Everywhere he went, he baptised Sikhs by the thousands and made them swear in front of congregations that they would never again touch intoxicants and pornography or adopt Western ways. They did not break their oath. Money previously squandered was saved. Time previously wasted in drink and drugs was now spent on more careful tillage—bringing more money. Bhindranwale saved a large section of Sikh peasantry from rack and ruin.
It was their women and children who acclaimed him as a saviour and a saint: he was a good guy. To this image, Bhindranwale put on the macho gloss of a tough man: bandolier charged with bullets across his hairy chest, pistol on his hip, in his hand a silver arrow like the one Maharaja Ranjit Singh used to carry. The crowds loved him when he referred to Indira Gandhi as pandit dee dhee (that daughter of a Brahmin—much milder than what Praveen Togadia has called Sonia Gandhi in recent times) and the central government as bania-Hindu sarkar. Unemployed young men who passed out of college but could not be absorbed into their ancestral farming business were impressed by his fiery speeches and became his followers.
Later when Bhindranwale shifted to the Golden Temple, started making anti-Hindu speeches and his goons began killing innocent people, his admirers dismissed the allegations as government propaganda. To them he still remained a good guy. Even as Hindus were being pulled out of buses and being shot and transistor bombs were going off in crowded markets all over north India, Sikh pride was at its height.
The year 1984 witnessed the bloodiest confrontation between Bhindranwale’s followers and the Central government when the Indian Army entered the Golden Temple at Amritsar and destroyed the Akal Takht. Almost 5,000 men and women, mostly innocent pilgrims who were there on the martyrdom day of Guru Arjun Dev, the founder of the Temple, were killed in the crossfire between Bhindranwale’s men and the Army. A few months later, on 31 October, Indira Gandhi was slain by one of her Sikh bodyguards. Terrible results followed. In towns and cities across the Gangetic plain down to Karnataka, frenzied mobs, often led by Congress leaders, took a heavy toll of Sikh life and property.
In Delhi alone, over 3,000 Sikhs were burnt alive and over seventy gurudwaras wrecked. On the afternoon of 31 October, I saw a huge cloud of black smoke billowing out from Connaught Circus. Sikh property in the area had been set on fire. In the evening I saw hooligans wreck Sikh-owned taxis parked outside Ambassador Hotel and ransack Sikh shops in Khan Market, a stone’s throw from my house. I saw two lines of policemen under an officer across the road. They were armed, but stood idly watching the looters on rampage.
At midnight I was woken up by slogan-shouting: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon say lengey.’ Blood for blood. I ran out into my back garden and through the boundary hedge I saw a truckload of men armed with lathis and cans of oil attack the Sujan Singh Park gurudwara and set fire to a few cars left for servicing in the garage run by Sikh mechanics.
Although I had anticipated some spontaneous outburst of anger against Sikhs because of what Bhindranwale’s men had been doing to innocent Hindus in Punjab, what happened in Delhi was organized. The entire government machinery went into voluntary paralysis. No curfew was imposed, no order to shoot at sight was carried out.
It was not a communal riot because in many areas Hindus came to the rescue of their Sikh neighbours. Also, there was no retaliation against Hindus by Sikhs in Punjab. The finger of suspicion clearly pointed at one party for giving the signal ‘Teach the Sikhs a lesson.’
Nineteen eighty-four was the worst ever year for the Sikhs since they lost their kingdom 133 years ago. For years after the pogrom, no one was convicted. There were many commissions that went over the events of the two days. Non-official commissions led by eminent men like Justice Tarkunde, Dr Kothari and retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court S.M. Sikri roundly condemned the govenment of the day. They even named several MPs of the Congress for having instigated violence against a hapless and vastly outnumbered minority which had never had the slightest sense of insecurity in its relationship with the Hindus. But the official commission exonerated the Congress and the government of all blame. To this day Congress leaders who led the mobs live as free men.
The country paid a heavy price for 1984. But the events of Gujarat prove that neither the political parties nor the people of India have learnt any lessons from that. We are condemned to repeat history.
