On the Grand Trunk Road (22 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
I asked what evidence he had for this contention, as Kamran was the only witness to the attack to have come forward.
“No one meant to kill Kamran,” Jam answered confidently.
I said that one of my biggest concerns was that I could not tell whether this attack was a warning satisfactorily executed or a hit not yet completed. Jam answered that he thought the matter would go no further.
“That’s what I’m very concerned about, that it go no further,” I said with as much force as I could muster.
“It will stop here,” Jam replied firmly, staring at me intently. Then he lifted the large glass of imported beer he was drinking. “Cheers,” he said.
Jam talked about the unusual nature of the crime problem he inherited. He said he could not defend his police force, but could I defend the New York or Washington police?
I asked what he meant when he said earlier that Kamran was an intelligence agent.
“I am not an agent, I do not know how these things work,” he said. “Kamran does not only work for you, he works for agencies, and those agencies are all trained in Washington.” I pressed him for evidence of this charge. He took my hand and said, “Let’s discuss this sometime in a better mood.”
At the end of our conversation, Jam invited me to be his guest during an upcoming three-day tour that the prime minister of Pakistan intended to make in rural Sind province. Jam said that all my needs would be taken care of if I accepted his invitation—except wine, which he said was difficult to find in the countryside, and women, which he did not think he could arrange very easily.
At his spiked metal gate Jam said farewell and presented me with a gift—a package of white silk fabric trimmed with lace.
“Good night,” he said, extending his arms in warm, prolonged embrace.
For much of history, South Asia has been ruled by men—and occasionally by women—like Jam. Some controlled fiefdoms no larger than a Wisconsin family farm. Others led vast empires, waged long wars, and erected prodigious monuments to themselves. Many embodied the attitudes of successful patriarchs, simultaneously asserting their will by force and seeking popularity through patronage. The British slipped comfortably into this system, rewarding indigenous rulers who were willing to cooperate with the empire and quashing those who were not. At independence, despite the exposure of many in the South Asian elites to Western ideas such as democracy, capitalism, socialism, and bolshevism, the subcontinent had precious little experience with systems of governance other than those dominated by rulers who derived their legitimacy from land, power, force, wealth, charisma, patronage, and divine sanction.
In theory at least, one of the advantages of democracy is that it permits peaceful arbitration, even co-optation, of these old, narrow, often bloody political arrangements. Hold an election for the first time in a tribal area and the traditional autocratic tribal chief will duly collect all the votes. That may not seem Jeffersonian. But if the chief does a lousy job in office and the democratic system holds fair and firm, then in the next election his colleagues have a way to shunt him aside without shooting him in the head and sparking regressive, chaotic mayhem. A dozen successful popular elections later and suddenly the younger generation is running its campaign on a platform of abolishing the tribal codes altogether. Thus, a peaceful revolution. In theory.
In this respect, South Asia’s experience with democracy since independence is one of those glasses half full or half empty, depending on your inclination toward gloominess. Many of the autocratic political structures present on the subcontinent when the British withdrew have withered away through democratic arbitration. Obviously, this is most true in India, which has held to its parliamentary democracy, with one brief interruption, for more than four decades, and which possesses a vigorous independent press and a judiciary that occasionally asserts an independent voice. It is true to a significant extent even in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, whose democratic experiments have been more fitful and less evolutionary.
But while South Asian democracy can boast of many achievements, it has also generally failed to produce institutions strong enough to withstand the perfidies of politicians. It has failed to produce political economies prosperous enough to unify decisively tentative nation-states. And it has failed, to various degrees in various countries, to undermine the potential of autocrats, that is, to banish the kings.
Why it has failed to do this is an enormously complicated question best addressed in volumes that trace in detail the political histories of independent India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. But there are a few general points worth making here. One is that successful democracies depend on the strength of independent state institutions, and on this score the Nehruvian state has had a decidedly mixed record. Another is that democracies depend on free and fair elections. Here again, South Asia’s record is mixed, although hardly dispiriting. Most important, even if the democratic experiments in South Asia had not been interrupted by the many cataclysms of the past four decades, it would be too soon for us to predict their ultimate success or failure—you cannot mediate away two thousand years of feudal and imperial history in four decades, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many free and fair elections you manage to hold.
Even healthy democratic systems produce bad leaders, so it is perhaps not surprising that South Asia’s imperfect systems have thrown up a remarkable list of truly awful ones since independence. What is interesting about these leaders is not the particular chronicles of their incompetence, foibles, and quirks, but rather their common failures of temperament and outlook. Time and again South Asian democracies have been betrayed by elected leaders who chose to govern as if they were kings or queens. In this they have been tempted by the strains of subcontinental history, the weakness of their countries’ democratic institutions, and the universal inability of human beings to disbelieve the adulation of crowds.
Most interesting of all in this regard are those who should have known better. There are, of course, many who don’t know better. You meet a lot of people in South Asia like Jam, minor thug-rulers who appear to be unencumbered by political conscience. Such men feed on the weakness of the state, exploiting opportunities for profit and glory with the tenacious ruthlessness of your average Wall Street bond trader. The system expects little of them and they give back even less. But there are others who have properly seen themselves at the center of South Asia’s modem struggles, leaders of destiny empowered to tilt the national course and to discipline the minor thug-rulers who hold the nation back. When such leaders take center stage—an Indira Gandhi, a Rajiv Gandhi, a Benazir Bhutto-they promise ideas, progress, a further break with the past, and at the same time continuity, unity. And they promise modern democracy. Yet they quickly find themselves at the epicenter of a political culture infused with the most undemocratic temptations. The Jams beneath them rush to offer their fealty, opening their arms in friendly embrace. The suffering crowds throng to the roadsides, begging pitifully for salvation. The permanent political bureaucracy—the courtiers and the generals—conspire and dissemble and maneuver for position. All this can trigger a psychological struggle bordering on the Shakespearean, made no less so by the culture’s tendency to melodrama.
