Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (2 page)
Introduction
I
f there is a better place for a journalist to work than South Asia, I would like to know about it. I say this not because of the Victorian romance of a New Delhi posting, which is surely part of the bargain, but because of contemporary factors: with the cold war’s demise, the Indian subcontinent finds itself today in the midst of a transition from socialism to something beyond, a transition in which nearly all the earlier political and social arrangements are being fiercely contested. This has placed many of the most compelling and universal ideas of our time—revolution, counterrevolution, political religion, separatism, nationalism, and capitalism, to name a few—into a kind of bubbling cauldron of subcontinental conflict and experimentation. Something like that could be said these days of other regions of a rapidly transformed world, such as the former Soviet Union. But in South Asia all this collective groping for the future seemed to me uniquely accessible and enlivening.
f there is a better place for a journalist to work than South Asia, I would like to know about it. I say this not because of the Victorian romance of a New Delhi posting, which is surely part of the bargain, but because of contemporary factors: with the cold war’s demise, the Indian subcontinent finds itself today in the midst of a transition from socialism to something beyond, a transition in which nearly all the earlier political and social arrangements are being fiercely contested. This has placed many of the most compelling and universal ideas of our time—revolution, counterrevolution, political religion, separatism, nationalism, and capitalism, to name a few—into a kind of bubbling cauldron of subcontinental conflict and experimentation. Something like that could be said these days of other regions of a rapidly transformed world, such as the former Soviet Union. But in South Asia all this collective groping for the future seemed to me uniquely accessible and enlivening.
Partly that is because South Asian societies are wide open, highly self-conscious, and for the most part deeply hospitable to Western outsiders. Time and again on my reportorial travels for
The Washington Post,
which sent me to New Delhi in 1989, I would wander unannounced to the forbidding iron gates of a princely palace or a seat of governmental power, pass my calling card to the guard on duty, and find moments later that I was sitting, astonished, in some grand but tattered drawing room, sharing milky tea and intense conversation with somebody I had longed to meet. With repetition, I learned not to be surprised by this sort of hospitality, but to be bolder about the access I sought.
The Washington Post,
which sent me to New Delhi in 1989, I would wander unannounced to the forbidding iron gates of a princely palace or a seat of governmental power, pass my calling card to the guard on duty, and find moments later that I was sitting, astonished, in some grand but tattered drawing room, sharing milky tea and intense conversation with somebody I had longed to meet. With repetition, I learned not to be surprised by this sort of hospitality, but to be bolder about the access I sought.
History, revolution, and politics lie around in South Asia like heirlooms and furniture in a cluttered guest room that your host has not had time to clean and sort. You are free—and privileged—to wander about, pick the heirlooms up carefully, dust them off, turn them over, and inquire respectfully about their origins. I did this quite literally one time in the old palace where a former Indian prime minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, was reared. I arrived without an appointment, and the guard responded by ushering a tour in which he climbed ladders to pull down old sepia family photographs from the walls. He then used the pictures as exhibits while recounting all the scurrilous gossip he could remember about the family of a man who was at that moment India’s most powerful politician. The guard wasn’t mean-spirited or disrespectful or politically motivated. It’s just that they were such good stories, and really, he seemed to feel, there was no reason not to share them with a welcome guest from abroad. This was hardly an unusual attitude. Revolutionary guerrilla commanders, religious gurus, indentured laborers, nuclear scientists, charismatic national politicians, spies, criminals—everyone, it seemed, was more than happy to take time out for tea and an extended chat, even if they intended to lie boldly throughout.
This book is the ultimate consequence of those travels and those conversations. It is intended as a piece of journalism, in the traditional sense. It is meant to be accessible, idiosyncratic, entertaining, and serious, though I don’t mean to insist that it actually turned out that way. My point is that there are a few things this book is not meant to be. It is not meant to tell South Asians what to think about themselves or to compare South Asia’s present problems with the equally formidable challenges facing the West. It is not a work of scholarship, as will be obvious, but it does attempt to describe and explain questions that South Asian governments and outside specialists are wrestling with today. These include political violence, separatist and religious rebellion, social conflict, the corruption of public officials, the decay and abuse of state power, and the ongoing attempt on the subcontinent to construct, in a fast-changing global environment, a transition from socialism to capitalism. What these conundrums now have in common, it seems to me, is their relationship to epochal change in the region that once was Britain’s Indian empire. The sources of this change are the end of the cold war, the advanced erosion of the socialist states built by South Asian independence leaders after World War II, and the urgent need of a new generation on the subcontinent to build something of their own, without reversing what progress they have inherited.
