On the Grand Trunk Road (37 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

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So the people, or their local Hindu preachers, invented their desire for a temple in order to prevent Muslim businessmen from encroaching on their neighborhood? And they brought out a snake in order to stir enough Hindu fervor to accomplish this?
 
“This is obvious,” Patwari said. “Everybody is talking that this is the real reason for the riot. The plots have already been sold by Saleem to different Muslims for building. The Hindus and Muslims live opposite each other in that neighborhood. The Hindus fear the road will be blocked by the Muslims and the entry to their area, to their shops, will be blocked. The only way to prevent this is with the temple.”
 
At the Hapur police station, as we sat on lawn chairs arranged on carpets in the sun, police superintendent Rajesh Kumar Lai said that this analysis sounded about right to him. “The Hindus were of the view that if this land was sold to Muslims, they would come near to their community and their Muslim colony would expand. There was a fear that if they expanded, there may be problems later on. That was the reason this whole thing developed.... It was basically a land-grabbing process.
 
“About a month ago, they decided to put a photograph of Lord Shiva on that tree and they started worshiping at that place. They formed a temple committee and started negotiations with Saleem and other Muslims. The Muslims were of the view that if a temple was built, that would be a cause of dispute and problems in the future. The administration tried to mediate and find a peaceful solution. Our administration initiated measures to attach the property so nothing could be done on that place—to defuse the situation. Nobody could build anything at all. But the Muslims obtained a stay on our order in court. This meant they could build.
 
“Right afterwards, a big snake appeared—a cobra. It had no fangs and it was blind. It is said that it was purchased for three hundred rupees from a snake charmer, purchased by mischievous elements. It was told to the public—in the form of pamphlets and speeches also—that Lord Shiva had appeared in the form of a cobra. That snake was put near the tree and the information went around that this place is now more holy because Lord Shiva decided to appear as a snake. People here are very simple. In their belief in God, their fear of God, they were carried away. Large groups came with folded hands to see that snake. A feeling of resentment, fear, and panic developed among the Muslims.
 
“The next day, a wall was broken near the tree. There was tension in the air. Rival crowds, very agitated, chanting slogans, roamed about. Local police officers tried to cool the feelings. We tried to negotiate the matter. There was a meeting in which myself, others in the administration, and representatives of both parties talked. Different peace-loving people of the area, responsible persons, were called. They decided in the interests of peace and harmony to remove some of the objects from the tree. Meantime they were negotiating for the land also. Plus they were requesting the Muslim fellows that they should be allowed to construct a
dharamsala
[religious hostel] in that area. Initially the Muslims agreed to this. But later on, when measurements were done, no land was available. When no extra land was available, the negotiation failed.
 
“The snake itself tried to run away several times. But the Hindu leaders did not let it. The snake was their money-earner. The snake brought the people.
 
“A few days later, we called the Hindu leaders. They said, ‘The situation is beyond our control. We cannot remove those idols.’ We requested them to take these things away amicably, on their own. This they would not do. They resented it. As a strategy, men went indoors and they sent their ladies outside. The women surrounded the tree and started worshiping and singing. On the other side, the Muslims were also collected. It appeared there was a chance of a clash between the two communities. So we decided to remove those photographs and idols from the tree. The crowd started to throw stones. It was coming from all around—except from the Muslim side. When the stones started coming, the ladies went home. We lathi-charged [attacked with sticks] first, then fired tear gas. They went onto the rooftops and started pelting stones and country-made bombs. They started firing country-made pistols. They set one Muslim shop ablaze. We were almost cornered. We did not want to use bullets. It’s a last resort. But more and more our efforts failed.... The bombs started falling on us. We were injured. There was no option but to use firearms.
 
“Even then, they were crazy. They kept on throwing things. It was surprising. That was because of their heightened religious feelings. They were ready to sacrifice themselves. Those who started this—their motive was land-grabbing by exploiting religious feelings. Finally, the firing controlled them. The dead and injured were sent to the hospital.
 
“Taking advantage of this firing, the snake vanished in thin air. The snake has taken its toll. The snake is gone.”
 