Often, one of the first symptoms of this interior struggle is Nixonian paranoia. Consider Indira Gandhi, for example.
She grew up at the political knee of Jawaharlal Nehru, her father, one leader in recent South Asian history who proved decisively able to resist the temptations of traditional, personalized autocracy. But Nehru’s successor died suddenly of a heart attack and by then Indira Gandhi was in a position to make her bid. The Congress bosses backed her because they thought she could be manipulated. This proved a miscalculation. But as Indira asserted herself, rushing from crisis to crisis and from one comer of the subcontinent to another to project herself as Mother India, she began at first to overwhelm and then in time to undermine the democratic institutions her father had built. By the mid- 1970s she had managed to organize the Congress Party and the sprawling state apparatus on principles of strict personal loyalty to her and to her court. She was isolated by sycophants and supplicants, including her son Sanjay. At the same time she was confirmed in her high self-regard by the enduring enthusiasm of the great crowds that flocked to greet her public appearances. The South Asian crowd is vast and impressive but its importance is easy to overestimate. A colleague mentioned before I left for India that he could attract a crowd of twenty thousand in South Asia just by changing a tire on the roadside. That is not much of an exaggeration. Why a woman like Indira Gandhi begins to believe in this crowd at the expense of everything else she may once have thought about democracy is hard to say. But at the end of the process, in 1975, you have her throwing out the cabinet, jailing her opponents, suspending freedom of speech, and declaring a National Emergency in response to a perceived conspiracy to dethrone her from her rightful rule.
Failure must be rationalized and the easiest way to do that in South Asia is to blame your enemies. Couple this with the isolating traditions of the royal court and you do not exactly have a prescription for stable democratic checks and balances. A personally insecure ruler, such as Indira Gandhi, begins to see the democracy she once championed through the prism of her court. Conspirators dart in the palace shadows. Political manipulations course through the popular press. The idea of democracy becomes intertwined with the person of Indira Gandhi and thus both must be defended with vigor against the conspirators.
When Indira topped arrogance with stupidity and called an election in the midst of her Emergency to ratify what she believed was her overwhelming popularity, Indian democracy found a way to reassert itself and tossed her out of office. In an interview with David Frost immediately afterward, Indira was shameless, unrepentant. She believed the whole fiasco of the Emergency and the election defeat was a conspiracy against her. Frost asked if she had been ill served by the people around her, the courtiers.
“That some people kept the facts [from me] is evident from what happened subsequently,” she answered.
“Which people?”
“Intelligence people and so on.”
“You say intelligence people kept facts from you?”
“Well, I don’t—I mean, I think—I mean, I imagine that they did.”
Substitute for Indira Gandhi in India Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan or Sheikh Mujib in Bangladesh, and you have a partial glimpse of what went wrong, psychologically and materially, with South Asian democracy during the 1970s.
Rajiv Gandhi was less cunning than his mother, milder in temperament, but he inherited her sense of entitlement to rule. Or, at least, he did not reject very firmly his courtiers’ advice that in him lay the salvation of the Congress Party and the unity of India.
There was nonetheless something likably befuddled about Rajiv, a contentedness that beamed across his face when he went wandering among the crowds in his khadi and jogging shoes. But this charming aspect of the boy-king—and all his ennobling talk about science, technology, and modernity—masked political programs that sanctioned, whether by neglect or calculation, the continuation of his mother’s authoritarian abuse of the party and the Indian state. On Rajiv’s watch elections in Kashmir were violently rigged in 1987, stirring an armed rebellion that remains the most politically dangerous of the many under way on the subcontinent today. In revenge for his mother’s murder, and because he did not wish to control his most thuggish henchmen, he perpetuated a reign of police violence against Sikhs in Punjab that turned a tricky political situation into an impossible one. He manipulated religious feeling. He eschewed internal Congress Party elections, thereby further entrenching the network of regional thug-rulers installed by his mother. He did nothing to discipline or clean out the convicted murderers and kidnappers in northern India who sat in legislative assemblies under the banner of his party and the glow of his charisma. He talked about radical capitalist reforms when he first came to power late in 1984, but he backed away from the plans quickly when the old Congress bosses—the Jams of Bombay and Lucknow, Agra and Bhopal—resisted economic liberalization, presumably because it might empty the state patronage trough at which the party and its leaders fed. Later, after his death, friends and partisans of Rajiv attributed these failings to his being overwhelmed initially by the challenges of dynasty and office, and they argued that had he lived, he would have changed his ways. Perhaps. Only Rajiv’s most hardened enemies accused him of innate malevolence. As the Ruler of Oz once said of himself, Rajiv was not a bad man, he was just not a very good wizard. For a little while at least, he did much to inspire the Indian middle class’s emerging, progressive demands for modernity. He sustained his family’s symbolic but arguably useful role as the embodiment of a postindependence unified Indian nation-state. But in a political culture heavily influenced by sycophancy, autocracy, and the psychology of the ruling court, good intentions will not win out. On the contrary, they are easily subsumed.
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