On the Grand Trunk Road (33 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

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At Hizbul Mujaheddin downtown headquarters, a guerrilla named Khalid, of the Zia II regiment, fondling a telescopic sniper rifle with an estimated range of 1.5 kilometers, laughed when I expressed my astonishment. “Kashmir is completely under our control,” he boasted. “The mujaheddin are showing their mettle. Every young man in Kashmir is a militant.” And then, the standard invocation of teenage rebellion: “It is now or never.”
 
The odds are it will be never.
 
A perennial question about South Asia is whether its recently created nation-states will break up under separatist pressure. The catastrophic split of West and East Pakistan in 1971 makes this more than an abstract speculation. At present, the most serious rebellions in the region—in northeast Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Punjab, Sind—are being run on the ground by teenagers who, while often courageous and certainly well-armed, seem much too unfocused or too prone to criminal indiscipline to defeat the mustered power, however decayed, of the Nehruvian state. In Kashmir and Punjab particularly, to the degree the guerrillas have any coherent long-term vision, they are counting on the state’s gradual weakening over a period of years, even decades. If it does not reform itself successfully, the Nehruvian state’s long-term staying power is indeed questionable. Among other things, counterinsurgency at the scale India now practices it is highly expensive, and the state is short on funds. Moreover, New Delhi’s historical blindness and mendacity in Kashmir and Punjab are difficult to overestimate.
 
But given India’s emotional attachment to the land in Kashmir—a sentiment not confined to the governing classes—it is hard to imagine the territory ever being permitted to secede unless Pakistan defeats India in a war, and that is a prospect that would draw long odds at Harrah’s. The same is doubly true in Punjab, where secessionist history is more shallow, the rebellion is less popular, and the political disorganization of the boys is more obvious.
 
So what you have instead of imminent revolution on the borders of South Asia today are these bubbling, brutalizing half-wars, where generations of teenagers are drawn into the radicalizing vocation of extortion, terror, and seemingly unwinnable revolt, motivated and even ennobled by the death-squad nihilists on the other side such as Punjab’s K. P. S. Gill, whose attitudes make it even more difficult for the state to recover its reputation or its authority. The long-term consequences of this sort of youth education, during a time of accelerating, irreversible social and economic change on the subcontinent, are potentially disturbing but not so easy to predict.
 
Just after the Soviet Union fell in on itself, Shekhar Gupta, one of India’s most energetic and independent journalists, published a long essay that asked in part whether what happened to India’s great patron to the north could also happen to India. Gupta has covered separatist insurgencies in South Asia for fourteen years and probably knows the dynamics better than anyone. Yet in his essay he dodged the question he raised. I went to see him in his office at
India Today
in New Delhi to ask what he really thought.
 
“I don’t think anyone who has been exposed to the situation in India can help but draw parallels with the Soviet Union, because I don’t think there are any two countries in the world which are so multilinguistic, multiethnic, and multireligious,” he said. “It’s very interesting because both countries have chosen very different paths to create their own nationalism. You know, there was no such thing as Soviet nationalism, there was Russian nationalism. In India we did not even have in history anything akin to a Russian nationalism.... The challenge before both nations was to develop this nationalism. The Soviets chose the path of communism, ideology. We Indians chose a path which was a little less well defined, but a path of a constitution, a kind of liberal, multiethnic, multilinguistic kind of nation. So whereas the Soviet Union crushed all the languages in the republics, in India languages were encouraged. I think we went the other way to a fault.”
 
The difficulty now, he went on, is that for the first time since India’s independence, separatist insurgencies or other sorts of rebellious movements are raging simultaneously in a number of different places—not only in Punjab and Kashmir, but in several states in the northeast, pockets such as Gurkhaland—and there are even renewed stirrings in the Indian south.
 
“I don’t think it’s possible for any state to fight so many fires at the same time,” Gupta said. “First of all, it bleeds you economically because it costs a lot of money to do this. Second, it creates a general feeling of cynicism that, you know, everything is up in flames, nothing is going to work out. Earlier, it was trouble in one part of the country. At least ninety-five percent of the people were able to say, okay, it’s a small problem, so solve it. Today a lot more people—maybe thirty percent or forty percent—are either directly affected by the problem or witnessing trouble, and they are also watching the state’s helplessness or the state’s inadequacy.... In a poor society which has a lot of special social tension and discord anyway, militancy or rebellion can become employment, good business—and it also becomes a ‘high.’ ”
 
As we talked on it became apparent that what gave Gupta hope, what made him in the end an optimist, was less his faith in the state’s ability to transform itself than its track record of defeating insurgency even while proceeding from weakness. Through a shifting blend of brutality, patience, and federalist political solutions, not only India but Pakistan and Sri Lanka have—with the single exception of 1971—managed to hold on in the face of a mind-boggling array of separatist challenges. Occasionally it is the death squads that do the decisive work; more often some autonomy deal is eventually cut around the negotiating table. In these deals, the guerrillas are urged to form themselves into an ordinary political party and are given unbridled control over their regional patronage network. The guerrilla leadership is corrupted, the bubbling subsides, and the particular separatist challenge lapses into remission. Whether the best metaphor for this process is that of a cancer inexorably weakening the Nehruvian state until it dies or that of a long-lived body politic facing and defeating its own viruses remains to be seen. For now, while the cancer has its credible advocates, the big bets—indeed, nearly all the industrial and state wealth of South Asia—back the body politic.
 
