Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

  The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has a list of over a hundred disputed sites of the Babri Masjid type. Two are especially important. In Mathura, a Muslim shrine stands on the supposed birthplace of the god Krishna; and in Benares, a site allegedly sacred to Shiva is also in Muslim hands …

  In Bombay, I found a ‘midnight child’, a clerical worker in the docks, a Muslim named Mukadam who was such a supercitizen that he was almost too good to be true. Mukadam was absolutely dedicated to the unity of India. He believed in small families. He thought all Indians had a duty to educate themselves, and he had put himself through many evening courses. He had been named Best Worker at his dock. In his village, he claimed proudly, people of all faiths lived together in complete harmony. ‘That is how it should be,’ he said. ‘After all, these religions are only words. What is behind them is the same, whichever faith it is.’

  But when communal violence came to the Bombay docks in 1985, Mukadam’s super-citizenship wasn’t of much use. On the day the mob came to his dock, he was saved because he happened to be away. He didn’t dare to return to work for weeks. And now, he says, he worries that it may come again at any time.

  Like Mukadam, many members of Indian minority groups started out as devotees of the old, secular definition of India, and there were no Indians as patriotic as the Sikhs. Until 1984, you could say that the Sikhs were the Indian nationalists. Then came the storming of the Golden Temple, and the assassination of Mrs Gandhi; and everything changed.

  The group of Sikh radicals led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the religious leader who died in the Golden Temple storming, could not be said to represent more than a small minority of all Sikhs. The campaign for a separate Sikh state, Khalistan, had similarly found few takers among India’s Sikhs—until November 1984, when Indira Gandhi died, and it became known that her assassins were Sikhs.

  In Delhi, angry Hindu mobs—among whom party workers of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress-I were everywhere observed—decided to hold all Sikhs responsible for the deeds of the assassins. Thus an entirely new form of communal violence—Hindu-Sikh riots—came into being, and in the next ten days the Sikh community suffered a series of traumatizing attacks from which it has not recovered, and perhaps never will.

  In Block 32 of the Delhi suburb called Trilokpuri, perhaps 350 Sikhs were burned alive. I walked past streets of charred, gutted houses in some of which you could still see the bones of the dead. It was the worst place I have ever seen, not least because, in the surrounding streets, children played normally, the neighbours went on with their lives. Yet some of these neighbours were the very people who perpetrated the crime of 32 Trilokpuri, which was only one of the many massacres of Sikhs that took place that November. Many Sikh ‘midnight children’ never reached forty at all.

  I heard about many of these deaths, and will let one story stand for all. When the mob came for Hari Singh, a taxi-driver like so many Delhi Sikhs, his son fled into a nearby patch of overgrown waste land. His wife was obliged to watch as the mob literally ripped her husband’s beard off his face. (This beard-ripping ritual was a feature of many of the November killings.) She managed to get hold of the beard, thinking that it was, at least, a part of him that she could keep for herself, and she ran into their house to hide it. Some members of the mob followed her in, found the beard and removed it. Then they poured kerosene over Hari Singh and set fire to him. They also chased his teenage son, found him, beat him unconscious, and burned him, too. They knew he was a Sikh even though he had cut his hair, because when they found his father’s beard they found his cut hair as well. His mother had preserved the sacred locks that identified her son.

  Another taxi-driver, Pal Singh (born November 1947), told me that he had never had time for the Khalistan movement, but after 1984 he had changed his mind. ‘Now it will come,’ he said, ‘maybe within ten years.’ Sikhs were selling up their property in Delhi and buying land in the Punjab, so that if the time came when they had to flee back to the Sikh heartland they wouldn’t have to leave their assets behind. ‘I’m doing it, too,’ Pal Singh said.

  Almost three years after the 1984 massacres, not one person has been charged with murdering a Sikh in those fearsome days. The Congress-I, Rajiv Gandhi’s party, increasingly relies on the Hindu vote, and is reluctant to alienate it.

  The new element in Indian communalism is the emergence of a collective Hindu consciousness that transcends caste, and that believes Hinduism to be under threat from other Indian minorities. There is evidence that Rajiv’s Congress-I is trying to ride that tiger. In Bombay, the tiger is actually in power. The ruling Shiv Sena Party, whose symbol is the tiger, is the most overtly Hindu-fundamentalist grouping ever to achieve office anywhere in India.

  Its leader, Bal Thackeray, a former cartoonist, speaks openly of his belief that democracy has failed in India. He makes no secret of his open hostility towards Muslims. In the Bhiwandi riots of 1985, a few months before the Shiv Sena won the Bombay municipal elections, Shiv Sena activists were deeply involved in the anti-Muslim violence. And today, as the Sena seeks to spread its influence into the rural areas of Maharashtra (the state of which Bombay is the capital), incidents of communal violence are being reported from villages in which nothing of the sort has ever happened before.

  I come from Bombay, and from a Muslim family, too. ‘My’ India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind, the defining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once. But the India of the communalists is none of these things.

