On the Grand Trunk Road (47 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
A clan of us Delhi-based foreign reporters, busy with the usual scattered obligations, had been trying to keep track of the democracy movement’s gradual fermentation since its February launching. The sudden swelling of popular demonstration that Friday meant we had to scramble. Seven of us had the last plane into Kathmandu that evening pretty much to ourselves, since the tourists were being told that it was not possible to get from the airport to the downtown hotels because of a nationwide transport strike and an army-enforced night curfew.
King Tribhuvan Airport sits on a plateau above the Kathmandu Valley and the capital city. As we dragged our luggage out of the terminal in the darkness, we could see fires burning for miles and hear shouts of protesters echoing all about. It was eerie and exhilarating. Just below the terminal, teenagers hurled rocks at billboards of the king’s visage, painted over “Welcome to Nepal” signs, and burned tires in the road. There were no cars, no buses, no taxis. We decided to walk the two miles to the nearest hotel to see what was happening in the streets and then file our dispatches by telex. So we grabbed a couple of baggage trolleys, loaded all our luggage onto them, and headed briskly down the hill into the revolution—the ultimate in pack journalism.
The revolutionaries were friendly, the police seemed too frightened and preoccupied to bother with us, and for about a mile we rolled along, marveling at the sights. Suddenly a black van came racing up from behind and stopped just in front of us on the main road to Kathmandu. Out jumped a dozen or so riot police with truncheons and a few soldiers holding automatic weapons. They surrounded us. A mustachioed lieutenant with a walkie-talkie pushed through the gun barrels to the front and announced that we were in big trouble.
He was from airport security and he was upset—very, very upset—that we had stolen two baggage trolleys from King Tribhuvan Airport.
We proceeded to have what must be one of the most absurd conversations in the history of world revolution. He wanted us to give the trolleys back. We said we needed them to get to our hotel. Is it our fault, we asked, that you are having a revolution and so there aren’t any porters or taxis to carry our bags? We pointed to broken bricks, glass, and a burning tire nearby and suggested that perhaps he and his men had better things to worry about than our trolleys. Mark Tully, who has not spent two decades in South Asia for the BBC for nothing, reached into his linguistic bag of Hindi curse words, which evidently translated reasonably well into Nepali. But the lieutenant insisted even more adamantly than before that we yield our carts.
Emboldened by what we considered to be the utter implausibility of an army lieutenant’s shooting seven foreigners over two baggage carts, our side, led by the large and belligerent Tully-sahib, declared, in effect, No, do what you must, arrest us, shoot us, but we are not giving up our trolleys. Several of us leaned on them meaningfully.
The lieutenant then retreated with his walkie-talkie and yammered in Nepali for what seemed an excessive time. He returned to say, Okay, you can keep the trolleys, but give us your passports. When you return the carts, you can get your passports back.
We responded, Forget it, we need the passports for identification, to check into hotels and change money. There’s no way we’re giving them up. We offered to make a “deposit” on the trolleys, but he refused—obviously a man of integrity.
In the middle of this, a small band of protestors, in defiance of curfew, king, God, and country, marched by chanting “DEM-o-crah-see!” and something along the lines of “Death to King Birendra!” But the lieutenant paid them no mind. He got back on his walkie-talkie and at our urging, negotiated a compromise. We agreed to give him our visiting cards with our passport numbers written on the back as a guarantee that we would return the trolleys in a few days, when order was restored, if order was restored. The soldiers kept their guns at the ready while they checked our passports to make sure that we wrote down the correct numbers. Before climbing back into his van, the lieutenant turned and announced in his sternest tone, “Be sure of one thing—if these trolleys are not returned, we will lodge a formal protest with your respective embassies.”
We pushed off into the night, laughing so hard that it hurt. The Nepalese teenagers wandering around in the night, chanting and setting their symbolic fires, seemed to be having a pretty good time as well.
