My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  In conclusion, I wish to reaffirm that as a writer I have the right to state my opinions and beliefs. As a free citizen of India, I have the right to be part of any peaceful dharna, demonstration, or protest march. I have the right to criticize any judgment of any court that I believe to be unjust. I have the right to make common cause with those I agree with. I hope that each time I exercise these rights I will not be dragged to court on false charges and forced to explain my actions.

  The petitioners have committed civil and criminal defamation. They ought to be investigated and prosecuted for perjury. They ought to be made to pay damages for the time they have wasted of this Apex Court by filing these false charges. Above all they ought to be made to apologize to all those citizens who are patiently awaiting the attention of the Supreme Court in more important matters.

  POSTSCRIPT: In the trial that followed, the Supreme Court asked Arundhati Roy to apologize for this affidavit. When she refused she was convicted for Contempt of Court and sentenced to one day in prison. She served the sentence in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

  Legal affidavit filed in New Delhi, April 16, 2001.

  DEMOCRACY: WHO IS SHE WHEN SHE’S AT HOME?

  Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn’t very complicated. Only that a friend of hers, Sayeeda, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died someone carved “OM” on her forehead.1

  Precisely which Hindu scripture preaches this?

  Our prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, justified this as part of the retaliation by outraged Hindus against Muslim “terrorists” who burned alive fifty-eight Hindu passengers on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra.2 Each of those who died that hideous death was someone’s brother, someone’s mother, someone’s child. Of course they were.

  Which particular verse in the Koran required that they be roasted alive?

  The more the two sides try and call attention to their religious differences by slaughtering each other, the less there is to distinguish them from one another. They worship at the same altar. They’re both apostles of the same murderous god, whoever he is. In an atmosphere so vitiated, for anybody, and in particular the prime minister, to arbitrarily decree exactly where the cycle started is malevolent and irresponsible.

  Right now we’re sipping from a poisoned chalice—a flawed democracy laced with religious fascism. Pure arsenic.

  What shall we do? What can we do?

  We have a ruling party that’s hemorrhaging. Its rhetoric against terrorism, the passing of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the saber-rattling against Pakistan (with the underlying nuclear threat), the massing of almost a million soldiers on the border on hair-trigger alert, and, most dangerous of all, the attempt to communalize and falsify school history textbooks—none of this has prevented it from being humiliated in election after election.3 Even its old party trick—the revival of the plans to replace the destroyed mosque in Ayodhya with the Ram Mandir (a Hindu Temple to Lord Ram)—didn’t quite work out.4 Desperate now, it has turned for succor to the state of Gujarat.

  Gujarat, the only major state in India to have a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, has for some years been the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political experiment. In March 2002, the initial results were put on public display.

  Within hours of the Godhra outrage, a meticulously planned pogrom was unleashed against the Muslim community. It was led from the front by the Hindu nationalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal. Officially, the number of dead is eight hundred. Independent reports put the figure as high as two thousand.5 More than 150,000 people, driven from their homes, now live in refugee camps.6 Women were stripped, gang-raped; parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children.7 Two hundred forty dargahs and one hundred eighty masjids were destroyed. In Ahmedabad, the tomb of Wali Gujarati, the founder of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in the course of a night.8 The tomb of the musician Ustad Faiyaz Ali Khan was desecrated and wreathed in burning tires.9 Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, hotels, textile mills, buses, and private cars. Tens of thousands have lost their jobs.10 A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the director general of police, the police commissioner, the chief secretary, the additional chief secretary (home) were ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did not intervene. The mob dragged Ehsan Jaffri out of his house, and dismembered him.11 Of course it’s only a coincidence that Jaffri was a trenchant critic of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, during his campaign for the Rajkot Assembly by-election in February.

  Across Gujarat, thousands of people made up the mobs. They were armed with petrol bombs, guns, knives, swords, and tridents.12 Apart from the VHP and Bajrang Dal’s usual lumpen constituency, there were Dalits and Adivasis who were brought in buses and trucks. Middle-class people participated in the looting. (On one memorable occasion a family arrived in a Mitsubishi Lancer.)13 There was a deliberate, systematic attempt to destroy the economic base of the Muslim community. The leaders of the mob had computer-generated cadastral lists marking out Muslim homes, shops, businesses, and even partnerships. They had mobile phones to coordinate the action. They had trucks loaded with thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded weeks in advance, which they used to blow up Muslim commercial establishments. They had not just police protection and police connivance but also covering fire.14

  While Gujarat burned, our prime minister was on MTV promoting his new poems.15 (Reports say cassettes have sold a hundred thousand copies.) It took him more than a month—and two vacations in the hills—to make it to Gujarat.16 When he did, shadowed by the chilling Modi, he gave a speech at the Shah Alam refugee camp.17 His mouth moved, he tried to express concern, but no real sound emerged except the mocking of the wind whistling through a burned, bloodied, broken world. Next we knew, he was bobbing around in a golf cart, striking business deals in Singapore.18

  The killers still stalk Gujarat’s streets. For weeks the lynch mob was the arbiter of the routine affairs of daily life: who can live where, who can say what, who can meet whom, and where and when. Its mandate expanded from religious affairs to property disputes, family altercations, the planning and allocation of water resources … (which is why Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan was assaulted).19 Muslim businesses have been shut down. Muslim people are not served in restaurants. Muslim children are not welcome in schools. Muslim students are too terrified to sit for their exams.20 Muslim parents live in dread that their infants might forget what they’ve been told and give themselves away by saying “Ammi!” or “Abba!” in public and invite sudden and violent death.