  I spent one long evening in the company of a (‘47-born) Bengali intellectual, Robi Chatterjee, for whom the inadequacies of society are a cause for deep, permanent, operatic anguish. ‘Does India exist?’ I asked him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he cried. ‘Where the hell do you think this is?’ I told him that I meant the idea of the nation. Forty years after a nationalist revolution, where could it be said to reside?

  He said, ‘To the devil with all that nationalism. I am an Indian because I am born here and I live here. So is everyone else of whom that is true. What’s the need for any more definitions?’

  I asked, ‘If you do without the idea of nationalism, then what’s the glue holding the country together?’

  ‘We don’t need glue,’ he said. ‘India isn’t going to fall apart. All that Balkanization stuff. I reject it completely. We are simply here and we will remain here. It’s this nationalism business that is the danger.’

  According to Robi, the idea of nationalism in India had grown more and more chauvinistic, had become narrower and narrower. The ideas of Hindu nationalism had infected it. I was struck by a remarkable paradox: that, in a country created by the Congress’s nationalist campaign, the wellbeing of the people might now require that all nationalist rhetoric be abandoned.

  Unfortunately for India, the linkage between Hindu fundamentalism and the idea of the nation shows no signs of weakening. India is increasingly defined as Hindu India, and Sikh and Muslim fundamentalism grows ever fiercer and entrenched in response. ‘These days,’ a young Hindu woman said to me, ‘one’s religion is worn on one’s sleeve.’ She was corrected by a Sikh friend. ‘It is worn,’ he said, ‘in a scabbard at the hip.’

  I remember that when Midnight’s Children was first published in 1981, the most common Indian criticism of it was that it was too pessimistic about the future. It’s a sad truth that nobody finds the novel’s ending pessimistic any more, because what has happened in India since 1981 is so much darker than I had imagined. If anything, the book’s last pages, with their suggestion of a new, more pragmatic generation rising up to take over from the midnight children, now seem absurdly, romantically optimistic.

  But India regularly confounds its critics by its resilience, its survival in spite of everything. I don’t believe in the Balkanization of India any more than Robi Chatterjee does. It’s
my guess that the old functioning anarchy will, somehow or other, keep on functioning, for another forty years, and no doubt another forty after that. But don’t ask me how.

  1987

  2

  CENSORSHIP

  THE ASSASSINATION OF INDIRA GANDHI

  DYNASTY

  ZIA UL-HAQ. 17 AUGUST 1988

  DAUGHTER OF THE EAST

  CENSORSHIP

  My first memories of censorship are cinematic: screen kisses brutalized by prudish scissors which chopped out the moments of actual contact. (Briefly, before comprehension dawned, I wondered if that were all there was to kissing, the languorous approach and then the sudden turkey-jerk away.) The effect was usually somewhat comic, and censorship still retains, in contemporary Pakistan, a strong element of comedy. When the Pakistani censors found that the movie El Cid ended with a dead Charlton Heston leading the Christians to victory over live Muslims, they nearly banned it, until they had the idea of simply cutting out the entire climax, so that the film as screened showed El Cid mortally wounded, El Cid dying nobly, and then ended. Muslims 1, Christians 0.

  The comedy is sometimes black. The burning of the film Kissa Kursi Ka (Tale of a Chair) during Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency rule in India is notorious; and, in Pakistan, a reader’s letter to the Pakistan Times, in support of the decision to ban the film Gandhi because of its unflattering portrayal of M. A. Jinnah, criticized certain ‘liberal elements’ for having dared to suggest that the film should be released so that Pakistanis could make up their own minds about it. If they were less broad-minded, the letter-writer suggested, these persons would be better citizens of Pakistan.

  My first direct encounter with censorship took place in 1968, when I was twenty-one, fresh out of Cambridge and full of the radical fervour of that famous year. I returned to Karachi, where a small magazine commissioned me to write a piece about my impressions on returning home. I remember very little about this piece (mercifully, memory is a censor, too), except that it was not at all political. It tended, I think, to linger melodramatically, on images of dying horses with flies settling on their eyeballs. You can imagine the sort of thing. Anyway, I submitted my piece, and a couple of weeks later was told by the magazine’s editor that the Press Council, the national censors, had banned it completely. Now it so happened that I had an uncle on the Press Council, and in a very unradical, string-pulling mood I thought I’d just go and see him and everything would be sorted out. He looked tired when I confronted him. ‘Publication’ he said immovably, ‘would not be in your best interest,’ I never found out why.

  Next I persuaded Karachi TV to let me produce and act in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, which they liked because it was forty-five minutes long, had a cast of two and required only a park bench for a set. I then had to go through a series of astonishing censorship conferences. The character I played had a long monologue in which he described his landlady’s dog’s repeated attacks on him. In an attempt to befriend the dog, he bought it half a dozen hamburgers. The dog refused the hamburgers and attacked him again. ‘I was offended,’ I was supposed to say. ‘It was six perfectly good hamburgers with not enough pork in them to make it disgusting.’ ‘Pork,’ a TV executive told me solemnly, ‘is a four-letter word.’ He had said the same thing about ‘sex’, and ‘homosexual’, but this time I argued back. The text, I pleaded, was saying the right thing about pork. Pork, in Albee’s view, made hamburgers so disgusting that even dogs refused them. This was superb anti-pork propaganda. It must stay. ‘You don’t see,’ the executive told me, wearing the same tired expression as my uncle had, ‘the word pork may not be spoken on Pakistan television.’ And that was that. I also had to cut the line about God being a coloured queen who wears a kimono and plucks his eyebrows.