Not Just the BJP
It would be in all our interests to remember that what the BJP has perfected began under the Congress. Before Gujarat, the worst example of police connivance with terrorism was witnessed during the two days following the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. N.S. Saksena, a retired Director General of Police, wrote in his book Terrorism: History and Facts in the World and in India: ‘The police in Delhi, Kanpur, Gaziabad, etc., was under the impression that anti-Sikh riots had the approval of the government.’ The then home minister admitted in Parliament that over 2,400 persons were killed in Delhi alone. (The real figure was much higher.) The Delhi police registered only 359 cases. The magistracy proved equally compliant: Ninety-nine per cent of the accused charged with these unbailable offences were released on bail and they terrorized relatives of the very people they killed and molested from giving evidence against them. Saksena astutely observed that ‘terrorism has largely been a public sector enterprise’.
What could have been put down by a firm hand in a few hours was deliberately allowed to go on for seventy-two hours. Far from condemning it, in his first public oration as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi explained it away: ‘When a big tree falls, the earth about it shakes.’ The conduct of the Congress in the elections that followed was equally reprehensible. Its posters had a distinctly anti-Sikh bias. For example, the ad ‘Do you feel safe in a taxi driven by a member of another community?’ In his own constituency, Amethi, where Rajiv had his Sikh sister-in-law Maneka opposing him, one of the slogans chanted was: Beti hai Sardar ki, qaum hai ghaddar ki (She is the daughter of a Sikh, she belongs to a community of traitors). The Congress party won its landslide victory on a wave of anti-Sikh sentiment generated by it.
But 1984 was not the only case of communal violence during Congress rule. The record of Congress governments in the states ruled by it has been generally abysmal. The cold-blooded shooting down of over seventy Muslim peasants in Hashimpura, anti-Muslim riots in Ahmedabad, in Bhiwandi and Jalgaon, in the towns of Madhya Pradesh, and in Bhagalpur, give the lie to the Congress’s secular credentials.
One should not judge political parties by the labels they wear on their lapels or by the high-sounding manifestos issued by them, but by their actions. I will concede that Muslims have never had it as bad as now, when the BJP is in power. But they were never allowed to flourish under Congress rule either. Indira Gandhi and then Rajiv used the Muslim community as a vote bank. They weren’t interested in their future as Indian citizens. They ensured that like the Dalits, Indian Muslims remained poor and insecure, so they could be fooled into seeing the Congress as their only saviour.
I remember a visit to Aligarh in the mid 1970s. What I saw there sums up what the Congress had done for the Muslims of India. Driving back to Delhi after a brief stay at the Aligarh Muslim University, I had a glimpse of the ‘progress’ made by the Muslim peasantry. Some miles from Ghaziabad were a few villages entirely inhabited by Muslims. I went through the largest one called Dasna. Its population: 2,300. The homes looked clean enough but the lanes were incredibly filthy. Drains clogged with evil-smelling slime. A few electric lights. But though everyone was within calling distance, there was a loudspeaker attached to the minaret of the mosque. I saw the only school at Dasna, a high school; but I was told that no more than thirty children went to it. ‘What will they do with education?’ asked a young man whose family was one of the three in the entire area that owned a tractor. ‘They learn the Quran Sharif at the mosque and that is enough. And we do not believe in education for girls.’ The Tehsildars accompanying me told me that in the last family planning drive in the region, not one male or female in the collection
of villages around Dasna had volunteered for vasectomy or hysterectomy.
By encouraging regressive mullahs and orthodox leaders and treating Indian Muslims as a homogeneous mass, the Congress consigned the whole community to an intellectual and social ghetto. The Muslim closed his mind, he withdrew into himself as a tortoise withdraws into its shell. This helped the BJP demonize the community.