You will find here, then, if I have succeeded at all, a sense of what these challenges amount to, where they arise from, why they matter—and, mainly, an account of what this change and conflict looks and feels like on the streets of South Asia today. There, in a variety of ways, the collective future of roughly one billion people too often ignored in the West is currently being decided.
STATES OF FLUX
1
Sound and Fury
We who have grown up on a diet of honor and shame can still
grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath
of the death of God and of tragedy.
—
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie
D
uring three years in South Asia, I shook hands with several men who subsequently exploded. There was no reason to suspect causality in this statistic. But the explosions were instants of intimate violence, and through their intimacy they demanded exploration.
uring three years in South Asia, I shook hands with several men who subsequently exploded. There was no reason to suspect causality in this statistic. But the explosions were instants of intimate violence, and through their intimacy they demanded exploration.
One place to begin is Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, on March 24, 1990, in the sultry morning sun on a concrete jetty beside China Bay. Sweat drawn by the equatorial heat ran like tap water from the pores of those assembled. Three frigates had arrived to take home the last two thousand or so men of the Indian Peacekeeping Force, the dubiously named army dispatched by Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 to rescue the island nation of Sri Lanka from its years of gruesome fratricidal war between ethnic Sinhalese and ethnic Tamils. The army had failed in its mission and had achieved the improbable effect of making Sri Lanka’s problems even worse than before. Now the Sri Lankan government had arranged a celebration to mark the final departure of the Indian troops. Hostile civility filled the air. A ragged naval band with brass and bagpipes lined the dock. Sri Lankan honor guards in pressed olive uniforms and pink scarves pointed the way to the departing ships. Turbaned Indian soldiers with the Seventh Sikh Light Infantry stood gamely at attention, melting before our eyes as they waited for the ceremony to end. From unseen loudspeakers came a medley of popular songs, such as “Oh, What a Feeling” and “We’re Going to Have a Party Tonight.” Whether these lyrics were meant as a message from the Sri Lankans to the Indians or vice versa was not clear.
On the dock beside the last frigate stood Ranjan Wijeratne, Sri Lanka’s minister of state for defense, reputed leader of the island’s notorious death squads and all-around hero of his country’s counterrevolutions. Dressed in flowing white
khadi,
and with a fine mane of silver hair, he looked nearly biblical that morning. Wijeratne was both a chilling and an entertaining figure as a cabinet minister. He managed vast tea plantations in the island’s interior and donned unapologetically the airs of a nineteenth-century colonial master. After rising through planters’ and landowners’ organizations into politics, he was placed in charge of Sri Lanka’s official and unofficial armed forces and directed the beleaguered government’s several counterinsurgency programs. That March morning, paramilitary pro-government death squads, which many on the island believed reported to Wijeratne, were winding up a months-long campaign of slaughter that had killed somewhere between twenty thousand and sixty thousand Sri Lankans suspected of involvement with the People’s Liberation Front, a Maoist guerrilla group. It was difficult to keep count of the victims. The death squads drove around the island’s lush jungles in green Mitsubishi Pajero jeeps, plucked suspects from their homes in the night, and dumped their smoldering corpses on pristine beaches in the morning. Wijeratne never admitted that he controlled the squads, despite considerable evidence that he sanctioned and perhaps even organized them. But he boasted of his sympathies. In his capacity as state defense minister Wijeratne met the press each week in a cool conference room in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s seaside capital. At these meetings he tried to exceed his previous achievements in murderous witticism. Once he called the International Committee of the Red Cross a “terrorist organization.” He offered to “wring the necks” of demonstrators with the Mothers’ Front, an organization of relatives of victims who had disappeared in the night. Threatening to attack the Jaffna peninsula on the north of the island, he advised an estimated one million civilians to vacate the area or “good luck to them.” Luck was a favorite theme with Wijeratne. One day in the conference room, he challenged any of the several guerrilla groups he was attempting to crush to go ahead and kill him if they didn’t like his policies. He wished these guerrillas, too, “good luck.”
