Zafar walks gravely around the conference table where the shades of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah are seated, but when we get outside again he asks, “Why is that stone lion still holding up an English flag?” The probable answer, I hypothesize, is that nobody noticed until he did. India has been independent for over half a century, but the flag of St. George is still up there on the roof.
A little ducking and swerving in the grounds to dodge the BJP-wallah who now runs the institute. Alas, I am here not only as observer but also as observed, and I mustn’t fall into the trap of looking like the BJP’s man. A handshake that would certainly be photographed is worth a little fancy footwork to avoid.
Unlike V. S. Naipaul (who is also in India, I gather), I do not see the rise of Hindu nationalism as a great outpouring of India’s creative spirit. I see it as the negation of the India I grew up in, as the triumph of sectarianism over secularism, of hatred over fellowship, of ugliness over love. It is true that Prime Minister Vajpayee has tried to lead his party in a more moderate direction, and that Vajpayee personally is surprisingly popular among Muslims, but his attempt to reshape his party in his own image has failed.
The BJP is the political manifestation of the extremist Hindu movement, the RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh), rather as Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland is the political offspring of the Provisional IRA. In order to change the BJP, Vajpayee would have to carry the leadership of the RSS with him. Regrettably, the opposite is happening. The relatively moderate RSS chief, Professor Rajendra Singh—“Rajju Bhaiyya”—has been ousted by the hard-line K. S. Sudarshan, who has started warning Vajpayee to toe the RSS line.
The prime minister’s options are limited. He could give in and unleash the dogs of religious strife. He could try doing what Indira Gandhi brilliantly carried off in 1969, when the kingmakers of the Congress attempted to turn her into their puppet. (She resigned from her own party, formed the Congress-I or Indira Congress, took most of her MPs with her, called a general election, and destroyed the old guard at the polls.) Or, as seems most likely, he could soldier on until the next election and then stand down. At that point the BJP’s moderate mask will slip, it will no longer be able to hold together the kind of broad-based coalition that presently underpins its hold on power, and, given the shambles the Congress Party’s in, India will enter another phase of splintered, unstable governments. It’s not a happy prediction, but it’s what the probabilities suggest. And it’s a good enough reason for keeping away from BJP apparatchiks, however low-level they may be.
There is a conference under way at the institute. Professor B. B. Lal, using grayware pottery shards found at sites associated with the great Kuru-Pandava war as evidence, concludes that the age of the revered Mahabharata may be only three thousand years, not the supposed five thousand. What will the BJP/RSS make of so radical a rewriting of the story of this sacred Hindu text?
My metamorphosis from observer to observed, from the Salman I know to the “Rushdie” I often barely recognize, continues apace. Rumors of my presence in India are everywhere. I am profoundly depressed to hear that a couple of Islamic organizations have vowed to make trouble, and trouble is news, and so maybe, I think, this will be seen as the meaning of my trip to India, which will be very, very sad, and bad, indeed.
At dinner in Solan’s Himani restaurant, I’m tucking into the spicy Indian version of Chinese food when I’m approached by a Doordarshan reporter called Agnihotri, who just by chance happens to be vacationing up here with his family. And there it is: he has his scoop and the story’s out. Within moments a local press reporter arrives and asks me a few friendly questions. None of this is very unexpected, but as a result of these chance encounters the jitteriness of the police reaches new heights, and boils over into a full-scale row.
Back at Anis Villa, Vijay receives a call on his cell phone from a police officer named Kulbir Krishan in Delhi. Krishan is somewhere in the middle of the invisible chain of command of Delhi desk-pilots, but what he says makes Vijay lose his composure for the first time in all the years of our friendship. He is almost trembling as he tells me, “We are accused of having called those journalists to the restaurant. This man says we have not been gentlemen, we have not kept our word, and we have, if you can believe the phrase, ‘talked out of turn.’ Finally the fellow says, ‘There will be riots in Delhi tomorrow, and if we fire on the crowds and there are deaths, the blood will be on your heads.’ “
I am horrified. It quickly becomes clear to me that there are two issues here. The first, and lesser, issue is that after a week of accepting all manner of limitations and security conditions, we are being accused of dishonesty and bad faith. That is insulting and unjust, but it isn’t, finally, dangerous. The second issue is a matter of life and death. If the Delhi police have become so trigger-happy that they are preparing to kill people, then they must be stopped before it’s too late.