  Notice has been given: this is just the beginning.

  Is this the Hindu Rashtra, the Nation that we’ve all been asked to look forward to? Once the Muslims have been “shown their place,” will milk and Coca-Cola flow across the land? Once the Ram Mandir is built, will there be a shirt on every back and a roti in every belly?21 Will every tear be wiped from every eye? Can we expect an anniversary celebration next year? Or will there be someone else to hate by then? Alphabetically: Adivasis, Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Parsis, Sikhs? Those who wear jeans or speak English or those who have thick lips or curly hair? We won’t have to wait long. It’s started already. Will the established rituals continue? Will people be beheaded, dismembered, and urinated upon? Will fetuses be ripped from their mothers’ wombs and slaughtered? (What kind of depraved vision can even imagine India without the range and beauty and spectacular anarchy of all these cultures? India would become a tomb and smell like a crematorium.)

  No matter who they were, or how they were killed, each person who died in Gujarat in the weeks gone by deserves to be mourned. There have been hundreds of outraged letters to journals and newspapers asking why the “pseudo-secularists” do not condemn the burning of the Sabarmati Express in G
odhra with the same degree of outrage with which they condemn the killings in the rest of Gujarat. What they don’t seem to understand is that there is a fundamental difference between a pogrom such as the one taking place in Gujarat now and the burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. We still don’t know who exactly was responsible for the carnage in Godhra.22

  Whoever did it—whatever their political or religious persuasion—committed a terrible crime. But every independent report says the pogrom against the Muslim community in Gujarat—billed by the government as a spontaneous “reaction”—has at best been conducted under the benign gaze of the state and, at worst, with active state collusion.23 Either way, the state is criminally culpable. And the state acts in the name of its citizens. So, as a citizen, I am forced to acknowledge that I am somehow made complicit in the Gujarat pogrom. It is this that outrages me. And it is this that puts a completely different complexion on the two massacres.

  After the Gujarat massacres, at its convention in Bangalore, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the moral and cultural guild of the BJP, of which the prime minister, the home minister, and chief minister Modi himself are all members, called upon Muslims to earn the “good will” of the majority community.24

  At the meeting of the national executive of the BJP in Goa, Narendra Modi was greeted as a hero. His smirking offer to resign from the chief minister’s post was unanimously turned down.25 In a recent public speech he compared the events of the last few weeks in Gujarat to Gandhi’s Dandi March—both, according to him, significant moments in the Struggle for Freedom.

  While the parallels between contemporary India and pre-war Germany are chilling, they’re not surprising. (The founders of the RSS have, in their writings, been frank in their admiration for Hitler and his methods.)26 One difference is that here in India we don’t have a Hitler. We have, instead, a traveling extravaganza, a mobile symphonic orchestra. The hydra-headed, many-armed Sangh Parivar—the “joint family” of Hindu political and cultural organizations—with the BJP, the RSS, the VHP, and the Bajrang Dal, each playing a different instrument. Its utter genius lies in its apparent ability to be all things to all people at all times.

  The Parivar has an appropriate head for every occasion. An old versifier with rhetoric for every season. A rabble-rousing hardliner, Lal Krishna Advani, for Home Affairs; a suave one, Jaswant Singh, for Foreign Affairs; a smooth English-speaking lawyer, Arun Jaitley, to handle TV debates; a cold-blooded creature, Narendra Modi, for a chief minister; and the Bajrang Dal and the VHP, grassroots workers in charge of the physical labor that goes into the business of genocide. Finally, this many-headed extravaganza has a lizard’s tail which drops off when it’s in trouble and grows back again: a specious socialist dressed up as defense minister, whom it sends on its damage-limitation missions—wars, cyclones, genocides. They trust him to press the right buttons, hit the right note.

  The Sangh Parivar speaks in as many tongues as a whole corsage of tridents. It can say several contradictory things simultaneously. While one of its heads (the VHP) exhorts millions of its cadres to prepare for the Final Solution, its titular head (the prime minister) assures the nation that all citizens, regardless of their religion, will be treated equally. It can ban books and films and burn paintings for “insulting Indian culture.” Simultaneously, it can mortgage the equivalent of 60 percent of the entire country’s rural development budget as profit to Enron.27 It contains within itself the full spectrum of political opinion, so what would normally be a public fight between two adversarial political parties is now just a family matter. However acrimonious the quarrel, it’s always conducted in public, always resolved amicably, and the audience always goes away satisfied it’s got value for its money—anger, action, revenge, intrigue, remorse, poetry, and plenty of gore. It’s our own vernacular version of Full Spectrum Dominance.28

  But when the chips are down, really down, the squabbling heads quiet, and it becomes chillingly apparent that underneath all the clamor and the noise, a single heart beats. And an unforgiving mind with saffron-saturated tunnel vision works overtime.

