Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  But a rupture had occurred. What was the position of Muslims in India? Were they wanted or not? Where else could they go?

  These questions had an extra special relevance for Hyderabad, the only region of southern India—the more developed and peaceable half of the country—to become embroiled in the parricidal bloodshed that attended the Partition of India. The clamour for India’s division originated in the anxieties and prejudices of the subcontinent’s decaying Muslim elites. Having lost their privileges after India fell to the British, they pitched for a state of their own as Britain’s exit from the subcontinent loomed. If Muslims remained in a democratic India, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, told a meeting of his co-religionists in 1940, they would be responsible for the ‘complete destruction of what is most precious in Islam’. Jinnah had begun his political career as a proponent of interfaith collaboration in India’s struggle against British colonial rule. But cruelly thwarted on the nationalist stage by Gandhi, he morphed into a personification of the classical demagogue Abe Lincoln warned against almost exactly a century before Jinnah picked up the baton of Muslim nationalism: ‘Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm … that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.’2

  Insisting that Muslims and Hindus were two distinct ‘nations’ inhabiting one land, Jinnah demanded the amputation of the subcontinent along religious lines to invent ‘Pakistan’, Land of the Pure. Muslims who regarded their faith as one aspect of their composite Indian identity turned in horror from his agitation. But Jinnah could not be reasoned with: ethno-religious nationalism, worn in the beginning as an expedient mask, had progressively devoured his face. Diagnosed with terminal lung disease, he kept his illness hidden from his followers and incited religious passions he knew he would not be able to contain. ‘India divided or India destroyed’ was Jinnah’s ultimatum to the British as they prepared to leave: civil war and scission were the choices before Indians.

  On 15 August 1947, Britain formally withdrew from its most lucrative colonial possession, India attained independence, and Pakistan, carved from the eastern and western flanks of the subcontinent, was inaugurated as a state for its Muslims. A complete negation of the very notion of human multiplicity, Pakistan was, on its own terms, a monument to bigotry and chauvinism. But its creation also dramatically validated every Hindu-nationalist trope about Muslim treachery. India had extended its hospitality to believers of all faiths for thousands of years: only the followers of Islam, they said, saw themselves as a people apart by virtue of their religion, refused to become assimilated into it and dismembered its difficultly achieved unity. Within days began the transfer of populations. More than half a million people were killed as Indians, suddenly uprooted in the name of religion, exploded with irrepressible fury. Trainloads of corpses travelled in both directions. It was the largest—and possibly the bloodiest—exodus in human history. Jinnah died just over a year after Pakistan’s birth. His only daughter, forbidden by her once-secular father from marrying outside the faith, remained in India.

  After Partition, the hundreds of so-called ‘princely states’ governed indirectly by London had the choice of acceding either to India or to Pakistan. Hyderabad’s Muslim ruler dreamt of making his overwhelmingly non-Muslim dominion, located in the centre of India, an exclave of Pakistan. His capital was one of the best endowed cities in India. But the dry country that formed the bulk of his kingdom was a theatre of ancient horrors. Its human cast was composed of the Nizam’s vassals—implacably sadistic feudal lords belonging to the Reddi and Velama castes—and landless serfs emaciated by centuries of servitude. A form of bondage that was slavery in every sense flourished there.

  There are foreigners who have written books in which the Nizam’s court is a setting for taboo romance. The starveling peasants whose labour underwrote the opulence of Hyderabad do not appear in these exotic amphigories, which continue the literary tradition inaugurated by Kipling’s William the Conqueror, in which a famine in southern India furnishes the backdrop for a British love story. There are Indians who have mourned the passing of the Nizam’s rule. No matter that, in addition to slavery, the Nizam presided over a system of rigid religious segregation.

  Refusing to see himself as a native of the land his dynasty ruled for centuries, the Nizam used the taxes extracted from his etiolated subjects to advance a generous subvention to the insolvent government of Pakistan, which might otherwise have collapsed within days of its inception. He ordered a halt to the export of metals to the rest of India and banned Indian currency in Hyderabad. The British warned the Nizam not to test the resolve of India, reminding him that their successor state in Delhi ‘was immensely powerful, and still possessed one of the biggest armies in the world’.3 But the old man had by then lost touch with reality. He squandered millions of dollars to purchase 400 tons of weapons on the European black market with the assistance of an Australian arms dealer. His mujahideen, meanwhile, led by a man called Kasim Rizvi and calling themselves Razakars, rampaged through towns and villages terrorising civilians.

