On the Grand Trunk Road (4 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
As the region’s elites make this turn, dissenters bark at them noisily from the left and right and sometimes set off the explosions that rattle South Asia’s surface. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, the insurgents include Islamic radicals and secessionists who rail against the whiskey-and-soda set that has managed and mismanaged national affairs since independence. In India, they are Hindu revivalists, unrepentant Communists, campaigners for caste justice, radical separatists, and cranky, idiosyncratic right-wingers. In Sri Lanka, they are fanatical revolutionaries who live in the jungles and communicate through pamphlets. What they have in common is contempt for the status-quo elites, even elites that are attempting to reform themselves.
One of South Asia’s most interesting dissidents is Arun Shourie, a much despised and much admired Indian newspaper editor, neoconservative writer, investigative reporter, and religious nationalist. Shourie is a detached, soft-spoken man with a Hitlerian mustache and a penchant for repeating accounts of his early encounters with Robert F. Kennedy during the early 1960s. I sometimes visited him in his air-conditioned office and asked him to identify the ways in which South Asia’s elites have helped to fuel the sound and fury they sometimes seem to want to explain away. In response, he spoke of Nehruvian socialism as if it were Soviet bolshevism.
“We have converted socialism into just a device for centralizing patronage,” Shourie said one afternoon toward the end of my stay. “The state became those who occupy offices of the state at the moment—it became their private property. We have yet good time to change, and the people will be the great allies. They are the ones who suffer every day from the inefficiency of the state and its owners.... These few persons in the elite have become so weak and so illegitimate, even in their own eyes, that ... they are always in dread that the testimonials on which they survived will be taken away.”
One point the elites and the iconoclasts agree on is that the explosions and gunfire erupting across the surface of South Asia today are symptoms and auguries of profound change. Faster than ever before, under immense and varied pressures, South Asia is shedding its past and groping for its future. One side of the debate sees modern India, and to a lesser degree its neighbors, as responsive to these forces of change and capable of withstanding and absorbing them. The other side blames the ruling elites of South Asia for fostering violence and predicts that they will not mend their ways in time to prevent swelling, convulsive bloodshed.
As I wandered through the subcontinent, reporting on slum riots, insurgencies, assassinations, border wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions, it did not often seem necessary to choose between these analyses or dwell at length on their forecasts. Out on the mud streets and in the villages, the struggle for change, emancipation, social and economic opportunity, power, and revenge—the struggle for possession of the future—seemed filled with such energy that trying to predict the outcome would inevitably be risky. But the faces, the voices, the pathos, helped point the way from the noise along the surface to the pressures rising underneath.
Here is one face: dark-skinned, bespectacled, young, white teeth protruding from an overbite. She wore a green scarf and an orange salwar kameez, a draping gown. That morning, she had tied her tangled black hair behind her neck; it now fell below her shoulders. Clenched in her hands at chest level was a garland of white flowers attached to a sandalwood rod. She stood in a crowd next to a makeshift corridor built from logs and rope. Beside her was a young Tamil girl who held a sheet of paper containing verses of Hindi poetry composed in honor of Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister of India. The young poet planned to read the verses to Gandhi, who was approaching along the corridor dressed in white khadi and Western jogging shoes, smiling amid the commotion, chants, and shouts of joy that routinely greeted his orchestrated public appearances.
Later, millions of Indians concentrated their imaginations on this freeze-frame: The bespectacled dark-skinned woman’s mouth was slightly agape and she seemed serene, respectful. She was memorialized at this moment by a photographer, so it was possible afterward to revisit the image again and again. By then, of course, scrutiny was enhanced by the knowledge that beneath the woman’s orange salwar lay a Velcro belt intricately wired to a nitroglycerine-based explosive, and that a moment after the picture was snapped, as the little girl prepared to read her poem, the bespectacled woman handed her sandalwood garland to Rajiv Gandhi, bent to touch his feet in respect, pushed a detonator on her Velcro belt, and set off a bomb that ripped her own body in half, obliterated most of Gandhi’s head, and killed the little poet and a dozen others standing nearby.
The bespectacled woman’s nom de guerre was Dhanu. She was twenty-four, a Sri Lankan Tamil from Batticaloa, a picturesque city situated beside sandy beaches on the Indian Ocean. Her father was described by Indian investigators as an ideological mentor of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the radical separatist group also blamed by many for the assassination bombing of Ranjan Wijeratne, the Sri Lankan minister of state for defense. Little else could be discovered about Dhanu. She had a sister living in Paris. She had finished junior high school. She may or may not have been raped by Indian soldiers in Sri Lanka. Beyond this, what led her to Rajiv Gandhi’s political rally in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991, what may have passed through her mind as she stood with her garland beside the child-poet, is not known. A year after the assassination, India Today, the country’s leading news magazine, could muster only a three-paragraph biography of Dhanu. “An enigma,” the magazine called her.
