Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (30 page)
Organized, state-sponsored political murder is practiced regularly and on a significant scale in South Asia today not only in Sri Lanka but in the disputed Indian states of Punjab and Kashmir. Government counterinsurgency campaigns also persist in the Indian northeast, in Pakistan’s Sind Province, in the hills of Bangladesh, and in other areas. At the moment, most of these other counterinsurgency programs are in various states of remission.
In Punjab and Kashmir several thousand people die annually in low-intensity wars of insurgency fought between Indian security forces—police, paramilitary troops, and regular army soldiers—and a fractured array of dozens of separatist, religious, and revolutionary guerrilla groups. In Punjab, guerrillas claiming to represent the state’s ethnic and religious Sikh majority are attempting achieve total independence from New Delhi. In Kashmir, guerrillas claiming to represent the state’s Muslim majority also seek total independence from New Delhi. The Indian government, arguing that neither guerrilla movement represents the popular will and that in any case secession of any part of the Indian union is unacceptable, has suspended most of its civil and criminal legal code and deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to defeat the guerrillas with force.
In Punjab, this years-long counterinsurgency campaign has been accompanied by sporadic but unsuccessful attempts at political negotiation with the separatists. In Kashmir, the government does not yet feel that the “situation on the ground,” as Indian officials refer to it, has “ripened” sufficiently to warrant meaningful political initiative. This process of ripening involves an attempt to weaken the guerrilla groups—which are not as unified or as committed as Wijeweera’s Liberation Front was in Sri Lanka—with unbridled force. A substantial number of the annual victims of violence, perhaps several hundred in Kashmir and as many as one thousand or more in Punjab, are young men suspected of being insurgents, who are arrested and murdered in custody by Indian security forces.
After an extensive investigation in Punjab during 1989 and 1990, the human rights group Asia Watch concluded that these killings “are not aberrations but rather the product of a deliberate policy known to high-ranking security personnel and members of the civil administrations in Punjab and New Delhi. Moreover, there is credible evidence to indicate that, in some cases, the police have actually recruited and trained extrajudicial forces to carry out many of these killings.” In other words, death squads. Everything I saw and heard during half a dozen visits to besieged Kashmir suggested the same was true there as well. In both places, however, death squads operate on a considerably lesser scale than they did in 1989 and 1990 in southern Sri Lanka.
The political heirs to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi have a much tougher time coping with the political morality of their death squads than Premadasa had in Sri Lanka. India’s international credibility depends on its self-image as a humane, even spiritual, democracy. Confronted with evidence about state-sponsored murder in the half-empty chambers of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva or the General Assembly in New York, Indian diplomats respond by chanting the mantra of democracy—the basic syllogism is, we have elections, therefore we are not killers. They fall back, too, on the old xenophobic defenses, accusing human rights investigators of undermining India’s sovereignty on behalf of neo-imperial interests. At the same time, the Indian diplomats do all they can to assure the world that their opponents in the insurgency wars represent a greater evil than themselves—the Sikh guerrillas are international terrorists implicated in plane hijackings and bombings and massacres of unarmed civilians, the diplomats remind us, and the Kashmir guerrillas are Islamic fundamentalists armed by outlaw states. This tack, despite the counterpropaganda efforts of Sikhs and Kashmiris living in the West, works reasonably well. The Indian government has every reason to believe that it can get away with its present level of state-sponsored murder in Punjab and Kashmir indefinitely, particularly now that New Delhi’s embrace of free market reform has enlivened the interests of Western governments.
Consider, for example, G. N. Saxena, the Indian governor of Kashmir at the time of my visits. Saxena, a senior civil servant with a pencil mustache, sat in a sprawling, well-tended colonial mansion on a hill above Srinagar’s picturesque Dal Lake. He rarely left his mansion except by helicopter because if he had driven through the valley below, the rebellious Kashmiris would almost certainly have killed him. From his aerie he supervised the Kashmir counterinsurgency—the long curfews, the daily house-to-house searches, the retaliatory arson attacks against entire villages, the mass arrests, torture, and murder. Each time I went to Kashmir, I stopped in to hear the governor explain in his isolated mansion how, while it might not be entirely evident to a foreigner like me, the situation on the ground was actually getting better and better. During one recent visit, we were discussing some incremental evolution in Kashmiri guerrilla tactics when the governor suddenly intervened in a tone of great annoyance, not with me but with the pesky revolutionaries who filled his life with such stress.
“This kind of tinkering with the war is a nuisance,” the governor said, referring to the new guerrilla tactics. “What are they achieving? This kind of thing—we can live with it for centuries.”
It was a rare outburst of honesty, but hardly anyone in or out of India doubts it, except the faithful among the Kashmiris and the Sikhs. Of course, as was true in Sri Lanka, the prediction depends on the stability and durability of the Nehruvian state. Those in the senior ranks of the Indian counterinsurgency programs—governors, army officers, police officers, intelligence officers—do not often question the state’s strength or righteousness because they are its living embodiment. They see the challenge before them in terms of centuries not so much because of some abiding faith in the future but because of the historical continuity in their own roles. In effect, they did this work for the moguls, they did this work for the British, they did it earlier for the independent Indian government in places like Bengal and the tribal northeast, and they will carry on doing it in the name of Nehruvian democracy. As members of a permanent and prosperous class, they can afford the long view.
