Durbar (48 page)

Towards the end of Rajiv’s term as prime minister when this wave of Hindu resurgence was beginning to spread into middle-class neighbourhoods in Delhi I got in touch with an acquaintance from my days in the
Statesman
’s reporters’ room called B.L. Sharma ‘Prem’, who was not just a practising member of the RSS but a fanatical Hindu. He used to come to the reporters’ room often to see if we could help him get information about his son who had been on a merchant ship that got lost at sea. He was a small, tired-looking man with sad eyes and lines on his face and his search for his lost son was so obsessive and so hopeless that I felt more than a little sympathy for him.

He came from a lower middle class Punjabi family that had come to Delhi as refugees in 1947 and like a lot of other people who had seen the violence of that time grown up with a passionate hatred of Islam. It was this that attracted him to the RSS and its ideology of aggressive nationalism laced with a deep hatred of Muslims and Islam. One of the earliest heads of the RSS, Guru Golwalkar, suggested in a book he wrote that the way to deal with Indian Muslims was the way Nazi Germany had dealt with the Jews. Prem never articulated views this extreme in front of me but when he did not find his lost son he filled the emptiness of his life with RSS work. He organized shakhas in middle class residential colonies in different parts of Delhi and because I was curious about what the RSS was up to I sometimes went along.

I knew something about the RSS from the Rajmata of Gwalior who had always been an ardent supporter but she had an exalted, nationalistic idea of its philosophy. She believed that all that the RSS was promoting was an assertive nationalism and this she considered a good thing for
India. She believed, like many Hindus did, that the only defence against the possibility of the country being broken up once more in the name of religion was to promote the aggressive nationalism of the RSS. Many rich Indians subscribed to this idea and were persuaded to donate vast amounts of money to the RSS and the BJP. What they did not see was the kind of RSS workers that I met through Prem.

From going with him to several morning shakhas I learned that there was a public face of the RSS and a private one. The public face was carefully harmless. Men young and old in shapeless, unflattering khaki knickers would gather at dawn in some park or open space and conduct activities that were self-consciously patriotic. The sessions began with the raising of the national flag which was saluted by everyone present. This would be followed by the collective singing of patriotic songs and an exercise in martial arts so feeble that it could not have saved anyone from an attack by a child. Then they would sing the national anthem, lower the flag ceremonially and go home for breakfast.

It was at these breakfasts that I discovered what was really going on. Sitting on the floor in small, middle class living rooms eating rich Punjabi breakfasts of parathas and oily potatotes I listened to Prem and his friends talk about how necessary it was for Muslims to be driven out of India. Where should they go, I remember asking more than once, and every time I heard the same answer. ‘Pakistan. It was created for the Muslims. This is Hindustan and they cannot stay here.’ Inevitably I would then ask if they seriously believed that a hundred and fifty million Muslims could be driven out of India and Prem would usually say, ‘Not a hundred and fifty million. Two hundred and fifty million and the way they are breeding they will overtake the population of Hindus in a few years and then what will happen?’

Rajiv’s policies as prime minister unleashed demons that should have died after the country was partitioned. An ugly, new form of Hindutva that became resurgent then would one day propel the BJP to a position that would make it the only national party in India capable of taking on the Congress. Did Rajiv not understand the consequences his policies would have? I believe that he did not.

W
hile Rajiv played into the hands of the worst kind of conservative Muslim by legislating to allow Muslims to be governed by Shariat personal laws, he did nothing about making the lives of ordinary Muslims more secure.

From the time I first started working as a journalist, I took a special interest in communal riots. Not just because I thought the horrible violence, caused mostly by petty disputes, made India seem like such a primitive country, but because I could never understand why the Indian state seemed so helpless in the face of violence. I took every chance to go to places where ethnic violence had occurred, and conducted a sort of amateur inquiry of my own. Nearly everywhere I went I found that the reason why more Muslims had been killed in a clash with Hindus, or Dalits in a clash with upper-caste Hindus, was because local officials tended to sympathize with the other side. The unstated reason for this was that most officials were upper-caste Hindus and were emboldened by the reality that when the violence ended all that happened was the setting up of an inquiry committee. It usually took so long to come out with a report that nobody ended up being punished for the dereliction of their duties. Rajiv could do nothing to change this because of his open justification of such violence in 1984, but that still does not explain why he took no action when in the summer of 1987 the Congress chief minister of Uttar Pradesh allowed his policemen to get away with massacring Muslims as if they were animals.

