Dragon Fire

Connaught Place, Delhi, India

Journalists disputed the exact time the riots broke out. Many claimed to witness the first killing, depending where they were in Delhi, or in India at the time. The sturdy communities of Old Delhi, living cheek by jowl in the hot narrow slumlike streets, were old hands at bloodshed, and there it took the same course as it had for generations. The Hindus claimed they were attacked by Muslims. The Muslims insisted they were the innocent party. Nevertheless, after the first flash of violence, slaughter began on both sides.

It may well have been the Hindus who struck first, aggrieved that an Islamic nation had unleashed the bomb on their armed forces. But the issues soon gave way to grievances and blind revenge for a cruelty which had occurred just minutes before. In the mixed slums of other main cities, Calcutta, Bhopal, Patna, Hyderabad and many more, hostilities broke out in the hours after the nuclear strike. Bombay, ruled by a grass-roots Hindu movement, saw some of the worst atrocities against Muslims, allegedly encouraged by the state government itself.

But if the real political issues of communalism and nuclear power were played out anywhere it was in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Before the rioting started, a small group of about three hundred people gathered there with anti-nuclear placards. They spaced themselves in groups of about ten right around the outer pavements and stood silently, as if waiting to be engulfed by a mushroom cloud.

‘The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made,’ read one leaflet they were handing out, words taken from the author Arundhati Roy, whose writings had made her a figurehead of the anti-nuclear campaign. ‘If only nuclear war was just another kind of war.’

It was a strange morning in Delhi. In the first instance, roads out of the capital became clogged with refugees, most on foot or with animals, so that within a few hours Delhi was, in effect, cordoned off with no land route in or out. Government announcements appealed for people to stay at home or go to work as usual. They had some effect, and factories reported that about 50 per cent of staff had turned up. The security forces were exemplary, with hardly a man going sick or choosing his family over his duty.

News of the Pakistani attack had been widely broadcast, but very few understood the meaning of ‘tactical battlefield strike’ or that they were in no immediate danger. The population acted as if it was living out its final hours, so great was the ignorance about nuclear warfare. Hospitals were overwhelmed with people complaining of radiation sickness. Violence broke out when doctors tried to send people home. Many shops opened as usual, and hawkers around Connaught Place imaginatively created potions and masks which would ward off a nuclear death. Thousands flocked to the temples and shrines looking for solace. Others, looking for someone to blame, killed and rioted.

Soon, however, when the searing of the sun and the cloudless May sky carried through the morning unchanged, impatience and irritation set in, as if India had been cheated of her final Armageddon. Then there were announcements of India’s retaliatory strikes, creating a lull in the tension and new excitement. India was neither destroyed nor victorious. Nor had the war ended. When the holocaust failed to appear, the acute personal emotion of waiting for death diminished and tedium set in. The fatalistic citizens of the Indian capital resorted to getting on with the routine of their lives. Those frustrated with pent-up fear and aggression took to the streets again.

The anti-nuclear protesters stayed their ground throughout, understanding more than most the issues involved. But they appeared too knowledgeable for the situation. There was an air of the ‘I told you so’ about them, as they pushed leaflets into hands of the public and tied their placards to lamp-posts. Nor did they suggest any solution which Indians could have accepted. Should it declare away its nuclear weapons as a result of the Pakistani attack, then India might as well ground its air force and surrender.

The movement had never been a powerful one and the activists protesting that morning were from the educated and liberal middle class. They were brave to be out. Their arguments against nuclear weapons were well thought out and made sense against the backwardness of India. But nations stumble forward more in folly than in wisdom, and the eloquent voice of writers like Arundhati Roy cut little ice against the raw pride of an impoverished nation.

Her name was Shanti Tirthankara, aged twenty-three, a graduate in civil engineering, with a special interest in rural irrigation. She was attractive, bubbly and outspoken, with long, dark hair, which blew back and forth across her face as she read from an article by Ms Roy. Coincidentally, her father, a wealthy businessman from the Jain community, had an office and large rambling apartment in the old buildings of Connaught Place.

Shanti Tirthankara died on the streets where she had grown up. Quite a crowd had grown up around her. ‘The air will become fire,’ she read in Hindi. ‘The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night. Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in. Water will turn into toxic ice. Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and contaminate groundwater. Most living things, animal and vegetable, fish and fowl, will die.’

A single rifle shot hit her in the heart, fired by a policeman, and no one found out why because he was beaten to death minutes later. A mob surged, spontaneously, disorganized, horribly cruel, tearing down the anti-nuclear placards, beating the activists and fighting the police at the same time. Petrol bombs were thrown into shops and black smoke curled up on the clear, hot morning, the latest evidence of India’s precarious existence.

Connaught Place was burning just as it had done in the great watersheds of history before and Indians died as police bullets tried to bring their great civilization into line. But as the rioters were cleared from Connaught Place, the debris and the bodies left behind, they found another common target for their anger. Communities throughout India were not suffering from nuclear radiation, but from the aggression of misplaced blame. Eight hundred metres to the south-west down Parliament Street lay Parliament House and the offices of government.

Three policemen died as the mob broke through the cordon. Rioters died in the hail of fire which followed. But by now, the mob was thousands strong, many running with burning rags and petrol bombs to attack the seat of power.