Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (14 page)
On the way back, we stopped at the Moheshkhali jetty to drop off a local guide. Dozens of islanders jumped uninvited into our boat. The captain shouted at them, putting on a show for our benefit, then pulled away and began collecting money for fares. Fifteen minutes later, in choppy high seas, the sloop’s motor quit. The passengers all stood up and shuffled from side to side on the deck, nearly tipping us over. They flagged down two passing trawlers, whose captains each in turn pulled alongside, sized up the situation, waved sheepishly, and pulled off at full bore. Adrift, we were knocked around by the waves and it looked as if we might go over. The shore was a couple of miles off but I thought I could make it if the tide was with us. I pointed out some floating driftwood and suggested to Anita that if we capsized, we should meet at the driftwood and swim in together. Unflappable as ever, she chose this moment to mention that she could not swim. The panicked passengers did not look like Olympic champions, either. I remembered what they taught us in junior lifesaving about what drowning people do to those who think they can swim. With renewed self-interest we watched our captain as he dove from the stern and swam beneath the boat, trying to fix something. He was made of muscle and swam like a fish, clad only in a sarong wrapped tightly to his thighs. He was utterly calm. Of course, he had nothing to worry about—he probably swam five miles each morning to fetch his breakfast. Finally, he climbed aboard, pulled a rope, and the motor roared. We bounced on the waves and chugged into the harbor at Cox’s Bazaar. At the harbor’s mouth we passed one of the two trawlers that had passed us up. It was stuck now on a sand bar. Passengers on both boats jeered and cursed one another as we went by.
The West feels pity for these people. If it values courage and determination, what it ought to feel is respect. If South Asia’s rural poor received from their political leadership one tenth of the opportunity they deserve, they might do a lot more than survive.
Back in Dhaka, feeling oddly bullish about Bangladesh in the midst of this catastrophe, I went around to talk to Bangladeshi friends and acquaintances active in rural development. One was Mohammed Yunus, a remarkable man who founded something called the Grameen Bank, which lends money to rural women, and which seems to have found a niche somewhere between market mechanisms and the Gandhian ideal, the Village on a Hill. I asked him whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future.
“There’s a tremendous amount of strength in the people,” he answered. “Among the young, they’re willing to make any sacrifice. There’s enough of everything but there’s a lack of information and management structure in the society. We have enough things but we don’t know how to make use of them.... In some ways we are moving forward and in some ways backward. In terms of development we’re going backward because we are stuck with the same old approaches and ideas.
“What is the difference between here and Florida?” he continued. “The difference is poverty. The basic fault is not on the developed countries, not on the West. It is on us. Why should we glow year after year in the sympathy of the West? If you squander what is coming, that is the tragedy.... We have tremendous potential together as a people. Our only problem is our stupidity as a nation.”
STATES OF MIND
5
Enemies
These brave warriors will think you have withdrawn from battle
out of fear, and those who formerly esteemed you will treat you
with disrespect. Your enemies will ridicule your strength and
say things that should not be said. What could be more painful
than this?
The Hindu god Krishna, to Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita
I
n the fall of 1990, Pakistan had an election. The campaign was filled with egregious lies, distortions, vilifications, exaggerations, and corruption, but at least it was an election campaign and not martial law or revolution, which in Pakistan meant there was some reason to be optimistic. On polling day the question was whether or not the vote would be stolen by the government, so those foreigners who were around fanned out to the cities and the countryside looking for malfeasance. As it turned out, what malfeasance occurred was generally difficult to see, so mostly we scurried from polling place to polling place and watched large numbers of Pakistanis stand in line. Late in the day, in Rawalpindi, a gray-brown urban sprawl just south of the capital of Islamabad, I wound up in an elementary school that was being used as a polling booth. The lone classroom was dim and bare. A single naked lightbulb glared above concrete floors and chipped green walls. Anatomy posters of human skeletons and organs loomed over rows of old wooden desks, the kind with holes for ink pots. Bored with the voting, which was proceeding smoothly, I wandered around the classroom and looked carefully at the teaching materials, some of them in Urdu, some in English. Taped to the wall in front of the little desks was a fable in English scrawled by a felt marker.
