VL: Okay, where was I? Oh, yes. Trouble started elsewhere before it got here. In the next few days, much of North India was seized by a frenzy unprecedented since Partition. Groups of surcharged young men paraded the streets in every town, morning and evening, day after day, aggressively bearing bricks in the name of Ram, throwing slogans at the Muslims like acid. Slogans which were horrible in their virulence, their crudeness, their naked aggression. The Muslims, huddled in their ghettoes, watched with disbelief and horror, which turned quickly to cold terror and sullen anger.
RD: You couldn’t stop them? Ban the Ram Sila Poojan program?
VL: I wished I could. I saw what was happening as nothing less than an assault on the political values of secular India. I asked permission to ban the processions in my district. It was denied. Only West Bengal, where the communists have a pretty firm hold on power, actually banned the Ram Sila Poojan program. The other state governments were trying to have it both ways. They proclaimed their secularism but did nothing to maintain it. They didn’t want to alienate the Hindutva types, so they refused to ban the Ram Sila Poojan. They probably thought, to give them some credit, that banning it would simply give the Hindutva movement the aura of martyrdom and so help them attract even more support. So they let it go ahead. There were certainly some in the government who had a sneaking sympathy for the cause of rebuilding the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. Not just sneaking: many expressed it openly. So the government’s inaction in the face of all this provocation profoundly alienated the Muslims. For many of them, their faith and hope in Indian secularism, built over four decades of dogged efforts by successive administrations, soured.
RD: So tensions were high among the Muslims that day.
VL: Tensions were high. And not just amongst the Muslims. The Hindu community was in a state of great agitation. Their leaders — or perhaps I should say, those who claimed to speak in their name — were openly whipping up passions on the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. Even the media and intelligentsia were quickly infected by the communal dementia sweeping the land.
RD: And the secular voices?
VL: What secular voices? There was a deafening silence.
RD: Was this a widespread phenomenon or did you have a particular problem on your hands here in Zalilgarh?
VL: It was pretty widespread in this part of the country: U.P. — you know, Uttar Pradesh — Bihar, parts of Madhya Pradesh. Not so much where I come from, in the South. But here, it was pretty bad. In less than ten days after the announcement of the Ram Sila Poojan, riots broke out in town after town — militant processions brandishing Ram bricks, shouting hate-filled slogans day after day, violent retaliation by small Muslim groups, followed by carnage, deaths, arson, and finally curfew. At one point around three weeks after the launching of the program, as many as 108 towns were simultaneously under curfew.
RD: Tell me about Zalilgarh.
VL: Well, you’re here, you’ve seen it. It’s a small district town in Uttar Pradesh. Not much to write home about! But like any other small town in these parts, Zalilgarh could hardly remain untouched by the sectarian fever that had infected the land. An undersized, haphazardly planned town of fewer than one lakh persons—
RD: A hundred thousand?
VL: That’s right. About a lakh. With an uneasy balance of almost equal strengths of Hindus and Muslims. In fact, I discovered soon after I arrived that Zalilgarh is classified in official files as “communally hypersensitive.” The records show that the first communal clash took place as far back as 1921.
RD: When you say “communal,” you mean—
VL: Hindu-Muslim. At that time, Zalilgarh suffered a Hindu-Muslim clash even though in much of the country Hindus and Muslims were united in a joint campaign, the Khilafat agitation against the British. These clashes have been repeated with frightening regularity over the following decades.
RD: What causes these communal clashes?
VL: Oh, many things. The issues are mostly local, such as attacks on religious processions, desecration of shrines, illicit relationships between men and women of different communities, and so on. The two communities live separately but near each other in crowded shantytowns or bastis, and any small spark could set ablaze a bloody confrontation. Each skirmish would leave behind its own fresh trail of hostility and suspicion, which offered fertile ground for the next clash.
RD: Knowing all this, wasn’t there anything you could do to prevent what happened? You and the police?
VL: I’ve asked myself a thousand times if I could have done more than I did. Guru — Gurinder — too. You know the superintendent of police?
RD: Gurinder Singh. I’m interviewing him next. A friend of yours, I believe?
VL: Yes. We were at college together. St. Stephen’s, in Delhi, a couple of years apart. I didn’t know him well there, but we’ve become very good friends here. A tremendous officer. But such an unlikely cop.
RD: Why?
VL: Oh, he studied history in college, you know. Played hockey and played hookey. Drank a lot, even then. Was known for cracking bad jokes. They called him “the Ab Surd” — Sikhs are “Surds,” you see, short for “Sardarji,” which is an honorific for them — oh forget it, like most cross-cultural jokes, it’s just too complicated to explain. Anyway, he’s absurd when he wants to be, especially with a glass in his hand — make that a bottle. And he swears a lot. As I fear you’ll find out. “The story of my life,” he says, “begins with the words, ’Once a pun a time.’” Today he’d probably say “a fucking time,” so be prepared. He took the IAS exams, as so many of us did at St. Stephen’s, largely to please his parents. He really wanted to be a farmer — a peasant, he said, but secretly his ambition was to be a big commercial farmer, mechanized agriculture, tractors, irrigation canals, the lot. Simple pleasures, as Wilde said, are the last refuge of the complex. So he didn’t try hard enough in the exams. Couldn’t get into the Administrative Service, but made it to the police service. He hoped his parents would credit him for the effort and let him go off and work for his grandfather, who had the land but still tilled it the old-fashioned way. But they were horrified at the prospect. The police, they said, was hardly a great career, but it was better than farming. What sort of status would they have in society if their son were a mere flogger of bullocks? It was one thing if he’d failed the exams altogether, but here he had the chance for a real job, with real power. They weren’t going to let him waste his life farming. How much money could a farmer make anyway? He gave in. [Pause.] We all do. [Pause.] I wanted to be a writer. My parents had other ideas.
RD: In America, parents have stopped trying to tell their kids what to do in life.
VL: It’ll be a long while before we get to be like America.
RD: I’ll say. So you were telling me about Zalilgarh. The demographics. The background. Whether there was anything more you could have done to prevent what happened.
VL: Whether we could have done anything more? I honestly don’t think so. We did everything. It started the same way, you know, in Zalilgarh as elsewhere. The pattern was the same — daily belligerent processions and slogans of hate. Gurinder and I responded by the book, doing everything we’d been taught to do in such situations — calling meetings of the two communities, advising restraint, registering strong criminal charges against the more rabid processionists, energizing the peace committees, preventive arrests and so on.