The Xenophile Historian

	The Road to Independence
	India Since 1948
	Pakistan and Bangladesh
	Nepal: A Communist Kingdom?
	Sri Lanka: Paradise Lost
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Whereas the previous Indian nationalists had expressed their views in ways that appealed to well-educated Indians, Gandhi gave Indian nationalism a new dimension by introducing the involvement of the masses. Drawing upon a variety of sources--the main ones being Hinduism, Christianity, and the works of Leo Tolstoy--he believed that the three most important virtues were truth, nonviolence, and self-discipline. He belonged to the Vaishya or merchant caste, but he lived an ascetic's life with almost no personal possessions so rich and poor alike would hear his message. He called his campaign Satyagraha (nonviolent non-cooperation), and it involved resisting the British in any way which did not involve violence: boycotts, civil disobedience, general strikes, hunger strikes, making homespun clothing (as opposed to buying the textiles of British factories), and even making salt from sea water (to resist the salt tax). In 1915 Gandhi returned to India and was hailed as a Mahatma (great soul or saint). He set up an ashram (retreat), gathered and trained his truth fighters, and received subsidies from wealthy contributors who sympathized with his cause.⁽¹⁾

At first Gandhi was willing to cooperate with the British, and a promise of postwar concessions was enough to guarantee Indian support of the Allied cause during World War I. However, the legislation passed after the war was far less than had been hoped for. Gandhi declared March 30, 1919 a day of national humiliation, during which all work would cease and the entire population would pray and fast. After that protests increased, occasionally turning to violence. On April 13, a British platoon surrounded and fired into a crowd of 10,000 demonstrators in Amritsar. In ten minutes the soldiers fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition, of which very little was wasted: 379 people were killed and 1,208 wounded. After the massacre Gandhi declared, "Cooperation in any shape or form with this satanic government is sinful." The popular support for Gandhi's campaign was so enthusiastic that it persuaded the British to grant one concession after another afterwards.

A few words on the other leaders in the Indian nationalist movement would be appropriate here. Leadership of the Indian National Congress alternated between two radicals: Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. Nehru (1889-1964) was an agnostic member of the Brahman caste and the son of a previous Congress leader. While he was attending college in England, the noble families of Britain entertained Nehru, but when he got back to India he was snubbed by white middle-class colonials. He met Gandhi in 1916 and the two men, despite their different backgrounds, became the best of friends. Motivated by Gandhi's emphasis on action rather than words to combat injustice, Nehru was soon thrown in jail for demonstrating; in his cell he studied Karl Marx and added socialism to his philosophy. His political education was completed one night in 1919 as he traveled on the same train as General Reginald Dyer, the leader of the troops at the Amritsar massacre. From the next sleeping compartment, Nehru overheard Dyer telling other officers that he had wanted to make the Sikh holy city "a heap of ashes" and had only held back because he "took pity on it." Nehru was deeply shocked both by this admission and by the general British approval of Dyer's action. "I realized then," Nehru later wrote, "how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes."

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945) was the son of a radical judge from Bengal. He was every bit as extreme as his predecessor Tilak; his favorite slogan was "Give me blood and I promise you freedom!" Unlike the other nationalists, who agreed to support Britain in World War II if there was progress toward independence, Bose openly favored the Axis dictators. Early in 1941, he escaped house arrest in Calcutta and made his way via Afghanistan and Russia to Germany, where he married a German and started broadcasting Nazi propaganda. He recruited 2,000 Indian prisoners of war (taken in North Africa) to form an army unit called the German Indian Legion; in Southeast Asia he formed a larger force called the Indian National Army for the Japanese. The latter was used when the Japanese invaded India in early 1944, advancing about 150 miles before it was defeated and forced back into Burma. When the British retook Rangoon in 1945, Bose fled to Tokyo and was killed in a plane crash on Taiwan.

