My mind went mad for a day

March 31, 1998

Elderly Sikhs on the Indo-Pak border share moving accounts of revenge to award-winning writer, Suketu Mehta

Illustration: Amili Setalvad

Attari is the closest town to the border at Wagah. The train to Pakistan passes through Attari station, a mile away from the Wagah road crossing. It lies on the Grand Trunk Road, the legendary artery of northern India that comes down from the Khyber Pass, runs through Lahore just twenty miles away into Pakistani territory, and continues all the way to Calcutta. I sat at an open–air cafe next to the border crossing on this road, watching the sporadic traffic go by — trucks and the ramshackle conveyances of travellers taking the land route through Asia, beat-up four wheel drive cruisers that could use a wash.

I was talking to a 70–year–old Sikh man I will call Gurdev Singh, a large-framed farmer and sometime Congress Party politician, with huge moustaches and a fondness for his nightly peg of whisky. He started telling me what he did one day 50 years ago when his mind went mad.

Gurdev Singh said all the madness happened in the five to six months of terrible suspense it took to realise that Lahore would be on that side, Amritsar on this side. As a youth, he remembers that Lahore was so close to Attari, he used to be able to bicycle there in an hour. At the time, there were no all–Muslim or all–Sikh towns in Punjab. The lives of all three communities, and their residential spaces, were deeply enmeshed with each other. When Partition occurred, it was as if all the Catholics in New York City had to suddenly migrate to New Jersey; the process of extrication, of separation, proceeded street by street, house by house.

He told me about the trains. Attari is the first stop on the Indian side. Gurdev Singh used to go to the station to give buttermilk and water to the refugees. Three times a week a train would come from Pakistan. It was loaded with bodies. Gurdev Singh would drag the bodies off the trains and perform mass cremations —once he had sixteen people on one pile, and performed a common service for all of them. They had to loot a Muslim’s timber shop for the wood. Three times a week Gurdev Singh saw what the Muslims had done to Hindu and Sikh men, women, children.

The Hindu and Sikh refugees started coming from the West, filling Attari with their stories. Mukunde Shah is an 85 year-old cloth merchant with a thriving shop in Attari. He is Sikh, but wears no turban and his hair is shorn. One night fifty years ago a group of Muslims came to his parents’ home in Nathkalod, in what is now Pakistan. They asked for their spears, to, they said, protect them. When his parents turned over their weapons, the Muslims skewered thirteen people in Mukunde Shah’s family, including both parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. Mukunde Shah was working in a kiln at the time, and his four children and wife were also spared.

“We grabbed our hookahs and ran,” Shah told me. I was puzzled; of all the things to take from a life’s accumulations, why hubble-bubbles? Then he explained: they disguised themselves as Muslims, who are fond of the opium–and–tobacco mixture; Sikhs are forbidden to smoke. That is when Mukunde Shah cut his hair.

When Mukunde Shah got to Attari he moved into a house vacated by a Kashmiri Muslim. He has since prospered in the cloth business, and also owns sizeable property. “When I remember that time I hope that no one goes through that again.” He touches his earlobes, a form of prayer. “When we survived it was like a second birth.” One day during Partition, Gurdev Singh said, an old Sikh man in a village near Attari, out on a walk to buy milk, was murdered by some Muslims. Gurdev Singh was a student then, a “leader-type,” as he refers to himself. Ten Sikh men, four from Gurdev Singh’s family, gathered to seek vengeance. Before they went on their expedition, they went to the gurudwara, the Sikh temple, and took an oath not to kill or molest women and children. Then Gurdev Singh put on his armoured vest. He took a revolver.

They went to the Muslim part of the village. One member of their band grabbed a Muslim woman, but he was reminded of his oath by the others. Seventy–five thousand women were abducted during Partition; most of them were never returned. They were converted to the religion of their captors and stayed on, their captors gradually becoming their only known families.

Gurdev Singh did not tell me what happened next. “My mind went mad for one day,” is all he would say. The next morning, he brought along a friend. Balbir Singh (I have changed his name, too) was another of that band of ten men. He looked at a map in the lobby of the tourist hotel at the border.

It was a large map of undivided Punjab, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Punjab. “Even now the heart…” he started saying, and his eyes reddened, his voice thickened. He is a thin, dignified man with a white turban, dressed in simple but clean clothes — a faded white shirt, navy-blue trousers, neatly pressed. He has done well with his wheat and rice farms. He has a daughter in the US, and a son in Toronto, and has travelled there, marvelling at the friendship between Canada and the US, the free trade over the border.

When the columns of Muslim refugees came trudging down the road from Amritsar, remembered Balbir Singh, they would stop by his wells and look. Very hesitantly they would ask, can we come and get a drink of water? “It upset me that there should be so much fear that they could not ask for water.” There was a woman not much older than him. The paddy was being cultivated at that time, the green fields flooded with water. She put her face straight into the field to drink the water, and died right there. Balbir Singh also remembered the very old man that came down the road, walking on all fours, his incapacitated wife on his back, so that they made a sort of human cart. The convoy had to leave them behind. They were too slow.

On the day after the massacre, Gurdev Singh’s father asked him why he, a strapping 21–year–old man, looked so sad. He had been watching the Muslim women and children going over the border, people he had grown up with. “Pieces of my heart are going across,” said Gurdev Singh to his father

Finally, Balbir Singh told me what happened the day their minds went mad. He repeated, as a prelude, what Gurdev Singh had stressed. “When the old man was killed, nobody could hold back. But we didn’t touch any woman or child.”

“There was much junoon (madness). It lasted fifteen to twenty days. When we heard that injured bodies, dead bodies were coming in the trains people were going crazy. Then when the old man was killed, nobody could hold back.” They got guns, swords, spears, scythes. Then they went to the Muslim village. “It lasted just a few hours. At most two people killed the old man, so we should only have looked for them.”

Balbir Singh knew some of the people in the village — they were his classmates. He was looking out for them. But they were not there; so Balbir Singh did not have to make the terrible choice of whether or not to save his colleagues. The Sikhs rounded up the Muslim men, and gathered the women and children to one side. “We killed one third of the people in that village. About 50–60 men were killed in those few hours. The women and children were put to one side but they were watching; they were screaming. In some places there was fighting, but they weren’t begging for mercy — by that time everyone knew that asking for mercy was meaningless, there wasn’t much being said.”

Balbir Singh was weeping profusely by now, his handkerchief going now to one eye, now the other. It was obvious that he was saying some things for the first time; at this point, he was not even talking directly to me. “I don’t get angry on anybody else but myself. I didn’t sleep all that night, I didn’t stop thinking about it for a single minute. That’s the worst memory for me.”

What happened to the survivors, I asked him. “Then they walked to Pakistan. I’ve never met any one of them after that — not even my classmates, the ones who got saved.”

Gurdev Singh retained his equanimity during this account of the massacre. “We took revenge here, they took revenge there,” he shrugged, talking about the mirrored atrocities on both sides of the border. He does not seem to be much affected now by whatever he did then. But on the day after the massacre, Gurdev Singh’s father asked him why he, a strapping 21–year–old man, looked so sad. He had been watching the Muslim women and children going over the border, people he had grown up with. “Pieces of my heart are going across,” said Gurdev Singh to his father.

