Riot

by Shashi Tharoor

  The mother replied in angry bitterness. “There is no point in telling you the names of the killers. Every time in Zalilgarh when there are riots, the same men lead the mobs, looting and burning and killing, but nothing ever happens to them. During the last riots, we were hopeful because the police even noted down our statements. We waited for four days, but nothing happened. In the end the police did come, but it was we who were arrested. So this time we have nothing to say.”

  The DM turned to me and then back to them. “I promise you,” he said in that quiet way of his, “that this time justice will be done. I was not here during the last riots. This time I am here. Please give me the names.”

  And they did finally give the frigging names — of some of the most powerful and prestigious men of the bloody district. The DM turned to me and said very calmly, “Let us round them all up before the body of this boy is lowered into the dust.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. No “Lucky” this time, not even “Lakshman”; this was an order from the DM. I left the thana immediately in my jeep, roaring out of there like a blast from a buffalo’s behind. I broke my own fucking speed limit several times that evening. I knew the DM would also have to leave on his incessant patrols. It was after midnight when I returned to the graveyard. They’d finished digging the boy’s grave. I followed the beam of my torch across the cold moonless dark of the cemetery to the burial spot. The DM was back. The body had not yet been lowered into the dust.

  I marched up to the DM, who was standing with the bereaved family. “Sir,” I said, “they have all been arrested.”

  You should have seen the expressions on the frigging faces of those Muslim mourners. They didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  It was around three o’clock in the morning when the DM and I returned to our camp cots in the police station. We wearily stretched out, fully dressed, to catch a little sleep. Two hours later, as dawn was breaking, we were awakened by an uproar at the thana gates. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded of the constable on duty. “It sounds like a pair of hippos making babies on a tin sheet.” Lucky was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes when we found that it was indeed a hippo in human shape. The local MLA from the ruling party, member of the state legislative assembly, a generously endowed and utterly charmless specimen of the tribe called Maheshwari Devi, had arrived. She was with a group of her supporters, all banging pots and pans and shouting motherloving slogans. And frigging hell, they were all holding curfew passes.

  “Injustice, injustice!” she was crying out, dutifully echoed by her eunuch supporters. “We will not put up with this injustice. We will not allow the arrest of innocent people.”

  It didn’t take long for Lucky to wake up and figure out what the hell had happened. I’d never seen him so furious. “Tell me,” he asked her, “are you the representative of just one community, and not of this whole town? The last few days, when hundreds of Muslims were arrested, beaten, dragged by their beards, and placed behind bars, often on mere suspicion, even though many had no criminal records, no complaint against them, I never heard even a whimper of protest from you. But last night, because ten men have been arrested, after complaints in which they were directly named as guilty of murder, you march here within two hours and shout of injustice? How dare you!”

  The hippo was so pissing startled by this outburst you could have heard her veins pop. No mere government official had ever dared to address her this way. She was as much at a loss how to respond as a blind nympho to a wink. “Get out,” the DM said, though if you asked him, he’d fucking say he “directed her to leave the premises of the police station immediately and refused to discuss the issue any further.” I escorted her out.

  Don’t give up on me just yet, Randy. Come on, have another drink. You see, that was not the end of the story. The MLA’s demonstration was only the beginning — political foreplay. The whole day witnessed more pressure on the DM than he had experienced, he tells me, in a single day on any issue during his career. The chief minister of the state telephoned to inquire why there was so much outrage. The DM replied that it was a matter of basic justice, and he would not change his decision. He was relieved that the CM did not get back to him again. But from the state capital downwards, the pressure continued to mount like a bad case of wind. Then, just as perceptibly, it eased in the afternoon. Once again, we thought we’d weathered the bloody storm.

  Late that night — in keeping with our daily pattern since the tension in the town had arisen — we sat together at police headquarters. We were reviewing the arrests and releases of the day — our scorecard, we used to call it. Lucky noted that some of the numbers didn’t add up. He summoned the station house officer and asked him to explain.