There was still the problem of the shootings before the palace gates. Kathmandu residents were enraged by the killings. Word spread that renewed and even larger popular demonstrations for democracy would be attempted at the palace on Sunday. Meantime, the king ordered the army into the capital, and by Saturday morning his soldiers had erected bunkers on many street corners to enforce a twenty-four-hour curfew. The silence and emptiness across Kathmandu that day did not portend well for the king. It seemed to me that either His Majesty had to relinquish power quickly and decisively, or else he had better be dusting off his helicopter manuals over at the palace. On Saturday afternoon, I called over to the palace official I had met in February and he agreed to see me. At dusk, I shouted my way past half a dozen bunkers, explaining and gesturing with some exaggeration that I had been summoned by the king. I reached the palace gates and was ushered inside by unhappy-looking Gurkha soldiers in full battle dress.
“The king is consulting a large number of people,” my informant explained. “He has seen all the ex—prime ministers, most of the speakers of the old parliaments. He’s been just busy meeting important people. What happened Friday was a surprise to everyone. We feel now the process has gone quite far in meeting the widespread desire for change. I think the dialogue is quite serious.”
I asked what the king was prepared to accept.
“We’re really assessing what they want,” he answered, referring to the democratic opposition. “We don’t want to force anything down their throat. They haven’t raised the question of the king’s role yet. Their demand has been multiparty democracy. The king has no personal objection to being a European-style constitutional monarch. He’s guided by what the Nepali people want.... We’ll show a lot of flexibility there.” This sounded, in the circumstances, like a very useful capitulation. My informant ended our long discussion with this sentence: “We basically have to keep our people happy.”
Four hours later, this enlightened insight of noblesse oblige resulted in the announcement, broadcast over state-owned television, that “on the basis of the international environment and the will of the people,” the king had decided to amend the constitution immediately to provide for multiparty democracy, had lifted the ban on political parties, had ordered the release of political prisoners, and had decided to appoint a committee to advise him further on how to change the constitution “as per the will of the people.” The business about the “international environment” seemed a particularly nice touch—here was a monarch who read the newspapers. The king is dead! Long live the king!
The celebration began in the darkness that night and carried on through the next day. By midmorning several hundred thousand people had poured into the streets of Kathmandu. Businessmen, beggars, rickshaw drivers, students, children, and tourists dabbed their faces and clothes with red paint, a Hindu rite of celebration, and then they marched through the city center in great sweeping circles, banging drums and demanding that lackeys of the old regime be hanged. Students rode about in trucks brimming with previously illegal party flags. They stuck flags on rooftops and in the stone hands of the statue of King Mahendra near the palace. That many of these flags depicted Communist hammers and sickles on crimson fields did not, in the emerging international scheme of things, seem a pressing anomaly. Overnight, the anthem of the student movement had been transformed. Now it went, “We GOT DEM-o-crah-see!”
I wandered for hours through the streets in an emotional stupor, drunk on the political joy spilling over everywhere, very much uninterested in the requisite interviews. Anyway, for Western newspapers, the democratic transformation of Nepal was a story with very short legs. And as always, there were reasons for skepticism. There had been a period of political liberalization earlier in Nepalese history and it had failed. It was ridiculous to believe that the new, elected political bosses would perform in office much better than the old bosses, or that the advent of democracy would lead directly to the alleviation of Nepal’s crushing rural poverty. But that Sunday afternoon in the streets of Kathmandu, in the sunshine, amid the dancing and singing, none of this seemed terribly important.
16
Bombay and Beyond
Liberalization is not a one-shot deal—that you switch on the lights
and the darkness goes away.
—Aditya Birla
M
arketing the bright future of India is today a booming trade, and in India itself there is no shortage of persuasive salesmen. Certainly the best known and arguably the most interesting of these are the Ambanis, a Bombay-based family of self-made industrial tycoons who loom over the political economy the way the Rockefellers did in America a century ago. As was true with the Rockefellers, the principal debate about the Ambanis is to what degree they should be seen as progressive and to what degree as robber barons. In the contemporary ferment of capitalist reform in South Asia, many are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, not least because the family’s power is difficult to challenge. The Ambanis themselves have proven nothing if not their energetic ability to adapt, so as free market ideology swept India after the cold war’s demise, the family tried publicly to disengage a little from the political king-making and socialist wheel-greasing that made them most vulnerable to charges of corruption. Anil Ambani, the young, articulate scion with a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania, spent less time dining with politicians in New Delhi and more time wooing investment bankers in New York and Tokyo, carrying with him impressive charts about the financial strengths of the family’s $1 billion-plus industrial empire, Reliance Industries, and about the promise of the emerging Indian economy. But even Anil, who seems to be the family’s most outward-looking member, did not neglect his domestic constituency. When he married late in the fall of 1990, he staged his nuptials in a Bombay cricket stadium and invited more than one hundred thousand of his dearest friends. Reliance operatives in New Delhi scoured the capital in advance of the event, carrying gold-embossed invitations by hand and inquiring discreetly of important guests whether they would like to be met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.