The Bitter Truth
The Muslim attitude is not a political but a national problem. We did not do enough after 1947 to rehabilitate them in the national mainstream. The non-Muslim has always had it deeply embedded in his mind that Muslims are bigots, fanatics and treacherous. We were brought up on tales of heroism of Prithviraj Chauhan, Maharana Pratap, Guru Gobind Singh and Chhatrapati Shivaji. All our heroes were non-Muslims who had fought Muslims. Not one in our pantheon was Muslim. Akbar was just a token figure. We were exposed to evidence of what Muslim conquerors had done: desecrated our temples, massacred our citizenry and imposed humiliating taxes on them. Although all this ended with British rule, we continued to harbour distrust against Muslims. The more liberal kept up a facade of friendship with some, but rarely did we learn to relax in their company and speak our minds. They were not a part of the Indian mainstream. Jinnah did not have to invent the two-nation theory; it was there for anyone who had eyes to see. The British were quick to notice the distance between the communities, and as any other foreign power would have done, exploited it to their own advantage.
The Sangh and the BJP have capitalized on these old prejudices about Muslims. Ironically, these so-called nationalists in saffron have been doing exactly what the British did to rule over us. They will do everything in their power to keep the Muslims in ghettos, so that they remain the ‘other’. This makes it easier for the Hindu fundamentalists to sell their lies to us. They tell us that the polygamous Muslims are multiplying at an alarming rate and soon Hindus will become a minority. We believe them, though census results clearly show that the rate of growth of the Hindu population has always been higher. They tell us that all Muslim rulers followed a policy of genocide against their Hindu subjects, when it is a proven fact of history that in India more Muslim blood was shed by Muslims than by Hindus. They tell us that today’s Muslims resent not being the rulers of India and are intolerant and prone to violence. The fact is that in almost every communal confrontation since Independence, Muslim loss of life and property has been almost ten times that of the Hindus.
The BJP has succeeded in convincing many Hindus that Muslims were pampered and favoured throughout the time Congress was in power. I have already pointed out exactly what kind of pampering this was. To add to that argument I go back to Judge Madon’s report, delivered after the Bhiwandi riots when the Congress was in power at the Centre and in Maharashtra. Although the Muslims were the victims (of the 121 killed, well over 100 were Muslims; of the property destroyed or looted, ninety per cent belonged to the Muslims), the vast majority of those arrested were Muslims. The Maharashtra police disgraced their uniforms by showing pro-Hindu bias—they beat Muslim prisoners and deprived them of food and water (given to Hindu prisoners). The report also revealed that a Home Ministry circular giving instructions on how to deal with communal riots assumed, as do most non-Muslims, that it was the Muslims who created communal tensions. They were the ones to be watched.
The Hindu right has also targeted the Christians. Their numbers too, we are told, are increasing exponentially because of conversions. Many of us assume this is true. Find out for yourselves—the Christian population in India has in fact gone down. And why don’t the Sanghwalas acknowledge that the missionaries have done more good for the country than they ever will? Christian missionaries did not limit themselves to preaching but put their beliefs into practice by opening schools, colleges and hospitals all over the country that are among the very best in India. In every natural calamity that visits our country, Christian relief workers are usually the first to arrive on the scene to the aid of the stricken. Everywhere they work among the sick and the diseased whom our society discards.
It is being insinuated that Christian institutions increased their activities encouraged by the fact that Sonia Gandhi, who has emerged as a contender for power, is a Catholic. This is absolute rubbish. Ever since she married Rajiv, she threw in her lot with her husband’s community and besides paying homage to Mother Teresa, as millions of non-Christians did, kept aloof from religious organizations. She chose India as her home and brought up her children as Hindus though she had every right to bring them up as Christians.
Similar fancies and false arguments have been spread by the likes of Arun Shourie and Praful Goradia in their books and columns. They are intelligent, well read men. If they give us selective information and plain lies instead of proven facts, they do so with a purpose. Whipping up hatred among the majority community, emphasizing differences and creating grievances will win them elections.