  The bugger was more tight-lipped than a Hindi film actress who’s been asked to kiss the villain. But finally the station house officer revealed that the ten men arrested the previous night had been released. By the frigging courts. Late the same bloody morning.

  Lucky looked like a cow that had been hit on the head with a trishul. “Released?” he asked incredulously. “But how could they release them?”

  Further questioning revealed that the police — my own men, goddamn them — had framed the weakest possible charges against the sisterlovers. Not of murder, arson, and rioting, but of the most minor bloody offense possible: violation of curfew. So the courts had let the detainees off with a fine of fifty rupees each. Just under three dollars at current exchange rates, Randy. No wonder we hadn’t been bothered by the screaming politicians all afternoon.

  I told you that earlier that morning I’d never seen the DM so furious. This time he exceeded himself. You’ve seen Lucky; he’s a soft-spoken, thoughtful, calm, and restrained individual. Now everyone was stunned to see him explode with all the unpredictable velocity of a soothli bomb. He shouted at the men in the station house. “You’re crooks, not police!” he ranted. “You’re deceitful, communal-minded bigots, not fit to wear your uniforms!” He was working himself into quite a state. “Go and find the murderers you’ve released. Go now! I’ll personally chase you right up to the gates of hell if the ten released men are not rounded up again within the hour.”

  “Lucky,” I murmured, “I couldn’t have done better myself.” I took the best of my police officers and rushed back into town. You should have seen the expressions on the faces of some of the ten accused men when they were rearrested. Like society matrons finding a horny hand up their saris. This time Lucky and I personally supervised the filing of the charges — the preparation of documents for the courts.

  The charges may or may not stick when they come to trial. But you should know that the Sessions Court released the accused Hindus on bail within a frigging week. The Muslims who had been rounded up in the bomb case are still being refused bail. The DM went to see the fucking district judge and said, “I have never tried to interfere with the judicial process. But here — the same riot, the same offenses, the same sections of the Penal Code — how can there be two such openly different standards for people of two communities? It is not an ordinary case,” he added. “It is a question of the faith of a whole community in the system of justice in our country.”

  But the motherloving district judge refused to even discuss the issue with the DM. We do our job, Randy. I just wish everyone would do theirs as well.

  Let me tell you something about these bloody riots — ours, and the others across northern India. They’re like a raging flood. When the stormy waters recede, all you will see left behind are corpses and ruins. Corpses, Randy, and fucking ruins.

  Priscilla Hart. I knew you wanted to talk about Priscilla. I’m just trying to get you to understand why we don’t know much about what happened to her. We had enough on our minds at the time. But I’ll tell you what I know, Randy. Let’s have another drink first.

  from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

  with Professor Mohammed Sarwar

  October 12, 1989

  Look, I’m a historian,
not a political activist. Though if you asked me, as a Muslim historian, whether I was a Muslim first or a historian first, I would have to tell you that depended on the context. But your question deserves a reply.

  Isn’t it amazing how these Hindu chauvinist types claim history on their side? The precision, the exactness, of their dating techniques are enough to drive a mere professor like me to distraction. People like me spend years trying to establish the veracity of an event, a date, an inscription, but the likes of Ram Charan Gupta have not the slightest doubt that their Lord Rama was born at the Ram Janmabhoomi, and what’s more, at the precise spot they call the Ram Janmasthan — not ten yards away, not ten feet away, but right there. Their own beliefs are that Rama flourished in the treta-yuga of Hindu tradition, which means that their historical exactitude goes back, oh, about a million years. What is a mere historian like me to do in the face of such breathtaking knowledge?