The first few days, Balbir Singh thought people would go and come back after the dust had settled. “I grew up with them. They were my family. I am very sad that the separation happened because the family got divided — the family of Punjab.” But at that time, he says, the leadership of both countries did not encourage the migrants to return to their homes. “After all, look at the lands we left there. If anyone had given us a promise we would be safe we would have gone back.”

But a great sense of trust had been lost. People of the majority community, on both sides, would offer to escort their friends to the border, and then kill them. “It was difficult to kill people from their own villages,” people they had grown up with, Balbir Singh explained. So they would make an arrangement with their co-religionists from other villages. They would send the refugees on their way, promising them safety, and inform the next village about their movements. “We’ll send them on their way and then you kill them.”

Sometimes, the same people that might massacre Muslims in another village would also at great personal risk escort Muslim friends or neighbours from their own village to the border. Gurdev Singh points to the border crossing. He himself brought Muslim friends here so they could go over safely. He had guns.

Balbir Singh’s uncle lived in Gujranwala, in Pakistan. It was close to Partition, and a Muslim mob had gathered to hunt down his uncle’s large family. So his uncle went to a Muslim friend’s house, a landlord, who had seven sons. The mob found out where they were and they surrounded the house and demanded that the landlord give up the Sikhs. The landlord came out and told the mob he had seven sons, seven guns, and a thousand cartridges. They would only get his guests, he declared, after the thousand cartridges had been fired, and after he and all his sons were dead. The mob dispersed.

That night, the landlord’s sons rode their horses across the border and contacted the Indian army. A Gurkha regiment came in a truck and took Balbir Singh’s uncle and his family away. Many years later, when his uncle’s daughter got married in India, an honoured guest was the Muslim landlord that had saved them.

The complex calculations of who should be killed and who should be saved went on within deranged minds. There was one world before, and there was another world after. But in between, there was just the junoon. This is how Balbir and Gurdev explain what they did. This is also how Mukunde Shah, the cloth merchant, made peace with his demons, explained to himself why the Muslims wiped out his family. “That was a time of josh — passion. It didn’t just happen to me, it happened to the whole nation. When I think of that I don’t feel bad.” How does a man live with having murdered his neighbours? Balbir Singh’s way of atonement has been through a constant searching out of the Other, a series of highly emotional meetings with his former enemies. He has crossed the border no fewer than three times since then, a feat whose magnitude can be appreciated by any Indian trying to get a visa at the Pakistani embassy in Delhi — the lines begin at four in the morning; then the application is sent to Pakistan for a two-month review. On his trips, he tries to meet his former neighbours, the Muslims from Attari whom he had a hand in driving out.

The first time Balbir Singh went to Pakistan was 1956. An entire convoy of vehicles came to the border to receive the Attari group, he says, 25-30 trucks, five to seven buses, cars. They were the Muslims that had been driven out. The group from Attari had to stay at each of their houses in turn, and nobody took money for lunch or dinner, or money for petrol.

But on that trip, he says, “the younger generation looked at us with a certain amount of hatred.” Balbir Singh’s wife’s village was in Pakistan. When he and his wife went back there, he said, “They knew I was the son–in–law of the family; they just held me and burst out crying.” He met the people that had worked in the household of his wife’s family. “Whatever money they had, they just emptied their pockets and gave me.” This is a tradition — the returning son–in–law is always feasted and feted by his in-laws. “After all these years”, he says, “my wife was still a daughter of the village.”

In 1980, one of Balbir Singh’s cousins went to Pakistan, and Balbir asked him to look up his best friend before Partition, a Muslim who was so close to him that he would eat a chicken that Balbir had cooked, even if it was not halal, prepared according to Muslim dietary laws. The Muslim friend received the cousin with great hospitality, and then asked him a favour. Would he bring Balbir Singh to the border? He wanted to meet him once.

The cousin went back to Attari and passed on the message. Balbir Singh went to the border at the appointed time. “All the security men said, you must be mad. You can’t meet.” Across the fence, Balbir Singh, after 33 years, saw his friend, who rushed forward, only to be pushed back by the Pakistani security men far beyond the fence. Balbir saw that his friend was straining against them, weeping.

At first Balbir turned back, but a relative who knew the soldiers intervened on his behalf. So Balbir Singh went forward with two of his youngest children beyond the fence and his friend came forward to meet him after thirty-three years. They embraced each other; they were overwhelmed and there was no point in talking. What could be said? How does one condense the highlights of three decades? His friend was crying, but Balbir Singh was determined not to. Balbir Singh apologised — for not having brought all of his children to show his friend. “I said I’m sorry. My two girls are married in different villages; I didn’t have time to get them all here to show you.”

Then the soldiers separated the two men and his friend went back into Pakistan and Balbir Singh started walking slowly back into India. He was stopped by agents from the Intelligence Bureau, and they asked him, “Who were you talking to?” “To my brother,” Balbir Singh answered. How can that be, they demanded, he was Sikh, the man who came to meet him was Muslim. “I said that’s exactly what I mean, he’s my brother. He has land on that side, I have land on this side, that’s why we’re separated. The intelligence men said don’t fool us. I said I’ve told you what I told you, I have said what I said, he’s my brother.”

Again, in 1982, Balbir Singh crossed the border. He went with his daughter to a village on the other side where a group of Muslim brothers from Attari had settled. Some of them were wrestlers; they went there and became sweet–sellers and made three good houses. But now there was only one of the brothers left. Balbir Singh and his daughter went to the old man’s house for dinner, and talked with the sweet–merchant’s entire family late into the night about the village.

In the morning when they woke up the old man said, “I’m going to tell you something…” and then all his grandchildren rushed forward and interrupted him. “We’re going to tell you what he’s going to tell you. He’ll say I had a dream last night that I was in Attari. Uncle, every morning when he wakes up he says he’s met this person in Attari, that person in Attari.” This was in 1982, 35 years after the old man had left his village. At least in his waking life.

If the border were opened up tomorrow, said the old man to Balbir Singh, his children would drive there, because they had cars. “But I’ll still beat them because I’ll run so fast.”

I looked for Muslims in Attari and found none. They had all fled. I looked for signs of their presence, those that lived here all these centuries. Gurdev Singh pointed out to me the houses they had inhabited, their quarter. Then he led me to the place he used, until quite recently, to come every day to pray at. It is a grave — the tomb of the fakir Gulab Shah.

Gulab Shah was Muslim. The light green building sits tranquilly in a grove of fruit trees. Peering inside the window of the structure, I could see the oblong tiled tomb of the saint. A coin was placed on it; on the far wall was a recess for a lamp, lit every day, and a can of fuel to supply it. An electric chandelier flickered uncertainly above. Every Thursday, people come from all the surrounding countryside to ask for favours at the tomb; that an ailing child might get better, that an examination might be passed. The worshippers are all Sikh and Hindu. “There are no Muslims here,” said Gurdev Singh. There used be a Muslim fair held here, a huge one with thousands of people coming from all over. “We took it over from them after Partition.” This shrine is not unique. All over the Punjabi countryside are the tombs of Muslim holy men, maintained and venerated by Sikhs and Hindus. Attari has a full-time keeper of the Muslim tombs, Arjun Singh, a man who claims to be 111-years-old.

