On the Grand Trunk Road (35 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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In search of a solution, Nehru invited a delegation of Varanasi Hindu leaders to meet with him in New Delhi. Viyas, then a young political science graduate, went along. He met with the secularist founder of the Indian nation-state in Teen Murti House in the capital.
 
“Nehru said, ‘You have been waiting several centuries, I think. You can wait one or two centuries more,’ ” Viyas recalled. “He said they were trying to establish a good local administration and the administration would decide the matter. ‘I will not touch it,’ he said. It was good advice. He was a great man.... Ever since, I have kept the position of this place, this house, for liberating the mosque. Whether that comes today or later, I can’t say. But I am a peaceful man. I want the liberation in a good way, not a bad way. I do not want bloodshed. Now, I cannot stop any Hindu political party. They will do what they like, but my position is this: no bloodshed. It should be done by conquering the hearts of the people. When many Hindus come here and see the ruins of their temple, they feel very much aggrieved. This is the curse of the Hindus.”
 
We left Viyas in this mood and traveled back through the congested, partially curfew-bound streets of Varanasi and the blackened residue of fires set during recent Hindu-Muslim riots.
 
We were curious above all about what Varanasi’s Muslims thought of this strange, vivid history. That night, we drove after dark into the Muslim quarter—recognizable by the tanneries and butcher shops, businesses essential to the Indian economy but anathema to vegetarian Hindus—to visit Naseer Benarsi, an eighty-five-year-old poet and local Muslim spiritual elder. We sat on sofas in his cramped living room and drank tea. Benarsi recited poetry and spoke at length about hearts broken by religious violence. Then he got around to history.
 
“A wrong done is always a wrong done, whether it is by Aurangzeb or by his father,” he said. “It will always remain a wrong. But we were born in this land. It is now five hundred years after the event. I can say that if I had lived in Aurangzeb’s time, I would have resisted his armies. But since I was not alive at the time, why rain on me? If the Hindus go on breaking mosques for their revenge, how long can Muslims keep that need for retaliation inside, sitting with their hands folded? The Muslims know that the longer they wait, the worse it will get. They feel the need to strike back. As far as I’m concerned, I hope there will be an amicable solution. Everybody realizes that through this issue of religion, much damage can be done. We’ve always had warriors.”
 
The next day, in Lucknow, we met Shah Syed Fazal-ur-Rahman Waizi Nadvi, the preacher of that city’s Tilewali Mosque, one of the two thousand disputed Mughal structures on the hit list of Hindu revivalists. I asked about the story of the Gyanwapi Mosque in Varanasi and suggested that the version of history we had heard provided useful propaganda for the Hindu activists.
 
“There is another history,” he replied. “There was another history that was written in Orissa by a Vishwanath. He argued that the temple at the Gyanwapi was not demolished by the Muslims. He said it was a raja’s private Hindu temple and that a priest at the temple started stealing and embezzling. So the raja got rid of the priest and gave the land to the Muslims. It was a tradition for Hindu rajas to give land for mosques. It happened frequently. People are always abusing Aurangzeb and calling him names but this man built so many temples. There is no evidence for this battle in Varanasi. It is all propaganda. There are not documentary cases. Not only are there none, the story is impossible. Demolishing a temple is strictly prohibited in Islam. It never happened anywhere in India. You might have a colony of Hindus who converted to Islam and voluntarily changed their temple into a mosque. That is something different.
 
“The problem here is not history. The problem here is that Hindu politicians want to unite Hindus, and they can’t see any other way to do it. Hindus are fractious. They are divided by castes and subcastes and it is difficult to find a theme for political unity. So these new politicians use this propaganda.... The people who are talking in this language—it’s a handful of them, politicians mainly. The ordinary Hindu understands us and says, ‘You might have been foreigners at one time, but whenever there were revolts or independence movements, you fought with us.’ These Hindu leaders want to make us into aliens because it’s the only way they can unite the Hindus. The Muslims are both afraid and angry. I am personally scared that we can’t take this too much longer. In Kanpur thousands [of Muslims] came out into the streets, unarmed, and said to the police, ‘Kill us in the streets.’ I’m frightened that Muslims will now take up arms and call for liberation like the Sikhs in Punjab. I’m frightened they will start to fight back with weapons. If it does go that way, it will be the end of the country. The country must go on with its secular foundations. What does an ordinary Muslim want? He wants to live peacefully. This new trend of religious violence is like a flood. When it comes, it takes everything—houses, people, everything. And when it recedes you will see only corpses and ruins.”
 
We met a Hindu political science professor, another teacher of young minds. His name was Suresh Awasthi. He complained that Muslims were breeding faster than rabbits and that if they were not stopped they would soon dominate Indian society. For this reason among others, it was essential that Muslims renounce their imperial history, own up to their past religious and political atrocities, and make restitution to the Hindus. The reconciliation of history was everything. “This cultural question is essential,” he said. “If they will just accept a history that is not the history of Muslim invaders, then they will have accepted reality—that Islam is not supreme, the Indian nation is supreme. We want this psychology to be changed. And there is a religious aspect to this. When family planning is pursued among the Muslims, they say it is un-Islamic. They put their religion above the needs of the nation on the family-planning issue. When they return to us these religious places, they will understand that their religious leaders have misguided them.... The Muslims don’t want to face the facts of history. They want to change history to suit them.”
 
Such is the language of religious violence in India: hot, intolerant, very much of the present, and yet woven from fragments of history and myth. Hindus twist and exploit the history of Muslim invasions; Muslims claim amnesia. Essentially irrelevant are the lost factual details, such as those concerning the dispute over Varanasi’s Well of Knowledge—there are very few reliable records for an objective historian to work with, even if he or she thought objective history would be believed. What matters today is that India’s precolonial history included enough religious wars, invasions, conquests, and appalling acts of slaughter and triumph to justify the anger of anyone who wishes to define the future by the past.
 
