The Refugees’ Predicament: A Select Study of Indian Fiction

The paper seeks to explore how democratic countries in the Indian Sub-continent try to appropriate power in their own clandestine ways in order to engineer thought control and it is held that it is as vicious and blatant as in the authoritarian countries. To acclimatize the Hindus and to empower the Muslims through its discriminatory laws as shown in Taslima Nasreen's Lajja (1993), the government devised all ways to employ all state machinery to hush minorities. In fact, the lunatic fringe ran amuck during the fateful days of rampage of holy places as mentioned in the novel. It is common knowledge that some individuals, mostly self-seeking politicians, play upon the emotional chords of mobs in order to gain political leverage. Murad Ali in Tamas (1987) Master Tara Singh, Jinnah and Congress leaders in Cracking India (1993) Ram Charan Gupta and Bhushan Sarma in Riot (2001) and the Muslim political leaders in Lajja are all set to foment tensions and fish in the troubled waters