998 people detained under TADA by the end of 1992 were convicted. If this 0.81 percent conviction rate constitutes a severe indictment of TADA and the Indian state, what are we to think of the 0.37 percent conviction rate for TADA detenu in the Punjab, which at one time the Indian government was apt to characterize as lost to terrorism? The manner in which the passage of anti-terrorist legislation has been secured in countries that are purportedly democratic is another pointer to the 'normalisation' of such legislation. The quick, almost summary, reviews of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act in Britain, and the short debates around this act in Parliament, have already been adverted to; and more ominous still is the history of Parliamentary response to such legislation in India. The last two-year extension of TADA, in the late summer of 1993, called forth a mere 70 minutes of discussion in the Lok Sabha, and in a house with a membership of 542, no more than eight members saw fit to speak on this piece of legislation. Nor has the previous record of Parliament been any more inspiring or illustrious in this respect: to summon only two instances, the debate in August 1985 on the extension for five years of the Essential Services Maintenance Act (1980), which provides the state with vast powers to curtail the rights of striking workers when the supply of essential goods and services appears to be under threat, was conducted over a period of three hours, and elicited the participation of thirteen members of the Lok Sabha; more strikingly, only 20 members of the House were present during the 44-minute discussion on the amendment to the Indian Post Office Act, and of this body only four registered their opinions about a piece of legislation that, had the President of India not withheld his assent to the bill, would have allowed the government to tamper with the mail of Indian citizens in the name of 'national security'. When anti-terrorist legislation is 'normalised', treated just like other proposed changes and additions to the law, the consequences for democracies must be perilous. This legislation becomes fraught with hazards greater than the perils from which it is supposed to rescue the nation. Even in instances where such legislation is altogether necessary, or where action undertaken by virtue of the provisions of such legislation is warranted, the state may find that it cannot legitimate its actions. The bitter public memory of those abuses returns to haunt the state; its entitlement to public sympathy and support notwithstanding, the state finds that its legitimacy is now mistaken for illegitimacy. However, I think it is possible to take yet a more fundamental stand against anti-terrorist legislation, for the question is not only one of whether the abuses of the law can be checked, but whether legislation and other modes of repression are not inherently flawed as strategies to meet the threat of terrorism. Why is the illusion of the temporariness of anti-terrorist legislation so central, if not because any acknowledgment that the legislation is more than merely temporary is at once an admission that terrorism originates not in nothingness,

as evil designs of mad and disenchanted men, but in problems so deeply embedded in the fabric of civil society that they cannot be addressed through any means other than terrorism? The resort to anti-terrorist legislation, far from being the only just recourse available to a democratic society, might well prove to be its undoing, for it defers the moment of recognition that terrorism can never be contained, much less eliminated, until it has been addressed as an epiphenomenon of some deep-seated injustices and endemic problems. As I have suggested, anti-terrorist legislation may well precipitate violence, and that in a most insidious manner precisely because the supposed resolution of the problem carries within it the seeds of yet more destruction. In perfecting the tools of legislative repression, we succeed only in creating a more impregnable Frankenstein monster.