I was curious about what Saleem Ahmed thought of all this. We wandered around the Muslim quarter asking about him and eventually he turned up. He was thirty-two years old, a father of four, mild in demeanor, subdued about all that had arisen from his land deal. In fact, he said, the peepul-tree deal was the first land transaction he had ever attempted. He had decided to move into real estate because his other business—fertilizer—was doing well and throwing off surplus cash. By subdividing the land he bought from Patwari, Ahmed cleared a quick 120,000-rupee profit. He said that after he sold the land, the first he heard about the plans for a temple was when a local Hindu leader approached him, explained that religious idols had been placed in the peepul tree, and demanded 20,000 rupees to remove them. Ahmed said that when he refused to give in to this extortion, the business with the snake miracle began.
 
I asked Ahmed how he felt about the real estate business now that he had gotten a taste of it.
 
“I wish I hadn’t gotten into this entire affair,” he answered. “I hate this job. There’s a lot of antipathy toward this kind of businessman. The money I made was of no value.... I’ll go back to my other trade now.”
 
I thought for days afterward about Ahmed’s demoralization. On the one hand, it seemed to me inauspicious for India, because the enterprise of millions of Ahmeds is the tide on which India’s political economy rides. Obviously, he and his Hindu and Muslim brethren will do better for themselves and better for their country—create more jobs, create more income—if they can buy and sell their property and trade their shoes in an integrated economy, one that is not Balkanized by the shifting, imaginary Indo-Pakistani borders that spring up in the northern industrial towns and cities in times of religious violence.
 
But there was another way to view Ahmed’s predicament. In his property deal around the peepul tree, he had rediscovered to his chagrin a code of community that South Asians have lived by for centuries. These communities are defined not only by religion but by ethnicity and tribe and clan. When they compete as loose-knit groups in a dynamic political economy, the result is by no means limited to bloodshed. The communities also provide creative, collective backing for the understandable and necessary desire of poor people to become rich. Through this process, a larger, more egalitarian nation-state can arise. And if the Hindu-Muslim divide offered a sometimes dispiriting example of this kind of conflict between South Asian communities, there was related conflict under way in boom towns like Hapur that seemed to contain more cause for optimism: the struggle among castes.
 
12
 
Inside Out
 
 
“Servants are thinking too much,” that is still a common phrase that
you hear around the house.
 
—
P
.
Murali Gopal
 
 
 
I
do not know the name of the man I admire most in India. He may have left a business card but I did not retain it.
 
He showed up unannounced at my front door in New Delhi one afternoon in the midst of the 1990 caste riots. An affirmative action plan promising reserved government jobs to a wide tier of India’s lower castes had sparked a violent reaction in the north. Mobs of upper-caste university students fearful of losing opportunity through reverse discrimination roamed New Delhi’s wide avenues, trashing cars and grocery stores stocked with smuggled imports from the West. Lower-caste students and farmers staged their own demonstrations, battled with police, and erected makeshift roadblocks on the highways out of the capital, where they burned buses and pelted cars with stones. Hysteria about the riots and the divisive consequences of affirmative action sang daily from the Indian national newspapers, which are owned, edited, and written by members of the upper castes. Fueling the apprehension was a spreading wave of ghoulish self-immolations by aggrieved upper-caste teenagers and pre-teens. The burnings had been sparked by Rajiv Goswami, an obscure, quiet upper-caste student at Delhi University who stood one afternoon on the perimeter of a street crowd of chanting protestors and then, in circumstances which remain unclear, doused himself with kerosene and set himself alight. Soon Goswami, wrapped in gauze and fighting for his life in a New Delhi hospital, was being hailed as a tragic but noble paragon of self-sacrifice in a worthy cause, namely the development of a society based on “merit,” not caste or feudal identity. Seeking to emulate Goswami’s reputation, and perhaps to resolve troubles unrelated to political dilemmas such as affirmative action, dozens of other upper-caste teenagers in New Delhi and elsewhere began to soak themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire. Panic and dread spread among parents of the upper-caste urban middle class—accountants, clerks, bureaucrats, and businessmen born to social privilege but struggling under varied pressures in an increasingly competitive political economy. In my neighborhood, which was dominated by such relatively wealthy but insecure households, parents kept a sharp eye on their matches.
 
