But that’s not what Mr. Gupta is proud of when he says he’s proud to be a Hindu. He’s speaking of Hinduism as a label of identity, not a set of humane beliefs; he’s proud of being Hindu as if it were a team he belongs to, like a British football yob, not what the team stands for. I’ll never let the likes of him define for me what being a Hindu means.
Defining a “Hindu” cause may partly be a political reaction to the definition of non-Hindu causes, but it is a foolish one for all that. Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get — he died from a Hindu assassin’s bullet with the words “Hé Ram” on his lips — but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, “it is doomed to destruction.” The rage of the Hindu mobs being stoked by the bigots is the rage of those who feel them-selves supplanted in this competition of identities, who think that they are taking their country back from usurpers of long ago. They want revenge against history, but they do not realize that history is its own revenge.
from transcript of Randy Diggs interview
with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh
October 14, 1989
RD: I’ll accept that drink now, thanks. What happened next?
GS: Lucky and I quickly realized that the only way the mob could be prevented from assembling below the house — the house from which the fucking bomb was thrown — was by getting there first ourselves. I grinned, and said to Lucky: “DM-sahib, time for us to take charge.”
RD: They could have thrown their bombs at you.
GS: That was the risk, clearly. But it was an acceptable risk. To prevent a far bigger tragedy.
RD: And did the mob give way?
GS: We had to keep shouting to the pissing processionists that they should stay back. That we were taking charge of the situation. Fortunately their more rabid leaders, people like Bhushan Sharma or Ram Charan Gupta, were not in that part of the crowd. They were in the front of the motherloving procession, leading it for glory, and word had not reached them yet from where we were. Most of the crowd listened to us and stayed at bay. Inevitably, though, some bloody idiots with the brains of a squashed cockroach edged forward behind us as we headed towards the house.
RD: I’ve met Ram Charan Gupta.
GS: Our next member of Parliament for Zalilgarh. Or so the pissing political pundits tell me. Ironically, considering what we think of each other, he publicly praised my handling of this particular incident.
RD: What did you do?
GS: I opened fire.
RD: What?!
GS: Look, you’ve got to understand. We not only had to take control of a situation that was on the verge of getting out of control. We also had to be seen by the bloodthirsty mob as taking effective action. What do you think we should have done? Knocked politely on the door and asked them to serve us some tea with their bombs? Once we’d got to the damned house from which the bomb was thrown, the choice was clear. Assert ourselves, or allow the mob to assert themselves. I ordered the ASI — the Assistant Sub-Inspector who accompanied me — to fire a couple of rounds at the house, and I let loose a burst or two myself. This served several purposes. First, the crowd was satisfied that effective action was being taken. So the bloody idiots understood that they did not need to take the law into their own hands. Second, the stream of bullets also intimidated the hotheads in the procession. Nothing like a volley from a good police-issue revolver to make an asshole think twice. This ensured that the crowd did not venture below the house and present easy targets for further bomb-throwing. And last but not least, as we always used to say in our high school debates, the firing also deterred the bombers themselves. Here they were, all poised and ready to throw more bombs, and my bullets come screaming in. What do they do? They were amateurs, Randy, and the first instinct of a frigging amateur when things get too hot is to drop everything and run. It’s one thing to plan to chuck some bombs at a howling mob armed with knives and tridents. Quite another to take on policemen with guns.
RD: So what did they do?
GS: They ran away. They ran for their bloody lives. The bombers were so frightened by our firing they were pissing in their pants as they tried to get the hell out of there. I sent a couple of my men to the rear of the house. They caught one of the young idiots. Took him down to the thana. I’ll spare you the details, but soon he was singing like a mynah bird. Don’t look so fucking shocked, Randy. I’ve seen enough of your American cop movies. Whatever they did to him to get the full story, it was a good deal less than the Hindu mob would have done. So I figure justice was served all around. And thanks to him my police case was very quickly closed.
RD: What was his story?
GS: The story? Very simple, very stupid. A small bunch of young Muslims — eight youths, two of them petty government servants, a municipal driver and a patwari — decided that they had to retaliate against the insults and provocations flung their way by the Hindu extremists. Sisterloving idiots, of course. But they felt alienated from the system — none of them was important enough to serve on any of our bloody peace committees, for instance. And they felt equally alienated from the mainstream of their own frigging community, which they felt was too passive. “Don’t we have pride?” one of them asked me in the interrogation room. “Don’t you have brains?” I replied. I mean, just think about their brilliant plan. They collected whatever money they could, which was not very much, a few hundred rupees between them. Then one of them went off to purchase gunpowder from a firecracker factory in the neighboring district, where firecrackers are a frigging cottage industry. Place isn’t even a real factory. It’s a factory the way Zalilgarh’s a town. Half their bloody phatakas fizzle out at Diwali time. Anyway, this is their great arsenal. The night before the major procession, Friday night, they stayed up in an abandoned ruin by the riverside. We call it the Kotli. No one uses it. They ground the gunpowder with pieces of broken glass and old rusted nails, tied these in newspaper with a string, and made seventeen of what are known in local parlance as “soothli bombs.” They figured that would account for a few dozen Hindus, and they hoped to run away in the confusion. They hadn’t given any pissing thought at all to what would happen to the house they’d have bombed from, to the basti, to the neighborhood. Frigging idiots.