In some ways, Gandhi’s funeral was no less mysterious, because by the time it was held in New Delhi three days later, hardly anyone seemed moved by it, other than his immediate family and the thuggish politicians who dominate the rank and file of Gandhi’s Congress Party political machine. When Rajiv’s mother, Indira Gandhi, died at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, organized mobs poured through New Delhi’s streets, burning Sikhs alive at taxi stands and apartment houses, slaughtering at least several thousand of them in revenge. Fury begat fury begat fury. But in the aftermath of Dhanu’s explosion, fury evaporated. During those three tense days between the assassination and Rajiv Gandhi’s funeral, people speculated about why interest in the event was ebbing. Some said it was because Rajiv, unlike his mother, died as a spent political force—nobody cared about him enough to seek serious revenge. Others said it was because Tamils, Dhanu’s ethnic group, were less identifiable than the turbaned, bearded Sikhs and thus less easy to isolate and kill in street revenge attacks. Others said the quietude was encouraged by appeals for calm from Congress leaders, which only proved that the 1984 attacks on Sikhs had been an active conspiracy carried out by certain Congress politicians. Perhaps there was something to each of these theories. But in the streets of Delhi that Friday in May, when they pulled Rajiv Gandhi’s body along vacant avenues in blistering heat, what seemed palpable was a collective sense of paralyzing shock—at the severed torsos and bloody faces photographed at Sriperumbudur and splashed across the newspapers, and at the strange audacity of a twenty-four-year-old woman willing to destroy herself and all around her in a political act.
The Congress Party thugs brought in a few thousand peasant farmers and laborers. They packed them into trucks, unloaded them in the center of the capital, and told them to chant slogans on the streets of New Delhi during the three days Gandhi’s remains lay in state at Teen Murti House, the official residence of his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru. But these professional mourners—Congress street “cadres” like those who burned Sikhs alive in 1984—seemed a little confused about who they were supposed to blame for Gandhi’s death and how angry they were supposed to get about it. Around the grassy circle outside Teen Murti and along the tree-lined avenues nearby, the Congress-supplied crowds reached back initially to the old slogans of imperialism, in which foreigners are responsible for most things wrong in India. “The white people are eating away at India!” they yelled, and then beat up Western photographers and reporters who came to see the “grieving” thousands at Teen Murti. After a couple of days, however, this xenophobic theme dissipated, in part because some of the politicians who organized the Teen Murti crowds wanted Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, Sonia Gandhi, to take over leadership of the party and the country, and it occurred to them that stirring up hatred of white people might hinder the way to Sonia’s rule. By then, evidence from the assassination site made it appear all but certain that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had been involved. But while there was tension on the streets, nobody was yet prepared to hold Indian Tamils directly responsible for the transgressions of their Sri Lankan brethren. So after a few days the rabble climbed back onto their trucks and went home, still shouting “Long live Rajiv Gandhi!,” only now with less conviction than before.
Everybody was talking about what it meant to lose Gandhi, the last plausible heir to the Nehru-Gandhi family dynasty that had towered over Indian politics since independence from Britain in 1947. Gandhi struck many as a decent man but a lousy politician, prone to autocracy, political cowardice, and outright stupidity. But he was also in some ways a young progressive, enamored of modernity and technology, an internationalist who symbolized the bridge between India’s past and future. To lose him to an anonymous young woman with a bomb wrapped around her waist seemed to many Indians an event of overwhelming hopelessness, a moment when South Asia’s collective strength and purpose was subsumed by an incomprehensible, self-destructive anger.
One afternoon before the funeral, after wrestling with the thugs outside Teen Murti, I telephoned O. V. Vijayan, a South Indian author of strange stories and novels about village and city life. Vijayan suffered from Parkinson’s disease and lived cooped up in a dark New Delhi apartment. Yet his writing displayed a lively imagination. I asked how he felt about Gandhi’s assassination. “It shows how fragile our institutions are,” he answered. “I’m not prepared to say that we are going to fall apart, but I think it will be very difficult to reconcile [our differences].... What’s happening in India is very murky. The whole thing. The intelligentsia somehow is unable to face the challenge. They seem to be giving in to chauvinism. It’s a very ominous thing.” And then: “Hope and despair are like a sandwich for us. We have been living on it.”
For the march to the cremation ground they brought out squads of Black Cats, elite commandos who wore black jumpsuits and black berets, carried black Sten guns, sported thick black mustaches, and tried to look tough, which they did well. We mingled for several hours with these morose soldiers at the main entrance to Teen Murti, waiting for the funeral organizers to load Gandhi’s coffin onto a gun carriage. Garlanded portraits of Gandhi were posted all around. Besides the Black Cats, the turbaned Punjab 26th Regiment stood at attention in the blazing sun. Periodically a helicopter flew overhead and dropped fluttering rose petals on the Teen Murti grounds. Beneath the helicopter, black crows and carrion birds circled.
When the body was finally ready, a professional rabble of a few thousand joined the long march. Along Rajpath, the wide, majestic avenue that leads from the president’s palace to India Gate, barricades had been erected to hold back the expected throngs of mourners. But the baking lawns along the avenue were empty. At the cremation ground, whose name translates roughly as “Where Power Rests,” the crowds were respectable in number but subdued. We gathered around a raised brick platform where the funeral pyre had been built. Soldiers carried Gandhi’s body up to the platform and placed it in the wood. The corpse was wrapped in a white shroud. Singers and priests sat cross-legged, crooning mournful ragas and reading passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, and the Bible. To one side was the VIP section, a few dozen folding chairs propped on a dirt slope and cordoned off with logs and rope. The assemblage of political personalities drawn by Gandhi’s murder and now forced to sit together on a dusty lot in 101-degree heat looked something like a cartoon from Mad Magazine: Dan and Marilyn Quayle in dark suits, Yasser Arafat in his checkered headdress, Prince Charles of England laden with medals, President Najibullah of Afghanistan in his Bolshevik business suit, Benazir Bhutto draped in designer-princess gowns, the King of Bhutan in ceremonial hat and interlocking threads. We reporters were separated from them like cattle in our own pen, so all we could do was speculate irreverently about what this disparate group of Very Important Persons could possibly be saying to one another to pass the time.
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