Six months after the Babri Masjid demolition, The Times of India’s then editor Dileep Padgaonkar met V S Naipaul at the writer’s flat in London for an interview. Naipaul’s first two non-fiction books on his ancestral land, An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilization, had made Indians, regardless of political persuasion, angry and upset: the Left for his seeming lack of empathy and understanding for the poor and his bleak-eyed view even of India’s non-feudal past; the Gandhians because he was no respecter of their piety; the Nehruvian dreamers and Centrists because he could see no signs of progress, though he saw much corruption and in fact dismissed the country as being beyond redemption; and the Right because he acutely disliked the grip of religiosity and tradition on Indian society. By 1990, his views had changed, and in A Million Mutinies Now, he acknowledged that redemption, indeed, couldn’t be ruled out.But his reply to a question about his reaction to the Babri’s razing showed just how deeply his thinking had changed. He’d reacted “not as badly as the others,” he said. The Mughal ruler Babar, in his view, “had contempt for the country he had conquered. And his building of that mosque was an act of contempt for the country…The construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult… an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Ram.” In the kar sevaks who climbed atop Babri’s domes Naipaul saw “passion,” and in Hindu nationalism a “new, historical awakening” and hope for national regeneration.As controversy erupted, the right-wing revised its opinion of this previously condescending Trinidadian Indian. Though some moderates and some Indian intellectuals — Arun Shourie for instance —had backed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, Naipaul’s comment marked a key moment in the legitimising and mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism and, in fact, of militant Hindutva. Naipaul attracted much opprobrium of course, all the more as he accused Indian liberals of double standards, said Hindutva and Islamic fundamentalism couldn’t be equated and criticised Romila Thapar for her “Marxist” version of history; the scholar Rafiq Zakaria even described him as “a neo-proponent of Hindutva” in the tradition of RSS sarsanghchalaks. But Naipaul not only didn’t mind, he revelled in the row; he’d earlier always felt, unhappily, that reactions to him in India were tepid.Though Naipaul made it clear later that history had to be finally “left behind” and that it had to be written by those with “independent minds,” the post-Babri label stuck. So much so that after Beyond Belief, the book on his travels to non-Arab Muslim countries, was out in 1998, the more passionate among Indian ‘liberals’ joined Zakaria in comparing him to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who’d originally expounded the theory of Hindutva, and M S Golwalkar, ex-RSS chief and Sangh Parivar icon. He was called “Fascist” and “anti-Islamic” for criticising the poet Muhammed Iqbal and writing, at the very beginning of the book, that Islam was “not simply a matter of conscience or private belief” but made “imperial demands” and altered a convert’s core identity, his worldview, his idea of history, his sacred language (to Arabic) and his holy places (to Arab lands). This theory underlying the text, as also his description of Pakistan as little better than “a criminal enterprise,” led to him being labelled a “Muslim baiter” in that country, and similar accusations were made from within India when he yet again spoke of the “passion” he felt had animated the kar sevaks in Ayodhya.When the Swedish Academy chose him for the Nobel Prize after the 9/11 attacks, doubts were raised about whether the choice was political. But for a man described for decades as egotistical, rude, racist, misogynistic, pitiless and worse — not just by enemies but by one-time close friend like Paul Theroux, who felt Vidia’s grasp of Islam was “naïve” and “his ignorance of Arabic… kept him from understanding the Koran” — such doubts were water off a duck’s back. In the new millennium he returned to India on more than one occasion and re-stated his position on Islam and Hinduism , eliciting strong reactions from the likes of Girish Karnad. And on his death, many remarked on Twitter that the new, emerging India had failed to bestow any real honour on Naipaul. The pot, evidently, remained stirred.