Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd First published in India by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited, in 2019

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  Westland, the Westland logo, Context and the Context logo, are the trademarksof Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

  Copyright © K.S. Komireddi, 2019

  K.S. Komireddi asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved

  For sale only within the territories of India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Any circulation of this edition outside these countries is strictly prohibited and unauthorised.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 9789387894969

  To my mother

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Prologue Rupture

  Part One ANTECEDENTS

  1 Erosion

  2 Surrender

  3 Decadence

  4 Dissolution

  Part Two INDIA UNDER MODI

  5 Cult

  6 Chaos

  7 Terror

  8 Vanity

  9 Seizure

  10 Disunion

  Coda Reclamation

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  It would be a boon to democracy if one of the great nations of the world … proves that it is possible to provide a good living for everyone without surrendering to a dictatorship of either the ‘right’ or ‘left’ … India is a tremendous force for peace and non-violence, at home and abroad. It is a land where the idealist and the intellectual are yet respected. We should want to help India preserve her soul and thus help to save our own.

  —Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, 1959

  Prologue

  Rupture

  We noticed nothing as we went,

  A straggling crowd of little hope,

  Ignoring what the thunder meant …

  —Nissim Ezekiel

  Saare jahaan se achhaa, Hindositaan hamaraa. My days began with those words when I was a child. Better than all the world is our India. I chanted them, in a school assembly of a hundred or so boys, facing the Indian flag, every morning for four months. The author of this unabashed ode to India, the great poet Iqbal, had not actually seen the world beyond the subcontinent when he published it at the beginning of the twentieth century; and, after a brief sojourn abroad, he recoiled from the song’s pan-Indian timbre and reinvented himself as an exponent of ruinous ethno-religious nationalism, the spiritual father of the idea of religious segregation that culminated in the Partition of India and the birth of Pakistan. But we did not know this then. And so, at one of the first schools I attended, which was really a madrassah, an Islamic seminary, we recited every morning of the week, in the shade of the mosque that soared behind the flagpole, Iqbal’s verses exalting India’s specialness. We are Indian, we sang in chorus. India is our homeland.

  The mosque, which lent grandeur to the school, looked so majestic that I thought the Taj Mahal must have been modelled on it. For a while, I thought it was the Taj. At noon, the boys, led by an elderly man with a soft beard and thick black glasses, went there to pray. The only non-Muslim pupil, I was left on my own. I was sitting alone in the classroom when a man walked in and asked me why I wasn’t at prayer. He was tall and slender, with a pencil-thin moustache and black eyes lined with kohl. I had seen him before, always in a loose-fitting kurta standing at the back of the assembly, almost an adult. I wasn’t allowed to, I said. ‘O, you are that boy,’ he said excitedly, as though he had just confirmed some improbable rumour. He walked over and sat next to me. No one is prohibited from praying, he said. ‘Ask your father to buy you a cap. I’ll take you to the mosque.’ He then offered me his protection: ‘If anyone gives you trouble, let me know. Ask for Murad.’

  He was beside himself with laughter when he saw me walking up to him a few days later with my cap on. What I was wearing was a Nehru topi, not the taqiyah, the Islamic prayer cap. My father, who had deposited me at this madrassah for a lofty reason—to inoculate me against sectarian temptations in later life—did not know the difference, and had bought me a hat made popular by India’s notoriously ungodly founding prime minister.

  But no matter. Any head covering would do, Murad said. We stood beneath the imposing dome that afternoon, and I, after rinsing my hands and feet, mimicked his motions, while repeating, under my breath, the only words I discerned in the call to prayer that radiated from the loudspeakers affixed to the mosque’s minarets: Allahu Akbar Allah.

  We fell in together after that. A bond formed over afternoons of sharing lunch, praying and playing cricket. He was the first person I accepted, consciously, as a friend. He called me his brother and invited me to his house. On a Friday, when classes finished early, we rode a packed green double-decker bus to the old quarter of Hyderabad where he lived. Murad held my hand and led me through the crowds. We walked under grand identical arches that were like gateways to a fabled city, flanked on either side by carts piled with fruit and jewellery shops canopied with stacks of red and green glass bangles suspended from their lintels, and stopped at Charminar, a stupendous hazel-hued mosque with four minarets but no dome, the architectural jewel of the old city, built four decades before the Taj Mahal, slummy and chaotic now, but a few generations ago the resplendent seat of the Nizam, the ruler of Hyderabad, the richest man in the world. Unexpectedly, at the base of one of its minarets, was a Hindu temple.

  I had driven past this place before. But now we walked, making our way through the late afternoon traffic of motorbikes, buses and yellow auto-rickshaws, past butcher shops with fly-blown hunks of beef and mutton hanging from hooks behind rusting grilles, exotic birds in cages, women examining saris splayed out on the floors of carpeted shops, a man outside a chemist’s pouring water into his mouth from a steel pitcher and gurgling and spitting it on the road.