In 1935 India was given a federal government and a measure of self-rule; that left the questions of when independence would come and what form it would take. The second question was very important. Nepal and the predominantly Buddhist areas (Bhutan, Sikkim and Sri Lanka) were made into separate states without any protests.⁽²⁾ The subcontinent's Moslem community, however, was a more difficult matter. The Hindu-Moslem unity which the British had worked hard to achieve was coming apart, as the Indian National Congress and the Moslem League alienated themselves from each other. Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), the leader of the Moslem League, called for the creation of a separate state for India's Moslems. The name he invented for it was an acronym for most of the provinces it would one day contain: P for Punjab, A for the Afghans in the Northwest Frontier region, K for Kashmir, S for Sind and the last syllable in Baluchistan. The result was Pakistan, which also means "Land of the Pure." While proposals for Pakistan's status and borders changed constantly, the creation of it became the primary goal of the Moslem League from 1940 onward. As Gandhi and the Congress campaigned under the slogan "Quit India!," the Moslems told the British to "Divide and Quit!"

As time went on, Jinnah became absolutely inflexible. At one point Gandhi even offered Jinnah leadership of the whole subcontinent if that would keep him from dividing India, but Jinnah refused, saying that the Indian people would no longer accept such a compromise. What was not known at the time was that Jinnah had a case of tuberculosis so bad that it killed him a year after independence; he kept it secret because the British would not have given him what he wanted had they known!

In 1942, as the Japanese advanced to the eastern border of India, the British government reached a political settlement with the Moslem League, but not with the Congress. Fearing mass civil disobedience, the government arrested Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders. They were released again in 1944 and negotiations resumed. June 1948 was picked as the date for independence.

The last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, arrived in February 1947 promising independence within 16 months, but the rioting between Hindus and Moslems had gotten so bad that he granted it in six. On August 15, 1947, India and Pakistan became independent nations. Because there were Hindus and Moslems in every community on the subcontinent, there was no way to partition India and Pakistan without leaving millions of people on the wrong side of the border. Soon the roads became clogged with Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing to India and Moslem refugees fleeing to Pakistan. Tragically, no attempt was made to protect these refugees, and violence spread like wildfire. Fights often broke out when groups of refugees heading in opposite directions happened to meet. Trains crossing the border were frequently attacked and arrived at their destination with all of their passengers dead. In the cities minority communities were massacred. British troops were too busy packing their bags and getting out to restore order, and native troops either looked the other way or took part in the killing. More than one million people died in 1947-48 because of the partition.

Mahatma Gandhi never gave up trying to reconcile Hindus and Moslems. From Calcutta he stopped the violence with a hunger strike, threatening to fast unto death unless peace returned. The fighting stopped in five days. Moslems feared that if he died, they would suffer a new and even more terrible bloodbath at the hands of the Hindus; Hindus did not want to be guilty of causing his death. Gandhi broke his fast and predicted that he would live to be 125. He only lived two weeks after that, though; when he announced he was going to Pakistan on a goodwill mission, a Hindu extremist assassinated him. The twentieth century's most devoted peace demonstrator became the last victim of the violence that India's partition produced.

India Since 1948

Another problem that the British had left for Nehru was the maharajahs; what was to be done with 562 princes of every personality type imaginable, ruling personal estates ranging in size from a few acres to realms larger than many European countries? There was no place for these petty monarchs in the governments of either India or Pakistan, and in the end both nations decided to buy them out: in return for giving up his land, each maharajah was offered a sizeable pension for life. Most of them agreed to this plan, but three caused trouble. Two of them, the Nawab of Junagadh (in Gujarat) and the Nizam of Hyderabad, were Moslems surrounded by Hindus on every side, and they were determined to keep their lands from becoming part of India. The Nawab fled to Pakistan when his people voted overwhelmingly to join India; it took an outright invasion of Hyderabad by the Indian army before the Nizam saw the light and gave up his sizeable state in the Deccan.

Kashmir presented the opposite problem: its population was 85% Moslem, but the maharajah was a Sikh. When he refused to join Kashmir with Pakistan, guerrilla violence by Moslem rebels began. Pakistan gave support to the rebels, India aided the Kashmir government, and soon the escalating violence drew both nations into a war over Kashmir. It ended in 1949, when a UN-meditated ceasefire divided Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani-controlled portions. Another corner of Kashmir, desolate Aksai Chin in the east, was annexed by China in 1957 so that a road could be built between the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet; this area is so remote that the Indian border patrols did not even know they had lost control of it until they discovered the nearly-completed road a year later! This dispute, coupled with India giving refuge to the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan refugees since 1959, culminated in a border war in 1962. The issues that sparked that conflict were forgotten afterwards, but Indian-Chinese relations remained so bad that India sided with the USSR in Sino-Soviet disputes, and Pakistan improved relations with China to offset whatever Indo-Soviet cooperation might produce.