Since independence, the competing alternative in India has been to jettison the strife-torn past for the more appealing, secularist myths offered by the modernizing Nehruvian state. But as the Nehruvian state’s ability to govern effectively has declined, so has the binding power of its myths. As the journalist Ned Desmond has pointed out, it was Nehru himself who helped to create India’s postindependence secular version of history in the seminal work he penned in prison,
Discovery of India.
In this rambling tract, which used history and myth to rally Indian nationalism against British rule, Nehru “created a fable that celebrated the achievements of Mughal emperors and [Hindu] maharajahs alike, playing down the ceaseless conflict and fratricide” while at the same time overemphasizing, for Nehru’s own purposes, the history of emperors with a “proto-secular outlook, or at least a strong impulse to harmonize contending religious forces within their empires.”
 
Nehru’s vision prevailed when the British withdrew. But India’s Hindu revivalists and nationalists, as Desmond wrote, have long harbored a less idealized version of history in which India looms “not as a record of proven and varied cultural achievements but as a blood-soaked battlefield on which the two main contenders, during several centuries of conflict, were Hindu civilization and Muslim invaders. Hindus, they argue, were the chosen people of the subcontinent.... Muslims, in this account, were freebooters and religious fanatics who, arriving from Turkey, Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asia beginning in the 11th century, shattered Hindu society, broke temples, forced conversions at swordpoint, and imposed an alien culture. Justice demanded that the glory of past Hindu civilization be restored as the basis of Indian political identity, and all the followers of ‘alien’ traditions on the subcontinent, especially Muslims and Christians, must bend their knee to the Hindu order, and forget the special privileges Nehru granted to them.”
 
In South Asia, past, present, and future bleed into a swirling pool. In the two decades between 1962 and 1981—during the long, ponderous rise of the Nehruvian state—4,770 people were officially recorded as having died in India’s religious riots. But during the 1980s and early 1990s, as the state began noticeably to decompose amid accelerating social change, the religious-violence death rate roughly doubled. Between 1989 and mid-1991 alone, 2,025 people were hacked, stabbed, burned, and shot to death in urban brawls between Hindus, Muslims, and Hindu-dominated security forces. On a per capita basis, the rise in the death toll is not so dramatic because the increasing number of victims is compensated for by the growth in the overall population—on a graph representing victims of religious violence since independence as a percentage of total population, the line does not rise steeply during the 1980s; rather, the graph looks like a series of rolling waves, with the latest crest rising across the 1980s to the present day. Whether per capita statistics or absolute numbers offer the most useful way to think about the toll of religious violence is not, perhaps, the point. The point is that since 1980, the problem has been getting steadily worse.
 
Yet while the fact of rising religious violence was undeniable, what all this bloodshed meant and where it might lead politically were not so clear. Various defenders of the secularist state—whether nihilists in the security forces or humane adherents of the fading Nehruvian ideal—preferred to see the riots as a cyclical, manageable legacy of history, “a small ripple over the sea,” as Indian prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao put it. On the other side, various religious leaders, Hindu and Muslim alike, drew language from their visionary texts to describe the emerging conflict in apocalyptic terms. This view naturally contained an important role for the religious leaders themselves and ample motivation for their followers; thus it seemed self-perpetuating and potentially self-fulfilling.
 
India’s Hindu leaders perhaps can be excused for thinking that rising religious violence in the streets and slums of north India during the late 1980s meant divine destiny was with them—after all, in India’s national election of 1990, the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), or BJP, scored its most impressive political victory ever, winning the second-largest number of seats in the national parliament, behind Nehru’s long-dominant, secularist Congress Party. The Hindu party’s leaders marched in saffron robes beneath banners promising a return to mythical religious glory and (as they so frequently chanted) “Victory to Lord Ram!” Besides becoming leaders of the national parliamentary opposition, the revivalists also won control of the state government in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in the nation, the center of the Mughal Empire and widely seen as India’s political heartland. Once in office, the Hindu preacher-politicians vowed to end the rioting that had charred the downtown slums of the largest cities, eliminate corruption in all its forms, and to conjure up a temporal, political paradise.
 
Predictably, what the preachers mainly did instead was to ensconce themselves in the privileged offices vacated by their secularist predecessors, ride about in chauffeured Ambassadors, settle with their families in state-subsidized bungalows, and begin manipulating the patronage networks of state employment and business licensing that are the key to political prosperity. Struggling for control of these scant but precious state resources, the Hindu revivalists divided themselves quickly into bickering subfactions just as their secularist predecessors had done. If there had been no established democracy in India, presumably the preachers would have had the foresight to declare a long-lived dictatorship of the clergy and thus would have bought some time to enhance and divvy up the spoils of office. As it is, however, the preacher-politicians are accountable every five years to the electorate, and in Uttar Pradesh they faced the daunting prospect of explaining to the electorate why Uttar Pradesh does not very much resemble heaven. The devastating attack on the Ayodhya mosque can be seen as one answer to this predicament: by defining their politics in the angry streets, the Hindus dodge responsibility for their failures in office. While it is debatable whether, in Ayodhya, this was a deliberate strategy by the senior Hindu movement leadership or a scrambled reaction to events beyond their control, the result is the same either way. After the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, the Hindus were dismissed from government in Uttar Pradesh and many were locked up temporarily. Now they are free to wage the politics with which they are most comfortable and at which they are most competent: street demagoguery.

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