  The poor professors, alas, have not been able to establish with any certitude whether Lord Rama was born at all or simply emerged, wholly formed, from the creative and devout mind of the sage Valmiki, the putative author of the great religious epic the Ramayana. But if he was born, as the epic claims, in Ayodhya, there is no certainty that it was the place we today know as Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh — just as we can’t be sure if the Lanka he conquered to retrieve his kidnapped wife Sita is the Sri Lanka of today, rather than somewhere in Central India. The Vedas, the old Hindu scriptures, mention Rama as a king of Varanasi, or Benares, not of Ayodhya. One of the Jatakas, the Dasaratha Jataka, also says that Dasaratha and Rama were kings of Varanasi. There’s more. The Ramayana actually mentions the Buddha, who lived around 500 B.C., but at that time the capital of the kingdom of Kosala, Rama’s kingdom, was Sravasti, not Ayodhya, and the Ayodhya described in the Ramayana could not possibly have existed before the fourth century B.C. There are other inconsistencies, but you get the picture.

  Now to the date of his birth. Simple fact: neither the seven-day week nor the division of the months into thirty days was included in the Hindu calendar, the Panchang, until the fourth century A.D. So even if Rama was a historical rather than a mythological figure, you have to get into a lot of guesswork before you date him. The Ramayana has suggestions that Rama lived in the dwapara-yuga, about five thousand years ago, rather than the treta-yuga of traditional belief. There is a Hindu pundit, a learned man, though without a degree in history as far as I know, a man called Sitanath Pradhan, who goes so far as to declare that the great climactic battle for Lanka was fought in 1450 B.C. and that Rama was exactly forty-two years old at the time. On the other hand, historians dating the existing texts of the Ramayana pretty much agree that it was composed sometime between 400 B.C. and A.D. 200, which is also the period in which that other great epic the Mahabharata was written, give or take a couple of hundred years. Confused enough? Your Hindutva types are presuming to know the exact place of birth of a man whose birthdate is historically unverifiable.

  I know there are people who’ll say, Ignore these pettifogging historians, how does it matter? All that matters is what people believe. But there too, my historian’s inconvenient mind asks, when did they start believing it? The Ramayana existed as a text, as an epic, for about a thousand years before anyone began treating it as sacred. There is no evidence of any temple being built to worship Rama anywhere in India before the tenth century A.D. It’s ironic, when you see the passions stirred around Rama’s name in northern India today, that it was first in the South that Rama became deified. The Tamil Alvars, who were poets and mystics, started idealizing the god-king from around A.D. 900; it was a Tamil poet, Kamban, who started the cult of Ramabhakti, the divinity of Rama. The first community of Rama worshippers, the Ramanandins, came into existence in Kashmir between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. And then the great poet of these parts, Tulsidas, wrote his brilliant, moving Ramcharitmanas in the sixteenth century, sanitizing the deeds of Rama, removing all those aspects of his conduct that had been questioned as less than godlike in the earlier Puranas, and elevating Rama to his present unchallenged supremacy in the Hindu pantheon. Actually Tulsidas’s Ramayana, with all its idealizing of Rama as the ideal man and its barely veiled anxieties about women as the objects of lust in need of protection, owes more than a little to the Muslim invasions of India at the time. The Rama cult, and its offshoot the Bhakti movement, rose during the period of the Muslim conquest of North India and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, when Hinduism was on the defensive and where the position of women, who had traditionally been quite free, changed for the worse. Women were put into purdah, away from the prying eyes of the Muslim conquerors; Islamic attitudes towards sexuality and male dominance, emerging from a nomadic warrior society, directly influenced the softer, more liberal and tolerant but now effete Hindu society. Someone ought to do a Ph.D. on the role of Islam in the sanctification of Rama, but I wouldn’t take a life insurance policy out on him these days.

  I know the Hindutva types believe that the temples of Ayodhya precede Babar and that he must have destroyed the biggest one because it was the best located. But the problem with this is that there’s a lot of evidence for the opposite — for the building of temples in Ayodhya under Muslim rule, well after Babar built his masjid. I don’t want to bore you with all the details of the tax-free land grants given by rulers like Safdar Jang, who ruled from 1739 to 1754, but they document support for temple building. It was land that the Muslim nawab provided to a Hindu abbot that led to the construction of the Hanumangarhi, the most important Hindu temple in today’s Ayodhya. Many historians, not just me, argue that Ayodhya filled up with temples as a direct result of support from the Muslim nawabs of the area, and that as the nawabi realm expanded, so did Ayodhya gain as a major Hindu pilgrimage center in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was two hundred years after the Babri Masjid was built.