n the fall of 1990, Pakistan had an election. The campaign was filled with egregious lies, distortions, vilifications, exaggerations, and corruption, but at least it was an election campaign and not martial law or revolution, which in Pakistan meant there was some reason to be optimistic. On polling day the question was whether or not the vote would be stolen by the government, so those foreigners who were around fanned out to the cities and the countryside looking for malfeasance. As it turned out, what malfeasance occurred was generally difficult to see, so mostly we scurried from polling place to polling place and watched large numbers of Pakistanis stand in line. Late in the day, in Rawalpindi, a gray-brown urban sprawl just south of the capital of Islamabad, I wound up in an elementary school that was being used as a polling booth. The lone classroom was dim and bare. A single naked lightbulb glared above concrete floors and chipped green walls. Anatomy posters of human skeletons and organs loomed over rows of old wooden desks, the kind with holes for ink pots. Bored with the voting, which was proceeding smoothly, I wandered around the classroom and looked carefully at the teaching materials, some of them in Urdu, some in English. Taped to the wall in front of the little desks was a fable in English scrawled by a felt marker.
“The Wolf and the Lamb” was its title. It went this way:
Once a hungry wolf was drinking water at a stream. He saw a lamb also drinking water there. He became very happy. He wanted to kill him and eat him up. He went near the lamb and said to him, “Why are you making the water muddy?” The poor lamb replied that the water was flowing from his, the wolf’s side, to his, the lamb’s side. So he was not making the water muddy. The wolf said angrily, “Why did you call me a name last year?” The lamb replied that he must he must be mistaken because he, the lamb, was then only six months old. The wolf said that it must be his, the lamb’s, elder, so he jumped on the poor lamb and killed him.
Such is the peril faced by South Asia’s lambs, such is the disingenuousness of its wolves, and such are the lessons about each conveyed to young minds. In the jumble of codes, ancient and modem, that coexist uneasily on the subcontinent—legal codes, democratic codes, feudal codes, tribal codes, revenge codes, caste codes, family codes, religious codes—there are many possible routes of appeal and many possible justifications for pouncing and eating.
The overarching political struggle in South Asia late in the twentieth century can be seen as an attempt to squeeze an ungainly, unruly feudal body into a neatly pressed, imported democratic suit of clothes. The fitting is as yet incomplete. Part of the trouble is, you can try to import democratic or socialist or capitalist structures, but you cannot so easily import or impose an egalitarian state of mind. This is not because South Asians are inherently or culturally antidemocratic. Rather, modem democratic ideas and identities must compete with older, better-established ones such as tribe or caste or religion. In Western Europe a version of this competition took place over a span of centuries—and even today the struggle to reconcile hierarchies remains unfinished. In South Asia the effort has been compressed into decades, not so much because the region’s internal social evolution demanded such acceleration, but because the subcontinent suddenly found itself sucked into a newly interdependent twentieth-century “global village,” where all sorts of ideas and identities splashed freely across national boundaries that were themselves artificial. Many new nations have had to cope with this tide and backwash since World War II and a few have been destroyed by the pressures. In South Asia, the result has been occasionally catastrophic but more often merely peculiar.
You see this tension in the obscurantist leaders who tried to build their movements with the most modern Western technology, such as the turbaned Islamic radicals in Pakistan who traveled with cellular telephones or the saffron-robed Hindu revivalists in India who spread their message with mobile video vans. Some people are alarmed by this appropriation of modern technology for potentially repressive ends, but in these cases, at least, I figured that in time the machines might win out over their proprietors, in the sense that movements built with such dazzling technology would ultimately have to find a way to deliver the same technology equitably to the faithful; otherwise, the movements would fail. A more disturbing question, it seemed, was how high the costs might be in human lives and liberty before this process worked itself out one way or the other.