This is the faith that Mahatma Gandhi called sanatana dharma, the timeless, tolerant faith of the Indian countryside, where it is no contradiction to worship at the shrine of a religion you have killed people for belonging to.

It is a common desire among those displaced by Partition to make the return crossing, to try to go home again. The Pakistani writer Intizar Husain, whom I met in Lahore, told me that for 50 years he tried to get a visa to go back to India, particularly to the village he was born in, Dibai, near Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh. Although he has been living in Lahore since 1947, most of his fiction is set in Dibai. Like the old Muslim exile from Attari, he had also been having a recurring dream.

“I go there, to my home, and am wandering among the houses. Those lanes, those palaces. The terraces where we flew kites,” and then he described his house for me, constructing it lovingly in the air with his hands. “The Muslim quarter began at our house. The terraces of the Hindu houses were so close that at Diwali time I would reach across, steal oil–lamps from their terraces, and bring them home.”

Thirty years later, at the invitation of a literary gathering in Delhi, Husain was able to get a visa to go back. He was at Aligarh, and then made an impulsive decision to revisit Dibai. Driving toward the village, he saw the trucks all along the road, the phantom convoys of Partition. As they came into the village, he couldn’t believe how much it had changed. There used to be a pilgrim’s hostel. Where was the hostel? Where was the hospital? Everything had become a bazaar. He looked for his house, but the geography of home had changed. His companion said, why don’t you ask someone? “I said I have come to my own town. I am not going to ask someone else for directions.” Husain got out and wandered the bazaars but could not locate his birthplace, and something in him would not let him ask a stranger for guidance in the territory of his own childhood, his own dreams. Frustrated, he got back in the car, and drove back to Aligarh. “I still haven’t gone back.” I asked Husain why there were no museums, no memorials to that time. He responded, “It is good that the killings are not memorialised, that there are no pictures of those times.” I found this curious, coming from a writer whose entire body of work deals with “those times.” What tormented him, he seemed to be saying, was his generation’s burden alone. What use would it be to rake up the past, to keep harping on the atrocities of Partition? If the current generation could only forget what his generation went through, then maybe they could start talking to each other.

There are millions of Partition stories throughout the subcontinent, a body of lore that is infrequently recorded in print or on tape, and rarely passed on to the next generation. All over the map of the subcontinent, there is an entire generation of people who have been made poets, philosophers, and storytellers by their experiences during Partition.

Any person over 55 or 60 in Delhi or Amritsar or Lahore has stories to tell of that period, even if they were not themselves dislocated then. And for those who have been displaced from their birthplaces against their will and at an early age, the impression of home is all the more vivid and sharp; it haunts their dream–lives, and their minds are the battleground between the need to forget and the need to remember.

(The writer was awarded the Whiting Award for exceptional American writers in October 1997 for his piece Mumbai published in a special issue of the English journal, Grantha, to mark 50 years of India’s freedom. He visited the Wagah border in June 1997.)

Bias on record

February 28, 1998

Dongri 1 to Police Control: Two military trucks have come carrying milk and other rations, led by Major General (retired) Syed Rehemtullah. Therefore, a crowd has gathered at IR road near Bhendi Bazar, please send some more men.

(Voice): Why the f—are you distributing milk to them laandyas (abuse for a circumcised person)? Do you want to f—their mothers? Miyan (Muslim), bastards live there.

Dongri 1, (agitated): There are lots of police here. Let them distribute milk.

Voice: Why are you distributing milk to them? Are you doing them a favour or what?

V.P.Road to Control: A mob has gathered outside Maharashtra garage, Ghas galli, Lamington road with the intention of setting it on fire. Send men.

Voice: Must be a laandya’s garage. Let it burn. S— don’t burn anything that belongs to a Maharashtrian. But burn everything belonging to a miyan, the bastards.

(Excerpts from transcripts of police wireless messages taped by Teesta Setalvad between January 10 and 18, 1993)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 1998, Year 5 No. 41, Cover Story,

Where is your Allah now?

February 28, 1998

The police force in Bombay, in Maharashtra and all over India must not forget that they are Hindus first and policemen thereafter,” Bal Thackeray pronounced at the Vijayadashmi Day rally at Shivaji park, Bombay, in October 1993. The Maharashtra government and the Bombay police chose to turn a deaf ear to such blatant communal incitement of policemen.

In sharp contrast to official lethargy in prosecuting and punishing those responsible for the December – January riots was the alacrity with which the Maharashtra police handled the serial bomb blasts which killed over 300 people in the metropolis in March, 1993. It was only to be expected that the law and order machinery nab the culprits, conduct interrogations and prosecute them. But it did much more. In the name of investigations, hundreds of relatives, friends and even casual acquaintances — men and women, young and old — of the suspects, were illegally detained for days and badly tortured.

To cite just two instances: Rehmat Sayed Ali Kadri: About 70 years in age, she is the mother of Shabbir Kadri, an accused from Mhasla in coastal Maharashtra who is absconding. She was illegally detained first at the Mhasla police station and later at the Mahim police station in north central Bombay. Her daughter and daughter-in-law (with a 10-month-old son) were also kept behind bars.

Said Ms. Kadri: “For 15 days, all three of us were dragged by the hair every day, beaten and verbally abused. The 10-month baby was starved of any food. We were repeatedly humiliated. Shabbir’s father was stripped and paraded before us. ‘Where is your Allah now? Forget him. say, Jai Sri Ram,’ they used to shout.

The Haspatel family: On April 13, 1993 with much fanfare, the Maharashtra police revealed that they had unearthed 16 “projectiles” (rocket launchers) from a home in Walwat village on the coast. the “projectiles” were proved to be spindles used in a local yarn factory.

But for 10 days before that, the two male members of the family, Iqbal (65) and Mobeen (17) had been detained and tortured daily. Also illegally detained, verbally abused and humiliated for five days were two women from the family — Zubeida (55) and her daughter-in-law along with her 18-month-old baby. Senior police officials assisted by a woman constable beat the family, stripped the men and paraded them before the women every day. Mobeen, who had been cured of epileptic attacks for over ten years started getting renewed attacks after being subject to “parrot torture” for four hours every day. “You have to stop saying Allah. Or you will have to go to back to Pakistan,” is the most common refrain they heard from policemen in the lock-up.

(The victims spoke to Teesta Setalvad during a video-taped interview soon after their release)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 1998, Year 5 No. 41, Cover Story,

Isn’t it awful how we refuse to learn from our mistakes?

February 28, 1998

On the day (February 16) he presented his 700-page report to the Maharashtra government on the findings of the officially appointed commission to investigate the communal riots of December 1992-January 1993 and the serial bomb blasts of March 1993, Justice B.N.Srikrishna spoke to Communalism Combat, in an exclusive interview. What his main findings were, the judge would not say except to emphasise more than once that the findings must be made public so that we all learn from the errors of the past. And, Justice Srikrishna did agree to share with us the Epilogue to Chapter VII of the commission’s report. We reproduce below excerpts from the interview with Teesta Setalvad and the epilogue:

How do you feel at the end of the whole exercise?
For all these years, sitting in this chair, being witness through real-life accounts to all that had taken place in Bombay, was an awful churning. Many times I felt angry and depressed. But now with the report submitted I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is a job well done. I feel relieved and satisfied.