No time now for niceties. Zafar looks on, dazed, while I blow my stack at poor, decent Akshey Kumar (who is not at all to blame) and tell him that unless Kulbir Krishan gets back on the phone right now, apologizes to Vijay and me personally, and assures me that there are no plans to murder anybody tomorrow, I will insist on our driving through the night back to New Delhi so that I can be waiting at Prime Minister Vajpayee’s office door at dawn, to ask him to deal with the problem personally.
After a certain amount of this kind of raging—“I’ll go to the British high commissioner! I’ll call a press conference! I’ll write a newspaper article!”—the hapless Kulbir does call back to speak of “misunderstandings,” and promises that there will be no shootings or deaths.
“If I spoke out of context,” he memorably concludes, “then I am very sorry indeed.” I burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of this formulation and put down the phone. But I do not sleep well. The meaning of this entire journey will be defined by what happens in the next two days, and even though I hope and believe that the police are overreacting, I can’t be sure. Delhi is their town, and me, I’m Rip Van Winkle.
FRIDAY, APRIL 14
We leave Solan at dawn and drive Zafar and Vijay to Chandigarh station. (I, of course, am going all the way by road.) Zafar is recovering from the shrimp attack, but Vijay looks worn out, frazzled. He repeats several times that he has never been spoken to so rudely, and doesn’t propose to let the matter rest. I can see that he’s had it with the police, with all the traveling, and probably with me. Tomorrow night, I tell him, all this will be over and you can go back to being a lawyer and not think about Salman Rushdie and his problems even once. He laughs weakly and gets on the train.
It’s the day of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize banquet, but I’m not thinking about that. All the way back to Delhi, I’m wondering whose instincts will prove the sharper: mine or my protectors’. How will my return-of-the-native trip end: happily or badly? I’ll soon know.
At half past twelve I’m closeted in a meeting with R. S. Gupta, the special assistant commissioner in charge of security for the whole city of Delhi. He is a calm, forceful man, used to getting his way. He paints a dark picture. A Muslim politician, Shoaib Iqbal, plans to go to Friday midday prayers at the city’s most important mosque, the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi, and there get support for a demonstration against me, and against the Indian government for allowing me to enter the country. The congregation will be in six figures, and if the mosque’s imam—it’s Bukhari—supports the call to demonstrate, the numbers could be huge and bring the city to a standstill. “We are negotiating with them,” Gupta says, “to keep the numbers small, and the event peaceful. Maybe we will succeed.”
After a couple of hours of high-tension waiting, during which I am effectively confined to quarters—“Sir, no movements, please”—the news is good. Fewer than two hundred people have marched—and two hundred marchers, in India, is a number smaller than zero—and it has all gone off without a hitch. The nightmare scenario has not come to pass. “Fortunately,” Mr. Gupta tells me, “we have been able to ma
nage it.”
What really happened in Delhi today? The security worldview is always impressive and often persuasive, but it remains just one version of the truth. It is one of the characteristics of security forces everywhere in the world to try and have it both ways. Had there been mass demonstrations, they would have said, “You see, all our nervousness has been amply justified.” But there were no such marches; and so I’m told, “We were able to prevent the trouble because of our foresight and skill.”
Maybe so. But it might also be the case that for the vast majority of Indian Muslims, the controversy over The Satanic Verses is old hat now, and in spite of the efforts of the politician and the imam (both of whom made blood-and-thunder speeches) nobody could really be bothered to march. Oh, there’s a novelist in town to go to a dinner? What’s his name? Rushdie? So what?
This, certainly, is the view taken, almost without exception, by the Indian press in its analysis of the day’s events. The small demonstration that has occurred is noted, but the private political agendas of its organizers are also pointed out.