In Meerut in this bout of violence there were many days of murder and mayhem. And the city was under total curfew when police vans arrived one evening in an area called Hashimpura. They parked in a street in
which there were mostly Muslim homes. Under the pretence of rounding up troublemakers, late on the evening of 22 May, the policemen filled a van with Muslim men, some as young as thirteen and some as old as seventy-five, and drove out of the city to the edge of a canal where they opened fire on the unarmed, helpless men while they were still in the van. Their bullet-ridden bodies were thrown into the canal. The story of what happened would never have been told had a few of the men not survived. One of them, Zulfikar Nasser, stayed alive by pretending to be dead after being thrown in the river.

Human rights activists helped him get to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi for the treatment of bullet injuries that were to leave him with a permanent limp. Once he was brought to Delhi he was quickly discovered by reporters, who extracted every last detail of the massacre on the canal and brought it to public attention. Television was still state-controlled but the story of what happened in Hashimpura appeared in newspapers across India. From the government came only the usual cursory response that an inquiry commission would look into what had happened.

The policemen responsible for the carnage were dismissed from service but reinstated as soon as the fuss died down. The Congress Party Chief Minister Vir Bahadur Singh got away with the slightest public reprimand. Rajiv behaved exactly as Indian prime ministers always had when Hindu–Muslim riots happened. He ordered an inquiry knowing that by the time it came to any conclusions memories of the violence would have faded. Today more than twenty years later justice has still not been done and the Hashimpura massacre almost certainly became part of the reason why Muslims in Uttar Pradesh lost faith in the Congress. In nearly half of the state’s eighty parliamentary constituencies, the Muslim vote is the deciding factor because of the Muslim community’s tendency to vote collectively. The Congress Party’s support has been so reduced in the state that despite an aggressive campaign led by Rahul Gandhi in the 2012 elections to the state legislature, the Congress managed to get only 28 seats in an assembly of 403.

Rajiv’s attempts to appease both Muslims and Hindus ended up serving the purposes of only the worst elements in both communities. This muddled political strategy laid the grounds for his defeat in the 1989 elections by allowing two powerful enemies to loom larger and larger. One was V.P. Singh, who continued his campaign against Rajiv’s alleged corruption,
and the other was the BJP, which used Ayodhya as a foundation to build a new political structure of Hindu religiosity. With all manner of Hindu priests and ascetics on its team, it did not take long before word spread in small towns and villages that Rajiv and his foreign wife were anti-Hindu and so, automatically, anti-India.

By the beginning of his last year as prime minister, Rajiv had become unpopular with the very people who believed so much in his ability to bring hope in place of cynicism. He seemed oblivious of this and before the year ended did one more thing to tarnish his image. He banned Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses
from being sold in India. It is often forgotten that the first people to notice that the book was ‘anti-Islam’ was the Government of India and not Ayatollah Khomeini. Was this a conscious choice on Rajiv’s part? I believe not. I believe that because he had no real political beliefs himself, he became an easy victim of those who did.

For my part, I had fore-knowledge of the book’s potential to create trouble by the strangest circumstances. Someone who had seen a proof copy of the book told me, laughingly at some Delhi party, that one of the characters in
The Satanic Verses
was a Sikh woman called Tavleen, a human bomb who blows up an aeroplane in the first few pages of the book. She is as minor a character as imaginable, but it seemed to me that a Sikh woman terrorist called Tavleen had the potential to cause serious problems for me since Rajiv had already hinted in the Lok Sabha that Raghu Rai and I had something to do with the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Srinagar in July 1984. Until my father invented my name to save me from being given the usual gender-neutral Sikh names like Tavinder and Tejinder, Tavleen was not a name at all. There are now many Sikh girls who are called Tavleen (at one point there was even a tigress in Corbett Park named Tavleen!), but at the time when Rushdie wrote his book it was my name alone. It worried me that some bone-headed official in the Government of India might be inspired to reopen the file on my alleged terrorist activities.

