His congregation was tense already. It was with dismay that many Muslims in Brahmpur had, over the months, seen the foundations of the temple rising in the plot to the west of their mosque. Now, after the first part of the prayers, the Imam gave his audience the most stirring and inflammatory speech he had given in years, very far removed from his ordinary sermon on personal morality or cleanliness or alms or piety. His grief and frustration as much as their own bitter anxiety called for something stronger. Their religion was in danger. The barbarians were at the gates. They prayed, these infidels, to their pictures and stones and perpetuated themselves in ignorance and sin. Let them do what they wanted to in their dens of filth. But God could see what was happening now. They had brought their beastliness near the very precincts of the mosque itself. The land that the kafirs sought to build on - why sought? were at this very moment building on - was disputed land - disputed in God's eyes and in man's eyes - but not in the eyes of animals who spent their time blowing conches and worshipping parts of the body whose very names it was shameful to mention. Did the people of the faith gathered here in God's presence know how it was planned to consecrate this Shiva-linga? Naked ash-smeared savages would dance before it - naked! These were the shameless, like the people of Sodom, who mocked at the power of the All-Merciful.

... God guides not the people of the unbelievers.

314Those - God has set a seal on their hearts, and their hearing, and their eyes,

I and those - they are the heedless ones ;

Without a doubt, in the world to come they

will be the losers.

They worshipped their hundreds of idols that they claimed were divine - idols with four heads and five heads and the heads of elephants - and now the infidels who held power * " in the land wanted Muslims, when they turned their faces westwards in prayer to the Kaaba, to face these same idols and these same obscene objects with their heads bowed. 'But,' continued the Imam, 'we who have livedthrough hard and bitter times and have suffered for our faith and paid for our faith in blood need only remember the fate of the idolaters :

I And they set up compeers to God, that

- they might lead astray from His way.

H Say : "Take your joy! Your homecoming I shall be -the Fire!"'

I

A slow, attentive, shocked expectation filled the silence

L that followed.

^B 'But even now,' cried the Imam in renewed frenzy, half^H gasping for air, 'even as I speak - they could be hatching ^B their designs to prevent our evening devotion by blowing IK their conches to drown out the call to prayer. Ignorant they may be, but they are full of guile. They are already getting rid of Muslims in the police force so that the community of God will be left defenceless. Then they can attack and enslave us. Now it is too clear to us that we are living not in a land of protection but a land of enmity. We have appealed for justice, and have been kicked down at the very doors where we have gone pleading. The Home Minister himself supports this temple committee - and its guiding spirit is the debauched buffalo of Marh! Let it not happen that our holy places are to be polluted by the proximity of filth - let it not happen - but what can save us now that we are left defenceless before the sword of our

315enemies in the land of the Hindus, what can save us but our own efforts, our own' - here he struggled for breath and emphasis again - 'our own direct action - to protect ourselves. And not just ourselves, not just our families but these few feet of paved earth that have been given to us for centuries, where we have unrolled our mats and raised our hands in tears to the All-Powerful, which are worn smooth by the devotions of our ancestors and ourselves and - if I God so wills - will so be by our descendants also. But have ] no fear, God does so will, have no fear, God will be with!

you: i

Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad, 1

Iram of the pillars, 1

the like of which was never created in the land,

and Thamood, who hollowed the rocks in the valley, 1

and Pharaoh, he of the tent-pegs, 3

who all were insolent in the land J

and worked much corruption therein? 1 Thy Lord unloosed on them a scourge of chastisement;

surely thy Lord is ever on the watch. j

O God, help those who help the religion of the Prophet 1 Muhammad, peace be upon Him. May we also do the " same. Make those weak, who weaken the religion of Muhammad. Praise be to God, the Lord of all Being.'

The plump Imam descended from the pulpit, and led the people in more prayer.

That evening there was a riot.

5.3

BECAUSE of the instructions of the Home Minister, the greater part of the police was stationed at sensitive points in Misri Mandi. There were only about fifteen policemen left in the main police station in Chowk by evening. As the call for prayer from the Alamgiri Mosque trembled across the evening sky, by some unfortunate chance or possibly

316I

intentional provocation, the sound of a conch was heard interrupting it several times. Normally such a thing might have been angrily shrugged off, but not today.

No one knew how the men who were gathering in the narrow alleys of the Muslim neighbourhood that lay on one side of Chowk became a mob. One moment they were walking individually or in small groups through the alleys towards the mosque for evening prayer, then they had coalesced into larger clusters, excitedly discussing the ominous signals they had heard. After the midday sermon most were in no mood to listen to any voice of moderation. A couple of the more eager members of the Alamgiri Masjid Hifaazat Committee made a few crowd-rousing remarks, a few local hotheads and toughs stirred themselves and those around them into a state of rage, the crowd increased in size as the alleys joined into larger alleys, its density and speed and sense of indistinct determination increased, and it was no longer a collection but a thing wounded and enraged, and wanting nothing less than to wound and enrage. There were cries of 'Allah-u-Akbar' which could be heard all the way to the police station.

A few of those who joined the crowd had sticks in their hands. One or two even had knives. Now it was not the mosque that they were headed for but the partly constructed temple just next to it. It was from here that the blasphemy had originated, it was this that must be destroyed.

