On the Grand Trunk Road (45 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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The United States government reinforced Pakistan’s worst political tendencies during the 1980s by pumping several billion dollars into Zia’s martial law regime while in pursuit of cold war objectives along the Afghan Hindu Kush. These direct and large subsidies, in the form of outright military grants and favorable credits, not only enriched and empowered the Pakistan Army relative to its domestic political competitors, but they reinforced a form of polarized, unforgiving politics that has retarded Pakistan’s development since the 1950s. When the United States precipitously cut its cold war subsidy flow in September 1990, nominally because of Washington’s concerns about nuclear proliferation but in the broader context of declining concern about preserving Pakistan as a strategically important ally, the immediate short-term effect was to disrupt Pakistan’s volatile politics by providing rhetorical grist for the Islamic-nationalist mill. Nawaz Sharif, heading a rightist Islamic coalition, marched from election rally to election rally in the fall of 1990 denouncing the United States as evil and fickle and Benazir Bhutto as Washington’s decadent lackey. This tactic, along with Bhutto’s myriad failings while in office, helped to carry Sharif to victory.
 
But what happened once Sharif reached office seemed more instructive about the importance of the cold war’s passing than did the opportunistic tones of his campaign rhetoric. Backed by a remarkably broad domestic consensus, he began to preach about the virtues of international, middle-class capitalism. He moved away from the Islamic radicals in his coalition. He challenged in a tentative way some of the army’s traditional prerogatives. Of course, between Sharif’s grand dreams of a prosperous, self-reliant, capitalist Pakistan—another Asian Tiger—and the realization of such dreams stand his own limits as a visionary, his lack of credibility as a national politician, corruption in his government, disintegration of the state apparatus, endemic poverty, illiteracy, and the polarizing legacies of recent history. These amount to enough obstacles, in short, to make any pessimist credible. But at the very least, the removal of Pakistan’s cold war subsidies has altered the range of plausible approaches to these problems. The army is now much less able to afford, in basic financial terms, the costs of undemocratic governance. So too, for that matter, is Benazir Bhutto. The Islamic radicals cannot come up with external subsidies to replace the ones lost by the cold war’s demise because the wealthy Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran will not or cannot afford to provide them. So the loss of the subsidies means Pakistan’s domestic political competitors are fenced in by new, pressing economic imperatives. I would not want to predict that what is occurring now within this fence is going to turn out well. But I do believe that it is a framework far more likely to promote the realization of Pakistani prosperity, nationalism, and independence than was the smothering embrace of cold war alliance.
 
In India the parallel case is more subtle but more promising. The final disintegration of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1991 made clear how the inequitable, inefficient structures of the Nehruvian state had grown since 1970 to depend in part on direct and indirect subsidies from the former Soviet empire. Measuring these subsidies is more difficult than in the case of Pakistan because they were contained largely in govemment-to-government trade deals between India, the Soviet Union, and Soviet allies in East Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. These deals included barter, guarantees, and currency conversions that amounted in many cases to effective subsidies from Moscow. How large these subsidies really were is a subject of dispute and it may be difficult for economists ever to assess them accurately and completely. But it is indisputable that because of them, India acquired much of its massive military arsenal on favorable terms, exported shoddy, inefficiently produced goods to markets that basically didn’t know any better, and was able for longer than it otherwise might have been to subsidize its sprawling state bureaucracy with hard currency borrowings from the West. In 1991, when the Soviet Union itself disappeared, the rapid deterioration of these Soviet-sponsored trading arrangements, coupled with the accumulation of international debt, provided India with a crucial shock of recognition—just when its middle class was becoming fed up with the recent incompetence and hypocrisy of its traditional, Nehruvian political class. Why did Indian prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, having squeaked into office in the chaotic atmosphere that followed Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and the rise of Hindu revivalism, move so suddenly in the summer of 1991 toward free market reform and integration with the international economy? It was not, as Rao made clear to anyone who talked with him, because he was enamored of Western-dominated capitalism; on the contrary, he had spent his entire political life as the author of tracts justifying India’s self-styled socialist nonalignment and its “balanced” view of bolshevism, which included among other things virtually unqualified support—in public, at least—for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Rather, it was because Rao recognized that with the end of the cold war, India had little choice but to change. In this recognition he was hardly alone. Fortunately for Rao, the legacy of the Nehruvian experiment includes an energetic class of technocrats, industrialists who have competed successfully outside of the Soviet bloc, and a populace that has grown used to rising prosperity but is impatient for more. It also includes, not incidentally, a system of governance that makes it possible for those who preach about prospective prosperity to succeed.
 
15
 
DEM-o-crah-see
 
 
People are not used to the new order.
—Raj Baral
 
 
 
 
O
ne of the strengths of democracy in South Asia is its relationship to festival. An election in India or Pakistan transforms the countryside with splashes of color—banners strung across roads, party symbols such as hands or wheels painted onto tractors and buses, graffiti dabbed on walls and houses, patchwork canopies erected for rallies on baking dirt lots. Voters move in clan-sized groups through these fairgrounds, in search of diversion as much as political decision. The election carnivals associate democracy with the most celebratory and hopeful sorts of traditional community events, and in India, with repetition, voting seems in many ways to have become an end in itself, irrespective of the periodic frustrations associated with its outcomes. This is by far the most useful legacy of the besieged Nehruvian political class in India. It managed to nurture the public’s sense of entitlement to elections even while it abused the public’s trust. By clinging to this principle, independent India created and then stabilized a means of public arbitration that none of its neighbors have enjoyed with the same consistency. The myriad benefits of this path are even more obvious to India’s envious neighbors than to many Indians.
 