  So that’s my historian’s answer to your question: There’s no evidence for the historicity of the Ram Janmabhoomi claims. Again, does that matter? Isn’t this all about faith, not history? Well, the fact is that the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation is profoundly antihistorical. The bigots who spearhead it want to reinvent the past to suit their aspirations for the present. If we allow them to do it now, here, they will turn their attentions to something else, and the whole orgy of hate and violence will start again. If they get away with attacking Muslims today, they’ll hit Christians tomorrow. And at a fundamental level, intolerance is the real enemy; intolerance can always shift targets. We’ve seen it happen in Bombay, where the Shiv Sena was born in the 1960s as a rabid bunch of Marathi chauvinists trying to drive South Indian migrants out of the city. “Sons of the soil” was their slogan in those days; they looted and burned stores with signs in South Indian languages. That worked for a while, made them popular with some of the local Tukarams, but its appeal was limited; so the Shiv Sena suddenly turned into a Hindu chauvinist party and started denouncing Muslims, a far better target for their brand of homegrown bigotry.

  The Shiv Sena leader says his hero is Hitler. And you know what happened under Hitler. As the German theologian Pastor Martin Niemoeller put it: “At first they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

  They are coming for the Muslims now, and I must speak out. But not because I am a Muslim. Only because I am an Indian, and I do not want them to come for any other Indians. No group of Indians must be allowed to attack another group of Indians because of where they are from, or who they worship, or what language they speak.

  That’ s why your Ram Charan Guptas have to be stopped. Here. Now. Before they set all of India alight.

  from Lakshman’s journal

  August 10, 1989

  Gurinder just won’t let u
p. “You, quitting the IAS?” He let fly a choice expletive or two. “You can’t be serious, man! You’re made for the IAS. You’re doing great work, work that makes a real difference to the lives of real human beings. You’ve got a great career, a great future. I can’t believe you’re even contemplating such a damn-fool idea. You know what your problem is? You’re thinking with your cock.”

  He brushed aside my feeble protestations. “You’ve seen the possibility of sexual paradise with this girl, all in Technicolor, and suddenly everything else in life seems prosaic black-and-white. You really think she’s worth giving up everything for — your wife, your kid, your job, your country?” He was really frothing now. “Look, however wonderful things have been with her, yaar, you can’t forget a few basic facts. Like, she’s an American, Lucky, a fucking Yank. They’re not like us. It’s a different country, a different culture, a different planet, man. You’ve lived all your life with a definite set of values. You know what’s right because it’s always been right. I know you’re not entirely happy with Geetha, what the hell, it’s never been a secret, but come on, yaar, she’s been a good wife to you. She runs a good house, serves a great table, gets the best out of the servants — so what if she gives them hell once in a while? — and spends a lot of time with your daughter. You can bring someone home for dinner at practically no notice and she adjusts to your needs. Your work takes you away unexpectedly, keeps you out till no one knows when, man, and she doesn’t complain.”

  She doesn’t complain, I want to say, because she doesn’t care whether I’m there or not. But Gurinder won’t be interrupted; he plunges remorselessly on with his portrait of Indian domestic bliss.

  “When you’re home she ensures you are served first and gives you the choicest portions before she eats herself. And you can be sure she’s never looked at another man and never will. If you die she will honor your memory, put a fresh garland round your fucking framed photo every day and do puja before it. These are not small things, man.” He thumped a hand into his palm for emphasis. “Not bloody small things. Take it from me, yaar. It’s a comfort to know these are things you can take for granted. As you grow older, you can rest assured there are some things you can always rely on.”