This is Azad. The great Azad.

• And yet, 85 per cent upper-caste Hindus.

Absolutely. I think this — some of this, has been slightly misreported. I think it is worth making quite explicit what the argument is. I am not saying 1857 is the jihad. Period. What I am saying is that within the uprising in Delhi, there’s a substratum of jihadis.

• No, no. I am not saying that. What I am saying is even when the clerics are calling it a jihad and the ruler is a Muslim, an army that is 85 per cent upper-caste Hindus has no problem with it.

Well, that is not entirely true, because certainly the court and the sepoys and the city of Delhi managed to keep together on Hindus and Muslim lines. There was no divide, but the jihadis do create a problem, actually. Because when they raising a flag from Jama Masjid... they are only about 10 per cent of the fighters.

• They are always only 10 per cent.

Nonetheless, they do create division. And particularly, one of the kind of key moments in the uprising in Delhi is on August 1, which is Eid, when the jihadis and Arabs, they want to slaughter a cow. Now Zafar, who is not known for being very proactive, and is called a sleepy guy, when he hears this, he realises this is catastrophe. I mean, if the army divides on Hindu, Muslim lines and the city divides on Hindu, Muslim lines, the uprising would be over. What he does is — he can’t arrest the jihadis for he hasn’t got the power — but he can arrest the cows. So there is this long stream of documents in the mutiny papers, which are letters from Zafar to the Kotwal saying go and arrest the cows in the city. The Kotwal says fine. Then somebody says there is barely room in his Kotwali for 100 cows and there are a thousand cows in Delhi, at least. In the end, they take a census of the cows instead. They didn’t actually have to arrest them.

... contd.