Do you feel that your report will make any difference, effect any changes, be accepted by the government?
How can I say? That is the job of the wider public to ensure. So many worthwhile judicial commissions have sat in the past. Have their recommendations made any difference? All I can say is that every effort must be made to see that it is made public and that we all, the state included, learn from the grave errors of the past.

On many occasions during the commission’s work, you used harsh words against the police, even lost your temper?
Why remind me of that? It was impossible as a human being not to react. I was faced with victims who went through unspeakable horrors. That’s why the constant churning that I could not but experience. But more on that after the report is made public. As I am sure that it must be.
Just two days ago there were serial bomb blasts in Coimbatore. It has come two-and-a-half months after a terrible communal carnage. Does it not seem like a repeat of what happened in Bombay five years ago? Isn’t it awful how we refuse to learn from our mistakes? Its like the situation in any family. There is this younger brother whom I beat again and again till he is pushed to the corner. So much so that he is pushed to the wall. A point is reached when he can’t and won’t take it any more, he rebels and then he will take the help of any outsider to get back at me. That’s what happens. Anywhere.

Epilogue to Chapter VII of the Srikrishna report submitted to the Maharshtra government on February 14, 1998
The voluminous evidence produced before the Commission strikingly brings home the stark reality that the beast in man keeps straining at the leash to jump out; frictions, irritations and disputes based on colour, race and religion are but excuses.

The commission has noticed that most of the violent communal riots during December 1992 and January 1993 took place in areas called Prem Nagar, Shanti Nagar, Gandhi Nagar and so on. That vicious communal violence on such scale should occur in the land of ‘Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah’ and Mahatma Gandhi, only shows that the message of love and brotherhood preached by apostles is not internalized. Unless that is done, the spectre of communal violence would haunt the city again and again.

The Commission sincerely hopes that the calamitous events of December 1992, January 1993 and March 1993 would serve as eye openers and lead to introspection and that all concerned attain the maturity to accept constructive criticism and mend their ways. For, in the immortal words of Ramayana: “Sulabhaah purushaa rajan satatam priya vaadinah Apriyasya cha pathhyasya vakta shrota cha durlabah” ( Persons pleasing in speech are easy to find; it is difficult to find one who speaks or listens to the bitter, but wholesome truth).

Finally, before parting, the Commission would reiterate the ringing exhortation of Shankaracharya:“Tvayi Mayi chaanyatraiko Vishnuh, Vyartham kupyasi mayyasahishnuh” (The same God resides in you and me; why then be needlessly angry with me !!).
Mumbai Dated 14th February 1998 Justice B.N. Srikrishna epilogue:

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 1998, Year 5 No. 41, Cover Story

Through the prism of prejudice

February 28, 1998

Like the average Hindu, the average Hindu policemen also believes that Muslims, generally, are cruel and violent by nature

It is not very difficult to identify reasons behind the discriminatory beha-vior of the police. The conduct of an average policemen is guided by those predetermined beliefs and misconceptions which influence the mind of an average Hindu. Like the average Hindu, the average Hindu policemen also believes that Muslims, generally, are cruel and violent by nature.

In the course of my study, I spoke to a large number of policemen working with different ranks. I was amazed to find that most of them seriously believed that apart from being cruel and violent, Muslims were untrustworthy, anti-national and easily influenced by a fanatical leadership and could indulge in rioting at the slightest provocation. Generally the policemen were in agreement that Muslims initiated riots. When I confronted many of them with the question as to why Muslims should start a riot as they suffered more, they replied with arguments that an average Hindu would use.

It is but natural that after being convinced of the mischievous role of the Muslims in riots most policemen do not have any doubts regarding the ways and means to check them. They sincerely believe that there is only one way to control a riot and that is to crush the mischief-mongering Muslims. Whenever an instruction is received from the state government or senior police officials to deal with the rioters firmly and ruthlessly, these instructions are interpreted in a prejudiced and biased way. Firmness and ruthlessness towards rioters is interpreted as firmness and ruthlessness towards Muslims. The various forms of firmness have distinct meanings: arrest means arrest of Muslims; search means searches of Muslim houses; and police firing means firing on Muslims.

Even in those riots where Muslims suffered from the very inception of rioting or where the killings of Muslims was totally one-sided, the policemen gave a very interesting picture of their way of thinking. It is not only during riots that they would believe that the riot was caused by the mischief of Muslims. While talking to some of the policemen posted in Bhagalpur (1989) and Bombay (1992-93), I was amazed to find that the perception of Muslims being violent and cruel was so deeply in-built in their psyche that even after admitting the disproportionate destruction of Muslim life and property, they had many “reasons” to deny the suggestion that “naturally non-violent and pious Hindus” were in any way responsible for the damage to the Muslims.

It is a common sight in the towns of northern India that the reinforcements sent from outside during communal tensions, make their lodging arrangements in temples, dharmshalas and parks in Hindu localities or the space available in Hindu homes and shops

It is this psychology of the policemen which guides their reactions during communal strife. While combating riots, they start searching for friends among Hindus and foes among Muslims. It is a common sight in the towns of northern India that the reinforcements sent from outside during communal tensions, make their lodging arrangements in temples, dharmshalas and parks in Hindu localities or the space available in Hindu homes and shops. When the shops are closed during curfew, food, tea and snacks are supplied to them by Hindu homes. Members of the majority community, who in normal times may keep a distance from the police just like the members of the minority communities, suddenly see policemen as friends during communal tensions.

It is their natural expectation of a ‘friendly’ police that it will not use force against them. Whenever, the police uses force against Hindus, their reaction is that of an amazed and cheated group. The FIR lodged by Sri Ajit Dutta, D.I.G. during the riots of Bhagalpur (1989), very candidly underlines this mentality. It’s perusal reveals the interesting incidents of a law-breaking mob of Hindus, congregating on the road during curfew hours, expressing its dismay and anger when Mr. Dutta threatened them with police firing.

I am reminded of a similar personal experience at Allahabad (1980) when in Gadiwan Tola, I warned a Hindu mob bent upon rioting, that we would open fire if they did not disperse. I found that the crowd did not take it seriously at first and thought it was a joke. Subsequently, when they heard me ordering the head constable to open fire from his carbine, there was a clear look of disbelief and surprise in their eyes.

How far this deeply entrenched perception of Muslims being solely responsible for the riots and strict behavior towards them being the only way to quell a riot, affects the reactions of a policeman, may be illustrated with the example of Hashimpura where the savagery and horrifying non-professionalism of the police behavior is a matter of national shame.

The riots in Meerut (1987) were unprecedented in the toll of human life and for the long period of continued and unabated violence. The magnitude of the riot which started on May 17, 1987 can be gauged from the fact that to deal with it, the services of about 50 gazzetted police officers and magistrates, along with more than 70 companies of P.A.C., para-military forces and army were pressed in. The policemen deployed here harboured all the above mentioned beliefs and prejudices. When their tremendous round-the-clock vigil could not control the violence, some of them resorted to an act which could have not been imagined.

Being fully convinced that riots in a civilised society could be ended only by teaching the Muslims a lesson, one section of the P.A.C. picked up more than two dozen Muslims from a locality known as Hashimpura on the 22nd of May, where house-to-house searches were going on and killed them at two places in Ghaziabad, after transporting them there in one of their trucks.