  Murad’s house, on the first floor of a dilapidated building, was really a small room that opened out on to the corridor, with one naked bulb and no furniture, painted green and partitioned by an old sari. There was a small cot with a thin mattress on it and calendars on the wall with pictures of Mecca. His mother, who opened the door, invited me in warmly and asked me to sit on the bed. She gave me hot milk in a small steel tumbler. Murad told his mother and sister, who sat in a corner and never spoke, that I had mastered the namaz. He was proud of me. They seemed amused by it all. And then it was time for me to go.

  I asked Murad where his father was. He didn’t know. They had a nicer, bigger house when he was small and his father worked in the Gulf, he said. But then his father stopped sending money and abandoned the family. The room I had seen belonged to his uncle. Murad, I discovered, wasn’t just a student at the madrassah; he also did odd jobs there. He was thirteen, and his family depended upon him. His mother was asking him to quit school and take up work near their house. I had no means then to understand the precariousness of his life.

  Murad had never seen a hundred-rupee note, or sat in a car, or been to the cinema. But he thought my life was grim when I told him that my family never celebrated Divali because my father thought it was vulgar. When once I pleaded with him to let me buy fireworks as we were driving home on or before Divali, my father parked the car and took me for a walk. He gestured at the crush of people sleeping on the pavements under the smoky black sky illuminat
ed by festive flares and thrust a hundred-rupee note into my hand. It will be less insulting to these people if you burn this right now, he said. Divali was dead for me.

  Murad said this was unfair and smuggled a bag of fireworks into the school a few weeks later. And in the courtyard of the mosque, I, prompted by him, celebrated Divali as we both thought it ought to be. Then, with a stone, he chiselled our names in Urdu into the wall of the mosque.

  We parted very shortly after that.

  The madrassah was never intended as a proper education—only a primer in Indian pluralism. I was shipped off mid-term to boarding school: a different world, a thousand miles from home, miserable and forbidding at first. There were bands and gangs, and seniors smoked pot in the woods. I thought about Murad; we hadn’t said goodbye before I was abruptly plucked out and put on a train to Delhi. I spent spare, unsupervised afternoons in the library. I played cricket and chess, and learnt to ride and to swim. I moved on. Among my new friends were the scions of a Nepalese political dynasty and expatriate Afghans. Nobody spoke about religion.

  A year into this life, my father, determined to grant me ‘exposure’ to new experiences, began making arrangements to send me to the Indian school in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s successes foiled those plans. But after straying interminably from school to school and spending a year studying drama in a Himalayan village, I was sent away, in my mid-teens, to England. My mind, which had begun in Delhi to dislodge Murad, secreted memories of the madrassah in some remote fold of my consciousness in London, where, coming of age in the aftermath of 9/11, I was overcome by a crippling admixture of pride and awkwardness about this past. I never thought to look him up.

  It was Murad who found me.

  Almost a quarter of a century had passed since the day he carved our names into the wall of the school’s mosque when I received a call from my father. ‘A man is here to see you. He says he is your friend.’ I was in Hyderabad, on a break from travelling in India. I did not recognise him at first. He wore a crimson plaid shirt and faded blue jeans. The skullcap was gone. His scalp, balding, was covered with a red baseball cap. His eyes, still lined with kohl, were just as intense. ‘Forgotten me already, boss?’ he said in Urdu and embraced me. He limped as we climbed down the stairs, a man who had aged beyond his years.

  I thought he reappeared to ask for help. We went for tea to an Iranian cafe. It was owned by a Muslim family originally from Tehran, but its Sanskrit name, Panchsheel—the five principles of peaceful coexistence Nehru negotiated in the 1950s with China—memorialised an epoch that had long ago vanished. Castigating Nehru was now a national pastime. Votes were being cast across India to elect a new government, and people complained, wherever I went, that Nehru had destroyed the country. An age was ending, and the aggrieved voice of a suppressed nation within a nation whose existence we, asserting our claim on India by reciting Iqbal, were oblivious to was closing in on us.

  But just when our own world was in jeopardy, Murad and I found ourselves searching for a common vocabulary. A great gulf had opened up between us. He had come looking for me over the years, he told me, but was told each time that I was away. He found my email address and wrote to me, but there was no answer.

  He dropped out of the madrassah not long after I left, and took up a job. His uncle owed money to the shop owner, so Murad took nothing home; he was repaying his uncle’s debts. The old man had been attempting for years to marry off Murad’s sister to a man in the Gulf. His mother, astonishingly for a woman in such a helpless condition, had put up resistance. But the uncle was unrelenting, and threatened to push the family out of their room if they did not consent. His sister agreed to settle for the marriage, and the family kept the roof over their heads. The groom who came to take her away was much older than they had anticipated, almost elderly, and his teenaged sister, after going through the wedding rituals, poisoned herself. To Murad’s trauma was added shame: he was the only male in his immediate family, and there was nothing he could do.