arketing the bright future of India is today a booming trade, and in India itself there is no shortage of persuasive salesmen. Certainly the best known and arguably the most interesting of these are the Ambanis, a Bombay-based family of self-made industrial tycoons who loom over the political economy the way the Rockefellers did in America a century ago. As was true with the Rockefellers, the principal debate about the Ambanis is to what degree they should be seen as progressive and to what degree as robber barons. In the contemporary ferment of capitalist reform in South Asia, many are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, not least because the family’s power is difficult to challenge. The Ambanis themselves have proven nothing if not their energetic ability to adapt, so as free market ideology swept India after the cold war’s demise, the family tried publicly to disengage a little from the political king-making and socialist wheel-greasing that made them most vulnerable to charges of corruption. Anil Ambani, the young, articulate scion with a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania, spent less time dining with politicians in New Delhi and more time wooing investment bankers in New York and Tokyo, carrying with him impressive charts about the financial strengths of the family’s $1 billion-plus industrial empire, Reliance Industries, and about the promise of the emerging Indian economy. But even Anil, who seems to be the family’s most outward-looking member, did not neglect his domestic constituency. When he married late in the fall of 1990, he staged his nuptials in a Bombay cricket stadium and invited more than one hundred thousand of his dearest friends. Reliance operatives in New Delhi scoured the capital in advance of the event, carrying gold-embossed invitations by hand and inquiring discreetly of important guests whether they would like to be met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.
The wedding was a sort of coronation of the emerging order. Much of it represented continuity, particularly the use of a traditional public festival to honor and sanctify the authority of a Big Man. But the throng in the streets of Bombay that day was drawn also by a less traditional worship of Big Money. The Ambanis claimed their financial and political power during the 1980s with astonishing and symbolically important speed. The family patriarch, Dhirubhai, is the son of a schoolteacher who toiled in a remote Gujarat village. Dhirubhai abandoned formal education and built his business by trading commodities and industrial materials between India and the Persian Gulf. By the time he achieved his dynamic fortune in the 1980s, schooled his sons to inherit it, and began to cozy up to India’s politicians—particularly those in the dominant Congress Party—the Ambanis had created around themselves an American-style mythology of upward mobility through perspicacity. That the family emerged from a Gujarat trading community with a long, enviable tradition of entrepreneurial success in international business diminished for some Indians the potential universalism of their saga. But nonetheless the tale contained elements of new social imperatives. The most important of these were Dhirubhai’s continual assertions that his rapid rise to wealth represented an achievement of Indian nationalism, and that this emerging nationalism was based on hard work, equal opportunity, and a pluralism that could rapidly overtake the old limits of clan and birth status. This self-image was doubtless calibrated for political effect, since the Ambanis were under constant attack from political and business enemies and they needed to come up with some larger justification for themselves. But self-interest did not diminish the power of their words and their example at a time when India was groping for new definitions of its national strength and identity.
“It is much more a nationalistic feeling than anything else that drives me,” Dhirubhai said. “If I slog to build up industry, I will slog in India. I refuse to go abroad, even though there may be a lot of profit in it, because I am not interested in building up other countries.... At Reliance we work like anything, leave no stone unturned, work round the clock, to achieve something which is the best. Our people get a kick out of Reliance’s achievements because it is their own individual achievement. We have got all communities; it is not only our kith and kin or anything like that. I have a rapport with all my people; they can reach me anytime they want.”
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