I was Superintendent Police, Ghaziabad, at that time. After receiving the information, I got two cases registered against the P.A.C. The cases were handed over to the Uttar Pradesh C.I.D. After eight years of investigations, a charge sheet has been filed against the erring personnel of the P.A.C., only recently (1995).

Why should the P.A.C. commit such a detestable act? I had the opportunity to talk to a large number of policemen deployed in Meerut in this period during my tenure as S.P., Ghaziabad (1985-88) as also during the course of the present study. I wanted to understand the motivating factors behind such a heinous offence. The analysis of the psychology of these men will help us appreciate the relationship between the police and members of the minority communities.

Firmness and ruthlessness towards rioters is interpreted as firmness and ruthlessness towards Muslims: arrest means arrest of Muslims; search means searches of Muslim houses; and police firing means firing on Muslims.

Most of the policemen posted in Meerut in 1989 thought that the riots were the result of Muslim mischief. They were also of the opinion that Meerut had become a mini-Pakistan because of the stubbornness of the Muslims and that it was necessary to teach them a lesson in order to establish permanent peace in Meerut. They were badly affected by rumours which suggested that Hindus in Meerut were totally vulnerable to Muslim attacks. Their belief that Muslims of Meerut deserve a suitable lesson resulted in Hashimpura.

Instances like Hashimpura worsen the inimical relationship between Muslims and the police. This relationship is clearly visible during communal tension. We find that many riots start with a Muslim attack on the police. Quite often the presence of the police in a surcharged atmosphere fills Muslims with anger. Reacting to the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, angry mobs of Muslims in other cities, venting their feelings of resentment on the street initially chose the police as their targets rather than ordinary Hindus.

There are many examples of communal rioting in which the trouble started as a clash between the police and the Muslims and then turned into a Hindu-Muslim conflict. The Idgah incident of Moradabad (1980) is an important example of this trend.

The most interesting example of the hostile relationship between Muslims and the police can be found in the behavior of a police party entering a Muslim locality during communal tension. The briefing, preparation and weaponry of this party intending to enter a Muslim locality for arrests, or searches, or even normal patrolling is as if it is going to enter enemy territory. I have seen many such groups and always found them full of apprehension and fear.

Their behavior is not without reason. Alertness on their part is necessary as they may be attacked at any time. Who is responsible for these feelings of distrust and enmity? Perhaps the seeds are to be found in the terms ‘we’ and ‘they’ used by police officials for Hindus and Muslims during their conferences, organised to devise ways and means to deal with a communal situation.

Reporting of facts, investigation into and prosecution of participants in communal riots is another area where we find a clear communal bias in police behavior. The reporting of facts is done at various levels. Intelligence reports being prepared at the level of police stations and intelligence units to be sent to government and senior police formations are normally affected by this bias.

For example, I have found one interesting thing in the lists of communal agitators being maintained at various police levels in Uttar Pradesh. For most of the officials responsible for maintaining such lists, a communal agitator means a Muslim communal agitator. Even during those days when Hindu communal forces were active in the movement of Ram Janambhoomi movement, it was very difficult to find names of Hindu inciters in the list.

What damage this bias can inflict on police professionalism can be understood from the incident of the destruction of the Babri Mosque. It is evident from the charge-sheet filed by the C.B.I. that the demolition of the mosque was the result of a well-planned conspiracy. None of the intelligence agencies could report this fact before the 6th of December, 1992.

A very heinous examples of this bias in reporting facts is available at Bhagalpur (1989). One hundred and sixteen Muslims were killed in village Logain on the 27th of October 1989. This brutal massacre was enacted by the Hindus of Logain and the neighbouring villages. Logain village is 26 kilometres from the district headquarters of Bhagalpur, with the police station only 4 kms away at Jagdisgpur. The Muslims killed were buried in the fields and cauliflower was grown over their dead bodies.

Out of the 181 Muslim inhabitants of the village, 65 survivors and their attackers went to many places, including Bhagalpur town, and reported this ghastly incident. Details were published in local and national newspapers. Inspite of this, the district and police administration of Bhagalpur kept denying any such happening till the 8th of December 1989, when a police party led by Sri Ajit Dutta, D.I.G. ,dug some of the dead bodies out of the fields.

Vibhuti N. Rai

(Excerpted from the writer’s recently published book, ‘Combating Communal Conflicts —Perception of Police Neutrality During Hindu-Muslim Riots in India’)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 1998, Year 5 No. 41, Cover Story,

Cry Coimbatore

February 28, 1998

Thirteen bomb blasts ripped through Coimbatore in mid-February, claiming innocent lives two and a half months after an anti-Muslim pogrom

It was 30 minutes before BJP president, L.K. Advani was scheduled to address an election rally at Coimbatore, at 3.50 p.m. on February 14. A mere 250 metres away from the rostrum put up at T.V. Samy Road — D.B.Road Junction, the first of 13 bombs exploded killing 46 persons and injuring more than 200.

In the days that followed 10 more were killed. Six were killed during a pre-dawn swoop by policemen at a multi-storeyed residential premise on Thirumal Street at 2.50 a.m. on Sunday, the day after, allegedly at a hide-out. According to the official version, the bomb attempted to be hurled at the raiding policemen actually killed the seven accused. Local civil liberties groups are investigating this particular case as the police version seems to have many loop-holes. Four teenaged Muslim boys died in a stray blast three days later.

Advani cancelled the meeting scheduled to be held in Coimbatore. He issued a statement backed by other party colleagues claiming that he was the target of the bombs — a part of an ISI conspiracy acting in tandem with terrorist Muslim groups. The BJP accused the ruling DMK government of being soft on Islamic extremists despite persistent demand for action against them by the BJP and its affiliate, the Hindu Munnani. Incidentally, the Hindu Munnani has been indicted, by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) along with sections of the local police for its direct participation in the anti-minority pogrom last November (see CC, February 1998). Policemen in uniform had aided Hindu communal elements in converting the government hospital at Coimbatore into a macabre war theatre, thrashing and stabbing Muslim victims brought there for treatment. Even innocent rickshawallahs who transported them were not spared. The seventh of the 13 bomb blasts that ripped Coimbatore on February 14 was placed at the same Coimbatore Medical College hospital, killing two innocent nurses. Not surprisingly, the acute communal polarisation caused by the bomb blasts led to a resounding victory for the BJP candidate in Coimbatore.

To tackle the emerging situation, The Federation of All Muslim Organisations in Coimbatore (formed in the aftermath of the November 1997 violence) observed an Anti-Terrorism week between March 7 to March 14. The campaign involved wall writings, wall posters and street corner meetings and culminated in a public meeting on Match 14. The Federation has also been assisting the police in apprehending known activists of some communal organisations and also detecting bombs. The Federation has also entered into a dialogue with non-communal Hindu organisations in an effort at creating lasting communal peace and unity in Coimbatore.

