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Why India Forgot a Hero - An Article From Past - In Tribute To Rajeev Goswami

RAJEEV GOSWAMI, A Delhi student, immolating himself during anti-Mandal demonstrations in 1990.

Why India forgot a hero

Author: Chandan Mitra

Date: March 1, 2004
Rajeev Goswami died unhonoured and unsung last week. Barring a few cursory references to the act that had once catapulted him to iconic status, it was a lonely death.

Those who zipped past the spaghetti junction that night are unlikely to have remembered that the AIIMS intersection in Delhi had been renamed Rajeev Chowk by riotous students in a celebration of his bravado 15 years ago.

In 1989, when he attempted self-immolation, it was an overcrowded crossing teeming with unruly pedestrians, ramshackle DTC buses, noisy three-wheelers and cars jostling for space.

Today, it is one of India's most aesthetic intersections, complete with a set of flyovers, an underpass and several pedestrian subways. The landscaping has been done with such meticulous care that it's a treat to drive through the once-dreaded AIIMS crossing, known only temporarily as Rajeev Chowk.

That is why Rajeev Goswami died unsung. India has changed so dramatically in the last 15 years that neither the cause he espoused with such violence, nor the methods his opponents employed to crush the agitation are relevant today.

I am not suggesting that everybody is feeling so good thanks to six years of NDA rule that there's no need for job seekers to be worried about the future. It is just that the entire idiom of Indian politics and society has changed so much that yesterday's heroes and villains have become today's non-entities.

So, Rajeev Goswami's death amounts to a personal tragedy but it is a social irrelevance.

I would definitely not have imagined this transformation when I paid a visit to the camp office of the Anti-Mandal agitators at the AIIMS Crossing on a sultry August night in 1989. I was then Editor of the now deceased Sunday Observer and had unleashed a vitriolic campaign against the implementation of the Mandal Report by the V P Singh government.

With front-page editorials provocatively headlined "Mandal: AIDS-infected syringe" and "Best wishes for an idealistic stir", it did not take long for the Sunday Observer to get deified by Delhi's student community.

When I went to the Camp, I found my editorials prominently displayed inside, along with copies of various sympathetic news reports that we carried about the agitation's spread to other parts of north India.

Rajeev Goswami was still convalescing in the Burns Ward of Safdarjang Hospital. A huge crowd of supporters milled around raising slogans extolling anti-Mandalism's first hero. By then several others had already made copycat self-immolation bids with varying degrees of success.

A mass movement that appeared to have got deflated three weeks after the promulgation of the Mandal order had revived with gale force. And the smug smiles on the faces of Mandal's perpetrators had metamorphosed into deep frowns.

Many uncharitable stories were floated by Mandalites regarding Goswami's motivation. It was claimed he had been paid heavily and his family assured a life of luxury in case he succumbed to his burns. Apparently, the dirty tricks department of the Congress was out to avenge V P Singh's humiliation of Rajiv Gandhi and no money was to be spared to bring the government to its knees.

Others asserted Goswami was intoxicated beyond any self-control and prodded by some people to attempt an entry into history books. Yet others said his self-immolation bid had little to do with Mandal and more to do with intra-college gang rivalry. None of this, however, washed with youngsters across the country who seemed to have been electrified by his symbolic sacrificial act.

V P Singh's Government was at sixes and sevens. Gone were the days when some of his Ministers would privately insist that anti-Mandal protests were only helping them consolidate their vote bank.

Some senior Janata Dal leaders were believed to have even said that if a few thousand died in anti-Mandal violence, it would help political polarisation and help get pro-Mandal students out on the streets to combat the upper castes.

A bloodbath that could potentially acquire civil war dimensions loomed large. But the Government was worried enough to put pressure on doctors to somehow save Rajeev Goswami's life.

V P Singh was reported to have instructed the Safdarjang Hospital authorities not to let him die under any circumstances. The few brief reports that have appeared after Goswami's death suggest that the overdose of medicines administered to ensure his life in 1989 took its toll over the years as his liver and kidneys were damaged beyond repair.

Within two years of this dramatic incident, the national agenda had changed beyond recognition. By November 1989, V P Singh was gone, briefly replaced by Chandra Shekhar.

Meanwhile, a much more significant political shift was happening in the country. L K Advani's rathyatra from Somnath to Ayodhya drew hysterical response across the country. Kamandal, the shorthand term coined by the media to represent BJP's politics, had begun to dilute Mandal.

By the time Rajiv Gandhi pulled the rug from under Chandra Shekhar's shaky feet, the Indian economy had reached its nadir. Forex reserves were enough to fund just two weeks of imports. (Today, they are $ 1 billion plus). Gold was flown out of India under the cover of darkness to provide collateral for loans advanced by the IMF with stringent conditions attached.

Punjab exploded in a renewed orgy of violence following the mindless replacement of K P S Gill by the Chandra Shekhar Government in a pathetic display of pusillanimity. Kashmir was already in the grip of militants, starting with the abduction of Rubaiya, younger daughter of V P Singh's Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.

Looking back, Rajeev Goswami's attempted suicide can be said to have been a turning point in contemporary Indian history. It marked the cusp between old politics and the new.

The outburst against the Mandal order marked the revolt of a new generation that demanded opportunities; they demanded an environment in which they could pursue their aspirations.

Advani caught that moment with his imaginative fusion of Hindutva and economic liberalisation. It was some time before the BJP would get the chance to implement its ideas, for the tragic assassination of Rajiv Gandhi half-way through the 1991 election brought Narasimha Rao to the helm to lay the foundations of the new economy, unshackled from the bondage of the Nehru-Indira license-permit regime.

Over the next decade, Mandalism was made irrelevant by India's intelligent political class that decided co-option was better than confrontation. Today, they are aggressively bidding comptetively to expand the arena of job reservations, but it doesn't evoke a reaction because there are no sarkari jobs going.

Behind the veneer of Mandal, Mammon has been unleashed on Generation Next. And as the current election campaign reveals, Bijli-Sadak-Pani has emerged as the Brahma- Vishnu-Mahesh of contemporary politics.

It is, therefore, not without some irony that Rajeev Chowk, that had been brought to a standstill by angry students who laid siege to that intersection for a fortnight, is now marked by a swank, state-of-the-art flyover complex. Rajeev Goswami's daring act now occupies only a passing footnote in history books.

Students of Delhi University today probably don't even know he was elected president of the their students' union next year with a landslide margin before returning to the oblivion from which he suddenly burst upon the national scene.

India has changed beyond recognition since 1989. And it is in the nature of catalytic agents to dissolve into the new chemical mixture. Rajeev Goswami was a catalyst who fused Mandal with Kamandal, Old Economy with New Economy, Old Politics with New Politics. It is sad but inevitable that New India doesn't want to remember him.