On the Grand Trunk Road (3 page)

Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online

Authors: Steve Coll

 
“There will be no change in plans,” Ranatunge answered. “We know what the minister wanted.”
 
Political assassination in South Asia is an advanced art characterized by grandiose themes of betrayal, revenge, and collective struggle. As in America, murders of beloved leaders hang over the culture, and the spinning of assassination conspiracy theories is a vibrant cottage industry. One of the hottest videotape rentals in New Delhi in the summer of 1992 was Oliver Stone’s
JFK.
As they talked about the movie, many urban Indians, including some in high government office, seemed to find the depth of Stone’s paranoia oddly reassuring.
 
Scan recent instances of violent political change in the subcontinental region bound for two centuries by British influence—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan—and you will find the spectacle peppered with overloud explosions and exaggerated gunfire. One feature common to many of the political murders is the excess force employed by the killers. This may be partially explained by the imprecise technologies available to South Asian assassins. But there is another factor: violence of feeling. Political killers in modern South Asia often stalk their victims with fanatical commitment. They are willing to kill themselves and uncounted others in pursuit of their ends. They are men and women of determination, engaged in grand dramas played out in the murky extremities of social conflict and political change.
 
They are also participants in mainstream politics. Sometimes, years after their work is complete, their supporters propose to erect statues to their memory, as occurred recently in India with Nathuram Godse, assassin of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Other times, they or their relatives become local heros and are nominated for political office, as has happened with nearly every Sikh in Punjab who has conspired to kill Rajiv or Indira Gandhi, the political (but not the familial) heirs to Mohandas. And of course, there are the more pedestrian cases of assassins committing or organizing murder to obtain office from a rival. Successful practitioners of this career strategy include such well-known names of recent South Asian politics as General Hussein Mohammed Ershad, president of Bangladesh for most of the 1980s; Babrak Karmal, who ushered the Soviet tanks into Afghanistan; and, at least in the view of some Pakistanis, the late cold warrior and military dictator General Zia ul-Haq, who ordered the hanging of the rival he overthrew, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir Bhutto.
 
There is in the details of these stories such genuine pathos as would embarrass even a producer of the most egregious Bombay masala cinema. Recall, as one example, Sikh subinspectors Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, bodyguards of former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who stepped from their sentry posts by a wicket gate behind the prime minister’s New Delhi residence on the morning of October 31, 1984, to take revenge for a military assault against the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion. The bodyguards approached Gandhi as she walked across the lawn in a peach sari, the prime minister’s chief aide later recalled. Beant Singh blocked the prime minister’s path, silently pulled a service revolver from his jacket, and aimed it at her.
 
“What are you doing?” Indira Gandhi asked.
 
The two assailants shot her twenty-nine times. They dropped their weapons and waited for nearby commandos to reach them. “We have done what we wanted to. Now you can do what you want to,” Beant Singh said grandly to his captors.
 
In the aftermath, investigators found a note on Indira Gandhi’s desk, apparently written four months before her murder. “If I die a violent death as people have been plotting, I know the [assassination] will be in the thought and action of the assassin, not in the dying,” the prime minister scribbled to herself. “No hate is dark enough to overshadow the extent of my love for my people and my country, no force is strong enough to divert me from my purpose.”
 
Another of South Asia’s modern empresses, Benazir Bhutto, echoed Gandhi’s tone several years later while recalling in an autobiography one of her last meetings with her doomed father, which occurred in a prison in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in 1978:
 
 
We sit in the courtyard for a precious hour, our heads close together so that the three jailers under orders to listen to us cannot. But they are sympathetic this time and do not press in on us.
 
“You are twenty-five now,” my father jokes, “and eligible to stand for office. Now Zia will never hold elections.”
 
“Oh, Papa,” I say.
 
We laugh. How do we manage it? Somewhere in the jail stand the hangman’s gallows which shadow our lives.
 