  There have been pogroms in India before, every kind of pogrom—directed at particular castes, tribes, religious faiths. In 1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress Party presided over the massacre of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi, every bit as macabre as the one in Gujarat.29 At the time Rajiv Gandhi, never known for an elegant turn of phrase, said, “When a large tree falls, the earth shakes.”30 In 1985 the Congress swept the polls. On a sympathy wave! Eighteen years have gone by, and almost no one has been punished.

  Take any politically volatile issue—the nuclear tests, the Babri Masjid, the Tehelka scam, the stirring of the communal cauldron for electoral advantage—and you’ll see the Congress Party has been there before. In every case, the Congress sowed the seed and the BJP has swept in to reap the hideous harvest. So in the event that we’re called upon to vote, is there a difference between the two? The answer is a faltering but distinct yes. Here’s why: It’s true that the Congress Party has sinned, and grievously, and for decades together. But it has done by night what the BJP does by day. It has done covertly, stealthily, hypocritically, shamefacedly what the BJP does with pride. And this is an important difference.

  Whipping up communal hatred is part of the mandate of the Sangh Parivar. It has been planned for years. It has been injecting a slow-release poison directly into civil society’s bloodstream. Hundreds of RSS shakhas and Saraswati shishu mandirs across the country have been indoctrinating thousands of children and young people, stunting their minds with religious hatred and falsified history, including unfactual or wildly exaggerated accounts of the rape and pillaging of Hindu women and Hindu temples by Muslim rulers in the precolonial period. They’re no different from, and no less dangerous than, the madrassas all over Pakistan and Afghanistan that spawned the Taliban. In states like Gujarat, the police, the administration, and the political cadres at every level have been systematically penetrated.31 The whole enterprise has huge popular appeal, which it would be foolish to underestimate or misunderstand. It has a formidable religious, ideological, political, and administrative underpinning. This kind of power, this kind of reach, can only be achieved with state backing.

  Some madrassas, the Muslim equivalent of hothouses cultivating religious hatred, try and make up in frenzy and foreign funding what they lack in state support. They provide the perfect foil for Hindu communalists to dance their dance of mass paranoia and hatred. (In fact, they serve that purpose so perfectly they might just as well be working as a team.)

  Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely happen is that the majority of the Muslim community will resign itself to living in ghettos as second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil rights and no recourse to justice. What will daily life be like for them? Any little thing, an altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas at a traffic light, could turn lethal. So they will learn to keep very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep around the edges of the society in which they live. Their fear will transmit itself to other minorities. Many, particularly the young, will probably turn to militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society will be called upon to condemn them. Then President Bush’s canon will come back to us: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”32

  Those words hang frozen in time like icicles. For years to come, butchers and genocidists will fit their grisly mouths around them (“lip-sync,” filmmakers call it) in order to justify their butchery.

  Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, who has lately been feeling a little upstaged by Modi, has the lasting solution. He’s called for civil war. Isn’t that just perfect? Then Pakistan won’t need to bomb us, we can bomb ourselves. Let’s turn all of India into Kashmir. Or Bosnia. Or Palestine. Or Rwanda. Let’s all suffer forever. Let’s buy expensive guns and explosives to kill each other with. Let the British arms dealers and the American weapons manufacturers grow fat on our spilled blood.33 We could ask
the Carlyle Group—of which the Bush and bin Laden families were both shareholders—for a bulk discount.34 Maybe if things go really well, we’ll become like Afghanistan. (And look at the publicity they’ve gone and got themselves.) When all our farmlands are mined, our buildings destroyed, our infrastructure reduced to rubble, our children physically maimed and mentally wrecked, when we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out with self-manufactured hatred, maybe we can appeal to the Americans to help us out. Airdropped airline meals, anyone?

  How close we have come to self-destruction! Another step and we’ll be in free fall. And yet the government presses on. At the Goa meeting of the BJP’s national executive, the prime minister of secular, democratic India, A. B. Vajpayee, made history. He became the first Indian prime minister to cross the threshold and publicly unveil an unconscionable bigotry against Muslims, which even George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld would be embarrassed to own up to. “Wherever Muslims are,” he said, “they do not want to live peacefully.”35

  Shame on him. But if only it were just him: in the immediate aftermath of the Gujarat holocaust, confident of the success of its “experiment,” the BJP wants a snap poll. “The gentlest of people,” my friend from Baroda said to me, “the gentlest of people, in the gentlest of voices, says ‘Modi is our hero.’”

  Some of us nurtured the naive hope that the magnitude of the horror of the last few weeks would make the secular parties, however self-serving, unite in sheer outrage. On its own, the BJP does not have the mandate of the people of India. It does not have the mandate to push through the Hindutva project. We hoped that the twenty-two allies that make up the BJP-led coalition would withdraw their support. We thought, quite stupidly, that they would see that there could be no bigger test of their moral fiber, of their commitment to their avowed principles of secularism.