Relations between India and Pakistan have not improved much either; they fought two more brush wars in 1965 and 1971 and violent incidents still take place today in Kashmir. The only issue settled by any of these conflicts was the creation of Bangladesh.

When Nehru died in 1964, his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, only lasted an ephemeral eighteen months. He was in turn succeeded by Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi.⁽⁴⁾ The main event of her first decade in office was the 1971 war with Pakistan over Bangladesh. In 1974 India surprised the world by becoming the sixth nation to explode a nuclear device. Despite that success and the resulting gain of prestige, India waited more than twenty years to build a nuclear arsenal, and then mainly because Pakistan exploded a bomb of its own in 1998.

In 1975 a judge in Allahabad, Ms. Gandhi's hometown, declared her 1971 re-election victory invalid because civil servants had illegally worked on her campaign. In response she declared a state of national emergency and arrested most of her critics. Then she implemented strong measures to boost the ailing economy and launched a mass sterilization campaign to lower the birthrate. Yet Gandhi did not have the instincts of a true dictator. In 1977 she called for new elections, and the voters kicked both Gandhi and the Congress Party out of office.

The victorious opposition (called Janata), however, was unable to run the country any better than Gandhi did, and its coalition government broke up within two years. That made it possible for Gandhi to stage a spectacular comeback in the 1980 elections.

In the early 1980s the previously apolitical Sikhs began demanding the creation of an independent Sikh state named Khalistan. In 1983 Indira Gandhi gave the police emergency powers in the Punjab. The headquarters and training center for the Sikh militants was the religion's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. In June 1984 Indian troops occupied the temple; 1,000 Sikhs were killed in the resulting battle, including the Sikh leader, Jarnall Singh Bhindranwale, and the Indians removed a stockpile of ammunition from the temple. Sikhs everywhere saw this episode as sacrilege. Four months later two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Ms. Gandhi.⁽⁵⁾ Rajiv Gandhi, a former airline pilot and Indira's eldest son, became prime minister, ruling until voted out of office in 1989.

The next two prime ministers after Rajiv Gandhi had so many problems, ranging from the economy to the Hindu-Sikh violence, that neither of them lasted for more than a year. In Kashmir, a new round of violence broke out, led by Moslem separatists. In August 1990, the government announced a plan to reserve 49.5% of all government jobs for members of the two lowest castes, the Shudras and untouchables. This attempt at affirmative action backfired when more than 100 upper-caste students protested the plan by burning themselves to death in public. Rajiv Gandhi saw this as his chance to make a comeback and campaigned for re-election in 1991. It looked like he was going to win, but in a small town near Madras, he was killed by a female Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka (a member of that island's Tamil separatist movement), who steered a bomb-laden bicycle toward Gandhi and blew both of them up in the act. Gandhi's Italian-born widow, Sonia, refused to run in his place, and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty ended. The Congress Party chose Gandhi's foreign minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, as its candidate, and the party won with 236 seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), just 20 short of a majority.

At first Rao was not expected to be anything but a transitional leader, since he had little popular support and was already seventy years old. He had the willpower, though, to make the tough decisions necessary to get India out of the grinding poverty that has marked its modern history. By this time the socialist program that they had followed since independence was a failure. To give just one example, in 1948 India's per capita income had been equal to that of South Korea, but the South Koreans had embraced capitalism wholeheartedly; by 1991 Seoul's per capita income was sixteen times higher ($5,600 vs. $350). Furthermore, there was a "brain drain" of the country's elite, as Indian doctors, engineers, scientists, etc., emigrated to English-speaking countries abroad, seeking a better life for their families. And the country's foreign debt had reached $70 billion, one of the world's highest. Rao launched a wave of sweeping reforms to give India a free economy and bring the debt under control. Inequities in the tax structure, and barriers to foreign trade/investment, were removed; the rupee was made fully convertible. Major efforts were also undertaken to improve the infrastructure and social services. At first it looked like India was going to default on payment of its foreign debt, but that was saved when the International Monetary Fund gave credits worth $4 billion in 1991, and other banks contributed twice that amount.

In Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, Hindus battled Moslems and the police over a sixteenth-century mosque that the Mogul emperor Babur had built on the birthplace of the Hindu hero Rama. In December 1992 Hindu fundamentalists succeeded in breaking through police barriers, tore down the mosque, and began to build a Hindu temple on the same site. This action led to more Hindu-Moslem clashes across the subcontinent, which killed nearly 3,000 people during the next six weeks. The same animosity also produced an escalating conflict in Kashmir, where Moslem separatists seek to end Indian rule over the province, and a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.

The 1996 elections brought more unrest to India. The Indian government had to force the people of Kashmir to vote because of boycotting from the separatist groups. Separatists protested with terrorist incidents, like the bombing of city buses in New Delhi. The elections took away the Congress Party's majority of seats in parliament, forcing Rao to resign as prime minister. The Pro-Hindu Janata Party won the most seats, but it didn't have a majority either. Consequently the next two prime ministers did not last long, both being unable to put together a working coalition. The third prime minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, took charge in March 1997; through a new agreement, the Congress Party agreed to support to his coalition.

India's social/economic woes are monumental and unlikely to be solved quickly, with hundreds of millions of people impoverished, illiterate, and increasing in numbers at an alarming rate. Nevertheless, progress in recent years has been significant, and it looks like the mass famines of the past are finally over. And unlike many countries around it, India can be thankful for a democratic government that has stood the test of time.

Pakistan and Bangladesh

In 1958 the seemingly insurmountable political and economic problems got so bad that the president proclaimed martial law. The commander of the armed forces, General Ayub Khan, ruled the country absolutely for more than ten years afterwards. His regime made some notable achievements in land and political reforms, and government assistance to East Pakistan tripled, but this did not eliminate the economic gulf between East and West Pakistan.

After the 1965 war with India, Ayub Khan was accused of "losing" Kashmir, and his popularity took a nosedive. Ayub tried to mend his fences, but his opponents were never satisfied, so he resigned in 1969. Another general, Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, became the next president.

With hindsight, one can see that the idea of Pakistan as Jinnah saw it was politically unworkable. The parts of the subcontinent with Moslem majorities were East Bengal, the entire Indus valley, the Punjab and Kashmir. There were too many Sikhs in the Punjab to consider giving all of it to Pakistan, for a start. Then there was the already mentioned trouble with Kashmir. Worst of all was the fact that East Bengal was separated from the other Moslem areas by more than 1,000 miles. The people of East Pakistan were shorter, darker, and poorer than their western countrymen. In fact, East and West Pakistan had nothing in common except Islam--they did not even speak the same language!

Tensions reached the critical point in the fall of 1970, when a devastating cyclone (Indian Ocean hurricane) slammed into the Ganges delta, killing over half a million East Pakistanis and leaving an even greater number homeless. Not long after that they held general elections. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a powerful advocate of more autonomy for East Pakistan, won by a landslide in the east, giving his party, the Awami League, a clear majority in the National Assembly. A former foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, emerged as the most popular leader in West Pakistan.

Suspecting Mujibur Rahman ("Mujib") of trying to make East Pakistan secede, Yahya postponed indefinitely the convening of the national assembly. Mujib responded with a civil disobedience campaign that turned into a full-blown independence movement by March 1971. Yahya banned the Awami League, arrested Mujib, and sent the army into East Pakistan. The army made short work of its poorly armed opponents. Nearly ten million Bengali refugees fled across the border into India, bringing stories of atrocities with them. The economic, social and health burden created by the refugees was more than India could bear. On December 3, 1971, India declared war on Pakistan; 13 days later the outmanned and outgunned West Pakistanis surrendered. Yahya ended martial law and resigned, Bhutto took his place, and East Pakistan became an independent nation called Bangladesh ("Bengal Nation").