I had met Salman Rushdie in Naveen Patnaik’s drawing room, where, in the days before Naveen became a surprisingly successful politician, it was possible to meet such exalted personages as Jackie Kennedy, Mick Jagger and Bruce Chatwin as they wandered through India. Salman came with an introduction from Naveen’s brother-in-law, Sonny Mehta, who was his publisher. On the evening that I first met Salman I had brought along my
old friend, the cricketer Imran Khan, who when he went on to become a politician was to deny ever having broken bread with a man who caused ‘immeasurable hurt’ to Muslims. He told a lie, but since he was aspiring to become prime minister of Pakistan he may have had to.

In the summer of 1988, months before the storm over
The Satanic Verses
broke, I sought out Salman in London. I was there for the
Indian Express
to see if I could ferret out more information about the shell companies to which Bofors bribes had been paid. Arun Shourie was editor of the
Indian Express
at the time and was determined to expose every detail he could discover about where the money had gone. His resolve strengthened when in retaliation Rajiv ordered more than a hundred income tax raids on the newspaper’s offices, showing that he did not believe much in a free press. When Arun asked me to go to London he gave me names of people about whom I was meant to make discreet inquiries. I was spectacularly unfortunate in this regard, and found that whatever leads I followed ended up with slammed doors or closed ones. What I did manage to do was meet Salman and appeal to him to change the woman terrorist’s name in his book. He told me it was too late because the first copies of the book were already in print and compensated by giving me a proof copy of
The Satanic Verses
signed, ‘For Tavleen, with apologies for the misuse of her name.’ He said that this was all he could do. When I told him that his use of my name could get me into trouble in India, he said that he thought the one who was more likely to get into trouble was him ‘with the mullahs’. An unfortunately accurate prophecy.

When the book was published, and before it became available in India, the first call I got was from G. Parthasarathy who was then the joint secretary in charge of external publicity in the Ministry of External Affairs. He had read
The Satanic Verses
and found it very funny that the Sikh woman terrorist had my name. ‘I always knew you were a terrorist,’ he said with a laugh, ‘and now we have confirmation.’

Rajiv’s government did not find the book amusing. As usually happens, the first people to draw the prime minister’s attention to it were those who had neither read the book nor had any intention of reading it. In India books are nearly always banned at the request of people who do not read but whose literary sensibilities are easily offended. In the case of
The Satanic Verses
, the people who took immediate offence were the
same fundamentalists who persuaded Rajiv to allow a separate personal law for Muslims. They came in delegations to demand that the book be banned and since they had the incomprehensible support of a section of Delhi’s liberal intelligentsia Rajiv was easily persuaded. What made it easier for him to make the decision was that in Mumbai hysterical protests had already erupted because of what the Muslim community had ‘heard’ about the book. By then I had read the proof copy Salman gave me and found it heavy going but not particularly offensive. But then I am not Muslim and not a believer. And I do not believe books should be banned.

It made me sad that Rajiv, as a young and supposedly modern prime minister, had been so easily persuaded to take the side of fundamentalists and fanatics. And, as usual, when he had finished appeasing Muslims by banning Rushdie’s book, he found it necessary to appease Hindus by way of compensation. He did this by beginning his election campaign in Ayodhya with the promise that if he won another term he would bring ‘Ram Rajya’ to India. With the BJP already demanding that the Babri Masjid be demolished to make way for a Ram temple, for ‘secular’ Rajiv to promise a return to Ram’s mythical utopia was insanity, but by now I had learned to accept that Rajiv was so apolitical that he was capable of all sorts of mistakes.