Vibhuti Narain Rai - Shahar Mein Curfew

In 1988, Vibhuti Narain Rai published a Hindi novel entitled Shahar Mein Curfew (Curfew in the City). Its theme was a 1980 Hindu-Muslim riot in the city of Allahabad, and Rai wrote freely about how religious prejudice in the Hindu dominated police force and provincial administration led to Muslim citizens' being viewed as enemies and thus becoming easy targets of brutality and murder. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad readily took offense and denounced the novel for being anti-Hindu. It now wants a ban imposed on the novel, and when Ashok Singhal, secretary general of the V.H.P., was told of a producer wanting to turn the story into a film, he threatened to burn down theatres that dared to screen the planned film. All this ire surrounds a project that has still not begun and a work of fiction that at no point directly criticizes any Hindu organization. It is worthwhile to quote here from a recent interview given by the author: "The intolerance of dissent is increasing in our society and the Ayodhya mobilization has largely contributed to this disturbing trend. The attacks on inconvenient writers and dissenting journalists are in fact motivated by a desire to silence all criticism and all reason, thereby making the very existence of rationally-thinking people redundant to the social and political process. This is extremely distressing."