Two incidents immediately sprang to mind when, in response to the Pratilipi invitation, I began thinking of my own experience of terror. The first of these occurred in 1992 during the outbreak of Hindutva violence against the Muslims in Surat. Terror possessed me suddenly on that occasion. The second time I experienced terror, the feeling built up slowly during a three-day house arrest in Khyber, and at some point acquired the character of terror. As I was thinking of these two incidents, a third occasion suggested itself when terror struck, without being any less scary for that reason, as a nebulous, all-pervasive feeling. This was during the Emergency.

The terror of the Emergency has variously been written about. Though, considering how much of it has been forgotten and condoned and even justified, more still needs to be written about it. I shall, however, not recall as to what that terror felt like then, nor narrate how the enormity of that terror sunk into my consciousness retrospectively a few years later as a result of what I saw during a visit to the Soviet Union. Nor will I talk of the terror that built up during the house-arrest in Khyber. Much though I have wanted to write about it, I am not persuaded that, given the delicacy of India-Pakistan relations, I have as yet acquired the language and the tone to convey that terror to the others the way it came to me.

I shall, therefore, talk only of the 1992 Surat experience. I have written about it earlier also. But I am unconvinced if I have quite understood the implications of that experience, or if one can ever quite understand at least some of the implications of that kind of experience.

As a necessary backdrop, I must narrate something that happened a couple years prior to the 1992 experience. Anti-Muslim violence had erupted in different parts of the country following the abortive assault on the Babri Masjid in October 1990. Aligarh was one of the affected places. Having taught at the Aligarh Muslim University, I felt an urge to visit the city and talk to friends about what had happened there. Two days later I decided to return to Delhi by the Assam Mail and got into a first class compartment.

The train had barely run for a few minutes when it came to a sudden stop. As one who had regularly commuted between Delhi and Aligarh, I should have found nothing out of the ordinary in that occurrence. But that day fear gripped me the moment the train stopped. I remembered an incident that I had been told about in Aligarh. A train had been stopped after it had moved out of the railway station and its Muslim passengers attacked. I feared that my train had been similarly stopped, and felt certain that, given my visage, I would be mistaken for a Muslim.

I quickly rehearsed in my mind what I thought was going to unfold. Within a split second I had experienced a host of contrary thoughts and emotions. At the end of that long split second, I was clear that, no matter what happened, I would not disclose my Hindu identity to escape what they would in those circumstances do to a Muslim.

Two years later the assault on the Babri Masjid was successful, and yet again the Muslims were made the object of Hindutva violence. The worst of this violence was unleashed, in two phases, in Surat where I was then working at the Centre for Social Studies. It was a forenoon in April, 1993, soon after the Bombay serial bomb blasts, and I was sitting in my office when the telephone rang. It was our Office Superintendent. He sounded worried as he enquired if I was planning to take a train later that day. Learning that I was, he told me that a bomb blast had occurred in the city, and fresh trouble was apprehended. He asked me to cancel my trip, if I could, or else leave for the railway station immediately.

I really needed to go the same day. So I quickly went home which was literally at a stone’s throw from my office. As I was hurrying with my packing, terror seized me. The Centre was located some ten kilometers away from the city. It would take me time to reach the station. What if violence started while I was on my way to the station? I would be in a three-wheeler and, therefore, easily visible. There was no chance of the murderous mobs taking me for a Hindu. Or believing me if I tried to tell them my name. Indeed, that would be disastrous. For, they would then insist on the physical examination conducted in such situations to establish a man’s communal identity, and that would show me to be a Muslim.

What should I do? Rather than attempt something that might necessitate the dreaded test, I decided to carry my passport. Just in case they had the patience to ascertain before striking.

How could I be terrorized like I was that day? What had happened to the me who had not been touched by terror a mere two years ago? From where, completely unbeknownst, had this terror meanwhile crept in? Was it a function of inner moral erosion? Or was it caused by a reappraisal of the external threat? A reappraisal suggesting an impossible disproportion between the inner moral resources and the diabolical external threat.

It was a shameful capitulation. And complete. There was no resistance, so far as I can recall, to carrying the passport. Not even a fleeting resolve during the long suspenseful ride to the railway station not to make use of the passport in the event of trouble. The guilt and the shame that came in – and have stayed since – came in only once safety was ensured.

The likes of us, even in our increasingly unsafe world, are rarely exposed to actual danger out there. Like I, with three near and dear ones, was in Khyber where everything from the ceaseless interrogation to the round-the-clock presence of eight Kalashnikovs to guard the four of us was designed to inspire terror. Usually it is from a distance, and intellectually, that we respond to and analyze the situations and circumstances from the thick of which the others – not us – experience and cope with terror. It is, therefore, important for us to closely examine our responses in the kind of situations in which I got caught, once to emerge unscathed and the second time to succumb completely to terror. Those situations may have been imaginary, but they were for that reason not unreal in terms of the way they were felt and the behaviour they elicited.

It is not possible, I feel, to be certain about why, in the face of similar danger, I behaved one way in Aligarh and in an opposite way in Surat. There is perhaps something unpredictable, in the ultimate analysis, about both the responses. Also, it can be hypothesized that if the apprehended danger had actually materialized, I could as well have acted differently from the way I had decided to act.

Be that as it may, the Surat experience frightened me for a whole decade into believing that the moral erosion that had made that terror possible was permanent and irrevocable. Living in Gujarat through the nightmare of 2002 helped me out of that paralyzing thought. I can now hope – no more than hope though – that my fall in Surat was an aberration. That, if ever challenged again by similar danger, I will act differently.

In order that I do act differently, I should also like to hope that I am not tempted to erase the memory of that humbling fall.