These fancy-pants administrators you are going to meet, Lakshman and Gurinder Singh, want us to call off our agitation because of the riot. Call it off? We will never do that, Mr. Diggs. Never! Because if we do, the Muslims will proclaim victory. They will think they have won, they will crow about our humiliation, and then, believe me, they will come and slaughter us in our beds.
There is the old story of the trooper standing guard with two drawn swords, one in each hand. An enemy soldier comes to him and slaps him across the face. The trooper does nothing and the enemy sneeringly walks away. “Why didn’t you react when he slapped you?” asks a bystander. “But how could I?” replies the trooper. “Both my hands were occupied.”
That trooper, Mr. Diggs, is Hindu India. We have the swords in our hands but we do not use them even when we are repeatedly slapped. Well, those days are over. We know how to fight back now, with what is in our hands.
Guru Golwalkar, the longest serving Hindu leader this century said it very clearly, years ago: “The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age-old tradition but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead — in a word, they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinate to the Hindu nation, claiming, deserving no privileges, much less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights.” That is the message to these evil Muslims. As you say in your country, they better believe it.
No, the Ram Janmabhoomi temple will be built. No matter how many lives have to be sacrificed to ensure it. Our blood will irrigate the dusty soil, our sweat will mix the cement instead of water, but we will build the temple, Mr. Diggs. Mark my words. I have seen the light in the eyes of the young boys in our procession, even the very ones who were stabbed. It is not just religious fervor that makes their eyes shine, Mr. Diggs. It is the look of victory — as if some spark that has been stamped on for forty years has suddenly blazed again. This light will not be easily put out. It will shine, yes, and it will illuminate the whole of India with its flame.
from Randy Diggs’s notebook
October 14, 1989
Gurinder Singh: tough cop. Turban, fierce beard, Sikh. Smart. Honest? Talks straight. Curses (a lot). Drinks (a lot). “I’m Sikh enough not to smoke and Punjabi enough to drink like an Ambassador. I don’t mean the diplomatic piss-artist: I mean I guzzle like that steel behemoth of an Ambassador car we make here.”
GS and Lakshman make an odd pair at the helm of the district, but to all appearances a good one. They’re old buddies, sort of. This from an interview, unprintables deleted: “We weren’t exactly close friends in college. You can see the differences. Lucky’s an intellectual type with a sensitive soul. I’m down-to-earth, a man of action. He reads books in his spare time; I run. At college he studied English; I did history. He debated and edited the campus rag; I played [field] hockey. He’s vegetarian; I bunked [skipped] the mess hall the one day of the week they didn’t serve meat. He’s a teetotaler; I always had a bottle of rum under my bed. But I liked the fellow for two reasons: he’s smart and he’s honest. So when he ran for president of the College Union against one of my hockey teammates, a fellow with as much wood between his ears as in his hands on the field, I supported Lucky. Made me a bit unpopular with the rest of the hockey team. But he was the better candidate, and the better man. I’m glad to be working with him in bloody Zalilgarh.”
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.