Hindu organisations in an effort at creating lasting communal peace and unity in Coimbatore.This action of the Federation assumes significance given the reaction of the Coimbatore public and police machinery once the bombs went off. Soon after the first explosion, Muslim commercial establishments and houses in the city in Hindu-dominated areas were attacked, looted and set on fire.On the night of the blasts, the government banned two organisations, the Al-Umma and the All-India Jihad Committee. Al-Umma leader S.A. Basha and 12 others, some from the Jihad Committee, were arrested.

The next day a highly sophisticated 80 kg car bomb was found and defused before it could go off. Arrests began immediately thereafter. Over 800 people have been arrested from the city, adjoining areas and districts as well as elsewhere in the state, besides nine others from Trissur in Kerala state.According to official reports, about 550 pipe bombs, 200 gelatin sticks, 1200 detonators and 1000 petrol bombs have been recovered.

Large-scale exodus of people, especially Muslims from many parts of Coimbatore, some of whom have left for adjacent Kerala, has been evident. Muslim families have also been forced to vacate houses rented by the landlords, many of whom were operating in abject fear and some facing threats., Some of these evacuees are staying elsewhere in the city, many with Hindu friends.

During combing operations the police have been responsible for many indiscriminate arrests without adequate proof, of innocent Muslims. A maulana, suffering from a mental illness, under treatment for the last four years (he had last been to the doctor on February 24 ) was arrested. under the same crime number.

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 1998, Year 5 No. 41, Cover Story,

Sri Lanka – Will Buddha’s Lions Make Peace with Tamil Tigers?

September 30, 1997

The countdown has begun. In less than 50 days, the Sri Lankan government has to put before its people, and Parliament, a devolution package which will hopefully end th 14-year-old ethnic war that has killed over 50,000 people and uprooted lakhs from their homes. With decades of a virulent Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism having given birth to the equally bloody-minded Tamil Tigers, the war-torn nation now seems to face a bitter option: Full regional autonomy along communal lines – Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim – or continued civil war whose only end-result can be the country’s Partition.

Teesta Setalvad reports from Sri Lanka

Three years ago, when Chandrika Kumaratunga stepped into the Presidential Palace at Colombo and convincingly addressed the Sri Lankan nation in both Tamil and Sinhala, it genuinely seemed as if Sri Lanka had negotiated a critical turn. Eleven years of a full-scale war, raging between the Sri Lankan army and its own Tamil-speaking people (ordinary civilians have been targets as much as Tamil militants) had taken a bitter toll.

She appeared like a breath of clean, fresh air, a rare breed among politicians unafraid of speaking the language of peace and reconciliation. In that highly charged and deeply communalized pre-election campaign of October 1994, she and her People’s Alliance (PA) had stoicly, and alone, offered the promise of peace.

Today, the countdown for this government has, in a metaphorical sense, begun. Within 45 days, that is, by end-November at the latest, the ruling government is politically and morally bound to place before the Sri Lankan Parliament, and its people, a full-fledged devolution package that, it is hoped, will grant substantive autonomy to the Tamil-speaking peoples of the island. Interests of the other minority group, the Muslims (largely Tamil-speaking) will also have to be met considering the deeply fractured and communalised state of Sri Lankan society and state. (The LTTE inspired eviction of over 70,000 Muslims within 48 hours from the northern province of the island in 1990 has resulted in an uneasy relationship between the two Lankan minorities).

Will this government deliver? And will the Sri Lankan people accept the unit of devolution? Put crassly, how will the new borders be drawn, will they be more just and reflect new, sometimes bitter grass-root socio-economic and political realities? Or will it be just another imposition of a majoritarian, Sinhala-Buddhist vision that will not merely be unacceptable to over 26 per cent of the non-Sinhala speaking population, but will in all probability escalate violence and brutality to new heights?

Thirty-six months of harsh reality have washed away much of the 1994 pre-and post-election euphoria. The Promise of Peace came as a welcome breather then. It allowed a cross section of the Sri Lankan people to dream again. Enthusiastic groups of ordinary people who joined the symbolic peace train from Colombo to Jaffna in 1994 reflected this.

But the harsh reality of the months that followed has put the theory of justice and peace to bitter practical test. Between November 1994 and February 1995, when the island enjoyed a brief respite from shelling and gunfire, three rounds of talks took place between the government and the LTTE. Before any significant progress could be made, the LTTE, threatened by the success or progress made through these initial parleys unilaterally broke the ceasefire. What followed soon after was the bombing of foreign ships and ambushes on innocent civilians by militants, claiming to represent the interests of all the Tamil people.

At this critical juncture, the fledging PA government failed the litmus test. Unable to silence the war-mongers within the ruling cabinet and contain the deep-rooted communal prejudice of the Sinhala Buddhist majority (76 per cent of the island’s 18.2 million-strong population), it capitulated. Forgetting that the path to peace is lined with thorns, not roses, it reverted to a conservative and aggressive position.

After the brief lull the war in the North and the East against its own people, was resumed in June 1995 by the Sri Lankan army and it continues today with the blessings of the ministry of internal affairs and defence. A full one-fourth of the annual government revenue earnings are swallowed up in sustaining this war. The war was earlier accompanied by a cruel economic embargo that deprived ordinary Tamilians of basic goods. (Though the embargo was lifted, in theory, by the ruling PA government, control and corruption by the Sri Lankan army even today denies these goods to most Tamil-speaking people).

The army operation is cynically termed Operation Victory Assured. Unfortunately, even this government that had set itself an agenda for peace has been unable to cease hostilities against its own people, launched systematically by successive Lankan governments’ decades ago.

News of the brutal bombings and killings by the Tamil Tigers make headline news, worldwide. Images of these and other atrocities by the LTTE on innocent civilians have dominated and clouded the south Asian and the world psyche. But brutal violations by the Sri Lankan state backed by its majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist ideology have remained buried and forgotten. Collective amnesia has successfully hidden repeated pogroms by the Sri Lankan – read Sinhala Buddhist – state against its own people.

This 14-year-old war – that is how all Sri Lankans term the ethnic conflict on the island – has altered significantly its demography. The population of the North-East has dropped from 1.7 million in 1987 to 9, 00,000 in 1992; that is, it dwindled by 47 per cent in barely five years. Of this drop in Tamil-speaking people by 8, 00,000, official figures reluctantly admit as many as 50,000 dead or missing. An estimated 5, 00,000 have left the country with a 4, 00,000 strong Tamil Diaspora in Western Europe alone.

Others live in camps outside the north and east of the country, refugees in their own land. More than 70,000 Tamil-speaking Muslims from the Northern provinces who became victims of the LTTE Vendetta in 1990 now live, reduced to penury, in southern parts of Sri Lanka. Another 1,00,000 displaced Muslim refugees are also victims of the war.

Even in the originally Tamil-dominant northern and eastern districts where the 14-year-old war rages, a systematic “colonisation” by Sinhala-speaking people (brought in by the army to occupy land owned by the Tamil minority there, even when other unoccupied land can be found in other provinces) has altered the ground situation gravely.

Two thousand five hundred years ago, a radical and non-violent challenge to tyrannical and oppressive Hindu-Brahmanical practices was posed by the Gautama Buddha who espoused a new spiritual and religious doctrine with a strong secular element – Buddhism. The stupas of Both Gaya and Sanchi within India are historical reminders of the location of the birthplace of Buddha, and Buddhism. But the sad historic reality is that Buddhism and Buddhists were driven away from the land of their birth – a testimony to the tenacity and the tyranny of Brahmanism.