Since the Superintendent of Police of the district was occupied in Misri Mandi, the young District Magistrate, Krishan Dayal, had himself gone to the tall pink edifice of the main police station about an hour earlier to ensure that things would remain stable in the Chowk area. He feared the increased tension that Friday often brought. When he heard about the Imam's sermon, he asked the kotwal - as the Deputy Superintendent of Police for the City was called - what he planned to do to protect the area.

The kotwal of Brahmpur, however, was a lazy man who wanted nothing better than to be left alone to take his bribes in peace.

317'There will be no trouble, Sir, believe me,' he assured the District Magistrate. 'Agarwal Sahib himself has phoned me. Now he tells me I am to go to Misri Mandi to join the SP - so I must be off, Sir, with your leave, of course.' And he bustled off in a preoccupied sort of way, taking two other lower officers with him, and leaving the kotwali virtually in the charge of a head constable. 'I will just be sending the Inspector back,' he said in a reassuring manner. 'You should not stay, Sir,' he added ingratiatingly. 'It is late. This is a peaceful time. After the previous troubles at the mosque we have defused the situation, I am glad to say.'

Krishan Dayal, left with a force of about twelve constables, thought he would wait until the Inspector returned before he decided whether to go home. His wife was used to him coming back at odd hours, and would wait for him; it was not necessary to phone her. He did not actually expect a riot; he merely felt that tension was running high and that it was not worth taking a chance. He believed that the Home Minister had his priorities wrong where Chowk and Misri Mandi were concerned; but then the Home Minister was arguably the most powerful man in the state next to the Chief Minister, and he himself was just a DM.

He was sitting and waiting in this unworried but uneasy frame of mind when he heard what was to be recalled by several policemen at the subsequent inquiry - the inquiry by a senior officer that is required to be held after every magisterial order to fire. First he heard the coinciding sounds of the conch and the muezzin's call to prayer. This worried him mildly, but the reports he had had of the Imam's speech had not included his prescient reference to a conch. Then, after a while, came the distant murmur of shouting voices interspersed by high cries. Even before he could make out the individual syllables, he could tell what was being shouted by the direction from which it came and the general shape and fervour of the sound. He sent a policeman to the top of the police station - it was three storeys high - to judge where the mob now was. The mob

318itself would be invisible - hidden as it was by the intervening houses of the labyrinthine alleys - but the direction of the heads of the spectators from the rooftops would give its position away. As the cries of 'Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-uAkbar!' came closer, the DM urgently told the small force of twelve constables to stand with him in a line - rifles at the ready - before the foundations and rudimentary walls of the site of the Shiva Temple. The thought flashed through his mind that despite his training in the army he had not learned to think tactically in a terrain of urban lawlessness. Was there nothing better he could do than to perform this mad sacrificial duty of standing against a wall and facing overwhelming odds?

The constables under his effective command were Muslims and Rajputs, mainly Muslims. The police force before Partition was very largely composed of Muslims as the result of the sound imperialist policy of divide and rule: it helped the British that the predominantly Hindu Congress-wallahs shouldbe beaten up by predominantly Muslim policemen. Even after the exodus to Pakistan in 1947 there were large numbers of Muslims in the force. They would not be happy to fire upon other

Muslims.

Krishan Dayal believed in general that although it was not always necessary to give effect to maximum force, it was necessary to give the impression that you were prepared to do so. In a strong voice he told the policemen that they were to fire when he gave the order. He himself stood there, pistol in hand. But he felt more vulnerable than ever before in his life. He told himself that a good officer, together with a force on which he could absolutely rely, could almost always carry the day, but he had reservations about the 'absolutely' ; and the 'almost' worried him. Once the mob, still a few alleys away, came round the final bend, broke into a charge, and made straight for the temple, the patently, pathetically ineffective police force would be overwhelmed. A couple of men had just come running to tell him that there were perhaps a thousand men in the mob, that they were well-armed, and that -

319judging by their speed - they would be upon them in two or three minutes.

Now that he knew he might be dead in a few minutes^ dead if he fired, dead if he did not - the young DM gave his wife a brief thought, then his parents, and finally an old schoolmaster of his who had once confiscated a blue toy pistol that he had brought to class. His wandering thoughts were brought back to earth by the head constable who was addressing him urgently. 'Sahib!' 'Yes - yes?'

'Sahib - you are determined to shoot if necessary?' The head constable was a Muslim ; it must have struck him as strange that he was about to die shooting Muslims in the course of defending a half-built Hindu temple that was an affront to the very mosque in which he himself often prayed.

'What do you think?' Krishan Dayal said in a voice that made things quite clear. 'Do I need to repeat my orders?'

'Sahib, if you take my advice -' said the head constable quickly, 'we should not stand here where we will be overpowered. We should stand in wait for them just before they turn the last bend before the temple - and just as they turn the bend we should charge and fire simultaneously. Th&y, WOT,'^ %3(tfw ham many we are, ana they won't know what's hit them. There's a ninety-nine per cent chance they will disperse.'

The astonished DM said to the head constable: 'You should have my job.'

He turned to the others, who appeared petrified. He immediately ordered them to run with him towards the bend. They stationed themselves on either side of the alley, about twenty feet from the bend itself. The mob was less than a minute away. He could hear it screaming and yelling; he could feel the vibration of the ground as hundreds of feet rushed forward.

At the last moment he gave the signal. The thirteen men roared and charged and fired.