Under Bhutto's leadership a diminished Pakistan began to rearrange its national life. Putting socialist ideas into practice, he nationalized the basic industries, insurance companies, domestically owned banks and schools and colleges. He removed the armed forces from the process of decision making, but tried to placate them by increasing the defense budget. In 1973 the National Assembly adopted the country's fifth constitution. However, the military did not appreciate its diminished role, and conservatives saw Bhutto's reforms as a threat to Islam. In response, Bhutto became more heavy-handed and authoritarian in the way he dealt with the opposition.

Nine parties united to oppose Bhutto in the 1977 general elections. When Bhutto's party won in three of the four provinces, he was accused of rigging the vote. Six weeks of demonstrations followed, which ended when Muhammad Zia-ul Haq, the army chief of staff, staged a coup and started a second period of martial law. Bhutto was imprisoned, accused of murdering a political opponent, and hanged in 1979. Zia declared himself president and started turning Pakistan into a true Islamic society. The laws of the Koran became the laws of the land, and special courts were set up to interpret strictly Islamic issues. Banking without interest appeared, and adultery, defamation, theft, and the consumption of alcohol all became serious crimes.

Pakistan was greatly affected by the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979. About 3.8 million Afghan refugees came into Pakistan, and Afghan rebels, including the notorious Taliban, used Pakistan as their base of operations. In 1980 the Afghan crisis moved US President Jimmy Carter to offer $400 million in aid to Pakistan, but Zia dismissed the offer as "peanuts."

Zia lifted martial law in 1985, though he remained in office as president. In August 1988 he died under mysterious circumstances when his plane exploded in midair. Four months later his main opponent, Benazir Bhutto (the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), was elected prime minister, becoming the first female head of state in the history of any Moslem country.

The West saw Benazir Bhutto's election as evidence that democracy had returned to Pakistan. There was much hope that she would succeed, but her first administration lasted only 20 months. Like her father, she could not compromise with her opponents, and she spent much of her time taking on every adversary (both real and potential); it must be admitted, though, that there were many opponents, since both the military and conservatives viewed her weak government with suspicion. Almost no legislation was passed as a result. There were also charges of corruption involving family members, especially her husband. The last straw was rioting between ethnic groups in Bhutto's native Sind province, which the local government was unable to stop. In August 1990 the normally ceremonial president used Article 58 of the constitution to dismiss Bhutto from office. The new government did no better, though, and in April 1993 it was also dissolved on charges of corruption. October elections gave a plurality of votes to Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, allowing her to return as prime minister.

During the 1990s, relations between India and Pakistan grew more tense, mainly because of the fighting that has gone on in the disputed Kashmir territory since 1989. Diplomatic talks broke down in January 1994, both nations closed consulate offices in each other's country, and Bhutto resumed Pakistan's nuclear weapons development program, something the United States had long opposed with sanctions. In May 1998 India responded by conducting five nuclear tests; Pakistan matched this with five nuclear tests of its own, becoming the first Moslem country with the bomb. At the time of this writing (June 1999), reports are coming out of dogfights between Indian and Pakistani warplanes over Kashmir. Because India and Pakistan do not have safeguards over their nuclear programs to match those of the west, the prospects for a nuclear war look more likely (and more frightening), than they did when the main arms race was between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Violence between rival political, religious, and ethnic groups erupted frequently within Sind Province, particularly in Karachi. More than 650 people were killed in 1994 as a result of the violence. In 1996 Bhutto's government was dismissed by President Farooq Leghari amid new allegations of corruption. The following elections brought Nawaz Sharif to power, in a clear victory for the Pakistan Muslim League. One of Sharif's first actions as prime minister was to lead the National Assembly in passing a constitutional amendment stripping the president of the power to dismiss parliament.

Since independence Bangladesh has been a basket case among nations; its people have one of the lowest per capita incomes found anywhere ($200), and floods/cyclones regularly make their lives even more miserable.⁽⁷⁾ There has also been the burden of refugees. 200,000 Burmese Moslems, known as Rohingyas, fled from the militant Buddhist government in neighboring Myanmar, and most of Bangladesh's Biharis (non-Bengali-speaking Moslems) were confined to refugee camps and treated like second-class citizens, since they were accused of siding with West Pakistan during the war of independence; not until 1993 were they allowed to leave.

