retained power because the opposition was too
divided to defeat her.
The most notable crisis of Indira Gandhi’s rule
occurred in the Punjab. Here, the Sikhs had
organised their own political party, the Akali Dal.
Even after partition religious and communal
antagonisms in the Punjab were a cause of con-
flict between Hindu and Sikh. Although Sikhs in
the Indian army have been conspicuously loyal, in
the 1980s extremist groups demanded the cre-
ation of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan.
Moreover, a religious fanaticism was growing
among the Sikhs in the 1980s. Indira Gandhi
made matters worse by attempting to play off the
more moderate Sikhs against the terrorists in her
efforts to secure central domination over the
state. In the end, in 1984, the killing of innocent
Hindus forced her to crack down on the extrem-
ists, who withdrew with their armed bands to a
Sikh holy place, the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
In June she ordered the assault of the Golden
Temple and, with the loss of hundreds of lives, it
was bloodily cleared. The assault provoked
outrage among the Sikh community and cost
Indira Gandhi her life: two of her Sikh body-
guards assassinated her in November 1984. A
wave of violence and murders followed, directed
against innocent Sikhs in Delhi and other Indian
cities. It was all a far cry from the days of Nehru,
who had sought to conciliate and to reduce com-
munal strife and bloodshed.
On a wave of sympathy and Hindu solidarity,
Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his mother to the pre-
miership and won a landslide victory in the
general election held in December 1984. But his
government found no solution to India’s peren-
nial problems, prominent among them ethnic–
nationalist stirrings in some of India’s troubled
states. Terrorist attacks in the Punjab eventually
caused hundreds of deaths and brought about
the imposition of emergency rule. And, despite
meeting Benazir Bhutto, Rajiv Gandhi was unable
to bridge the gap between Pakistan and India
over the Kashmir dispute. His boldest move, to
assist the Sri Lankan government to suppress
the Tamil Tigers by sending an Indian army to
the island in 1987, ended in failure when his
forces withdrew in the summer of 1989. Sri Lanka
continues to be torn by civil war. Rajiv Gandhi
and his ministers were accused of corruption, of
accepting bribes when concluding a 1986 agree-
ment with the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors.
His Congress (I) Party, meanwhile, was as heavily
divided as ever, so it came as no surprise when
it decisively lost the general election held in
November 1989.
A coalition of opposition parties assumed
control of the government under Prime Minister
Vishwanath Pratap Singh. Central and state gov-
ernment relations dominated the new govern-
ment. Kashmir erupted in what was more or less
rebellion and in 1990 suffered fierce and bloody
repression from the Indian army occupying it.
This increased tension between Pakistan and
India, now both capable of fighting with nuclear
weapons. In the south, the government has
cracked down on India’s Tamil state, which was
aiding the Tamils in Sri Lanka. At home Pratap
Singh’s efforts to assist the lower Hindu castes
through positive discrimination in government
jobs led to violent protests in 1990 by the better-
educated, higher-caste Indians, and young men
set fire to themselves. Singh’s uneasy and feuding
coalition partners in government could not
provide the consistent and stable development
policies India desperately needed.
Since the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi, India’s
party divisions have made it difficult to create
governments based on stable parliamentary ma-
jorities. The emergence of the Hindu-nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has even threatened
the cohesion of the state. Ambitious Hindu
leaders inflamed religious passions condemning
concessions to minority Muslims as a means to
power in an attempt to replace the Congress (I)
Party as the largest party in parliament. They
succeeded only too well in 1992 in stirring up
sectarian feeling. The flashpoint occurred in
December 1992 when a fanatical mob of tens of
thousands of Hindus tore down the sixteenth-
century Muslim mosque at Ayodhya. Militant BJP
leaders accused the Muslims of having desecrated
an earlier temple on the site dedicated to the
Hindu god Ram. The riots between Hindus and
Muslims, and the bloodshed that followed, were
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