  After exhaustive attempts to parley with the Nizam failed, India ordered in its forces in September 1948. It would have been inexpressibly cathartic for the people exposed to the Razakars’ ravages had India, upon liberating Hyderabad, placed the Nizam on trial. Instead, it pensioned him off. His band of holy warriors was permitted to emigrate to Pakistan. And the Muslim–Hindu collaboration that had bolstered the uprising against the Nizam dissolved in a bloodbath in which 40,000 Muslims were slaughtered.

  The secular Indian state’s arrival in Hyderabad began with three irremediable mistakes. First, the failure to hold the Nizam and his government accountable for their crimes against humanity; second, the failure to protect Muslim civilians; third, the suppression of the official report commissioned by Nehru which chronicled in chilling detail the subsequent massacres of Muslims. Integration into the Indian union was dyed with bitter disappointment for virtually every party in Hyderabad.

  Thousands of Hyderabadi Muslims resettled in Pakistan. The many thousands more who remained, who refused to vacate the hell that was Hyderabad despite the blandishments of paradise in Pakistan, voted for India with their lives. India’s Hindus never had to make that choice. Its Muslims did. Consider the view from the eyes of an ordinary Muslim family: encircled by the violence precipitated by Partition, their co-religionists were fleeing in the millions to Pakistan; Muslim businesses were being plundered and burnt to the ground; Hindu and Sikh fanatics were hunting Muslims for slaughter and rape; the possibility of being betrayed by neighbours and friends was very far from remote; families were permanently fracturing; powerful functionaries in the government were openly hostile to Muslims—hostility which no doubt would have been seen by many Hindus as tacit endorsement of their savagery.

  In spite of all this, millions of Muslims remained.

  In the 1940s, Congress—the dominant secular party that led India to independence from Britain, and was assailed by both Jinnah and the RSS—heroically withstood the demand of aggrieved Hindus to respond to Pakistan’s birth by turning India into a Hindu state. Nehru, as India’s first prime minister, frequently raced to scenes of communal clashes on his own, often chasing vengeful Hindu and Sikh refugees expelled from Pakistan without regard for his personal safety. ‘If you harm one single hair on the head of one Muslim,’ he told a mob plotting a massacre of Muslims, ‘I will send in a tank and blast you to bits’.4

  In the 1990s, Nehru was being recast by the ascendant Hindu nationalists as a deracinated interloper. Congress, once the revered engine of India’s freedom movement, was in the late stage of its slow metamorphosis into a sump for Nehru’s parasitical progeny to luxuriate in. The party’s commitment to secularism had long ago ceased to be a conviction. And half a century after placing everything on the line to hold on to India, Musl
ims were being told by Hindu nationalists—just as they had been told by the Muslim segregationist Jinnah—that they could not be Muslim and Indian.

  This was the milieu in which the bitterness and anger provoked by the destruction of the Babri mosque, finding no productive release, festered. And the old city, forsaken by India, degenerated into a fertile recruitment field for Pakistani spies. There was a surfeit of angry young men in Hyderabad, and Pakistani operatives materialised to marshal them into militancy. Claiming to be emancipators of Muslims besieged by unbelievers, they lured their prey with invocations of religious solidarity. But it was the wretched reality of Muslims that made them susceptible to such plain manipulation. Political victories by Hindu nationalists, heightening Muslim insecurity, made it easier for Pakistan to exploit them; and Pakistan’s penetration into India lent credence to the Hindu-nationalist claim that Muslims were a fifth column. As always, Muslim nationalism and Hindu nationalism, two sides of the same sectarian coin, fortified each other.

  Hyderabad became a hotspot of anti-terror operations.