Much foreign aid came in from abroad, but the political disorder got so bad that in 1975 Mujib assumed dictatorial powers, only to be killed in a coup a few months later. Five heads of state followed during the next fifteen years, the longest lived being General Hossein Mohammed Ershad, who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1982 and was ousted the same way in 1990. He was subsequently convicted and imprisoned on charges of corruption and illegal weapons possession. In February 1991 Begum Khaleda Zia, the widow of a previous head of state (Ziaur Rahman), was elected (the second female head of state in Islamic history), and the country became a parliamentary democracy again.

The next time elections took place (February 1996), a boycott led by opposition parties triggered low voter turnout and violence, and Begum Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party won by default. The opposition parties refused to recognize the results and called a general strike. This hurt Bangladesh's already strained economy, so in late March Zia agreed to resign, and allowed a caretaker government to preside over new elections. Abdur Rahman Biswas became president, and the elections, held in June, brought a shift in power to Bangladesh. The Awami League won the most votes and its leader, Sheikh Hasina (a longtime foe of Zia), was named prime minister. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, winning slightly more than one-third of the parliament's seats, formed the official opposition.

Nepal: A Communist Kingdom?

Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah became king in 1955. His reign saw more efforts, this time of a non-political nature, to open up the mountain kingdom to the outside world. Roads and regular air service linked Nepal to India and Pakistan, and they built a road over the Himalayas to Tibet. Polygamy, child marriage, and the Hindu caste system were officially abolished in 1963. Political parties were banned, however, in 1960, allowing the king to rule as an autocratic monarch with the consent of a partyless Parliament. In 1972 Mahendra died of a heart attack, and his twenty-six-year-old son, Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, has ruled since then.

The first election held in 22 years, on May 2, 1980, approved the existing system of government, but the decade that followed saw a pro-democracy movement take root. By 1990 the movement had grown strong enough that the king was persuaded to lift the ban on political parties and appoint an opposition leader as prime minister until they could hold elections the following year. When the elections took place the campaign was a battle of party icons; since only 26% of Nepal's people can read, they made posters and flags with no words on them, only the party's symbol. For example, a tree represented the Nepali Congress Party, while their rivals, the United Nepal Communist Party, used both the hammer & sickle and a red sun; other parties cluttered the field with pictures of drums, plows, ladders, books and elephants. Most voters simply turned their ballots in with a mark by their favorite party's symbol; many didn't even know the names of the parties or candidates. Out of 205 contested seats, the Nepali Congress won 110, while the communists made a strong second-place showing with 69 seats.

Nearly four years of corrupt and incompetent rule by the Nepali Congress Party angered the masses. In November 1994 they voted again, this time turning the system upside down: the communists won by a landslide. Few of the peasant voters knew they were the allies of the industrial proletariat in the class struggle against bourgeois capitalism, but they cheered for the winners in their victory celebration all the same.

This kingdom in the Himalayas is an unlikely place for communism. Tradition and tribe, not wealth, produce its social divisions. And if religion is the opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx once said, Nepalis are hard-core addicts. Yet many saw no contradiction between faith and politics; Marxist leaders went so far as to declare that "the principles of Lord Buddha are thoroughly communist."

When Man Mohan Adhikary was sworn in as prime minister, he made no move to abolish opposition parties, the monarchy or religion, the way the Chinese did in neighboring Tibet. In fact, the communists suffered from the same failings as their Congress Party rivals. In 1996 the Parliament dissolved the Communist government, and Adhikary resigned under allegations of corruption. The king swore in Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress Party as the next prime minister. Stability continued to falter, however, when in 1997 Sher Bahadur Deuba unexpectedly lost a vote of confidence and was also forced to resign. King Birendra named Lakendra Bahadur Chand, a member of the pro-royal National Democratic Party, as prime minister; Chand was backed by a royal-Communist coalition in which the Communist Party of Nepal had the majority of seats in parliament. Thus the sun did not scorch the tree very fiercely.