khadi,
and with a fine mane of silver hair, he looked nearly biblical that morning. Wijeratne was both a chilling and an entertaining figure as a cabinet minister. He managed vast tea plantations in the island’s interior and donned unapologetically the airs of a nineteenth-century colonial master. After rising through planters’ and landowners’ organizations into politics, he was placed in charge of Sri Lanka’s official and unofficial armed forces and directed the beleaguered government’s several counterinsurgency programs. That March morning, paramilitary pro-government death squads, which many on the island believed reported to Wijeratne, were winding up a months-long campaign of slaughter that had killed somewhere between twenty thousand and sixty thousand Sri Lankans suspected of involvement with the People’s Liberation Front, a Maoist guerrilla group. It was difficult to keep count of the victims. The death squads drove around the island’s lush jungles in green Mitsubishi Pajero jeeps, plucked suspects from their homes in the night, and dumped their smoldering corpses on pristine beaches in the morning. Wijeratne never admitted that he controlled the squads, despite considerable evidence that he sanctioned and perhaps even organized them. But he boasted of his sympathies. In his capacity as state defense minister Wijeratne met the press each week in a cool conference room in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s seaside capital. At these meetings he tried to exceed his previous achievements in murderous witticism. Once he called the International Committee of the Red Cross a “terrorist organization.” He offered to “wring the necks” of demonstrators with the Mothers’ Front, an organization of relatives of victims who had disappeared in the night. Threatening to attack the Jaffna peninsula on the north of the island, he advised an estimated one million civilians to vacate the area or “good luck to them.” Luck was a favorite theme with Wijeratne. One day in the conference room, he challenged any of the several guerrilla groups he was attempting to crush to go ahead and kill him if they didn’t like his policies. He wished these guerrillas, too, “good luck.”
Wijeratne wanted the Indian Peacekeeping Force off his island. The reasons were complicated but one compulsion was that he wished to press more freely his own attacks on the country’s various insurgents. He had come to Trincomalee that March morning to wave the Indian soldiers off. As the Sikh infantry marched up the gangway, I asked him how it felt to see them go.
“They had a trying time. They came on a peace mission, but then something untoward happened,” Wijeratne said in a patrician tone, referring to the combat deaths of twelve hundred Indian soldiers during their stay in Sri Lanka. “They got bogged down.”
We followed the troops up the plank for a last round of speeches aboard the frigate. The Indian ambassador told the dripping soldiers that history would record their achievements “in golden print” and that a “proud and grateful nation awaits your arrival in India,” assertions that must have seemed ridiculous to all but the most patriotic infantrymen.
Wijeratne took the microphone. “You have made a great sacrifice, there’s no doubt about that,” he said. Then he offered this benediction: “Those who sacrifice their lives will be born again as good men in a future world.”
The bomb that killed him eleven months later blew a thirty-six-square-foot crater in the asphalt of Havelock Road in Colombo. It was eight-thirty in the morning, rush hour on a busy thoroughfare. Wijeratne was on his way to the office from the airport, where he had seen his son off on a flight back to college in the United States. (Often a bond between counterrevolutionaries and revolutionaries in South Asia is the ambition that their children study hard in America to be doctors and engineers.) The minister rode in a Land Rover flanked by escort vehicles. When the assassin punched the car bomb detonator he or she set off a bang so loud it echoed in Colombo’s outskirts miles away. Who pushed the detonator remains a mystery, although guerrillas with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam head a list of suspects more numerous than any cast summoned to the drawing room at the end of an Agatha Christie novel. In any case, they were thorough. Pieces of flesh turned up 150 yards from Havelock Road. Besides Wijeratne, at least sixteen people died in the explosion and dozens of others were hurt. It took hours to pull the minister’s body from his jeep. Buildings throughout the posh palm-lined neighborhood were damaged. Vehicles lay strewn in mangled heaps. One of the smashed cars bore a windshield sticker that said, “Unite to Fight Terrorism.”
The Sri Lankan government promoted Wijeratne posthumously to the rank of general and put on a state funeral at Independence Square, a Colombo memorial to the end of the British Empire in South Asia. Army officers drew the minister’s body through the streets on a gun carriage. Sri Lankan honor guards surrounded the square. Buddhist priests eulogized Wijeratne’s accomplishments in service to the state. Soldiers fired a twenty-one-gun salute.
One day after the funeral, the weekly security briefing went on as usual in the appointed Colombo conference room. General Cyril Ranatunge, Wijeratne’s immediate successor, insisted on two minutes of silence in honor of the departed minister. Then he remarked that the detonation that killed Wijeratne was “the most powerful bomb exploded in the country up to now,” as if this were a final tribute to the departed minister’s stature.
Somebody asked if Wijeratne’s violent end would lead the government to alter or soften in any way its gun-blazing approach to counterinsurgency.
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