There was nothing remotely offensive to anybody about the passage I had read; its content, its evocation of Hindu and Muslim artists painting over each other's work, was precisely what I had come to affirm. In choosing this passage by a great Indian Muslim writer I was seeking to uphold the idea of the pluralist, tolerant India that had been attacked along with the Masjid. I refused to apologize, let alone disavow what I had read. But it was a sobering reminder that intolerance comes in many shades.
The second episode at the time was an address I was invited to make to the Indian community at the consulate in New York. A number of Hindutva sympathizers turned up for the question-and-answer session that was to follow, prepared to denounce the “pseudo-secularism” that they expected would underlie my critique.
Instead I spoke as a believing Hindu — and I spoke passionately of my shame that this could have been done by people claiming to be acting in the name of my faith. How dare the goondas of Ayodhya reduce the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the ignorant tub-thumping of their brand of identity politics? Why should any Hindu allow them to diminish Hinduism to the raucous self-glorification of the football hooligan, to take a religion of awe-inspiring tolerance and shrink it into a chauvinist slogan? My speech startled both the secular leftists in the audience and the acolytes of Hindutva. Some of the latter who had come to protest were chastened into silence; only one rose to question me, saying that he agreed with my vision of Hinduism but that such a faith could have only one logical outcome — support for the positions taken by Hindu political leaders. To which my response was simple: I was brought up by a strongly devout father in the Hindu belief that each of us had to find his own Truth. No true Hindu, I averred, would allow a politician to define his dharma for him.
But many Hindus have. India is a land where history, myth, and legend often overlap; sometimes Indians cannot tell the difference. Some Hindus claim, with more zeal than evidence, that the Babri Masjid stood on the exact spot of Lord Ram's birth, and had been placed there by the Mughal emperor as a reminder to a conquered people of their own subjugation. Historians — most of them Hindus — reply that there is no proof that Lord Ram ever existed in human form, let alone that he was born where the believers claim he was. More to the point, there is no proof that Babur actually demolished a Ram temple to build his mosque. To destroy the mosque and replace it with a temple would not, they say, be righting an old wrong but perpetrating a new one.
Of course, it does not matter what is historically verifiable when it comes to matters of faith. It is enough that millions of Hindus actually believe the masjid had occupied the site of a mandir, and indeed there is evidence of mosques having being built elsewhere in India on the ruins of demolished temples. And yet, when to act on that belief causes deep hurt to innocents who had nothing to do with the original wrong — if there was one — do we not have a greater responsibility to the present than to the past?
One of my more thoughtful challengers from the Hindutva ranks, Mr. Ashok Chowgule of the Mahanagar Vishwa Hindu Parishad of Mumbai, believes in the notion that I previously mentioned, and wrote to me to argue that Babur's motive in constructing the masjid in 1528 was to establish a symbol that would remind the conquered people of India who was the master and who the slave. That may well have been the case — in 1528. But today? The symbol, if such it was, retained the offensive meaning imputed to it by Mr. Chowgule only as long as the reality it sought to symbolize. When Mughal rule disappeared, so too did the potency of that symbol. Western countries have lived for centuries among Roman monuments constructed for exactly the same purpose, which remained, after the fall of the Roman Empire, as monuments, nothing more.
By 1992 the only symbolic importance the Babri Masjid had lay in our minds — in the importance we chose to give it. The attack on it, however, symbolized something else to Muslims in India and around the world; which is why I wrote of my sense of shame and sorrow at what Hindus had done in the name of their faith. When Mr. Chowgule writes that “it is natural that a free people should recover their own symbols,” he appears to exclude non-Hindus from his definition of the free Indian people. I admire Rana Pratap Singh, Chhatrapati Shivaji, and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi just as much as he does, but my admiration for Akbar, for Hyder Ali, and Tipoo Sultan is scarcely less. My sense of India's history embraces all their contributions (as well as those of a few South Indian figures the VHP never seems to mention, such as Krishna Deva Raya of Vijayanagar). I do not see Indian history as Hindu history, and the attainment of India's freedom means, to me, more than just the freedom of us Hindus.
There are some, like me, who are proud of Hinduism; there are others, including much of the VHP, who are proud of being Hindu. There is a world of difference between the two; the first base their pride on principle and belief, the second on identity and chauvinism. My Hindu pride does not depend on putting others down. Theirs, sadly, does.
To most Indian Muslims, the Ram Janmaboomi/Babri Masjid dispute is not about a specific mosque — which had in fact lain disused for half a century before its destruction, most of Ayodhya's Muslim minority having emigrated to Pakistan upon the Partition in 1947—but about their place in Indian society. For decades after independence, successive Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim Personal Law separate from the country's civil code and even financing Haj pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of India's first five presidents were Muslims, as were innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals, and supreme court justices. Until at least the mid-1990s India's Muslim population exceeded Pakistan's. The destruction of the mosque seemed an appalling betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India's pluralist democracy.
The Hindu fanatics who attacked the mosque had little faith in the institutions of Indian democracy. They saw the state as soft, pandering to minorities out of a misplaced and Westernized secularism. To them, an independent India, freed after nearly a thousand years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British), and rid of a sizable portion of its Muslim population by the Partition, had an obligation to assert its own identity, one that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any meaningful sense of the term; they are, instead, chauvinists, who root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings — and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith — but rather in its role as a source of identity. They seek revenge in the name of Hinduism-as-badge, rather than Hinduism-as-doctrine.
The Hindu zealots of 2002 who chanted insultingly triumphalist slogans helped incite the worst elements on the Muslim side, who may have criminally set fire to a railway carriage carrying temple campaigners; in turn, Hindu mobs torched Muslim homes and killed innocents. As the courts deliberate on a solution to the dispute, the cycle of violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, generating new victims on both sides, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We live, Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. As I pointed out in the last words of Riot, history is not a web woven with innocent hands.