Coming back to the 1990 violence, the countdown for the Hyderabad riot began when L. K. Advani, the president of the BJP, began his rath yatra from the temple of Somnath on the west coast to Ayodhya in the Hindi heartland of the north. The stated purpose of the yatra, which was to take Advani through a large part of the country in thirty days and over ten thousand kilometres, was the construction of the Rama temple at the legendary birth site of the god where stood a mosque constructed in 1456 by the founder of the Mughal dynasty. The Toyota van in which the BJP leader travelled was decorated to make it resemble the chariot of the legendary hero Arjuna, as shown in the immensely popular television serial of the Mahabharata. Advani’s chariot aroused intense fervour among the Hindus. Crowds thronged the roads to catch a glimpse of the rath, showered flower petals on the cavalcade as it passed through their villages and towns, and the vehicle itself became a new object of worship as women offered ritual prayer with coconut, burning incense, and sandalwood paste at each of its stops. In a darker, more sombre aftermath, there were incidents of violence between Hindus and Muslims at many places in the wake of the rath yatra.
Like a pond choked with lotus stalks during the monsoon, this religious-political exercise was replete with symbols. The symbolism began with the ‘chariot’: a large lotus, the symbol of the BJP, was painted on the front grill of the Toyota. In the Hindu mind, influenced by tales from the Mahabharata and the visuals of popular poster and calendar art, the chariot is the vehicle of gods and mythical heroes going to war. Above all, the chariot is associated with Arjuna, with Lord Krishna as his charioteer, as he prepares for a just, dharmic war against an evil though intimately related foe, the Kauravas. Arjuna’s horses were white, signifying his purity; Advani’s Toyota-chariot, which the newspapers were soon to call the ‘juggernaut of Hindutva,’ was also white.
Somnath, the starting point of the yatra and the location of an ancient Shiva temple, is also the greatest symbol of Hindu defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Muslims. The legend of Somnath, which has entered Hindu folklore over large parts of the country, tells us that in the eleventh century Somnath was the richest and the most magnificent temple of Hindu India. One thousand Brahmins were appointed to perform the daily worship of the emblem of Shiva, a thirteen-and-a-half foot lingam, four-and-a-half feet in circumference. Three hundred men and women were employed to sing and dance before the lingam every day and the temple treasury possessed vast riches in gold, silver, and precious gems, accumulated over the centuries. Mahmud, the sultan of the central Asian kingdom of Ghazni, who swept over north India almost every year like a monsoon of fire and was famed far and wide as the great destroyer of temples and a scourge of the Hindus, came to know of the Hindu belief that he could destroy so many of their temples only because the deities of those temples had forfeited Somnath’s support. With a view to strike at the very root of the Hindus’ faith in their gods, and tempted by the prospect of plundering the temple’s treasures, Mahmud marched to Somnath. The Hindus were complacent in their belief that Shiva had drawn Mahmud to Somnath only to punish the sultan for his depredations. Hoping for a manifestation of Shiva’s divine wrath, the Hindu resistance to Mahmud was unorganized and offered much too late. According to legend, hundreds of thousands of Hindus perished in the ensuing slaughter—fifty thousand, according to nationalist historians. The temple was razed to the ground. The Shiva lingam was broken to pieces and together with the temple’s plundered treasure transported to Ghazni where its fragments were fashioned into steps at the gate of the chief mosque. The Hindu historian, acknowledging Mahmud’s skill as a general and the fact that Muslim chroniclers regard him as one of the most illustrious kings and a great champion of Islam, adds: ‘By his ruthless destruction of temples and images he violated the most sacred and cherished sentiments of the Indian people, and his championship of Islam therefore merely served to degrade it in their eyes such as nothing else could.’26 Somnath and Mahmud of Ghazni have become intimately associated over the following centuries. Today, among Hindus, the name of the temple conjures up less the image of Shiva than the memory of one of the most rapacious and cruel of Muslim invaders. In choosing to start the rath yatra from Somnath, the symbolic reverberations of the act were well calculated; the righteous Hindu chariot was setting forth to avenge ancient humiliations, to right old historical wrongs.
