NEW YORK:   I can see "the double standard here," snapped Shabana Azmi, the Indian actress, activist and parliamentarian. "Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, and Hindus say they are proud to be ... secular."

All right, Shabana Azmi didn't really say it. Not as Shabana Azmi: She was on stage at New York's New School University auditorium, reading lines I wrote in my novel "Riot." She was playing the angry Hindu chauvinist Ram Charan Gupta, a character as far removed from Shabana Azmi's own perceptions of communal realities in India as it is possible to be.

But that was the whole point of the event. Its principal organizers, the Indo-American Arts Council, wanted to create a piece of literary theater in New York that went to the heart of the current communal divide in India. The reading gave voice to the different viewpoints articulated by the characters in the book, who are caught up in a fictional riot on the same issues that underlay the recent carnage in the Indian state of Gujarat. The aim was to set the stage for a discussion with the audience of sectarian issues in India and the recent tragic violence in Gujarat in particular.

So the novel was adapted to a staged reading for four characters whose contending views of the nature of Indian nationhood would play off each other dramatically. Shabana Azmi agreed to lend her prestige to the event. I added my own voice to the list, reading the part of a hard-drinking, hard-swearing Sikh police officer whose family had suffered in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi but who still affirmed a vision for himself in building a pluralist India from which no group would feel excluded.

The counterpoint came in the antics of a fringe group of Hindu chauvinist agitators, calling themselves, in a nice Orwellian touch, "Indian-Americans for Truth and Fairness in the Media," which embarked on a hate campaign against Shabana Azmi and, incidentally, myself in the weeks leading up to the reading.

But their attempts to stir up hostility to the event, by a series of e-mails asking people to protest outside the hall, backfired. They simply prompted a number of secular Indians to organize a counter-demonstration. So while we declaimed to a full house of 500, a noisier scene took place outside the auditorium. The slogans of hate were drowned out by the chants of the anti-communal groups.

It may seem odd that this little drama was enacted thousands of miles from India. But the passions of Indian expatriates mirror the divisions in their homeland. The problem is precisely with those who would turn their backs on dialogue, and that is what the four-member cast stressed in the lively discussion with the mostly Indian audience that followed the reading.

If we could all understand that the very pluralism of our arguments is a metaphor for the pluralism of India itself, we might again be able to find ways to live together as we have done for hundreds of years. That is why it was important that a Muslim secularist like Shabana Azmi should voice the impassioned rage of a Hindu like Ram Charan Gupta. Understanding the point of view of those with whom we profoundly disagree is, of course, the first step toward learning to create a society which manages such disagreement.

The family of a Muslim politician who had been murdered in the Gujarat riots drove for over two hours to New York to take part in the discussion after the reading. But they arrived late and, unknown to the cast, were barred by security from entering the auditorium. So they stood on the street and talked with the demonstrators. "What was remarkable," one of the protesters said, "was that they spoke without hatred and anger, only a great deal of sadness and grief."

That is the true measure of being Indian - not the hatred and anger of those who want to overturn the injustices of centuries past, but the grief and sadness of those who mourn the loss of justice and harmony in the present, and fear its absence in the future.

It is an attitude being tenuously kept alive by Indian expatriates in America, who hope that the same battle for tolerance will be fought on the more important stage back home.

Shashi Tharoor's most recent novel is "Riot." He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

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