Where the old and the new often blend most dangerously in South Asia is around the idea of the enemy. Every South Asian is born with potential enemies—members of rival families, rival tribes, rival castes, rival ethnic groups, rival religions. As an individual, you cannot easily opt out of these conflicts because you cannot escape your identity. It is there in your name, or in answers to the inevitable questions about what place your family “belongs to.” Even in the loose, chaotic cities, ethnic and caste and tribal clans reassemble and protect their members. Clan leaders graft themselves to the Nehruvian state and acquire power through patronage, setting the stage for wider conflict if the leaders compete for power on the national stage. Even South Asians who migrate abroad cannot completely escape their enemies. In England, expatriate Hindus and Muslims have fought battles in the streets occasionally, and rival factions of Sikh separatists have struggled violently for control of Sikh temples. Westerners impressed by the recent glories of the nation-state tend to view this fratricidal factionalism as evidence of a sort of unfathomable preindustrial chaos, a view reflected in newspaper boilerplate phrases about South Asia such as “centuries-old ethnic feuding” or “Afghanistan’s internecine tribal rivalries.” But clan identities in South Asia represent continuity rather than chaos; they are the identifies that have survived all the shifting empires and the failed emperors. National citizenship, however essential in the present world of global interdependence, is a new idea on the subcontinent—and it is the idea that has tended to stimulate the worst spasms of bloody chaos.
In the accelerated struggle to define South Asia’s political economies, ancient codes of identity, violence, and honor are mustered and melded in the service of modern ideology, such as separatist nationalism or leftist revolution. At the same time the codes are mustered and melded in service of old ideology, such as religion. Leaders reach back to old myths in order to whip up extreme feeling—and to produce extreme actions—sufficient to challenge the practical power of their opponents and the more ephemeral power of the ascendant national, democratic-pluralist idea. In reaction, those playing defense appeal to the same old codes, employ the same language of extremity. In this way rivals are confirmed as enemies and conflicts that might have been resolved through negotiation are settled in blood. And once the blood flows, the old codes are doubly confirmed.
The public manipulation and exploitation of feeling and tradition in this way can be both dangerous and absurd. It becomes necessary to see opponents not just as bad or misguided but as evil incarnate, evil in the face of which there can be no compromise.
One example from my time is what happened to Salman Rushdie, a Bombay-born Muslim whose family emigrated to Pakistan before Rushdie went on to settle in the West. As is well known, Rushdie ran afoul of Ayatollah Khomeini for writing the novel
The Satanic Verses,
which some Muslims found blasphemous. Khomeini then issued a
fatwah,
or religious edict, condemning Rushdie to death and forcing the author into hiding. That such an edict would emanate from the puritan terrorism of the Iranian revolution did not seem entirely surprising. But what was mind-boggling was the way Rushdie was treated in the land of his birth. India’s nominally democratic and pluralistic government, fearful of rioting and political blackmail provoked by local Muslim politicians, banned the novel. In Pakistan, a sporadic campaign of vilification culiminated in a hit movie,
International Guerrillas,
in which Rushdie is portrayed as the decadent and evil leader of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Islam. More than a million people saw this movie, its producers said. Many went back to the theater two or three times.
The Satanic Verses,
which some Muslims found blasphemous. Khomeini then issued a
fatwah,
or religious edict, condemning Rushdie to death and forcing the author into hiding. That such an edict would emanate from the puritan terrorism of the Iranian revolution did not seem entirely surprising. But what was mind-boggling was the way Rushdie was treated in the land of his birth. India’s nominally democratic and pluralistic government, fearful of rioting and political blackmail provoked by local Muslim politicians, banned the novel. In Pakistan, a sporadic campaign of vilification culiminated in a hit movie,
International Guerrillas,
in which Rushdie is portrayed as the decadent and evil leader of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Islam. More than a million people saw this movie, its producers said. Many went back to the theater two or three times.
At the height of the film’s popularity I was in Karachi and forced my friend and colleague Kamran Khan to go out and rent a videotaped copy and to translate the dialogue while we watched it on his VCR. He kept a remote control device handy to fast-forward through the song-and-dance numbers. This proved a brilliant stroke because, for a movie supposedly dedicated to the defense of Islam against its greatest living enemy, there was much shaking of flesh and crooning of passionate lament.
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