In this atmosphere I opened my door and stared in disbelief at a smiling young man on my front stoop who clutched a cigarette lighter, a bottle of kerosene, and a fire extinguisher. He was perhaps twenty-one, clean-cut, dressed in pressed slacks and a knit shirt. He announced that he was a salesman, appointed representative of the finest manufacturer of fire extinguishers in India. He said that if I would spare a minute of my time, he would provide a demonstration that would not only amaze me but would convince me of the immediate need to stock my house with his fine safety products.
 
“Sir,” he asked, “shall I set myself on fire?”
 
As he began to pour kerosene onto his forearm, I recovered my voice in time to object. I noted that as a foreigner, I had no great worry that my children would immolate themselves over a caste-based affirmative action plan. But I did wonder whether this sales pitch was working very well elsewhere in the neighborhood.
 
“Business, sir, is booming,” he answered.
 
I invited him in and asked about his background as he unpacked demonstration fire extinguishers and promotional videotapes. He said that he was lower caste by birth. His father was a peasant farmer who owned and tilled a couple of acres, meaning that he was better off than those at the very bottom of the rural ladder, the landless. Still, his parents had worked mightily and saved scrupulously to put him through school, he said. Now he was at university, an undergraduate in engineering. He hoped eventually to study abroad. Meantime, to earn money for school and to keep himself in style, he was moonlighting as a fire-extinguisher salesman, tromping door to door through upper-caste neighborhoods, offering to rescue the privileged from themselves at twenty U.S. dollars a pop. It was a very good franchise, he said.
 
Though uncertain about the quality or utility of his extinguishers, I told him that I would buy three, strictly on the principle that such audacity must be rewarded if India is ever to realize its ambitions. I think the salesman wasn’t sure what I was talking about, but he remained polite enough, no doubt on the principle that the money of lunatic foreigners was just as good as the money of frightened Brahmins.
 
I tended to invest my hopes in such quixotic characters because otherwise it would be easy to give in to despair about the legacy of feudalism and caste in South Asia. Even in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where casteless Islamic ideology has helped to decouple feudal economic arrangements from spiritual tradition, the old system clings to the land like glue, trapping all sorts of ambitious people in place. The system finds a thousand ways to perpetuate itself, including forms of religious sanction, as in the exploited tradition of living Islamic saints in the Pakistani countryside. As with race in America, it is difficult to be certain when you care too little and when you care too much about feudal and caste discrimination. But if you believe in virtually any version of the egalitarian ideal, and if you confront with open eyes what this discrimination means in South Asia today and how it operates, the enormity of the problem can be staggering.
 
In India, ancient caste identities remain very much alive, despite the determined efforts of Nehruvian policymakers to kill them off. If you could produce a satellite photograph of India with different colors marking the prominence of different castes, the result would be an indecipherable patchwork. There are thousands of castes and subcastes sanctioned by Hinduism as divinely ordained earthly stations from which one cannot escape except through death and reincarnation. Some castes are large, such as the superior Brahmins or the inferior untouchables, but even these have regional subdivisions notable as much for their differences as for their shared status. Other castes are tiny groups, confined to a single clan of artisans or laborers in a single village. The overall stratification is roughly symmetrical. About 15 percent of India’s population are reckoned to belong to the upper castes at the very top. About 20 percent belong to the very lowest castes or to oppressed indigenous tribes at the very bottom. (Untouchables are in this group, though technically they are not a caste at all, but a spiritually homeless group of “outcasts.”) This lowest tier is designated by the government as “scheduled castes and tribes” and has been targeted in various affirmative action programs since just after independence. In the middle, some 65 percent of the population belong to what is known these days as the “other backward classes,” lower and lower-middle castes and minorities such as Muslims and Christians. Within this grouping are some clans that have done very well since independence, some that have done very poorly, and some that have simply remained in servitude to their landlords. It was a doomed attempt by India’s crusading prime minister V. P. Singh to initiate for these other backward classes a new, sweeping affirmative action plan in public employment that sparked the caste riots of 1990, including the upper-caste self-immolations that brought the fire-extinguisher salesman to my door.

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