K. P. S. Gill, the Sikh chief of police in Punjab and the director of that state’s counterinsurgency programs—a man widely held responsible for the extrajudicial killings of hundreds, if not thousands, of Sikh youth—insisted that I understand this point one evening at his official residence in Chandigarh, the Punjab capital. The occasion for my visit was one of those sporadic attempts by New Delhi to quell the Sikh rebellion through some sort of democratic negotiation, rather than purely by force. This time the initiative was an election. I wanted to hear what such a champion of force as Gill thought of the idea, and he invited me over. His house, on one of Chandigarh’s broad, suburban, semiprosperous streets, was surrounded by barbed wire, sandbags, and bunkers. Floodlights shone over the lawns and the driveway. When I arrived, Gill was not there, so turbaned soldiers ushered me into his drawing room to wait. A few aides passed through, some hobbling on canes necessitated by wounds inflicted in past terrorist attacks. Gill turned up long after dark in a convoy of Ambassadors weaving this way and that through the streets, red lights flashing, curtains drawn across the windows, decoy cars turning back and forth to confuse potential assassins.
The chief strode in, greeted me perfunctorily, sat down in an armchair, propped up his feet, and ordered a full bottle of Royal Velvet Scotch Deluxe Malt Whisky, brewed in Bombay. He seemed the personification of the colonial Sikh—a tall, bony man with a waxed mustache, a trimmed gray beard, and clipped Oxbridge diction. He wore that night a maroon turban, a smoking jacket, and a tie. He poured himself a tall glass of whisky, downed it, and continued drinking one after another. Within an hour he had imbibed at least seven. Our conversation turned to the problem of revolution and terrorism. Democracy, Gill made clear, was no solution.
“The situation is evolving too fast for the human rights activists to keep pace with it,” he said. “Ultimately terrorism will die a natural death. It may take a little time. It may take a longer time. But there is no ideology behind it. The problem with the Sikhs today is that it is a progressive community saddled with a backward-looking political leadership.... Their killings are so pointless. They don’t even send a message. The creation of terror by itself, I don’t think that was advocated by any of the ideologues. The classical theory is much different from what is being worked out here.”
Well, then, I asked, what should be done?
“Has any democracy answered that question in the face of a problem like this?” he replied. “Against state power, you can’t use violence. It just doesn’t work. What a political solution boils down to today is elections. But elections are no solution.... Look, in Punjab there has always been this grudging admiration of the outlaw. Even when I was a child, if a dacoit [bandit] was killed by the police, a thousand people would come to see the body of the dacoit, which would be displayed. And we would hear exaggerated details of the dacoit’s physical prowess. Today it is that same thing. The militant is fighting. He is battling the police. It’s a grudging admiration. The police have never been popular in Punjab. I remember as children the idea was, when we traveled to a village, we had to reach it before sunset. It’s the same thing today. And the so-called ‘fake encounters’ [death squad killings] were a part of the Punjab administration in those days, too. Some district commissioners were remembered popularly for wiping out dacoitaries through fake encounters.... The general who fought Napoleon in Russia, his motto was ‘Time and patience.’ All you need is time and patience.”
His speech was milky now, cloudy and fluid, and he began to talk about religion, what stands between a man and the Creator. I came back to democracy. If you organize yourself around that idea, then don’t you have to have faith in it in a situation like the one in the Punjab? Won’t the violence Gill advocates—indeed, practices unapologetically—finally undermine democratic society?
“Elections are a very minor episode,” Gill said. “They don’t matter at all. Only you people are sold on elections. The problem is human nature. Terrorism is an inevitable product of human expression. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent reading Walt Whitman—a lot of time. Now, with all this, there’s so little time to read and recollect. I sometimes think I could turn and live with the animals. Not one of them is dissatisfied. Walt Whitman, he was not a poet. He was a saint. ‘I Hear America Singing.’ ”
Now Gill began to recite stanzas of Whitman. He began to recite Ezra Pound.
I asked again about terrorism and counterterrorism in Punjab, the uses of state power that he endorsed. Gill stood dramatically and walked to his bookshelf. He returned with a copy of Any Old Iron, a 1989 novel by Anthony Burgess that concerns the recovery of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, and how there no longer seem to be any human causes worthy of the sword’s might. Gill thumbed through the pages and then handed me the open book, his finger on a particular paragraph.
“Read this,” he pronounced in a deep voice.
The passage concerned the narrator’s recollected impressions of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. It read:
I saw fists and howling mouths and then Weizmann’s own acetone at work, and I was visited by a philosophical speculation rather mature for a boy of nine: that religious and political causes were only pretexts for smashing things and people; it was the smashing that mattered. Human beings were balls of energy, masses of fleshly acetone, and the energy could best be fired to a destructive end, creation being so difficult and requiring brains and imagination. But since man is a creature of mind as well as nerve and muscle, some spurious cause has to justify destruction. Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretence of religious or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.
I wondered afterward whether it becomes easier or more difficult to do what Gill does—round up the angry young men, supervise the interrogations and torture and killings, take the war to the enemy—if you think like this. Gill seemed to find some solace in it, or else in his whisky. To me, this sort of nihilism was more chilling even than the purposeful, visible state murder in the Sri Lankan jungles. There the death squads operated in a twisted, brutal climate of political morality. Gill’s vision was darker. It existed outside of conventional political morality because it rejected politics—rejected, even, human nature.
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