Sometime in the run-up to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the UP police made a sensational discovery. A house used by RSS supremo Guruji Golwalkar had been raided and two locked trunks recovered. When B.B.L. Jaitley, the inspector general of police, opened the trunks, what he found shook him to the core. There before him lay a detailed district-by-district, qasbah-by-qasbah blueprint for the physical elimination of the province’s Muslims.

Jaitley took the trunks to Rajeshwar Dayal, the seniormost civil servant in the home department at the time, who promptly conveyed the gravity of the discovery to G.B. Pant. The documents "revealed incontrovertible evidence of a dastardly conspiracy to create a communal holocaust.... The trunks were crammed with blueprints of great accuracy...prominently marking out the Muslim localities.... Timely raids conducted on the premises of the RSS had brought the massive conspiracy to light," recalled Dayal in his autobiography, A Life of Our Times, published in 1998. He sought the immediate arrest of Golwalkar on...