When Mobs Rape Civilization…

Islam, eternal enemy — unaware of this mad Hindu rage without a target, lost in the euphoria and pain of its victimization of itself, clueless of the impact of clicking Rushdie the icon, clueless about how closed a neighbourhood we were in this globally linked world, unmindful of how suddenly their medieval locality had been connected and wired and linked to a world of a different Millennium, unable to travel those hundreds of years in time on a week’s notice — marched post 9/11, post-Osama, post- Afghanistan, to stop our train, which contained the one enemy they could imagine.
On February 27, 2002, a fire woke up the train, but for most in the fateful sixth coach of that Sabarmati Express, as it prepared to leave a little known station of Godhra, it was an inferno that ended their travel of life.
Secularism, like in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, prepared to die, yet again, unleashing monsters all over.
***
As I stood on the platform, I knew I had woken up to a different morning, a different kind of a day, a different kind of a world, a moment when my country India had been unable to show up its usual Doctor Jekyll face. It had got mixed up on provocation, the wrong potions had been fed and consumed at night, and India, missing identities with its Mister Hyde face, had showed up.
It should have been simpler for me to have understood. I should have known this long ago. We are so many nations, so many names, so many identities: Bharat, Hindu motherland, Hindustan, Hindu-Muslim country, and India, modern nation. Each can replace the other; each identity a good enough substitute for the other; medieval and modern live together, but you can never get one to fully replace another, not perfectly, so they change, interchange, intertwine. Nothing else can be the truth, the final stability, this flux.
The slogans, instead of political compulsion and showmanship of last week’s media play, suddenly became real. Real was also the anger, the hate, the fury — deep within it had been always real, but now made more so — because the enemy was suddenly also real.
Fifty charred bodies of comrades, fellow Hindus, burnt down by a mad Muslim mob. A mob of Godhra — an extended octopus arm of Islam everywhere, hating others to its core, unable to understand coexistence, unable to comprehend their outsider status in the wired globe — had killed, burnt. The stench of patriots, of Hindus, of bodies of men burnt in their sleep dreaming of a grand Ram temple.
The slogans began, but they were real.
‘Badla.’ Revenge.
Somewhere far away, Narendra Modi, a man who had risen from obscurity to power but still largely unknown, heard these calls well. Unlike other politicians, he heard his people. His blood boiled when he heard of the fire, hurt as he was with his own inability as a chief minister, a sworn Constitutional authority.
Modi supposedly whispered: If only I were not a minister, I would have burst bombs. Yes, I swear by Lord Ram, I would have myself thrown bombs on Juhapura, where the Muslim terrorists throng in a ghetto.
The truth was he was not fully unbound to do as he may wish. But he was not fully bound either, not completely helpless, not completely impotent, nor were the Hindus sissies, and therefore, the Muslim lot would have to learn a lesson, he had decided that much.
He did not even whisper this, he just said it calmly: I give you three days, three days to teach them . . . them . . . a lesson. Three days later, he told his men, enough, now stop. The carnage stopped. But in three days, he proved to anyone who did not believe in it that the Dark Ages-Renaissance sequence was cyclic; he proved that history not only repeats, but also defeats itself; that nothing had changed about political revenge from 1984, merely, instead of the High Priestess of Congress, small Hindu pawns had fallen. Their comrades would now seek and get revenge the same old way: play-play, come, let us play a game, we will kill, in disdain, because our chief minister has told the policemen to look the other way.
In those three days, India conducted its third official genocide after the British decided to withdraw, partition the country, create Pakistan, and give Independence. For the third time, reason completely left the country, a country who took birth with Nehru’s words: At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom . . .
That Freedom died, too, murdered peacefully, like when Macbeth kills, and only the cursed darkness of midnight reigned.
***
Juhapura is a Muslim suburb in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s capital for decades. But the devil missed the detail in hearing the command of its chief, so it remained a rather peaceful zone, a weird exception, unlike the Gulmarg Society or Naroda-Patiya, where over hundred and fifty Muslims were burnt alive in this game and where selection of victims was left to random chance.
Housewives and menfolk, Hindus, angered and wronged, led mobs with knives, bombs, swords, and fire, and raped and killed, while the state, still thinking while the three days lasted, still preparing for post-carnage hygiene, still readying answers for the angst of the soul of the country, even if predominantly voiced by hypocritical political rivals, still playing fiddle, the state revisited the great banyan tree paradigm of Rajiv and spoke of spontaneous mob fury, of common anger, even as the agents of the state, policemen, pointed way to torching Hindu mobs, saying: yes, Muslims are there, go kill, yes, rape, yes, of course, we will watch, only watch . . .
In three days, India, like Lord Rama, burnt its Sita, asking her to prove her purity, yet again. And civilization, like the Kar Sevaks in the train, was condemned to get charred, even as the Muslims, like Sita, entered the fire and burnt but could never prove that they were Indian.
***
I walked with the mobs.
I saw Muslim women being raped, their houses being charred, while inside them, Muslim men, comrades of Osama, little kids, little Abduls and little Alis, little Salims and little Sadiqs, same little ones who would grow to burn The Satanic Verses and seek the blood of Taslima, same jihadis who could have flown more planes, felled more towers, killed more kafirs, same guilty-by-birth bastard terrorists, screamed and howled. And I stood by the side of the mob which burnt them.
I had always lived by the torch of reason, and that day I, Anurag, Cinna the poet, saw it burnt and raped, my pleas for reason falling on deaf ears, and I realized that the stage, for a man who belonged to it, had finally called. The Bard was right, so was our English school teacher Arlikatti about his greatness; all world was indeed a stage.
Alone, without a script, without a canvas save a large world-stage, saffron and green, white gone, black all around, I began, possibly, my final play . . .
Right there on the streets, my play — the only thing between murder-seeking Hindus and life-threatened Muslims . . . There was no journalist there, Hanu, else I would have given him a quote, a sound byte, or if I could in those final dying moments of life’s ecstasy found an editor, said, here, now we finally have a hook.
(An excerpt from Autobiography of a Mad Nation on Godhra for all those of you who can’t go to sleep on this yet-another-mob-carnage night. It is a crazy world, be it Charlottesville, Virginia, USA or Panchakula, Haryana, India…)
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Sriram Karri is author of the bestselling novel — Autobiography of a Mad Nation- longlisted for the MAN Asian Booker prize — and described as un-put-down-able, racy, thrilling, and a brilliant novel. His first book was the intellectually challenging The Spiritual Supermarket.
He writes columns, essays, short stories and plays, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Indian Express, BBC, Scroll, Firstpost, Rediff, The Huffington Post, The Wire and The Khaleej Times.
