Two days after the Babri demolition, on the night of 8 December 1992, Akmal and Syeda heard that the mausoleum of the Sufi saint Ahmad Shah, where Akmal would hang out when they moved to Lohta, had been damaged at night.
Sufism promotes a more liberal interpretation of Islam. Conservative Muslims anyway don’t like Sufi pirs and practices. Political Hinduism also started vilifying all forms of rituals and worships at various shrines and dargahs, frequented by people from across religions.
As a child, whenever Syeda wanted to eat jalebi, see her father or get a day off from weaving-related work, she would come to Ahmad Shah’s mausoleum and ask him to grant her wish. She sincerely believed this guaranteed the fulfilment of a wish. Without offering namaz or chanting mantras. Without buying chadar, flowers or incense sticks. Hindu–Musalman–Sikh–Isai, it didn’t matter. This was the only place in the world where she was granted what she wanted without giving anything in exchange. Unlike with her Ammi, Abba, Dada or Akmal, where service or a certain behaviour was demanded to meet the smallest desires: Behave like a good girl, Finish the thread cutting for the saree, Don’t ask me about today’s earnings.
You just had to walk up, sit next to Baba Ahmad Shah’s tomb, say what you had to, and leave. And somehow, sooner or later, your wish would come true. Even a hundred years after he had died, he could treat the urgency of a little girl’s desire to eat jalebi on a par with that of a poor man’s prayer to be cured of disease.
Within two days of the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, this shrine, this small resting place of a Sufi saint whose life story was woven from myths and folklore, became a ‘Muslim’ shrine. Someone tried to break the enclosure of the saint’s dargah that night. And the next day, all hell broke loose.
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This act of vandalism was a deliberate attempt to incite religious polarization. It added salt on the wound inflicted on the Lohta’s Muslims by the Babri demolition.
The wall of the mazar had been broken. The police station was informed early in the morning and repair work was started the same day.
The same morning, there were rumours that a vengeful Muslim mob armed with pistols, knives and sickles was moving towards Choti Bazaar and pelting stones at the houses of the Hindus. The mob had apparently split into two, proceeding towards Dhanipur and Mehmoodpur villages near Lohta.
Riots broke out. The violence continued through the day. There were reports that five people in the Harijan Basti had been killed and houses looted and destroyed.
At night, there was a war of slogans, with the beating of drums amplifying the competition.
Muslims yelled, ‘Allahu Akbar.’
Hindus yelled, ‘Har har Mahadev.’
Next day, the newspapers reported that over twenty-five people had been killed in the Lohta riots. Curfew was imposed once again. Various officials, including the district magistrate, the police commissioner and several contingents of the PAC, the armed police of the state of UP, reached the spot. They had been given standing instructions to carry out a large-scale operation to clear the area of all the rioters.
Akmal’s house was made of mud and straw, just like other weavers’ homes. There was only one concrete room, built with the money given by a master weaver-cum-trader. The practice was for master weavers or traders to give money to poorer weavers to build a concrete room so that the sarees, looms and raw materials could be protected from the sun and rain.
The police and the PAC were constantly firing outside. ‘Everyone in the house, Akmal’s brothers, their wives, all the children – we all locked ourselves inside that room and stayed quiet,’ Syeda recalls.
Akmal was as usual lost in thought and loitering near the mausoleum during the curfew to check out the repair work. ‘When I had no one, I had him,’ he would say about Ahmad Shah. The destruction of the mausoleum affected him deeply.
As he wandered around, benumbed, several men came running towards him. Tariq, another weaver, yelled at him, ‘Akmal, run!’
Akmal instinctively started running with the group, failing to notice they were being chased by a PAC platoon. There were around twenty-five PAC soldiers, who were firing incessantly. It was impossible to stop without facing a bullet.
They all ran towards the railway tracks and Akmal hid with the others in an abandoned railway coach.
Syeda and her family were still hiding in the concrete room when the PAC came to conduct a search operation in the house.
‘We heard a loud thud at the door. We didn’t open it,’ recalls Syeda.
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The children were crying but the grown-ups covered the kids’ mouths tightly with their palms, to prevent sounds.
But after a few minutes, when the police started to break open the door, Rameez, Akmal’s eldest brother, decided to open it.
There were five or six PAC soldiers outside. They had already indulged in wanton destruction. Flowerpots were lying broken on the floor, the thatched roofs of their mud huts had been pulled apart, and the mud wall in their compound had been smashed.
The PAC soldiers pushed Rameez and Alam on to the floor as they asked for Akmal’s whereabouts. But no one knew where he was.
Written with empathy and deep insight, The Many Lives of Syeda X is the story of untold millions and a searing account of urban life in New India.
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By evening news came that, officially, at least seventeen people were dead and over fifty had been arrested by the PAC. There was no clarity about which category Akmal was in.
That night, they all took refuge in Bazardiha, in Syeda’s brother Kashif ’s house.
The next day, on 11 December 1992, the PAC took out a flag march as a peace-building measure. But tensions smouldered. Meanwhile, the Gyanvapi mosque had been declared the next target by the Hindu supremacists after the Babri demolition:
Ayodhya abhi jhaanki hai,
Kashi-Mathura baaki hai.
Ayodhya is just a peek,
Kashi and Mathura are left.
The weekly Friday namaz at the Gyanvapi mosque was held under tight security. Nineteen Muslims offered prayers led by a mufti. Syeda remembers everyone she knew wore old clothes on that Eid.
Neha Dixit is an independent journalist whose work focusses on the intersection of politics, gender, and social justice in South Asia. Excerpted with permission of Juggernaut Books from The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit.
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