  The point I’m making is not that censorship is a source of amusement, which it usually isn’t, but that—in Pakistan, at any rate—it is everywhere, inescapable, permitting no appeal. In India the authorities control the media that matter—radio and television—and allow some leeway to the press, comforted by their knowledge of the country’s low literacy level. In Pakistan they go further. Not only do they control the press, but the journalists, too. At the recent conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in New Delhi, the Pakistan press corps was notable for its fearfulness. Each member was worried one of the other guys might inform on him when they returned—for drinking, or consorting too closely with Hindus, or performing other unpatriotic acts. Indian journalists were deeply depressed by the sight of their opposite numbers behaving like scared rabbits one moment and quislings the next.

  What are the effects of total censorship? Obviously, the absence of information and the presence of lies. During Mr Bhutto’s campaign of genocide in Baluchistan, the news media remained silent. Officially, Baluchistan was at peace. Those who died, died unofficial deaths. It must have comforted them to know that the State’s truth declared them all to be alive. Another example: you will not find the involvement of Pakistan’s military rulers with the booming heroin industry much discussed in the country’s news media. Yet this is what underlies General Zia’s concern for the lot of the Afghan refugees. Afghan entrepreneurs help to run the Pakistan heroin business, and they have had the good sense to make sure that they make the army rich as well as themselves. How fortunate that the Qur’an does not mention anything about the ethics of heroin pushing.

  But the worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. It becomes almost impossible to conceive of what the suppressed things might be. It becomes easy to think that what has been suppressed was valueless, anyway, or so dangerous that it needed to be suppressed. And then the victory of the censor is total. The anti-Gandhi letter-writer who recommended narrow-mindedness as a national virtue is one such casualty of censorship; he loves Big Brother—or Burra Bhai, perhaps.

  It seems, now, that General Zia’s days are numbered. I do not believe that the present disturbances are the end, but they are the beginning of the end, because they show that the people have lost their fear of his brutal regime, and if the people cease to be afraid, he is done for. But Pakistan’s big test will come after the end of dictatorship, after the restoration of civilian rule and free elections, whenever that is, in one year or two or five; because if leaders do not then emerge who are willing to lift censorship, to permit dissent, to believe and to demonstrate that opposition is the bedrock of democracy, then, I am afraid, the last chance will have been lost. For the moment, however, one can hope.

  1983

  THE ASSASSINATION OF INDIRA GANDHI

  All of us who love India are in mourning today. It is of no importance whether we numbered ourselves amongst Indira Gandhi’s most fervent supporters or her most implacable opponents; her murder diminishes us all, and leaves a deep and alarming scar upon the very idea of India, very like that left on Pakistani society by General Zia’s execution of the leader who was in so many ways son semblable, son frère, Prime Minister Bhutto. During the time of Mrs Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, the India news media’s favourite catch-phrase was the rather nervous ‘After Nehru, who?’ Today, we ask ourselves a more fearful question: ‘After Indira, what?’ And it is clear that what is most to be feared is an outbreak of reprisal killings, of Hindu-Sikh communal violence, both inside and outside the Punjab. The wind was sown in Amritsar; now, perhaps (and it would be good to be wrong), the whirlwind ripens.

  Where, in all this, can we find any scrap of hope for India’s future? Where is the way forward that leads away from destruction, disintegration and blood? I believe that if it is to be found anywhere then it must begin, at this most difficult of times, with the clearest possible analysis of the mistakes of recent years. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

  At the heart of the idea of India there lies a paradox: that its component parts, the States which coalesc
ed into the union, are ancient historical entities, with cultures and independent existences going back many centuries; whereas India itself is a mere thirty-seven years old. And yet it is the ‘new-born’ India, the baby, so to speak, the Central government, that holds sway over the greybeards. Centre-State relations have always, inevitably, been somewhat delicate, fragile affairs.

  In recent years, however, that delicate relationship has developed severe imbalances, and much of the responsibility must lie at Mrs Gandhi’s door. During her time in office, power has systematically been removed from the States to the Centre; and the resentments created by this process have been building up for years. The troubles in the Punjab began when the Congress-I leadership persistently refused to discuss the then very moderate demands of the Akali Dal Party for the restitution to the State government of powers which the Centre had seized. There can be no doubt that this intransigence was a major contributing factor to the growth in support for Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s terrorists, and to the whole sorry process which resulted in the attack on the Golden Temple.

  Elsewhere in India, too, the Centre’s power hunger has been very unpopular, and the Congress-I has suffered a string of defeats in State elections. Mrs Gandhi’s reaction to these defeats was sadly all too predictable, and very far from democratic. She embarked on covert programmes of destabilization, one of which succeeded, at least temporarily, in toppling the popular and elected Chief Minister of Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah, and another of which backfired when N. T. Rama Rao was dismissed, in Andhra, and then had to be reinstated when it turned out that he still commanded a majority.