Today, for the first time since the British withdrew from South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal all are constitutional, parliamentary democracies, albeit in varying states of repair. Bangladeshis were the last to achieve this. Late in 1990, they threw out their philandering, golf-loving president-for-life, General Mohammed Ershad. Dhaka’s streets erupted with democratic furor, although the agitation was tempered by awareness of Bangladesh’s short but brutal history of calamity-in-the-name-of-democracy. Even the ascendant mujaheddin in Kabul talk quixotically about an attempted leap forward from Afghanistan’s traditional methods of tribal consensus-building to a new system of one man, one vote. (One woman, one vote appears altogether out of the question.) There are many ways to think about this sudden spasm of democracy in South Asia, depending on your susceptibility to despair. How many steps backward must be taken before the next steps forward is a question beyond the control of democratic revolutionaries dancing in the streets. But if you accept that democracy is a worthy end in itself, then it is hard to see these recent changes as anything other than an exhilarating burst of progress.
 
South Asians do not require Westerners to explain to them why democracy is useful; since the beginning of the subcontinental independence movements in the nineteenth century, democratic principles have provided the basis for diverse forms of politics of hope. Democracy has become the dominant language of political progress and popular will, and not even the most powerful appeals to predemocratic public ideas such as Islam and politicized Hinduism, or postdemocratic ideas such as Marxist revolution, has yet toppled this ideological enthronement.
 
The difficulty is that over time, the meaning of ideology depends on its expression through institutions, and here South Asia’s experience is more precariously mixed. The Nehruvian state in India has succeeded, for example, in institutionalizing democracy’s narrowest mechanisms. Despite occasional, relatively isolated episodes of vote-rigging, India’s elections have been free and fair, and the constitutional arrangements around them have proven admirably flexible. But obviously, to measure a democracy’s strength by the conduct of its voting is to miss the point of democracy’s original appeal. Voters understand that the promise of a democratic system is not merely that the public may hold tyrants and crooks accountable, but that the public will be rewarded in this process with some form of egalitarian opportunity. As long as a democratic nation fails to create such opportunity through its institutions, it remains vulnerable. Prosperity—not raw wealth in itself, but national growth, national momentum—is the tide on which social mobility depends. In South Asia today, it seems to me, rapidly rising, capitalist-style prosperity is more essential than ever for the consolidation of democracy because the public, state-owned institutions are moribund and broke. They cannot afford to offer new jobs, so they cannot offer social mobility, so they cannot offer hope. And hope is the foundation of democracy, the source of political creation. After four decades of nursing colonial wounds, settling scores, and reckoning with the successes and failures of grand public experiments and international alliances, South Asians of all kinds today are deciding once again where they should go looking for hope. By the time I left in 1992, my own feeling was that a sufficient number already knew where they should begin, if not exactly where they would end. That, at least, was the indelible impression left by the strangely wonderful, unexpected democratic revolution that spilled into the Himalayan mountains as the subcontinent made its epochal turn from the cold war to what lies beyond.
 
Of all the ways in which the cold war’s end rippled and washed through South Asia, one of the most charming was what occurred during the fall of 1989 in the dilapidated offices of Kathmandu’s major newspapers, and particularly at the
Rising Nepal,
the English-language broadsheet referred to by local libidinous expatriate ex-hippies as the
Rising Nipple,
as in, “Did you see the
Rising Nipple
this morning?” That autumn it was a sight to see. Its beleaguered Nepalese editors were playing a rebellious joke on their king, a sort of game based on the themes of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
 
Since the eighteenth century, Nepal had been ruled with varying degrees of enlightenment and ruthlessness by a line of kings, the Shah dynasty, and by the Shahs’ usurping rivals, the Ranas. The country’s history was an epic of court intrigues, alleged poisonings, manipulations, royal coups d’état, and minor-league geopolitics arising from Nepal’s position as a Himalayan buffer state sandwiched between India and China. In 1950, the heir to the royal Shah dynasty, King Tribhuvan, conspired with Indian prime minister Nehru to retake power. (Nehru was worried about China’s military occupation of Tibet and was looking for a friend on his northern border.) Fitful experiments with Nehruvian democracy and socialism ensued briefly, but Tribhuvan’s son, King Mahendra, put an end to them during the 1960s by dismissing parliament, banning all organized political activity, suppressing non-Hindu religious groups, sending the police to put down demonstrations, and jailing uncooperative newspaper editors. In the decades since then, Nepal had remained a quaint, anachronistic, physically majestic, deeply impoverished Himalayan kingdom under the absolute rule of Mahendra’s heir, King Birendra. Tens of thousands of American and European tourists poured through King Tribhuvan airport in Kathmandu each year to trek in the glades and foothills or scale the forbidding peaks, including Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. Some urban Nepalese made out well under this regime, particularly the clans of traders and royal relatives who clustered around the monarchy and divvied up franchises in hotels, transport, catering, and other tourist services. But most Nepalese lived in isolated, medieval rural poverty in the hills, dependent on subsistence farming and nominally supported by a dysfunctional welfare state, which was controlled by the king’s ministers and funded for philanthropic reasons by Western governments. Any Nepali who objected publicly or persistently to these arrangements was likely to find himself or herself in prison, although by South Asian and broader Third World standards the repression was relatively gentle and easy to ignore. To the degree they thought at all about the place, Western governments tended to like Nepal, not because it was just or dynamic, but because it was stable and neutral, and thus it was easy for the diplomats and the philanthropic contractors to go about their business without much disruption from the locals.

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