On the Grand Trunk Road (13 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
“They’re right—we haven’t cooperated with them,” replied Kamla Devi, the pradhan’s wife, when I climbed up from Kala’s office and reported his comments. “But how can we cooperate with them? We don’t even trust those people.... The biogas stove, the tanks, the smokeless chimneys—none of it worked. The trees died. If they had gotten one thing right, maybe we would have worked with them.”
In nearly all of the villages immediately surrounding Chopta, the story is the same: The vast majority of the trees supplied have died and most of the “appropriate technologies” are not working. But in one relatively prosperous village at the base of the ridge, Gurfali, the program has made more progress. There, only about half the trees have died and about six biogas stoves work, reducing the need to cut trees for firewood. Gurfali villagers complain about the same failures of government implementation as do those in Chopta. But they say proudly that they have done somewhat better than their neighbors because they are better educated. “Half the people in Chopta don’t even understand the word ‘environment,’ ” said Bahidhar Dhondiyal, a member of the region’s Brahmin clan. One afternoon, I sat in the fly-infested house of the Gurfali village chief, Sultan Singh, and asked him and Dhondiyal to tell me what they would do if the World Bank gave them $30 million to improve the quality of life in the area. Without hesitation, they outlined a sweeping vision of improved horticulture, spreading agricultural technology, new roads and markets, and light industrialization. Their informal plan emphasized technical education, factory jobs, and cash crops simultaneously. In its detailed grasp of the region’s needs and limitations, it sounded impressive. But of course, the Gurfali leaders said, nobody in the Indian government or the World Bank has ever asked them for their ideas. “They think they know better,” Sultan Singh said. “Obviously, they don’t.”
After I published a long story in the Post about Chopta, its conditions, and the failed World Bank program, I got a lot of mail. Some of it expressed shock at the conditions in which the Chopta villagers live. Some writers complained that while I had described a series of compelling problems, I had offered no solutions. Dissidents at the World Bank said the lesson to be learned in Chopta was that development planning required close interaction at the local level. That would certainly help. But none of the writers seized upon what I thought of as the main points: that the Chopta villagers wanted mainly to define their own lives, that they shared a universal ambition to move themselves forward economically as quickly as possible, that many of them were willing to work unbelievably hard to achieve their goals, that they recognized injustice when they saw it—and that because of all this, governments and World Bank planners ought to concentrate on creating opportunities for them comparable to those enjoyed by the urban elite, rather than trying to keep them down on the farm with Gandhian welfare schemes.
The leftist South Asian elites have rejected such obvious market solutions on the grounds that capitalism was the form of historic exploitation on the subcontinent and would exaggerate the discrepancies in income and opportunity contained in the colonial inheritance. In many ways, this argument has been turned upside down since independence to justify a new form of exploitation. At the same time, it is clear that in the midst of dire poverty, market economics by itself is no magic pill, and that the feared consequences of a widening gap between rich and poor are serious indeed. To have capitalism, you need enough capital to go around; otherwise, those in power horde scarce capital for themselves. Rightist governments in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka that came to power during the 1980s used the controlled introduction of market mechanisms to reinforce military or elite dominance of the Nehruvian state and its meager resources. Spurred by market energies, their economies grew, and the rich got richer. That provoked those left behind to revolt. The revolts confirmed the worst fears of the governing socialists. They saw what happened in the Soviet Union. They feel the rumblings on their own doorstep, the clamorings of Kamla Devi and Birendra Singh for an “opening up,” for change. It may be difficult to stage a revolution when you are chronically malnourished, but still, the socialists worry:
Après nous, le déluge.
Après nous, le déluge.
The deepest depths of rural poverty in South Asia are plumbed not so much in India as in its severed limb, Bangladesh. A nation born in war and mismanaged since then by corrupt revolutionaries and generals, Bangladesh is seen by the West as the epitome of pathetic South Asian wretchedness. The head of an international relief mission in Dhaka once told me cynically that at least Bangladesh is a popular basket case, which makes for good fund-raising. “Among the donors there is a general bewilderment at how many emergencies Bangladesh faces,” he said. “There is a profound misunderstanding of the country, but a profound sympathy.” I suppose that is better than profound misunderstanding accompanied by profound lack of interest, but not by much. And there are plenty of thoughtful Bangladeshis who would prefer the lack of interest, believing that Western aid only helps to reinforce their corrupt government. As in Chopta, in Bangladesh I found myself torn between disgust at the political economy that produced and reinforced the country’s rural poverty and awe at the ability of impoverished Bangladeshis to find their way forward despite the obstacles.
Bangladesh flashes periodically onto Western television screens when it is in the throes of calamity. The catastrophe on my tour occurred in the spring of 1991, when a cyclone rushed up the Bay of Bengal, swept onto the bay’s heavily populated sea islands, and killed upwards of one hundred thousand people overnight. I was caught in Afghanistan when it happened, so another reporter was sent in initially. By the time I got back from Kabul, Western interest in the Bangladesh story was ebbing with the swollen tides. The Dhaka government tried to keep the story alive by inflating the casualty figures, announcing higher numbers each afternoon at a five-star hotel in the capital. But there is only so long that you can sustain interest in pictures of bloated corpses. I decided to take a long trip down to the sea islands, which had been made generally inaccessible by flooded roads and rough waters, to write about why and how so many people lived where the killer cyclones blew. Anita Pratap, a reporter with
Time
magazine, found a stalwart van driver and translator, and so we headed south from Dhaka in the smoky quiet just after midnight.
Time
magazine, found a stalwart van driver and translator, and so we headed south from Dhaka in the smoky quiet just after midnight.