Tragically, at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, this doctrine of the oppressed has metamorphosed itself and assumed a rigid and tyrannical form of its own. The Sinhalisation of Sri Lankan Buddhism – 7th century A.D. historical texts speak of many Tamil-speaking, Buddhist scholars translating ancient works from Pali – was critical in linking a religion with the language of the majority of Sri Lankans.

Today, no Buddhist in Sri Lanka speaks any language but Sinhala. Appropriating historical myths in constructing a superior Sinhala race with Aryan antecedents (due thanks to the European Orientalist tradition — see box) which has prior claim to the land and soil of Sri Lanka is matched by the project for the Thamil state of Eelam (home-land) that in no less measure advocates an exclusivist and communal construction of its citizenship.

History is the playing field for communalist ideologues, historians and ordinary citizens alike, from every community in Sri Lanka today. Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim (Moor or Malay) nationalism have successfully perpetuated a myth of its origin vital to any communalist ideology founded on notions of “purity of the race”. (see box).

Political patronage of Buddhism as the state religion with the Sangha (monastic order of Buddhist monks) being given special advisory status to the government after Sir Lanka attained independence in February 1948, followed by Sinhala (only) as the official language policy adopted through the Language Bill passed by Parliament in 1956 gave successful political expression to this deep-rooted exclusivism.

The modern Sri Lankan nation was constituted and continues to manifest itself as a Sinhala-Buddhist nation. Stark and imposing figures of the Buddha clutter the Sri Lankan landscape. A seemingly innocuous plaque at Colombo’s international airport greets visitors, “Reserved, for Clergy Only.” And Buddhism, already the state religion, is likely to retain this special status in a reserved category as a central subject, sitting there uneasily with categories like Defence and Irrigation under the revised draft of the “reformed” Constitution of Sri Lanka.

A popular Sinhala short story depicts the plight of a middle-aged woman, traumatised for days, her world shattered after she is accidentally told one day that Gautama Buddha was not Sri Lankan but Indian.

The state in Sri Lanka is a mirror of the deep-rooted communal divisions that have sharply polarised civil society. Sinhala-Buddhist and Tamil-Hindu categorise the most distinct of these divisions. The many other distinctions – between Muslims and others, between upcountry and low country Sinhalese and Tamils (the Tamil elite from Jaffna that epitomise the Tamil Tigers have consistently excluded both the 80,000 Tamil tea plantation workers ‘of Indian origin’ that are even today without citizenship and the Tamil-speaking Muslims from its vision of separate statehood) –, add confusion and complexity to this communalisation.

Different versions of history are taught in Sinhalese and Tamil-speaking schools. The communalisation of text books in Sri Lanka is acute, and has been the subject matter of extensive studies by scholars like Reggie Siriwardena who have shown how Sri Lankan history and the traditions, situation and contributions of non-Sinhala Buddhist communities have been falsified for many years by those who control the Sinhala press and prescribe text books.

Recently, a cartoon published in a popular English daily, The Island, after an elephant had crushed two civilians to death in Kandy, caused an outcry among academic circles in Colombo. The caption below the cartoon read: “How was the elephant wise enough to know that these people were Tamils?!”

For the Sinhala elite, allegiance to Buddhism is paramount. Culturally, however, in modes of dressing and religious rituals, many bear a similarity to the southern Indian traditions of worship and ritual. A senior social scientist and one of the leading historians of Sri Lanka, Kumari Jayawardena, while talking to Communalism Combat observed: “Teaching daughters the Bharatanatyam is not only fashionable, but even holding the “Arangetram” (first public performance of a young artist traditionally only after she has attained genuine expertise) is the done thing. But it is not unusual for the members of the same Sinhala elite to make racist remarks like, ‘Every 25 years, these Tamils become uppity. Therefore we need to bash them up.”

Recently, a cartoon published in a popular English daily, The island, after an elephant had crushed two civilians to death in Kandy caused an outcry among academic circles in Colombo. The caption below the cartoon read: “How was the elephant wise enough to know that these people were Tamil?!”

Only last month, when a senior Tamil bureaucrat, the deputy secretary of the North-Eastern Provincial Council travelled from Colombo to the eastern provinces of Batticaloa and Trincomalee, he was stopped at every check point. He had to produce his identity card each time after which his car was searched.

“This only happened because he was Tamil, it can never happen to a Sinhala officer,” said N. Shanmugaratnam, a senior economist from the Norwegian Centre for International Agricultural Development who was travelling with him. Two years ago, Shanmugaratnam, now settled in Norway, himself had to face a potentially dangerous situation right in the heart of Colombo.

Dr. Arulpragasam is the vice-chairman of Sri Lanka’s National Education Commission (NEC), a body that is hoping to pioneer significant educational reforms under the current political dispensation. He was formerly vice-chancellor, Colombo University. Speaking at a seminar organised to discuss Khoj – a secular education programme run by the publishers of Communalism Combat, Sabrang Communications, Bombay – in Colombo in September, he spoke eloquently about what it means to be a Tamil-speaking person in Sri Lanka.

He said: “How many of us in the south are even aware that the northern and eastern parts of the country are living in the grip of a 14-year-old war? How many of us even remember that after the first communal riots in post-independence Sri Lanka (1958), Black Friday – July 23, 1983 – changed the history of a people and a nation? That the actions of that one day against a minority have resulted in a large Tamil Diaspora in the United Kingdom, USA, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore and that their relocation in their home-land is not a practical proposition? That there are thousands of children in our country who have known no peace but who can easily recognise a bomb or a chopper? That the patriotism of every Tamil has been suspect and even I can be stopped, today, by Sri Lankan security forces here in Colombo and sneeringly dubbed a Nakhikotya (toothless tiger)!”

This ignorance or indifference of the majority among Sir Lankans, to the gravity and tragedies of the 14-year-old war remains today the most serious obstacle to a lasting peace. For the ordinary Tamil-speaking person from the north or east of Sri Lanka, life is a continuous cycle of humiliation and deprivation, a condition that finds no empathy or even recognition in the south. In a country with a small population, such deep-rooted divisions cause greater alienation and more resentment.

In the east and the north, people are made to stop at every check point; they have to obtain passes even to get to Vavuniya, a large town in the east that has better banking and health facilities. Outrageous cases of crass human rights violations by the Sri Lankan army (that is entirely Sinhalese), including refusal of passes to the aged and the ill, brutal gang rapes of Tamil girls and women (In June 1997, President Kumaratunga ordered immediate enquiry into a ghastly case of militaristic rape when Sinhala soldiers exploded a grenade in the vagina of a Tamil widow; there are, however, no public records of convictions of army personnel), only help legitimise the violence of the militants.

A young Tamil student last year passed the university entrance examination (itself a hellish task in Sri Lanka) for the engineering degree and had to report immediately to the university concerned to communicate his acceptance of the offer of admission.

On the way he was picked up the Sinhala security forces and illegally detained for six months. When, at last, he was fortuitously released and went to the university concerned he was refused admission on the ground that he had not turned up on time. No amount of appeals to the University Grants Commission helped. Today, he serves as a prominent ideologue for the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Whether based on fact or fiction, numerous accounts like this one do the rounds in the north and the east, reinforcing people’s feeling of being abused and outraged. These, coupled by the state and Sinhala majority’s amnesia over the atrocities committed against the Tamil minority, make a bad situation worse.