In the 1990s, ethnic tensions in neighboring Bhutan forced many Nepalis, who have lived in southwestern Bhutan for several decades, to flee the country. Nearly 86,000 Nepali refugees from Bhutan now live in camps in eastern Nepal. Talks between Nepal and Bhutan about the Nepali migrants resumed in 1993 after several unsuccessful attempts to reach an agreement. Bhutan insists that the migrants are being incited to leave the country by small Nepali groups seeking a greater share in Bhutan's political system. Nepali-dominated underground political groups have launched a campaign to destabilize Bhutan's prosperous southern districts to gain greater power and privileges for the Nepali there.

Sri Lanka: Paradise Lost

Trouble began in the early 1950s when the falling price of rubber, the growing population and rising cost of imported food created an unfavorable trade balance. Then the UNP showed its weakness in that it only represented the interests of the wealthiest part of the population. To the masses, the ideals of the elite appeared irrelevant or downright incomprehensible, and they were disturbed at how the government neglected the traditional language, religion, and culture. In the 1956 elections a new Sinhalese nationalism arose, and it found a champion in Solomon W. R. D. Bandaranaike. The UNP was swept out of office, the nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) took its place, and Bandaranaike became prime minister. His first piece of legislation, the "Sinhala Only" bill, made Sinhalese the only official language. The state replaced capitalism with a form of socialism, and a Buddhist revival was encouraged. English-speaking Tamils in the government lost their jobs. The result of all this was that the ancient Sinhalese-Tamil rivalry, long suppressed by centuries of European domination, now came to the surface again. In 1958 language riots flared up in Columbo and other cities. A survivor of those riots was a four-year-old boy who watched in horror as Sinhalese demonstrators tortured his uncle and burned him to death. That child, Velupillai Prabhakaran, would grow up to create a militant separatist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in 1972.

Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1959, and in the following year his widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, reorganized the SLFP. Madame Bandaranaike became prime minister⁽⁸⁾, and her husband's policy of nationalizing various parts of the economy continued.

In the mid-1960s, language and religion declined as political issues, and an economic crisis caused by the failure of state enterprise made people look back to the UNP. The 1965 elections returned the UNP to power under Dudley Shelton Senanayake, the son of the first prime minister. However, his program of economic development did not solve the problems of unemployment and food shortages, and the voters remained as dissatisfied as ever. In 1970 a leftist coalition won a landslide victory, and Madame Bandaranaike returned to steer the nation down the socialist road again. In March 1971 a brief but violent revolt by a Marxist Sinhalese group called the People's Liberation Front took place; it was suppressed in six months. Then Bandaranaike launched a new round of reforms, the chief ones being a new constitution and the changing of the island's name.⁽⁹⁾

Nevertheless, they could not stop the continuing economic decline. As the regime gained more power and wealth, patronage, nepotism, and corruption increased geometrically. By 1977, one seventh of the entire work force was unemployed. Bandaranaike was voted out of office, and later, when news of the corruption came out, she was barred from voting or running for public office until 1988. The UNP candidate, Junius P. Jayawardene, became the next prime minister.

The Jayawardene government had some initial success in reviving the economy; one of its innovations was a free trade zone just north of Columbo, to attract international commerce. Still, the ethnic violence gradually got worse. Open warfare broke out in 1983, when Prabhakaran and thirteen of his Tiger guerrillas attacked an army convoy, killing thirteen soldiers. The news of that incident sparked a five-day riot across the island, in which more than 1,000 Tamils lost their lives and 100,000 Tamils lost their homes to arson and plundering. After this many formerly moderate Tamils became militant separatists. The LTTE's members now became the toughest guerrillas in recent history, ruthlessly crushing other Tamil groups (both moderate and militant) to keep their place in the forefront of the rebellion.⁽¹⁰⁾ They also gained support from the 50 million Tamils living on the Indian mainland, and the Indian government even airlifted 22 tons of humanitarian aid to the militants.