It took sixteen bone-rattling hours over pitted two-lane roads and by ferries to reach Cox’s Bazaar, the fishing port at the far southern tip of Bangladesh, where the country bleeds into the green hills of Burma. Along the way we passed through Chittagong, second to Dhaka in population and certainly one of the grimmest cities in South Asia. The streets were flooded with water, mud, and oil slicks. Diesel smoke choked the air. Fires burned in trash bins. Hordes of bicycle rickshaws clattered about, powered by thin Bengali men who stood as they pedaled, leaning all their weight from side to side to force the pedals down. These are the cities to which South Asian villagers like the ones on Chopta ridge aspire. The money had better be good, because in the worst of the cities just about everything else looks like hell. In fact, the problem in Chittagong is that compared with Delhi or Bombay or Karachi—relatively prosperous urban centers—jobs and money are scarce. To quote one of the boilerplate lines from Bangladesh-disaster newspaper stories, the country has one hundred million people jammed into an area the size of Wisconsin. That is a lot of people looking for the same patronage and opportunity.
Chugging on a rickety wooden sloop through the gray-green waters of the Bay of Bengal on our way to Moheshkhali Island, where some eleven thousand farmers and fishermen reportedly had died in the cyclone, you could sense immediately why a Bangladeshi with few alternatives would risk the occasional murderous storms to live free along the sea, rather than scraping for some handout job from a prosperous thug in the city. Better to die on Moheshkhali than live in Chittagong, I thought. There was sky out here—air, space, sunlight. And in the water, fish. Shrimp. Protein. I talked to the passengers on the boat, islanders returning from Cox’s Bazaar. A student named Ashish Kumar Dey sidled over between the sacks of food and belongings stacked in the boat. “My father was born on the island. I was, too,” he said. “There are three ways to make a living other than fishing—farming, betel leaves [a product like tobacco], and salt. I’ve seen three cyclones in my lifetime. Now, what we have over here, even if we sell it, we won’t be able to buy land on the mainland. There just isn’t any land to buy. It’s extremely expensive. Here we’ve started something of our own, something we can claim. That’s the main thing.”
A local relief volunteer on the boat, Binoy Krishna Biswas, like Dey a member of Bangladesh’s small Hindu religious minority, said pride and stoicism had contributed to Moheshkhali’s high death toll during the cyclone. Accustomed to lashing storms and swollen tides, the islanders refused to leave their villages for prefabricated shelters even when the government broadcast its highest possible cyclone warning by radio and loudspeaker. “The police had to beat them with sticks to bring them in,” Biswas said. “They never paid heed to the signal. They’re too proud of their courage. Fighting with the ocean and the cyclones—they think that’s their life.”
On the island we found scenes of devastation and resilience. We rode toward the interior on a three-wheel rickshaw, then walked when the roads ran out. On a dirt path we passed an accident involving a bicycle rickshaw loaded with hay and a cart carrying sacks of rice. Children rushed out and scooped up handfuls of rice from the ground and scurried away. Every family, it seemed, had lost something—a chicken, stores of rice, grains, seeds, livestock, houses, money, relatives. Corpses lay in the marshes. Collapsed thatched homes dotted the landscape. Entire villages had fallen in on themselves. Survivors had built tree houses for their children on the sites of their wrecked homes. Throughout, we saw no tears, no paralysis of mourning. Everybody seemed busy.
At dusk we stopped at a tin lean-to occupied by the family of Nural Islam, a fisherman who had lost his house and several relatives. I asked about the apparent mood of calm determination on the island. “If one person had died, the others would have consoled,” he said. “But we have all been afflicted with the same calamity. We are stunned. The response has been a mixture of families caring for orphans, community relief, social organizations helping, and then some people looting. We have the courage and strength to work in the sea. The children are hungry and crying but getting by. The fishermen are ready to go back to the sea as soon as the trawler owners say so. The ocean is never an enemy, only a friend. We have a phrase in Bengali, ‘The ocean always gives back what it takes.’ ”
I asked what the ocean gives back in a good month. Islam said his boats sometimes earned two hundred thousand takas (about five thousand dollars) in a month. In Bangladesh, that is a lot of giving back. Absentee landlords, protected on the mainland by the Dhaka government, take most of the cash, and the fishermen and the farmers get the worst of the bargain. But they make a living, they live free, and they have something of their own to claim.
I pitched a tent in the sand outside the lean-to and zipped in for the night. Monsoon clouds gathered into a torrential storm. Lightning flashed continually, illuminating the surrounding paddy fields in an eerie glow. Thunder rumbled in the distance and crashed nearby. Rain poured down as if shot from a fire hose. Figuring that I wouldn’t recognize a tidal wave if I saw one, I decided to rejoin Anita and Nural Islam’s family in the lean-to. I showed up at the entrance waving my flashlight and drenched to the bone. Anita and our translator were awake, watching the fireworks. Everybody else was asleep, snoring soundly. In the morning, they explained that it was just a normal storm. The cyclone was a little like that, they said, only the wind was much stronger, and in the middle of it all, a twenty-foot tidal surge crashed through an embankment and washed many from their homes. They talked about it as if it were just one of those things.
We ate a few bananas and hiked back across the island to hire a boat for the day. After much bargaining, in which the islanders took us for all we were worth, we found a captain of a motor sloop willing to ride through the marshy channels and visit a few more islands. Churning through the muddy waters, you could tell when you were approaching the worst places because the trees suddenly disappeared and the air filled with the thick stench of decomposing bodies. The initial relief effort had been botched, and thousands of the poorest had trekked to local centers to wait for biscuits, rice, and rehydration pills that had not yet arrived. We filled our notebooks with the usual grim quotes.
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