  Murad stayed out of trouble, but around him men disappeared. There were whispers in his community that some of those captured or killed by the authorities had fallen under the spell of the ISI, Pakistan’s spy-ops agency. The prospect of losing their children made parents vigilant. The elders who once encouraged the young to carry arms now beseeched them to stay loyal to India. Edicts enjoining Muslims to abjure violence flowed from the mosques. Indian democracy, congregants were told, had adequate mechanisms to redress their grievances.

  Just as Hyderabad began attracting international attention as India’s Silicon Valley in the 1990s, the old city gained notoriety in the intelligence community as an entrepot of Pakistan-sponsored radicalism. Respectable newspapers published reports that said Osama bin Laden had scouted the city in 1998, two years before Bill Clinton paid it a presidential visit.

  By the new millennium, there were two Hyderabads, and they were increasingly immiscible. The new Hyderabad swirled with entrepreneurial energy, full of promise and opportunity. Its sobriquet was ‘Cyberabad’, a name that conveyed its status as the poster child for an impatient post-socialist India. The old Hyderabad was a suppurating ruin. People privately called it mini Pakistan. At dinner parties, its backwardness was ascribed by Hyderabad’s newly rich caste of software entrepreneurs to the benightedness of its inhabitants. Others, who owed their place at the table to old money and considered themselves progressive in the Nehruvian mould, protested meekly that this was a ‘communal’ way of looking at things. Everyone, in the end, projected their ideas on to the old city. Nobody, it seemed, really knew the place. It was a no-go area: no one wanted to go there. It was, beyond its much-fetishised façade, inaccessible. They did not admit it, but they felt threatened by it. The party that now governed the old city, that exerted total control over it, was a new avatar of the party once commanded by Kasim Rizvi. The distance between the two Hyderabads appeared unbridgeable.

  In India, complains a character in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel English, August, ‘from washing your arse to dying, an ordinary citizen is up against the government’. Delhi is zealously interventionist. For all the grumbling, this has not always been such a bad thing. Being harried by the state has had a civilising effect in many places where Indians have been forced to forgo barbaric customs sanctioned by religion.

  But things have worked differently for Muslims. The state bypassed the people of the old city in the crucial decades after Independence, in part because it was inhibited by its own secular credo, which required it to abide the stagnation of Muslim communities for fear of offending the leaders of those communities. Murad’s mother lived in penury because, as a Muslim woman, she was barred by law from seeking alimony from her ex-husband. Islam, said the men who claimed to be scholars of the faith, conferred upon husbands the right to cast aside their wives without providing for them; and the government, by recognising and defending the rights vested in Muslim men by their faith, was proving its secularity.

  This interpretation of secularism could express itself in perverse ways. When the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen appeared in Hyderabad, elected leaders of Rizvi’s political party assaulted her on camera and threatened to assassinate her. She was to them a blasphemer, deserving of death. When the police staged token arrests, a close relative of mine immediately offered to dispatch a team of lawyers to defend the assailants. The relative abhorred what had been done to Nasreen. But the only way he knew to uphold the ‘secularism’ he had internalised in his youth was by deferring to people who claimed to be tribunes of their religious communities. Hadn’t Gandhi taught us that Muslims and Hindus must always ‘respect each other’s religion and religious feelings’? Sure. But wasn’t the second half of that particular moral that we must ‘always refrain from violence’? The relative shrugged. He was not condoning violence. He was helping to contain it by rising to defend ‘community leaders’.

  Striving to buy communal harmony in this way, India left its Muslims behind while forcing its Hindus to modernise. A staggering social disparity has arisen between Muslims and Hindus, as the results of a survey commissioned by the government in 2010 show.5 Only 4 per cent of all Indian Muslims are graduates, 5 per cent have public employment, a majority of Muslims remain locked out of public institutions, their access to government loans and education severely restricted. The ghettoes of the old city, when I drove with Murad one afternoon in 2014, looked as much like a monument to the failures of Indian secularism as the detritus of the Babri mosque.

