Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (15 page)
The movie opens with a Koran, the Islamic holy book, towering on a pedestal. There is a meeting of Jews who have decided to destroy Islam. Rushdie wears pince-nez and a white leisure suit. (In real life, in case there is any confusion, Rushdie is neither Jewish nor a wearer of white leisure suits.) The Jewish conspirators drink champagne and liquor with women in short skirts. They discuss who will go to war with Pakistan, the “fortress of Islam.”
We cut to the fortress. Various male heroes and their brothers and their cousins are introduced. These movies always have a few cousins and other lesser relatives because family is a bedrock cultural organizing principle yet somebody’s got to die before the hero kills the villain. Various episodes of gun-fighting and song-and-dance follow—in the dance numbers, plump and scantily clad Pakistani actresses lip-sync to love songs, gyrate, and jiggle themselves thoroughly. A corrupt police chief unjustly shoots a few people, including the niece of our hero. She lifts her head from a pool of blood and says, “That dog Salman Rushdie must die.” Then she collapses.
“This is the first sacrifice in our holy mission,” says the hero. Zoom! Reaction close-up shot of the hero. Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! Reaction close-ups of all the brave Islamic guerrilla fighters who will soon track down Rushdie at his tropical island headquarters and attempt to kill him.
On the island, we find Rushdie amusing himself by tying some captured Arab fighters to wooden crosses, cutting their throats with a long, curved sword, and inhaling the blood of his enemies. He breathes in the fragrance of one dead Arab’s shirt and says delightedly, “This is the blood of the lovers of Mohammed,” as if impressed by a seductive perfume. Rushdie’s island security detail, led by a former commando of the Israeli army, nods in agreement. Rushdie retires to his extensive glass house to order weapons and liquor on a cordless telephone.
To Rushdie, our heroes vow, “Even the grave will not accept you! You ridiculed Mohammed with your tongue! We will cut your tongue into pieces!”
Three of the Pakistani guerrillas dress up as Batman with black capes and bat insignias to try to penetrate Rushdie’s security wall. It doesn’t work.
Rushdie kidnaps the wife of one of the guerrillas and tortures her by reading aloud sections of
The Satanic Verses.
The Satanic Verses.
At the end, Rushdie hurls a few hand grenades, blasts away with a machine gun, captures the heroic Muslim guerrillas, and ties them to wooden crosses to crucify them. On the crosses, our heroes sing about the Koran. Lightning bolts free them. Rushdie’s former girlfriend converts to Islam, war breaks out again, and a deep voice booms from the sky to say, “The Holy Book is the most powerful. This is the Book about which there is no doubt. The Koran’s protector is God himself.” We see the Koran on its pedestal again. It zaps Rushdie with a laser beam and he burns into nothing.
Now, it is arguable that the difference between this cultural fantasy and, say, an American vigilante-revenge-on-the-criminals movie boils down to a gap in cinematic production values. But the contexts are different. The West is not yet prepared to organize its political economies around revenge fantasy, the death penalty in the United States notwithstanding. In South Asia, the political economies are still forming, and the dialogue of the Rushdie movie reflects what too often passes for political speech in the region.
After watching more than three hours of this egregious schlock in Kamran’s flat, we drove over to a movie theater where
International Guerrillas
was in the midst of its record-breaking Pakistani run. In the lobby, at the end of a show, we collared some young men who turned out to be Pakistani air force recruits. One of them had seen the film three times. All were impressed by the force of its message. “We want to see what is the end of somebody who ridicules Islam,” said Mohammed Ismail, an eighteen-year-old mechanic. “Whoever sees this movie praises it highly. We haven’t seen such a good movie ever—and it’s also Islamic,” he concluded. This appreciation seemed appropriate for a young man entering an air force whose generals in Islamabad like to boast privately that they have recruited suicide pilots willing to fly F-16s laden with nuclear bombs right into the apartment blocks of downtown Bombay, should nuclear war with India ever become necessary.
International Guerrillas
was in the midst of its record-breaking Pakistani run. In the lobby, at the end of a show, we collared some young men who turned out to be Pakistani air force recruits. One of them had seen the film three times. All were impressed by the force of its message. “We want to see what is the end of somebody who ridicules Islam,” said Mohammed Ismail, an eighteen-year-old mechanic. “Whoever sees this movie praises it highly. We haven’t seen such a good movie ever—and it’s also Islamic,” he concluded. This appreciation seemed appropriate for a young man entering an air force whose generals in Islamabad like to boast privately that they have recruited suicide pilots willing to fly F-16s laden with nuclear bombs right into the apartment blocks of downtown Bombay, should nuclear war with India ever become necessary.