For the Hindus, Somnath is indeed what Volkan calls a ‘chosen trauma’, just as the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in December 1992 fairly bids to become one of the chosen traumas of the Indian Muslim.27 The term ‘chosen trauma’ refers to an event which causes a community to feel helpless and victimized by another and whose mental representation becomes embedded in the group’s collective identity. Chosen trauma does not mean that either the Hindus or the Muslims chose to become victims but only that they have ‘chosen’ to mythologize, psychologically internalize, and thus constantly dwell upon a particular event from their history. A chosen trauma is reactivated again and again to strengthen a group’s cohesiveness through ‘memories’ of its persecution, victimization, and yet its eventual survival. In the late nineteenth century, Swami Vivekananda had ‘remembered’ Somnath thus: ‘Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and hundred regenerations continually springing up out of the ruins rejuvenated and strong as ever.’28 At the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, Advani was to summon up the Hindu chosen trauma again from the depths of cultural memory.
If the yatra began in Somnath it was symbolically symmetrical for it to end in Ayodhya, the birthplace and capital of the kingdom of Lord Rama and thus the site of the Hindu’s chosen glory. For many Hindus, the story of Rama is the most resplendent moment of India’s history. The revival of its memory, commemorated annually in the Ram Lila, makes the collective chest swell with pride. The chosen glory, too, is psychologically internalized and is as salient for a group’s cultural identity as its chosen trauma; both constitute landmarks on the terrain of a group’s cultural memory.
Further, the painted lotus on the chariot, the symbol of the BJP, is one of the most Hindu of the universal symbols and is ubiquitous in India’s religious iconography. Various lotuses are associated with different gods and goddesses, e.g., the eight-petalled lotus is the dwelling place of Brahma.
Advani’s cavalcade, of symbols as much as of people, came to a halt when on 23 October he was arrested in Bihar before he could start on the last lap of his journey to Ayodhya, where the BJP and its allied organizations, the sangh parivar, had promised to start the construction of the Rama temple on 9 November. The already high political passions were now nearing the point of explosion. The spark was provided by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had vowed that to prevent the construction of the temple he would not ‘let even a bird enter Ayodhya’. The well-oiled machine of the sangh parivar, however, had succeeded in smuggling in thousands of kar-sevaks from all over the country for the task of construction. On 9 November, Yadav ordered the police to open fire on the kar-sevaks who had broken through the police barriers and were intent on the demolition of the Babri mosque as a prelude to the building of the temple. Scores of kar-sevaks died in the police firing. Their bodies were cremated on the banks of the river Saryu and the ashes taken back by the BJP workers to the villages and towns in different parts of the country from which the dead men hailed. There they were eulogized as martyrs to the Hindu cause. Soon, Hindu–Muslim riots erupted in many parts of the country.
In Hyderabad, more than a thousand miles to the south of Ayodhya, the riots began with the killing of Sardar, a Muslim auto-rickshaw driver, by two Hindus. Although the murder was later linked to a land dispute between two rival gangs, at the time of the killing it was framed in the context of rising Hindu–Muslim tensions in the city. Muslims retaliated by stabbing four Hindus in different parts of the walled city. Then Majid Khan, an influential local leader of Subzimandi who lives and flourishes in the shaded space formed by the intersecti
on of crime and politics, was attacked with a sword by some BJP workers and the rumour spread that he had died. Muslim mobs came out into the alleys and streets of the walled city, to be followed by Hindu mobs in their areas of strength, and the 1990 riot was on. It was to last for ten weeks, claim more than three hundred lives and thousands of wounded. One of the wounded was the two-year-old girl in the photograph.
The Warriors
....In my heart there are furies and sorrows.