Several instances of racist acts by the Sinhala state and its security forces have been recorded by commentators from the mid-seventies onwards (1977, 1981). But the worst, undoubtedly, was the holocaust of July 1983 that took the shape of an unmitigated pogrom against the non-Sinhala, Tamil population. The perpetrators have gone scot-free and there has been no public condemnation of the inhuman outrage.

Predictably, sustained and aggressive communal politics by the Sinhala-Buddhist Sri Lankan state has resulted in matching, exclusivist and communal Tamil minoritarianism. The chronicle of ethnic pogroms committed by Tamil militants, from the Anuradhapura massacre of 1985 to the Medirigiriya killings in late 1992, coupled with the expulsion of Muslims from their traditional homelands in the north, are among the most shocking manifestations of militant Thamil Eelam chauvinism.

Unfortunately, the ideology that dominates the Tamil people’s struggle today is also a powerful mix of narrow Tamil nationalism and militarism.

“Justice must be an intrinsic part of the peace and reconciliation process if the peace is to be long-lasting,” stresses Faizun Zackariya, a feminist-activist from Colombo who is a regular visitor to the northern and eastern provinces. “Not only is there no public acknowledgement of the wrongs done but none of the guilty of communal crimes have been punished.”

On the other hand, the Sri Lankan state continues to notch up “victories” against the militants. Hundreds of Sinhala soldiers sent to war are missing, the real issues that dog a multi-ethnic society, that of an equitable share in representation and resources, remain unaddressed.

The July 1983 pogrom against Tamils bears special recall. It all began around July 20, 1983 with the killing of Tamil guerrillas and the gang-rape of a Jaffna Tamil girl by Sinhala soldiers in the north. Two days later, there was retaliation by the militants with soldiers being killed. The next morning, the Sri Lankan government under the then Prime Minister, J.R. Jayawardene, issued an official communiqué that dubbed the act by militants in the north as a “racist killing of Sinhalese by the Tamils”. The government then stage-managed the soldier’s funeral and with it launched a state-sponsored pogrom against Tamils that lasted the whole week in Colombo and outside.

The pogrom launched from opposite the Prime Minister’s official residence in Colombo meant brutal killings, murder by burning and the deliberate destruction of property worth millions of rupees. (Two million kilograms of tea waiting to be exported was also destroyed, simply because it represented Tamil economic interests).

The services of the general secretary of the government sponsored union, Jathika Seveka Sangamaya (JSS), a young Buddhist bhikhu (monk) was used to wreck destruction. The ideological backing for this state sponsored pogrom was provided by none less than C. Cyril Mathew, union minister of industry and scientific affairs whose gospel of Sinhala – Buddhist racism had in the years that preceded and followed, gained wide political currency.

In 1978, the year he was sworn into the ministry, he authored a book, “Diabolical Conspiracy” in which he presented Sri Lanka as “the Holy Land of Sinhala-Buddhism.” Sri Lanka, according to him, was under threat from a joint conspiracy of the white skins and the descendants of the “Dravidian Chola and Pandya rulers” who were outsiders. Even after the brutal 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, the Ceylon Daily News had expounded Mathew’s thesis in a series of vitriolic anti-Tamil of articles published in September 1983.

When Lankan nobility invited Nayakkars from south India to rule

September 30, 1997

Leslie Gunawardana, a leading historian, currently vice-chancellor University of Peradeniya, in an exclusive interview with ‘Communalism Combat’

Your work has repeatedly suggested that scholars have been coming under increasing pressure in Sri Lanka to develop a representation of the past which lends legitimacy to the claims of either the Sinhala or the Tamil nationalist projects. Since when has this trend been clearly visible?

If you survey the type of writings that have been published since the mid-80s, you see this trend gathering strength. It is the tendency of taking sides in the ethnic conflict that is still raging within Sri Lanka. A good example of this is a statement made by an influential speaker at a gathering of archaeologists in Colombo on July 7, 1992. He compared the role of the archaeologist in the field to that of the soldier in the ongoing war in the North, commenting that the contribution of the latter was no less important.

You have also repeatedly observed in your works that the worst impact of the Orientalists’ categorization of the South Asian peoples into ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ has been felt in Sri Lanka. Could you elaborate?

The impact of Orientalism in South Asia seems to take varying forms. It has had its lasting impact in India, too. But out there, there has been a greater emphasis on religion. In Sri Lanka, this Orientalists’ categorisation can be identified as the single most divisive root of the current ethnic divide. Today people think that ethnic identity is the determining criteria little realizing that this is a post-19th century phenomenon.

The impact can be weighed especially if one looks back to see the way in which relations between the Sinhala and the Tamil communities in particular were friendly and mutually accommodative before this categorisation came to be accepted.

If you go back to the Kandyan period, we find the Sinhala nobility choosing an external South Indian dynasty – the Nayakkar dynasty – to govern them. This is not to present people of today in a negative light and the people of the past in positive terms but to emphasise and to remind people that the ruling ideas of different periods of history can be so different.

During the Kandyan period, caste was a much more important factor than ethnic identity. Between South Indian people and Sri Lankan people, the Sinhala people and the Tamil people, the same ideas and notions of caste prevailed.

Could you tell us a little more about this pre-19th century Sinhala nobility?

We had this very unusual phenomenon of kings being invited and placed on the throne, that is, South Indian rulers being invited here and placed on the throne. The lead in this was, ironically, always taken by the members of the nobility in consultation with members of the Buddhist clergy.

In fact, the first Nayakkar king was proposed to the throne by the chief incumbent of the Navaddha Vihara, a revered figure among Buddhist monks, the Samaka Sangha Rajja; this particular dynasty that was thus invited remained in power for about four generations and they formed close alliances with the local nobility.

There were much closer links between the Nayakkars and the local nobility and severe divisions between / within the local nobility.

What are the other main components of the communalist projects, both Sinhala ethno-nationalist and the Tamil ethno-nationalist one?

The Eelamist interpretation of history and the Sinhala interpretation of history, I see, as two sides of the same coin. They in fact support each other, socially and politically.

The historiographical project undertaken by some Sinhala ethno-nationalists has been the construction of a past in which the Sinhala language and the Sinhala ethnic identity has always been present. In this imagined past, all the Sinhala ethnics are Buddhists while their enemies who invade, create disruption and occupy their land are Tamil speaking Hindus.

On the other hand, the Tamil ethno-nationalist project is nothing less than the invention of a “classical age” for the Tamils of the Jaffna Peninsula. It is presented as a time when the peninsula was united under a Tamil kingdom centred on Kantarotai, independent from “Sinhala hegemony”.

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My mind went mad for a day

Elderly Sikhs on the Indo-Pak border share moving accounts of revenge to award-winning writer, Suketu Mehta

Bias on record

Where is your Allah now?

Isn’t it awful how we refuse to learn from our mistakes?

Through the prism of prejudice

Cry Coimbatore

Sri Lanka – Will Buddha’s Lions Make Peace with Tamil Tigers?

When Lankan nobility invited Nayakkars from south India to rule

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