We arranged an interview in Karachi with the movie’s director, Jan Mohammed. We found him in the mildewed upstairs offices of a Karachi film production company. He was a plump man squeezed into a kaleidoscopic polyester shirt that opened to his belly button and revealed much curly chest hair and—yes—gold chains. He was a bad imitation of a bad imitation of a Hollywood director, but there was something a little bit endearing about his being so self-consciously hip and nouveau riche. As we talked, it seemed obvious that he was in over his head with this whole Islam thing.
“It’s made about a million rupees so far,” he said of his film. “All of them are big hits that we’ve made, but this one has gained fame worldwide. The earlier ones were only commercial films. There was nothing meaningful in the ones before. There was something which was lacking. People would say they were hits, but there’s no thematic value. We were searching for something which would be meaningful—something entertaining which would be meaningful as well. The important thing was that it shouldn’t have been taken as a documentary because then people wouldn’t go to the cinema.... If we had not had all of these dancers and all of that, then people would not go as much to the movie and they wouldn’t have absorbed so much. A film is an attraction. I’ve been making entertaining films, but I always put in a holy bit or a miracle at the end of the reels. People say I repeat myself, but I try to do it every time.”
I asked about the propaganda aspect of the movie, its endorsement of the murder of Salman Rushdie, whose life had been ruined by a campaign in which the director’s film was perhaps now the most popular component. Mohammed paused for a while, seemed to struggle for his answer, then offered an entertainer’s utilitarian defense of murder. “I am not a religious man, or, I mean I am not a religious leader,” he replied, seeming to revise his thought in contemplation of the mullahs. “I want that everybody will be happy. If Salman Rushdie is killed, everybody will be happy.”
Islam, with its theory of martyrdom and its present international strain of expansionist fervor, is one movement on the subcontinent in which leaders and propagandists continually vilify their opponents for tactical reasons, whether to seek political office or reap box office receipts. But Islam is only one example. The uses of the abstract, exaggerated enemy are many—in politics, in business, in revolution. Lest the West should convince itself that it has somehow evolved beyond all this, the carnage in Yugoslavia is a reminder that when the nation-state weakens or collapses, prenational identities and enmities fill the void. In South Asia, the state has never grown strong enough to suppress these ancient enmities, so they rise more easily to the surface.
In the tribal areas of western Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, various nation builders have tried for the last 250 years to impose new codes on top of the old tribalism—codes of imperialism, democracy, communism—but they have failed so completely that the conventional wisdom these days is that it is a waste of time and effort to even try. Under Pakistan’s constitution, there are areas of Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier provinces that are officially designated “tribal areas,” meaning that ordinary Pakistani laws and political processes simply do not apply. Tribal leaders are free to govern by their own traditional rules, which in effect means they are free to kill each other with impunity and stifle progress at will, if they have the strength. The system was explained to me one afternoon in Quetta, a mud-rock Pakistani mountain city that is the provincial capital of Baluchistan province, by Nawab Bugti, then the provincial chief minister, a longtime Baluch nationalist and a member of the local tribal royalty who grew up in imperial style during the days of British colonialism. Bugti’s political problems that afternoon were considerable—shifting tribal relations, the legacy of leftist revolutionary movements, the resurgence of Islam, ethnic troubles with neighboring Pakistani and Afghan groups. But the chief, with his long, dignified white beard and flowing white Baluch turban, talked of his province like the fictional Godfather casually dismissing a few recent troubles in the family. As he spoke from behind his large desk, a turbaned servant brought him a glass of water on a tray, delivered it, waited for Bugti to finish, then placed the glass back on the tray and walked briskly off.
“The crime rate has gone up,” Bugti said. “There’s car theft, kidnapping, highway robbery, murder. Now we are trying to impress upon tribal elders the need to change. Generally, law and order is better than in other provinces, but we have the normal thing—tribal feuds, blood feuds, and vendettas.... Going about armed, that is the traditional way. It is a man’s ornament. He feels naked without a weapon on his shoulder. That is one reason why we have proper law and order. Everyone has weapons. The mutual fear keeps people in their places.”
I asked him when, under tribal law, it was justifiable for a man to kill his enemy. “It just depends on why A killed B,” he answered. “Was it a justifiable murder? If B owed a life to A, one could call it justified because B had previously killed A’s father or uncle and had not made restitution according to the tribal code. Adultery or fornication—the punishment is death, to be meted out by the person concerned, the father or the brother or so on. You kill both if it’s a case of adultery—the man and the woman, although sometimes the man will escape.”