It’s a hot day in Delhi, and there’s a hot wind blowing. A dust storm rages across the city. As we all take in the news that the only storm in Delhi today is meteorologically induced, we can finally begin to relax, and to concede that perhaps everyone has been more nervous than was necessary and that the long dispute that has kept me away from India is really over at last.
The script in people’s heads is being rewritten. The foretold ending has not come to pass. What happens instead is extraordinary and, for Zafar and myself, an event of immense emotional impact, exceeding in its force even the tumultuous reception of Midnight’s Children almost twenty years ago. What bursts out is not violence but joy.
At a quarter to eight in the evening, Zafar and I walk into the Commonwealth Prize reception at the Oberoi hotel, and from that moment until we leave India, the celebrations never stop. Journalists and photographers surround us, their faces wreathed in most unjournalistic smiles. Friends burst through the media wall to embrace us. The actor Roshan Seth, recently recovered from serious heart problems, hugs me and says, “Look at us, yaar, we’re both supposed to be dead but still going strong.” The eminent columnist Amita Malik, a friend of my family’s from the old days in Bombay, quickly gets over her embarrassment at mistaking Zafar for my bodyguard and reminisces wonderfully about the past, praising my father’s wit, his quick gift for repartee, and telling tales of my favorite uncle, Hameed, who died too young, too long ago.
Gifted young writers—Raj Kamal Jha, Namita Gokhale, Shauna Singh Baldwin—come up to say generous things about the significance of my writing for their own work. One of the great ladies of English-language Indian literature, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal, clasps my hands and whispers, “Welcome home.” I look around and there’s Zafar being interviewed for television and speaking fluently and touchingly about his own happiness at being here. My heart overflows. I had not really dared to expect this, had been infected by the fears of the police, and had defended my heart against many kinds of disappointment. Now I can feel the defenses falling away one by one, the happiness rising like a tropical dawn, fast and brilliant and hot. There are few such moments in a lifetime. Forgive me for saying perhaps too much about this one. It is a rare thing to be granted your heart’s desire.
Somewhere in there the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize goes to J. M. Coetzee, thanks to the deciding vote of the specter at the feast, the stone-faced Indian judge Shashi Deshpande. But this is a party even her curdled judgments cannot poop. India is the prize.
SATURDAY, APRIL 15
Rushdie in India: like Solzhenitsyn regaining home, but without the anger or medieval prophecies. There is only joy, lots of joy.” As the Indian Express’s hyperbolically affectionate front-page lead demonstrates, the party spirit is spilling into the media, drowning the few, muted negative voices. In all my conversations with the press I’ve tried to avoid reopening old wounds, to tell Indian Muslims that I’m not and have never been their enemy, and to stress that I’m in India to mend broken links and to begin, so to speak, a new chapter. Today the Asian Age concurs: “Let’s turn a page.” Elsewhere, in Outlook, there is pleasure that India has “made some amends for being the first to ban The Satanic Verses and subjecting him to the persecution and agony that followed.” The Pioneer expresses its satisfaction that India is, once again, standing up for “democratic values and the individual’s right to express himself.” It also, in less elevated mood, improbably but delightfully accuses me of “turning the city’s sophisticated party women into a bunch of giggling schoolgirls” who tell their men, “Dahling, [he] could send Bollywood hunks back to school.”
Dilip Padgaonkar of The Times of India puts it most movingly: “He is reconciled with India and India with him . . . something sublime has happened to him which should enable him to continue to mesmerise us with his yarns. He has returned to where his heart has always been. He has returned home.” In The Hindustan Times, there is an editorial headed “Reconsider the Ban.” This sentiment is echoed right across the media. In The Times of India an Islamic scholar, among other intellectuals, backs an end to the ban. On the electronic media, opinion polls run 75 to 25 percent in favor of allowing The Satanic Verses to be freely published in India at long last.