  Murad felt stifled by this strange new city of multiplying glass-and-steel buildings bearing the names of Western corporations but diminishing chances for people like him. His mother begged him to get married and go away. But he stayed to look after her. He sold computer accessories out of a shack. It was hard work, and he was giving more in bribes to the police than he took home. At the mosque, someone introduced him to a man who said he could find him a job in the Gulf. At a time when newspapers in the West were acclaiming India as the next great success story of globalisation, and Indian commentators were proclaiming the country a superpower in waiting, Murad, unable to access the prosperity that was percolating down to well-heeled people around him, was looking for ways to flee India. Arabia always had a need for Indian labour, and India was always able to meet the need. Murad began putting together money to resettle in Muscat or Kuwait.

  Catastrophe struck just when escape became available.

  In the summer of 2007, Mecca masjid, the magnificent granite mosque in the old city that had taken thousands of workers in the seventeenth century almost fifty years to complete, became a scene of carnage. Ten thousand men were saying their afternoon prayer when an improvised explosive, lodged in the area where worshippers performed ablutions, went off. It’s a marvel that only eleven people were killed in the blast.

  Within a day, the blame for the atrocity was assigned to Islamic detachments operating from Bangladesh and Pakistan. The first instinct of the authorities who long ago wrote off the old city was to swamp the place and cart away 200 random Muslim men for what they euphemistically called ‘interrogation’. Murad, ill-fated from an early age, was among them. There was no record of his detention. Nobody knew where he had been until after he was freed. He could not walk or sit or eat for days. He was broken from the inside. As horror stories of torture chambers spread, his mother, cursing herself for being alive, grabbed his legs and sobbed and asked him to go away.

  A year after the blast at Mecca masjid, twenty-one Muslim men were put up for criminal prosecution. It was reported that they were all taking orders from a Pakistani outfit. Their handler, a man called Shahid Bilal, was later shot dead by the police. India’s news media welcomed the ‘breakthrough’. It is ‘a fallacy to believe that there are rogue cells of the ISI at work operating beyond the pale of the Pakistani establishment’, India’s largest English-language newsmagazine told its readers. The assault on Mecca masjid, it assured r
eaders, was part of the Pakistani government’s ‘newest game plan to target religious places and foment communal unrest’ in India.6

  Such comforting certitudes were upended only a few years later when a repentant Hindu priest, captured by India’s National Investigation Agency, volunteered a shattering confession: that the attack at Mecca masjid had been one of several staged by a militant Hindu group which, he said, was intimately connected with the parent body of the BJP. The organisation counted among its members, the swami disclosed, an officer of the Indian Army.7

  Pundits immediately began conducting cautious enquiries on television. Did this revelation mean that India was now under attack by ‘Hindu terrorism’?

  The question landed like a whip on the wounds being nursed by the tortured men in Hyderabad. Graphic videos of atrocities against Muslims across India now began circulating in the old city. And late one evening, after prayers, dozens of people assembled to watch a documentary on the riots in Gujarat in 2002. Until then, Gujarat was something people talked about without fully knowing what had actually happened there. The film gave them a glimpse. The audience in the old city saw and heard testimonies of survivors of the violence. Wombs of pregnant Muslim women were sliced open with knives and their foetuses tossed out. Women were raped by gangs of Hindu men and then killed. Muslim houses were splashed with kerosene and set on fire. Truckloads of corpses of Muslims were dumped in mass graves. All of this happened over the course of several days. India watched. No help was sent. How much of this was true? It almost didn’t matter as long as some of it was.

  Narendra Modi was the newly appointed chief minister of Gujarat when this happened. He was asked by a foreign reporter if he had any regrets. Yes, he told her. He wished he had handled the news media better. The man on whose watch the murders and rapes and arsons by Hindus raged was, if not criminally complicit, then criminally negligent. If not criminally negligent, then he was, at the very minimum, the most incompetent administrator in India at the time. His political career should have come to an end in that moment. Instead, in 2014, a dozen years after the riots in Gujarat, Modi was the top contender for India’s highest political office; and, agonisingly for those with vivid memories of Gujarat, he was being applauded as a competent leader. Twenty-two years after the demolition of Babri, butchering Muslims—or failing to intervene and stop them from being butchered—was not a disqualification in Indian politics. It was a prelude to success.