Arthur Koestler in his Suicide of a Nation summed it up beautifully: ‘Throughout the ages, painters and writers of fantastic tales have been fond of creating chimaeras (a monster with a lion’s head, goat’s torso and a serpent’s tail). My own favourite brain-child is the momiphant. He is a phenomenon most of us have met in life: a hybrid who combines the delicate frailness of the Mimosa, crumbling at a touch when his own feelings are hurt, with the thick-skinned robustness of the elephant trampling over the feelings of others.’ To me the Shouries and Goradias are classic momiphants. They will ruin the country.
We have helped them by not confronting our long history of prejudice. Every Indian community has kept itself apart from the others. It is time for us to accept this fact. The traditional approach to defuse communal tension was the Ram-Rahim or the Ishwar-Allah teyro naam approach, preaching that all religions emphasize love between humans. It worked when we had people like Mahatma Gandhi around because he symbolized in his own person the spirit of Allah and Ishwar. It works no more. C. Rajagopalachari used to say that God was our best policeman. It is true that a truly religious man has no hatred in him. But such men have become a rarity while those who display their religiosity by emphasizing differences between religions have become a common phenomenon. Most of us have double standards of judgement: we are unable to see the shortcomings of our own religions but more than eager to see the fatuous in other people’s faiths. The Ram-Rahim approach is just a smoke screen.
Once we have seen the villain in ourselves, we will have taken the first step towards securing our future.
IS THERE A SOLUTION?
As our numbers multiply, so do our problems. I am convinced that the suicidal rate of increase of our population has contributed to the rising communal tension in our country. There is terrible congestion in our cities and small towns, where millions live cheek-byjowl in filthy and trying conditions. Resources are scarce and there aren’t enough jobs available. Naturally, tensions build up at the slightest provocation. Tempers are frayed and explode into violence. Instead of going for the person against whom you have a grievance, it is easier to gang up with members of your own community and go for those who are not.
Communal groups, of every community, have always taken advantage of this. The difference now is that Hindu communal groups are trying to unite the Hindus—eighty-two per cent of the population but traditionally divided into several mutually antagonistic caste and linguistic groups—to gang up against a common enemy. This common enemy according to them is the ‘foreigner’, namely the Muslims and the Christians who must be forced into a subordinate status or hounded out or even decimated.
In Gujarat we saw how the Sangh used the grievances of the poor and the jobless and the perpetually insecure and acquisitive Indian middle class to further its evil agenda. Economic motives for violence have always been around and the minorities have always been the victims of such violence. The Moradabad riots were triggered by Punjabi immigrants wanting to break the Muslim monopoly over the brassware industry. It was the same in Jalgaon and Bhiwandi (Maharashtra) where
outsiders, largely Sindhi and Punjabi Hindus, destroyed Muslim weavers in order to grab their business. In Haryana the Hindu backlash against Sikh terrorism in Punjab was directed against the Sikh shopkeepers of Panipat, Karnal and Yamunanagar. In riot-prone Hyderabad, Hindu mobs went for Muslim property including a Khadi Bhandar because the owner of the building was a Muslim. In Gujarat, not surprisingly, factories and shops owned by Muslims were burnt down, and in the villages, adivasis were let loose on Muslim money lenders.
A factor that adds to the problem is the rapidly increasing number of the educated unemployed. They were the single largest group behind terrorism in Punjab. It is the same in Kashmir. In Gujarat many of the Hindu terrorists who killed and raped Indian citizens were also unemployed men. Looting banks, robbing the rich, spreading terror gives them a sense of power.
The scenario is grim and getting grimmer day by day. What can be done about it?
First, we have to learn to live with it. As I have said before, we cannot wish communalism away. We cannot pretend communal differences are seen only during riots and don’t exist otherwise. They always have and they will in the future. So we must all, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, somehow overcome our stereotyped notions of communities other than our own. We must avoid the tendency to build community-based housing societies, schools and clubs. Hindus and Sikhs must understand that the Muslims of India do not have to atone in perpetuity for the historical mistakes of some past rulers of their faith who were in fact more concerned about the security of their empires, not their religion. Muslims have as much right to this country as anyone else. If they are foreigners, we all are. The only people who are indigenous are the adivasis, whom we have all but made extinct.
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