Vijay throws a farewell party for me. His wife, Rani, an expert on prison systems and penal reform, has returned from a conference in Vienna just in time. And there’s a surprise: my two actress aunts, Uzra Butt and her sister Zohra Segal, are there, with my cousin Kiran Segal, Zohra’s daughter and one of the country’s foremost exponents and teachers of the Odissi school of Indian classical dancing. This is the zany wing of the family, sharp of tongue and mischievous of eye. Uzra and Zohra are the grand old ladies of the Indian theater, and we were all in love with Kiran at one time or another. Zohra and Kiran lived in an apartment in Hampstead for a time in the 1960s, and when I was at boarding-school at Rugby, I sometimes spent vacations in their spare bedroom, next to Kiran’s bedroom door, on which there was a large, admonitory skull and crossbones sign. I now discover that Vijay Shankardass and Roshan Seth both stayed in the same spare room in the same period. All three of us would look wistfully at the skull and crossbones, and none of us ever got past it.
“I haven’t seen you dance for years,” I say to Kiran.
“Come back soon,” she says. “Then I’ll dance.”
June 2000
PART II
Messages
from
the Plague
Years
This is a selection made from the large number of pieces I published during the long campaign against the Satanic Verses fatwa.
[First, from a speech to the International Conference on Freedom of Expression, Washington, D.C., April 1992]
I’d like to thank all those who helped make this trip possible. It wasn’t a simple matter, and how odd that is! For a writer interested in freedom of expression to attend a conference on the subject should be a simple matter. It should not be necessary for his travel plans to be shrouded in secrecy. The security forces should not need to pay me any special attention. It feels a little like being inside one of those science-fiction yarns in which the present has been altered, so that the Inquisition appears in Piccadilly Circus, and there are witch-burnings on the Potomac.
The fatwa of Imam Khomeini bent the world out of shape. Ancient blood-lusts were unleashed, armed with state-of-the-art modern technology. Battles that we thought no longer needed to be fought—battles against such concepts as “blasphemy” and “heresy,” which throughout human history have been the storm troopers of bigotry—were re-enacted in our streets. Many people who should have known better defended the real and threatened violence and blamed its victims. Even now, in Britain, there is a powerful lobby that regularly denigrates my character. It is hard for me to be my own advocate in this matter, hard for me to insist on my own value. When I do, I am accused of arrogance and ingratitude. But whe
n I don’t fight my corner, my case is swiftly forgotten. Quite a double-bind.
As we used to say in the sixties, there is a fault in reality. Do not adjust your minds. What has been done to The Satanic Verses, its author, publishers, translators, and booksellers, is a crime against freedom. The novel is not the crime; the author is not the criminal.
Of course I know I’m not the only writer under attack. I have tried hard during the past three years to point out that those words, “blasphemy” and “heresy,” have been launched against writer after writer, especially in the Muslim world. I have tried repeatedly to remind people that we are witnessing a war against independence of mind, a war for power.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation—[robbing] those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. [For] if the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
Those words are from John Stuart Mill’s great essay “On Liberty.” It is extraordinary how much of Mill’s essay applies directly to the case of The Satanic Verses. The demand for the banning of this novel and indeed the eradication of its author is precisely what Mill called the “assumption of infallibility.” Those who make such demands do so, just as Mill anticipated, because they find the book and its author “immoral and impious.”
“But,” he writes, “this is the case in which [the assumption of infallibility] is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.” Mill gives two examples of such occasions: the cases of Socrates and of Jesus Christ. To these can be added a third case, that of Galileo. All three men were accused of blasphemy and heresy. All three were attacked by the storm troopers of bigotry. And yet they are, as is plain to anyone, the founders of the philosophical, moral, and scientific traditions of the West. We can say, therefore, that blasphemy and heresy, far from being the greatest evils, are the methods by which human thought has made its most vital advances. The writers of the European Enlightenment, who all came up against the storm troopers at one time or another, knew this. It was because of his nervousness of the power of the Church, not of the State, that Voltaire suggested it was advisable for writers to live in close proximity to a frontier, so that, if necessary, they could hop across it into safety. Frontiers will not defend a writer now, not if this new form of terrorism, terrorism by edict and bounty, is allowed to have its day.
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