Posted on 15-9-2003
Heart
Of Darkness
As a young backpacker Luke Harding found
India charming and eccentric. Fifteen years later he returned
as the Guardian's correspondent. Now, after finishing his time
there, he recalls how one terrible incident of secular violence
in Gujarat brought his love affair with the country to an end.
September 15, 2003, The
Guardian
I can identify the moment I fell out of love with India quite
precisely. It happened at the end of last February. Riots had
just broken out in the western state of Gujarat, after a group
of Muslims attacked a train full of Hindu pilgrims, killing
59 of them. In Gujarat's main city, Ahmedabad, trouble was brewing.
Hindu mobs had begun taking revenge on their Muslim neighbours
- there were stories of murder, looting and arson. Arriving
in Ahmedabad from Delhi, I found it impossible to hire a car
or driver: nobody wanted to drive into the riots.
But the trouble was not difficult to find: smoke billowed from
above Ahmedabad's old city; and I set off towards it on foot.
There were rumours that a mob had hacked to death Ahsan Jafri
- a distinguished Indian former MP, and a Muslim - whose Muslim
housing estate was surrounded by a sea of Hindu houses. A team
from Reuters gave me a lift. Driving through streets full of
burned-out shops and broken glass we arrived half an hour later
outside his compound, surrounded by thousands of people. Jafri
had been dead for several hours, it emerged. A Hindu mob had
tipped kerosene through his front door; a few hours later they
had dragged him out into the street, chopped off his fingers,
and set him on fire. They also set light to several other members
of his family, including two small boys. There wasn't much left
of Jafri's Gulbarg Housing Society by the time we got there:
at the bottom of his stairs I discovered a pyre of human remains
- hair and the tiny blackened arm of a child, its fist clenched.
Two police officers in khaki told us the situation was dangerous,
and that we should leave; they seemed resigned or indifferent
to the horror around them, an emotion I had encountered before
during what would turn out to be more than three years of reporting
on India for the Guardian. Later that afternoon, in the suburb
of Naroda Patiya, we watched as a Hindu crowd armed with machetes
and iron bars attacked their Muslim neighbours on the other
side of the street. All of the shops on the Muslim side of the
road were ablaze; smoke blotted out the sky; gas cylinders exploded
and boomed; we were, it seemed, in some part of hell. "We
are being killed. Please get us out," one Muslim resident,
Dishu Banashek, told me. "They are firing at us. Several
of our women have been raped. You must help."
When we asked a senior policeman to intervene he merely smirked.
"Don't worry, madam. Everything will be done," he
told a colleague from the Times mendaciously. We left. It was
too dangerous to stay.
The causes of the rioting - India's worst communal violence
for a decade - became clearer the next morning, when I returned
to Naroda Patiya - now a ruin of abandoned homes and smouldering
rickshaws. Virtually all of the Muslims had fled: I found only
a solitary survivor, Narinder Bhai, standing by the charred
interior of his home. "Everything is finished," he
said, showing off his ruined fridge. "Many people have
been killed here. My wife and children have disappeared."
Just round the corner, down an alley, I spotted a neat bungalow
that had apparently escaped the chaos. It was only on closer
inspection that I saw its owner: the charred and mutilated remains
of a Muslim woman had been laid out in the front garden and
framed by a charpoy. Round the back I found an address book
- which identified the woman as Mrs Rochomal; next to it, the
Nokia phone she had used in a doomed attempt to summon help.
Her son's washing was hanging on the line, in the morning sunshine;
inside there was a neat kitchen and black-and-white family photos.
Mrs Rochomal's flip-flops were still by the front door, next
to a swing-seat.
Five minutes later, her mobile phone rang. I didn't answer it.
Her body was less than 60 metres away from the local police
station. The police had not, it was obvious, bothered to rescue
her: they had, I was forced to conclude, been complicit in her
death.
Fifteen years earlier I had visited India for the first time
as a backpacker, only dimly aware of the country's inflammable
religious politics. I knew that India was a Hindu-dominated,
though officially secular country. I also knew it had a large
Muslim minority, which had failed to migrate to Pakistan at
the time of partition. But the charming aid workers I spent
four months with in the cool hills of Tamil Nadu, Madam Preetha
and Babu Isaac Daniel, were eccentric and devout Christians;
while the family friends I visited in Bombay were wealthy Parsis.
It seemed also that India's Congress party - led by the secular
Rajiv Gandhi - was destined to stay in power for a long time;
the party had, after all, governed India for most of the period
since Britain left the subcontinent.
Two years later, however, an arms corruption scandal forced
Gandhi out of office and a new ideological movement began to
dominate the political landscape - the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), or India People's Party. The BJP rejected
the idea that India should be secular; its more extreme supporters
wanted to turn the country into a Hindu state, a sort of Indian
version of Pakistan, an India-stan. By the time I arrived in
New Delhi for the Guardian, the BJP was firmly established in
power; and the multi-faith India of Mahatma Gandhi and Jarwarharlal
Nehru, India's first prime minister, was, it seemed, in big
trouble.
Mahatma Gandhi still appeared on India's banknotes, of course.
But nobody seemed to talk about him any more, and his vision
of an inclusive India was under threat from something darker
and arguably fascist. Driving last year around Ahmedabad, in
Gandhi's home state, I found a group of Hindu men standing jubilantly
around the ruins of a small brick tomb. They had just demolished
it. The tomb had belonged to Vali Gujarati - Muslim India's
answer to Geoffrey Chaucer, and the grandfather of Urdu poetry.
In its place, the Hindu youths had erected a tiny petal-strewn
shrine to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. "We have broken
the mosque and made a temple," one of them, Mahesh Patel,
told me. What should be done with India's Muslims, I wondered?
"They should not live in India. They should go and live
in Pakistan," he told me. This is clearly a tricky proposition:
India has 140 million Muslims, out of a population of more than
a billion. It is, paradoxically, the world's second-largest
Muslim country after Indonesia. The Muslims I talked to during
the Gujarat riots pointed out that they were Indian. They said
that they didn't want to go anywhere.
Returning to Delhi after a harrowing week in dry Gujarat, where
it is almost impossible to get a drink, I found dozens of emails
from incensed BJP supporters in Britain and elsewhere. Like
most commentators I had heaped blame for the riots on Gujarat's
BJP government, and its chief minister, Narendra Modi. I wrote
that Modi had condoned and encouraged what was in effect an
anti-Muslim pogrom by instructing his Hindu police force to
do nothing. The hate mail came flooding in. One email accused
me of "anti-Hindu sentiment", and announced that dozens
of demonstrators would gather outside my flat in the leafy Delhi
colony of Nizamuddin the following day.
They didn't show up. Another pointed out, correctly, that Britain
had chopped the subcontinent in half and looted "trillions
of dollars in goodies from India" - including the Kohinoor
diamond. He signed off: "I piss on your dead whore Queen
Mother." More ominously, though, I was summoned to meet
Mr Kulkarni, a special adviser to India's ostensibly moderate
BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As dusk fell, we sat
on wicker chairs in the garden of Kulkarni's government flat,
just opposite the prime minister's bungalow in Race Course Road.
I had failed to understand the nature of Hindu society, he politely
suggested over a cup of tea.
It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that the worsening
Hindu-Muslim divide in India threatens to tear the country apart,
but certainly relations between the country's two major communities
are as bad as they have ever been. Indian Muslims are now in
the unenviable position of being cast as fifth columnists for
Pakistan, India's Muslim neighbour and - for most of the time
- its enemy. Nehru's India appears to be dead. Islamic extremists
inside India, meanwhile, are taking their own form of bloody
revenge - killing more than 50 people, for example, last month
in two gruesome car bombings in Bombay.
The origins of the violence ultimately go back to Ayodhya, a
small, sleepy temple town in north India, where cannabis grows
in the ditches, and sadhus, or Hindu holy men, mingle with large
gangs of monkeys. It was here in 1992 that Hindu zealots tore
down a mosque on a site they claimed was the birthplace of Lord
Ram, Hinduism's most important deity. The episode propelled
the BJP to power, provoked widespread communal riots and severely
damaged India's secular credentials.
The issue of whether a temple should be built on the disputed
site - and India's hostile relationship with Pakistan - continue
to dominate Indian public life. In the meantime, little attention
is paid to the plight of the country's 400 million poor. Late
last year I travelled to Baran, an impoverished district in
Rajasthan, where dozens of low-caste tribal people had reportedly
starved to death. I found plenty of villagers who were still
eating grass; the rumours of starvation were true. There was,
it transpired, plenty of food in government warehouses - it
was merely that corrupt local officials had taken it for themselves.
In his latest book, India in Slow Motion, Mark Tully blames
India's problems on the "neta-babu raj" - the alliance
between politicians and bureaucrats to hang on to power. Tully
is probably right. But it is not just in rural India that the
pace of change has been slow. Faced with bankruptcy in the early
90s, India embarked on a programme of economic liberalisation.
Delhi now boasts Marks & Spencer and Pizza Express. The
biggest change in Delhi during my tenure in India has been the
arrival of the coffee bar, and the admirable coffee chain Barista.
It is now possible to buy a latte or espresso in India's big
metros - in a country famous for its tea. But in general, India's
infrastructure is as creaking and run-down as ever. During the
monsoon, the phone lines crack up; and in the infernal summer
months, the power fails. Maintaining electrical appliances -
fax machine, water purifier, back-up power supply - is a full-time
job. In the quiet periods after last year's Gujarat riots I
thought often of Mrs Rochomal, lying burned and mutilated in
her neat front garden, and of the horror of her last few minutes.
Did her children stumble on her body? Did the people who killed
her feel any remorse? I shall return to India, but not for a
while.
|