“How often does this happen?” I inquired, meaning killings for adultery, not the men escaping.
“That depends on desires,” Bugti answered. “It happens very often. If anyone kills for black work, which is what we call adultery or fornication, everyone will say, ‘Well done, very good. You have washed the situation clean.’ We have one honorable member of the provincial assembly who killed his own brother, the chief of the tribe, so he could become chief. That whole family, they have been killing each other for ages. None of them has ever died a natural death.”
Bugti spoke in a tone of light amusement about all of this, playing it up for the effect, and it was easy to share his jocularity. You could laugh with a guy like Bugti, or even the film director Jan Mohammed—until you remembered that there are a whole lot of ordinary South Asians who don’t get the joke. They don’t get it because the joke’s on them.
You think, for example, about the twelve- and thirteen-year-old Tamil boys patrolling the jungle roads in northern Sri Lanka these days with AK-47 assault rifles cradled in their arms and capsules of cyanide poison tied around their necks. Of all the dozens and dozens of guerrilla movements in South Asia founded in one way or another on ethnic or tribal identities, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, represents perhaps the most horrifying melding of old codes and new ideology. The Tigers began little more than a decade ago as a liberation movement representing the legitimate aspirations of Sri Lanka’s Tamils—a besieged ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority—against the island’s dominant Sinhalese group. Nurtured by Sinhalese racism, by a brutal civil war, and by the megalomania of a fanatical leader, Villaphallai Prabhakaran, the LTTE has grown into a grotesque cult of suicide and murder organized around the manipulation of hatred, the depersonalization of the enemy, and the desire of children who don’t know any better to die as heroes.
After Dhanu, the bespectacled Tamil girl, blew up herself and Rajiv Gandhi, I traveled with Mark Fineman of the
Los Angeles Times
back to the jungles of northern Sri Lanka to write again about the LTTE’s suicide culture and its growing isolation from ordinary Tamils. We found ourselves one afternoon in a Sri Lankan army bunker at the edge of an abandoned stretch of military no-man’s-land with a captain named Randu Hathnuada. He wore a nine-millimeter pistol at his waist, a crescent scar on his forehead, and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Another Elephant Pass Hero,” which referred to a thirty-day siege-battle he had fought against the Tigers at a fort just north of his present bunker. Peering out through the slits of his bunker, he talked about what it was like to fight against the Tigers. What impressed him was the vivid recklessness of their assaults, the suicide charges. They come in the night in waves, boys and girls no older than fifteen, in shorts and flip-flop sandals, attacking with assault rifles, armored cars, antiaircraft guns, bulldozers with explosives rigged to the blades. “They charged,” Hathnuada recalled of a particular attack at Elephant Pass. “We are shooting. As soon as they are hit, they are eating cyanide. Small children, even small girls. I have seen it so many times. They vomit and die.”
Los Angeles Times
back to the jungles of northern Sri Lanka to write again about the LTTE’s suicide culture and its growing isolation from ordinary Tamils. We found ourselves one afternoon in a Sri Lankan army bunker at the edge of an abandoned stretch of military no-man’s-land with a captain named Randu Hathnuada. He wore a nine-millimeter pistol at his waist, a crescent scar on his forehead, and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Another Elephant Pass Hero,” which referred to a thirty-day siege-battle he had fought against the Tigers at a fort just north of his present bunker. Peering out through the slits of his bunker, he talked about what it was like to fight against the Tigers. What impressed him was the vivid recklessness of their assaults, the suicide charges. They come in the night in waves, boys and girls no older than fifteen, in shorts and flip-flop sandals, attacking with assault rifles, armored cars, antiaircraft guns, bulldozers with explosives rigged to the blades. “They charged,” Hathnuada recalled of a particular attack at Elephant Pass. “We are shooting. As soon as they are hit, they are eating cyanide. Small children, even small girls. I have seen it so many times. They vomit and die.”
The Tigers communicate with their Sinhalese enemies through propaganda letters tacked onto trees around the army camps or smuggled into barracks by local Tamil servants. One of them, addressed to “the Sinhala Soldier,” was published by LTTE partisan Satchi Ponnambalam:
We see you riding down the streets of Tamil Eelam, khaki-clad and armed. The care of an old mother or father, or a sister, maybe, compels you to carry arms. While those in the seats of power in Sri Lanka flourish, you fall down as the victims. Very soon, you will stand, turned against your own people, your own class, ordered by this very same class in power. Those in power will use you to crush the revolt of your own people.
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