Quevodo
Majid Khan survived the attack. When I met him two-and-a-half years later, he was especially keen to show me the scar from the sword blow which had split his balding head in the middle. The thick ragged scar, many shades darker than the nut-brown scalp it traversed before meandering down into the fringe of wispy black hair at the back of his neck, was displayed as a proud badge of honour, a battlefield decoration from an old war. The murderous assault had made him, as Majid Khan put it, ‘the hero of Hyderabad’. Thousands of people gathered at the hospital when they heard the news about the attack,’ he recollected with pride as he looked in the direction of two young men in the room for their choral confirmation. ‘Thousands every day,’ the men obligingly responded. ‘Nothing united the Muslim nation of this city as much as that cowardly blow,’ said Majid Khan. ‘Absolutely true. Hyderabad has never seen anything like it before,’ both the men confirmed, this time with greater enthusiasm as they warmed up to their roles.
I took the men, in their early thirties, to be his chamchas, the fawning, all-purpose factotums who hang around politicians and film stars, catering to their physical and especially to their narcissistic needs. Majid Khan was not yet a political star of the kind who would be surrounded by a whole group, by what I would call a katori, the modest local version of the coterie which has traditionally built up around prime ministers.
Majid Khan’s political fortunes have nonetheless soared since the riots, and the visiting card he gave me was testimony to his importance in the Majlis. Printed in English, his name in cursive red letters riding many lines of different-sized letters in green, like the miniature flag of a new Islamic nation, the card informed me that Abdul Majid Khan was a council member of the All India Majlis-e-Itehad-ul-Muslimeen, a Director of Sarussalam Urban Cooperative Bank, had two telephone numbers and a residential address in Karwan Sahu, the part of the city where he owned a house and an eatery (which may be called a restaurant but which is respectfully referred to as a hotel).
I think we took him by surprise when we walked unannounced into the anteroom of his house around eleven in the morning of a hot, late April day. If he was inconvenienced by our intrusion, his deep-set eyes in a dark round face did not betray annoyance. Interrupting his conversation with the chamchas to greet us warmly, he inquired about Sahba’s health and expressed his great pleasure in seeing her again, before turning to me in courteous regard. A middle-aged, barrel-chested man of medium height, with a short thick neck that took its function of joining the head to the trunk more seriously than of separating the two, Majid Khan, even in his undervest and the crumpled green-and-black checked lungi, dominated the room with a miasma of raw power. One of the walls of the room was covered with mounted black-and-white photographs which showed him garlanding state and national politicians and being garlanded in turn by more local ones. As expected, the tall, cadaverous leader of the party, Sultan Owaisi, was a gravely benign presence in most of the photographs. Another wall was fully papered over by a coloured, grainy photograph of a wooden Swiss chalet standing at the edge of an icy cool stream and outlined against an impossibly blue sky, the colour of the sky highlighted by two fluffy light grey clouds. Spring trees cast dark velvet shadows on sun-dappled grass. Plump European cows with silky sheens and pink udders grazed in the gently rolling meadow. Outside, the morning was steadily getting hotter. The temperature had crossed the hundred degree mark, yet the boiling sun had only begun its inexorable ascent.
Majid Khan’s slight discomfort as we exchanged further courtesies while he inquired about the purpose of my visit, was not due to the heat or the sheen of perspiration on his bald scalp that periodically coalesced into large drops of sweat which then trickled down his forehead. He seemed to be more bothered by the informality of his attire and our meeting place. For someone aspiring to be a political figure of more than local significance, Majid Khan naturally wanted to present himself in more appropriate surroundings and suitably dressed for the role. Excusing himself, he asked one of his men to take us to the party office located about a hundred yards from his house above his restaurant where we were to wait for him.