Where the Nehruvian state seemed weakest, least able to assert itself, was not so much in Punjab and Kashmir. In those places, the forces of insurgency and counterinsurgency stood in stark, often brutal, opposition, and so even a weakened state could muster impressive power on its own behalf.
 
But that was not the case in northern India, in the urban slums of Kanpur or Aligarh or Agra, the overpopulated heartland of the Indian body politic. In these places mobs of civilians, not organized guerrillas, mainly stirred the dust. The lines of opposition blurred, and the heavily armed servants of the state sometimes had trouble deciding which side they were on.
 
11
 
Riding the Tiger
 
 
All roads take us to God.
 
—
Lai Krishna Advani
 
 
 
W
e had been searching all morning for the Man Who Kept the Crows. We found instead his grandson, Somnath Viyas, a gray-haired retired schoolteacher with a master’s degree in political science who lived in a tall stone row house in a crowded, damp square in central Varanasi, one of India’s holiest cities.
 
North India was smoldering again. In Varanasi, Kanpur, Aligarh, Lucknow, Agra—dense cities of more than a million people each—edgy mobs of Hindus and Muslims roamed the streets. In sudden bursts of fury they fought pitched battles with rudimentary homemade pistols, country shotguns, knives, gasoline grenades, and spiked sticks. Local politician-preachers led the mobs on processions into the slum quarters of their enemies to chant provocative slogans. Among the mobs stood battalions of paramilitary security police, dispatched by New Delhi to restore order in India’s northern heartland. But the police were mainly Hindus and reluctant in this emotional, polarized climate to fire on their own, so they tended to restore order by standing in front of the Hindu mobs and shooting at the Muslim mobs. This understandably enraged the Muslims further. And if you were angry, you could do a lot of damage in these slums. The alleys were no wider than a car and were smothered by four-and five-story brick and concrete buildings of haphazard design whose jumbled architecture provided cover for sudden strikes and quick escapes. Hindus and Muslims lived literally on top of one another in the mixed quarters. When the lines of battle were drawn, it was sometimes necessary for families to move their belongings out of one building and into another nearby so as to put themselves on the proper side. These makeshift religious lines would spring up overnight in a troubled slum and were referred to universally as the “Indo-Pakistan border” in a harkening back to the terrible religious strife that accompanied Partition. As the lines settled and the residents prepared to fight, you could see old women in the dirt alleys hauling goats and burlap sacks on carts across the street to join relatives on the other side of the “border.” Then, usually in darkness, the fighting would begin. Once, in Kanpur on the eve of a battle, I saw young women walking from door to door to hand out women’s bracelets to teenage boys who they felt had shrunk from the fight in a previous riot—the bracelets were meant to shame the boys into fighting harder this time.
 
The rhetorical, nominal cause of these riots was a continuing national dispute over religious places of worship. A swelling right-wing Hindu revivalist movement in India had identified some three thousand Muslim mosques and burial grounds that the Hindu nationalists said had been unjustly constructed centuries before on the sites of Hindu temples. (There are about one hundred million Muslims in India, or about 12 percent of the population. Some are the descendants of precolonial invaders; most are descendants of impoverished low-caste Hindus who converted to Islam in the old empires to seek opportunity.) The Hindu revivalists had targeted three such usurping Muslim mosques which they said had to be torn down or moved and replaced with Hindu temples.
 
One mosque was in Ayodhya, the supposed birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, or Rama. Late in 1992, a vast mob of politically organized hard-core Hindu militants swarmed over the seventeenth-century Ayodhya mosque, smashed it with hammers, and tore it down, stone by stone. This stunning act of intolerance ignited vicious slum riots across India. Hundreds died, mainly Muslims. A sect of Hindu fanatics in Bombay launched a pogrom against Muslims in the city’s slums, burning down houses, setting victims on fire, stabbing people to death with crude knives. Religious violence, even on this terrible scale, is not new in India. But there was something about the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, which the government had tried and failed to preserve, that seemed unusually ominous and demoralizing to many secular-minded Indians. Although it was possible to understand the Hindu revivalist movement as a product in considerable part of the most transparent and artificial sort of political manipulation, the hatred and destruction unleashed in the squalid lanes of Ayodhya late in 1992 could not be so easily explained. All the mustered power of the Indian state had failed to stop what law and common sense decreed an illegal act. If that sort of Hindu militant street power represents a vision of India’s future, the implications are almost too chilling to contemplate.
 
The Hindu militants’ determination to destroy mosques will not stop at Ayodhya. On the short list of targeted Muslim places of worship are a mosque in Varanasi, site of an important temple to the Hindu god Shiva, and one in Mathura, which Hindus believe is the birthplace of their god Krishna. The campaign to replace all these mosques had begun in Ayodhya, cynics said, because Ram was the most popular god in the north Indian electoral heartland, and thus a campaign on his behalf would be the most politically useful to the Hindu preacher-politicians. Local religious riots generated by the campaign had their own peculiar dynamics. But they were linked to the broad, swelling national campaign by the Hindu revivalists to reassert Hindu prerogatives and to take revenge for alleged injustices perpetrated by Muslim rulers in precolonial times. After Ayodhya, where this will lead is uncertain.

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