In July 1987, Jayawardene and India's Rajiv Gandhi met and signed an accord that promised to end the crisis. The agreement promised amnesty for Tamil militants, autonomy for two Tamil-inhabited provinces, and put the Tamil language on an equal footing with Sinhalese. India sent 7,000 Indian soldiers to keep the peace. It was a reasonable agreement, and the government tried to keep its part of the bargain, but before long the situation turned ugly again. The Sinhalese feared the Indian troops as an occupation force from an expansionist power, and Sinhalese politicians gained votes by championing anti-Indianism. The LTTE rejected the accord, saying that it had not been consulted before agreement was reached, and began attacking the Indians. Jayawardene retired in 1988, and his UNP successor, Ranasinghe Premadasa, got elected in a rare show of Tamil-Sinhalese unity by promising to get the Indians off the island. By March 1990 the last Indian troops had gone home.

With the Indians gone, peace talks collapsed, and the civil war began again. Tamil civilians fled across the straits to the Indian mainland at a rate that reached 1,000 a day, and both sides called the conflict a battle to the death. Premadasa played the role of a strong and ruthless leader; he suppressed a radical Sinhalese group in the south and led an unrelenting drive against the Tamil rebels in the north and east. Between battles he found time for economic liberalization and special programs for the poor.

On April 23, 1993, President Premadasa's most prominent opponent within the UNP, Lalith Athulathmudali, was gunned down in Columbo; eight days later, Premadasa was blown up by a suicide bomber during a rally in Columbo. The LTTE was blamed widely for the tragedies, but it denied all such allegations.

In 1994 new elections were held and 17 years of UNP rule ended; the voters elected the People's Alliance (PA), a nine-party coalition, led by Chandrika Kumaratunga, the 48-year-old daughter of Solomon and Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Like Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto and Bangladesh's Begum Khaleda Zia, she is the survivor of political killing; not only was her father assassinated in 1959, as mentioned above, but her husband, a film star turned politician, was also murdered (1988). This experience with violence made Kumaratunga campaign on a promise to be a peacemaker. Sure enough, immediately after being sworn in, she opened up negotiations with the LTTE to end the war which had killed 42,000 Sri Lankans (32,000 since 1990).

The Tamil Tigers were willing to talk, since government forces had them on the run; in 1995 the army overran their stronghold in the Jaffna peninsula. Growing more desperate, they resorted to one of terrorism's most lethal weapons: suicide bombers. From August 1995 to February 1996 they made four deadly attacks. The last one was the bloodiest; assassins drove a truckload of explosives into Columbo's central bank, killing 76 people and injuring more than 1,400. Just before the bombing, President Kumaratunga offered more power to the local governments. No Sinhalese leader has ever gone so far to meet Tamil demands. But the violent Tamil response shows that sweet reason seldom ends ethnic wars.

Now that the Sri Lankan war--largely ignored by the rest of the world--may be winding down, signs of an improving economy have appeared. The deficit is shrinking, the tea crop has recovered, and in 1993 a bumper harvest allowed the country to stop importing rice. Foreign investment has increased significantly, especially in the hotel and banking sectors. Still, the country's problems are far from being solved. Military expenditures still absorb about 20% of the budget, and unemployment and inflation remain uncomfortably high (both are running between 11 and 13%). And since the peace talks started, 75,000 refugees have returned from India, adding to the social and political unrest that already exists. It looks like many more years will go by before the island can claim to be the paradise that attracted tourists and immigrants in the past.⁽¹¹⁾

2. India voted to annex Sikkim in 1975.

3. Those five principles were peaceful coexistence, respect for other nations' territory and sovreignty, nonaggression, noninterference in other nations' affairs, and equality between nations.

4. No relation to Mahatma Gandhi; she just happened to have a husband with the same last name.

5. Sporadic fighting between Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab went on until 1993, when the Sikh separatists ran out of popular support and tempers cooled on both sides.

6. The western half of Jinnah's state survived, to be exact. Read on to see what happened to the east.

7. An April 1991 cyclone killed 139,000 and left 10 million homeless.

8. You may want to note that Madame Bandaranaike was the first elected female head of state in any nation's history.

9. Before 1972, Sri Lanka called itself by its British name, Ceylon.

10. The LTTE guerrillas are also ruthless to themselves; they habitually wear a cyanide capsule on a cord around their neck to commit suicide with if captured.

11. The most famous of those immigrants is the British-born science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball