Shashi Tharoor - Riot

The pair seem to have made the same sets of enemies. Which suggests they must work well together.

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh

October 14, 1989

RD: So you and the district magistrate couldn’t stop the procession from going ahead even after the stabbing incident that night?

GS: You’re right. We did our damnedest, you know. Of course, the bloody perpetrators were absconding. But I spent the night arresting every Muslim troublemaker I could think of. If you owned a motorcycle and didn’t own a foreskin, I locked you up. Then Lucky and I–

RD: Lucky?

GS: Lakshman. Sorry. I call him Lucky. A college nickname. He calls me Guru. Except when he’s issuing orders. Anyway, Lucky and I called in the Hindu leaders at dawn. Buggers came in rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Only made them look more bloodshot and murderous, the bastards. Told them we’d made the arrests, pleaded for calm, asked them to forget their little procession. You’d have thought we’d asked them to sell us their daughters. One of them, a fat little runt called Sharma, got so hysterical I thought his eyes would pop right out of his fucking head. No, they were determined to go ahead.

RD: And you couldn’t stop them?

GS: Not really. Actually, Lucky had already asked for permission to ban the procession. Well before the bloody stabbing. But he’d been denied by Lucknow. So, without an okay from the state government, that really wasn’t an option. In any case, there were already some twenty-five to thirty thousand Hindutva volunteers assembled in Zalilgarh. Buggers were determined and as charged up as the batteries on their megaphones. Lucky and I realized that if we attempted to halt the procession by force at this stage we were doomed to fail. It was a pissing certainty that police action would lead only to large-scale violence and killings. Don’t forget that at that point I was also outnumbered — I had a few hundred cops to their thirty thousand motherloving zealots. So we tried persuasion.

RD: And it didn’t work.

GS: You’re right — it didn’t work. They were as stubborn a bunch of bastards as ever smeared ash on their foreheads. Want a refill on that drink?

RD: No, thanks. But you go ahead. So you gave up?

GS: No, dammit, we didn’t give up. What the hell do you think we are, a bunch of pansies? We tried to get them to change their route, to avoid Muslim areas and in particular mosques. They wouldn’t agree to that either. Finally Lucky and I felt we had no choice. Our only option seemed to be to let the procession pass — but with intensive control and regulation.

RD: Meaning what exactly?

GS: Bloody soda’s flatter than a hijra’s chest. This is like drinking dog’s piss, if you ask me.Jaswinder! Soda hai? Anyway — sorry, what was it? Something else you asked me.

RD: What did your “intensive control and regulation” mean?

GS: Standard stuff, man. We imposed pretty stiff conditions on them. Oh, Lucky was stern and uncompromising that morning. The buggers could march, but they had to forget about beating drums or cymbals near the mosques. They wanted to carry stuff, fine — but they could carry placards, not weapons. None of this brandishing of swords and trishuls — you know, Shiva’s trident, which so many of these saffron-robed monks love to wave about the pissing place. And none of their anti-Muslim slogans of hate, calculated to insult the other motherlovers into rash retaliation.

RD: What sort of slogans?

GS: Pretty rabid ones. In fact, there had been a couple of weeks of sustained, offensive sloganeering before the stabbing incident, so we knew how words could inflame passions. Every day as the bastards prepared for their march, hundreds of young Hindu men would gather in the Muslim parts of town and shout slogans, abusing Muslims, taunting them, goading them. Sometimes they’d roar into the mohallas on motorbikes, revving their engines before shouting their provocations. “Mussalmaan ke do hi sthaan / Pakistan ya kabristan” — “There are only two places for a Muslim, Pakistan or the cemetery.” It got worse: “Jo kahta hai Ali Ali / Uski ma ko choddo gali gali” — “He who calls out to Ali, fuck his mother in every alley.” Of course the bastards did this during the day, when most of the Muslim men were away at work and the women and kids were cowering in their homes. Some of their slogans were aimed at bolstering the courage of the waverers among the Hindus. “Jis Hindu ka khoon na khaule / Khoon nahin hai pani hai” — “The Hindu whose blood doesn’t boil has water in his veins.” Or “Jo Janmabhoomi ke kaam na aaye / Woh bekaar jawaani hai” — “He who does not work for the Janmabhoomi is a useless youth.” And of course the usual affirmations that “Mandir wahin banayenge” — “The temple will be built right there.” That is, where the mosque stands. It may not sound like much, but when you hear these words in the throats of a hundred lusty young men on noisy motorbikes, revving their rage between shouts, you understand how maddened with fear the Muslims became. Whichever pissing Englishman wrote “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” had never been within sniffing distance of a slogan-shouting Indian mob. Words can hurt you, my friend. These words did. I have no doubt they led directly to the stabbing incident the night before the procession.

RD: So Mr. Lakshman tried to ban the sloganeering?

GS: Along with all the other things I mentioned. Agree to the conditions, he said, or no march; my good friend the stern cop here will withdraw police permission for your procession. And I nodded, giving my sinister smile. It was a bluff, but they couldn’t take the chance that it mightn’t be. So they agreed. And then Lucky pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen and asked the leaders of all the main Hindu parties to give us these commitments in writing. Bugger-all good that did, as it turned out.

RD: So they didn’t keep their promises?

GS: Lucky seemed to think it would make a difference if they signed something. But frankly, I never thought it would amount to a pisspot full of spit. Someone who doesn’t intend to keep an oral promise doesn’t suddenly become more trustworthy because he puts it in writing. Their signatures weren’t worth a rat’s fart on a cold day, if you’ll pardon my Punjabi. So I planned an extensive police presence anyway. Throughout the route of the bleeding march — cops at every corner and crossing, more in front of the mosques and sensitive neighborhoods, plus pickets of the Provincial Armed Constabulary, called in from neighboring districts where they’d been dealing with the same sort of crap. We really did everything we fucking could, Mr. Diggs. But it wasn’t enough.

RD: Tell me what happened.

GS: Well, the procession began as scheduled. And it was bloody apparent that it was going to be a problem. I’d never seen anything like it myself–

RD: You mean in size?

GS: Size, passion, militancy. Lucky and I were there, of course. He was clutching the piece of paper these bastards had all signed. Bhushan Sharma, Ram Charan Gupta, the whole lot of them, bloody hypocrites to a man. All their written assurances weren’t worth the cost of that single sheet of paper. They weren’t worth the sweat on Lucky’s hand that dampened that sheet every time he disbelievingly reread the undertakings they were openly violating. Restraint in sloganeering? Forget it — the most vulgar and vicious slogans were screamed out by the marchers, initiated by some of our precious signatories. No weapons? The procession was swarming with trishuls and naked daggers, which they flashed and pumped up and down as if practicing for a fucking javelin-throwing contest. Tie those bastards to a hydel generator, and you could have powered the pissing town for weeks. All this was bad enough, but then the leaders suddenly tried to steer the procession into the heart of the Muslim bastis. Just to provoke a reaction. Mind you, this was something they had specifically promised not to do, the sons of bitches. But I hadn’t trusted their promise anyway, so my men were in place, and we stopped their little attempted detour. We firmly pushed the slimy sisterloving marchers back to the agreed route.