Read Online Riot by Shashi Tharoor - Free Book Online

district capital, after all. So after days of doing our Ram Sila Poojan in each village of the district, we had planned a big procession in Zalilgarh town on Saturday the thirtieth of September. It was intended to be the climax of all our Ram Sila Poojan work throughout the area. Volunteers from each village in the district would bring their bricks, those from each neighborhood in the town would do the same, and we would all march together in one glorious procession, shouting slogans of celebration. From there we would proceed all the way to Ayodhya, to take the bricks to the spot near this usurper’s mosque, where they were being collected for this holy purpose. At last, after centuries of helplessness, we were about to right a great wrong.
    We were going to rebuild the temple.
    What preparations we made for that day! Young men worked so hard, making flags, printing posters, preparing pennants in holy saffron that we would string along our route. Our women sewed bunting, painted placards for the men to carry. The tailors of Zalilgarh toiled overtime to make shirts and kurtas in saffron for us. And the bricks! They were perfect: red like the blood we would so gladly have spilled for our Lord, with the name of Ram painted on them in bold white Devanagari script. We were going to make it such a great occasion. What do you call it in English? A red-letter day.
    But these Muslims are evil people, Mr. Diggs. You have to understand their mentality. They are more loyal to a foreign religion, Islam, than to India. They are all converts from the Hindu faith of their ancestors, but they refuse to acknowledge this, pretending instead that they are all descended from conquerors from Arabia or Persia or Samarkand. Fine — if that is so, let them go back to those places! Why do they stay here if they will not assimilate into our country? They stay together, work together, pray together. It is what you Americans, I know, call a ghetto mentality.
    Now these Muslims have already divided our country once, to create their accursed Pakistan on the sacred soil of our civilization. Some of the greatest sites of Hindu civilization — the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, the world’s oldest university at Takshashila, even the river Indus from which India gets its name in your language — are all now in a foreign country. It galls me to say this, but we have swallowed our pride and accepted this vile partition. But is this enough for them? Oh no! The Muslims want more! And we had Muslim-loving rulers, like that brown Englishman Jawaharlal Nehru who was our first prime minister, to give it to them. Muslim men want four wives, whom they can divorce by chanting a phrase three times — so Nehru gives them the right to follow their own Personal Law instead of being subject to the civil code of the rest of the country. Muslims want to go abroad to worship at their Mecca, so the government pays for the ships and planes to take them there every year and the hotels and lodges for them to stay in on the way. I ask you, why should my tax money go to helping Muslims get closer to their foreign god?
    I see all this is new to you. It is worse, Mr. Diggs, it is worse! Muslims have their own educational institutions with government subsidies, they have top jobs in the bureaucracy, they have even managed special status for the only Muslim-majority state we have, Kashmir. Do you know a Hindu from anywhere else in the country cannot buy a piece of land in Kashmir?! And worst of all, these Muslims are outbreeding the Hindus. They claim the right to four wives, and they keep them constantly pregnant, I tell you. While Indira Gandhi forcibly dragged our young men away to be vasectomized during her emergency rule a dozen years ago, these Muslims resist even voluntary family planning, saying it is against their religion. They all have dozens of children, Mr. Diggs! You only have to look at the population figures to know what I am talking