  A year after I left Hyderabad, violence between Muslims and Hindus engulfed Murad’s part of the city. The spark was supplied by the storming, in distant Ayodhya, of the medieval Babri masjid by mobs who, led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, claimed that the mosque had been erected by the founder of the Mughal empire on the birthplace of the god Rama. The BJP was launched in 1980 as the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother ship of Hindu nationalism. Founded in the city of Nagpur in 1925 by a Hindu physician whose family had fled religious persecution in Muslim-ruled Hyderabad, the RSS ascribed India’s history of conquests by Muslims and Europeans to the weakness of Hindus. The source of the weakness was attributed to caste, the most oppressive apparatus of segregation ever devised by man, which compartmentalised Hindus into four hereditary categories—priests, warriors, merchants, labour—while keeping multitudes, the so-called ‘untouchables’, wholly locked out of the system. The fact that the bulk of India’s Muslims were descendants of converts from the outcastes was a source of shame for Hindu nationalists. The RSS built on the doctrine of Hindutva—Hinduness—formulated in 1923 by an atheist called Vinayak Savarkar. To be an Indian, Savarkar wrote in his foundational text on Hindu nationalism, one had first to be a Hindu—and Savarkar’s Hinduness was an elastic category, open to all: the price of admission to it was allegiance to India, the secular deity of Hindus. But because India was also the sacred land of the Hindus, Muslims—practisers of an Arab faith—were precluded from membership to it.1 To become Indian, they had to undergo ‘purification’ rituals and ‘reconvert’ to the Hindu faith their forbears had relinquished.

  The growth of Hinduism as a political identity was inseparable from the sense of having been wronged by history. The self-definition was anchored in an awareness of the self’s inadequacy; shame was the basis of its foundation. The RSS fused Western ideas of individualism with the aggression it descried in Islam and committed itself to the creation of a muscular Hindu nation. For most of its early existence, it did not have a market beyond upper-caste Hindu men, and its leaders remained virtually unknown to most Indians. In 1948, the RSS was banned for a year after one of its former members—a protégé of Savarkar’s—gunned down Mahatma Gandhi for having allowed India to be partitioned by Muslim nationalists the previous year. Banished from the centre of power by the secular establishment in the early decades after Independence, the RSS pullulated out of sight and announced itself as a force in the 1980s. To its swollen ranks, Babri’s obliteration was the first step in healing the wounds inflicted upon Hindus by history.

  Two hundred people died in the rioting that ensued in Hyderabad. A majority of them were Hindus, the dominant religious community in the city as a whole but a minority in its old quarter. The authorities were by and large impartial as they stamped out the fighting—there were curfews, and rumours of an imminent shoot-at-sight order were circulated to deter crowds from forming—and their neutrality is perhaps what accounted for the uneven distribution of deaths. Hindus, being exhorted by the BJP to unite as a nation, began to seethe: their co-religionists had to die because they had the misfortune of living under a state that, calling itself ‘secular’, deserted the majority.

  In 1990, when the streets ran with blood, Murad, in spite of his family’s extreme poverty and physical proximity to the bloodletting, felt detached from it all. His sense of security, naive in retrospect, was an aspect of his unspoken faith in what he believed to be Indian ‘secularism’.

  The word signified something. It helped him navigate and form an idea of himself in relation to the world around him. It implied that he belonged despite being a Muslim, practitioner of a faith in whose name India had been mutilated with a wrenching finality. It guaranteed his position as a full citizen of a state that, vehemently rejecting religion as a valid determinant of nationalism even after Pakistan had been hacked out from it as the homeland of India’s Muslims, committed itself to upholding an ecumenical secularity in public life.

&nbs
p; It was a perilously audacious experiment from the outset. The future of the state was mortgaged to the presumption that Indians would continue to respond to history’s unresolved knots with the same self-possession as the republic’s founders. It was a project floated on the supposition that democracy would contain rather than intensify the yearnings for consolidation among India’s Hindus who, for the first time in history, would be an enfranchised majority in a politically united India devoid of a foreign master. It gave Indians an outstanding Constitution without, as Ardeshir Palkhivala put it, ‘the ability to keep it’.

  India did not always work for Murad and his family. It extended them rights without fostering the conditions for their exercise. What it did not do is question their Indianness. So in 1990, when riots erupted on his doorstep because Hindu mobs had entered the Babri mosque, he was confident, despite the history of the city he lived in, that he would be all right. But two years later, when Hindu militias razed the Babri mosque, he felt endangered. He had seen, or heard from someone who had seen, footage of policemen spectating as hundreds of Hindus scaled the domes of Babri and, working only with poleaxes and hammers for several hours, levelled the mosque that had stood there for half a millennium. P.V. Narasimha Rao, the prime minister of India when the mosque was pulled down, grew up in a village not far from Hyderabad. Murad still felt wounded by the betrayal of ‘our man’.

  The elders in the old city convened a meeting after the destruction of Babri masjid. The police could no longer be trusted. Muslims would have to organise their own security. Murad was now treated as an asset by people who had been content to see him and his family fall apart. Patrols were formed. Women were instructed to stay inside. Men were given knives. Then there was a long wait. Miraculously, the violence never touched them directly. This upset a few men who wanted to burn down the houses of the destitute Hindus who lived cheek-by-jowl with them. The elders vetoed the idea and everybody went home.