The office itself was spanking new but looked bare and unused. Along one wall, painted in what I have come to regard as Hyderabad blue, there was a brown rexine covered sofa. The only other furniture was a table with a formica top and a white plastic cane chair. The sofa, the table, and the chair were covered with a fine layer of dust. There were no cupboards, boxes of files, pens, pencils, paper clips, note pads, or other paraphernalia which bespeak of an office where work is done. We were asked by our companion to step into the adjoining room which was more luxuriously, even garishly appointed, in a lower-class fantasy of aristocratic splendour as shaped by Hindi cinema. The peach-coloured plush-covered sofa could easily seat six while the divan, with two cylindrical pillows encased in dark pink satin covers and in an exultant floral design, was equally spacious. A gleaming new Mirzapur carpet in loud blue with an intricate dark red Persian motif covered the full area of the floor. Majid’s man politely asked us if we would care to look at the Sahib’s photographs, an offer we accepted with equal politeness. The man came back after a few minutes, carrying two bulging cardboard shoe boxes and followed by a younger man, the chamcha’s chamcha, bearing two bottles of cold lemonade. As we sipped the oversweet lemonade, we were taken on a photographic tour of Majid Khan’s life which highlighted his political career and the social status he had achieved. There was genuine awe and admiration in the chamcha’s voice as he pointed out the burly figure of his patron in various situations: here he is in the welcoming committee receiving the former Chief Minister Sahib, there he is next to Sultan Sahib in the reception for the Governor Sahib, there he is in the front of the group garlanding Sultan Sahib at the opening ceremony of the bank.
As we murmured our involvement with subdued ‘oohs!’, ‘ahs!’ and increasing ‘uh-huhs!’ Majid Khan came into the room followed by one of the young men we had earlier met at his home. Majid Khan was now clad in the politician’s uniform of fresh, lightly starched white kurta-pyjamas and matching white leather sandals. He apologized elaborately for keeping us waiting and then took out a remote control device from his pocket with which he tried to switch on the vertical fan standing next to the divan. The blades completed one full circle before coming to a halt. The remote control button was pressed again and the fan made another effort. This was repeated a couple of times before an almost imperceptible nod to the chamcha galvanized him into switching on the fan manually. During the play with the fan, Majid Khan kept on talking to the young man about how everything was now sorted out with the police and that there was no longer any cause for concern. I had the distinct feeling that this conversation had already taken place earlier in the house and on the way to the office. It seemed to me that the highlights were now being repeated for our benefit; Majid Khan was introducing himself. Without appearing to be overtly boastful, he was conveying through the conversation the extent of his power, the breadth of his concern, and the degree of his importance in the life of his community and the mohalla where he lived. Someone, it seems, had reported to the police that a bomb and a revolver were hidden in a house in the neighbourhood. A police party came to Karwan in the evening, took away everyone in the house to the police station for questioning, and some of the men were roughed up. A young man, who worked in a factory, was the only member of the family who was not at home at the time of the police raid. He came running to Majid Khan for help. Majid went to the police station and arranged f
or the release of the young man’s family, a task made easier by the fact that the house search had not yielded any weapon. After the young man left, Majid Khan proceeded to deliver a lengthy monologue on the ever increasing zulm, the oppression of the Muslims, by the police. The chamcha took up the narrative by telling us of other incidents where Majid Khan had also starred as the helper and saviour of the oppressed poor, fearlessly confronting police high-handedness, facing down armed policemen who were ready to fire into Muslim crowds during a riot.
For me, it was difficult to reconcile the image of this courteous, confident man whose zeal in the service of his community could not be a total pretence, with the one projected by Hyderabad’s English language newspapers and the police for whom Majid Khan was a well-known goonda. Most of the urban elite know the goonda in his caricatured form from Hindi movies as the villainous, dark-skinned, usually unshaven, solidly muscled tough in tight sweatshirts and jeans (or in a check lungi, if Muslim), with a knotted scarf around the neck and a gold chain nestling in the chest fur. The Hyderabad police have a special name for them. In their records such men are listed as ‘rowdies’; a rowdy, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, is a ‘rough, disorderly person; one addicted to quarrelling, fighting or disturbing the peace’. Although the word itself is of American origin, today a rowdy conjures up more the image of a British soccer fan wreaking mayhem in a European football stadium than a knife-wielding tough in the back alleys of Hyderabad. The police also call them ‘history sheeters’, which refers to the sheets of paper in police files where, year after year, a history of their unlawful activities is carefully recorded from the surveillance and surmise of plain clothes officers, together with the noting of arrest records and any subsequent trial verdicts.
Colours of Violence Page 8