 
Interspersed with such melodrama there is farce. Consider the tale recorded by Raja Anwar, a former Pakistani leftist jailed for several years in Afghanistan’s Pul-i-Charki prison. During conversations with fellow political inmates, Anwar claimed to have pieced together the story of the murder of Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan revolutionary leader who died when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Amin had taken power several months before the invasion by directing thugs in his employ to murder the country’s president, Noor Mohammed Taraki, by choking him to death with a pillow, or by shooting him in the head, or by some other means (there are several versions). One way or another, the task was accomplished and Amin moved into a grand palace on the southern outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan’s mud-rock capital, from where he evidently expected to direct his country’s Bolshevik revolution for many years. Soviet military planners and rivals in Amin’s tiny band of leftist revolutionaries, however, wanted the new Afghan president out of the way. As their agents, by Anwar’s account (which some Afghans regard as credible, and some regard as incredible), the coup makers selected two Soviet cooks and a Soviet food taster whom Amin employed in his palace because he feared Afghan chefs might poison him.
 
On December 27, 1979, the day tens of thousands of Soviet troops moved to seize power in Afghanistan, Amin, his children, his daughter-in-law, and two guests sat down for lunch in the palace. According to the account later provided to Anwar by Amin’s widow and surviving children, they all ate food prepared by the Russian cooks. No sooner were they finished than they fell over unconscious as a result of poisoning. The family members and guests remained stricken. Amin, however, awoke and blinked his eyes about two hours later. The reason, his relatives said later, was that the night before, Amin’s cooks had unintentionally given him a bout of dysentery, and because of this Amin had only nibbled at his lunch. Grumbling, the nauseated but alert Afghan president was taken to his bedroom. A general from the Soviet army medical corps soon arrived. According to Anwar’s account, translated from the original Urdu:
 
 
The [Soviet] general must have been disappointed to see that the “patient” was well enough to greet him. Expressing his pleasure at Amin’s recovery, he left ... According to the Amin family, the first tank shell hit [the palace] at exactly six o’clock in the evening.... At 6:45 P.M., the invading force was in front of Amin’s residence. The resistance being offered by his guards was petering out. Amin ordered his [military aide] to extinguish all the lights, then turning to his wife he said, “Don’t worry, the Soviet army should be coming to our rescue any minute.” ... Suddenly, there were men outside shouting: “Amin, where are you? We have come to your help.” Abdul Rahman ran down the stairs screaming, “This way, come this way. This is where Amin is.” He [Rahman] was shot dead on the lower veranda. Amin’s youngest son and Mrs. Shah Wali [one of the lunch guests] were killed while they were still unconscious. One of Amin’s daughters was shot in the leg, but she survived, only to become a prisoner.... When they entered Amin’s office they found him in his chair, his head resting on the table with blood flowing from his temple. They are not sure if he had received a stray bullet or committed suicide.
 
 
It might seem obvious to suggest that nations whose politics are shaped by violent, pathological dramas such as these are profoundly unstable, destined to careen between dangerous crises. To a degree, this is the impression of South Asia held today in the West, particularly in the United States: one billion riotous and unfathomable poor people best left alone, disarmed if possible. In response to this characterization, some South Asians have evolved a shrill and defensive outlook in which they see themselves as simultaneously victims and conquerors of Western imperialism—the imperialism of history, perpetrated mainly by the British between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and the imperialism of culture, supposedly pursued today by the dominant if increasingly amorphous West. Those of us Westerners who move through this debate learn to recognize its caricatures: the white man haranguing locals because the phones don’t work and the planes don’t fly on time; the corrupt
babu
who blathers on about Western decadence, then segues into a rapturous account of his last trip to Disney World; the glassy-eyed Western hippie traipsing through the countryside in search of oriental enlightenment; the slick banker in Bombay or Karachi who predicts the imminent collapse of his society over a glass of black-market whiskey.
 
Often, the specific reference points of this debate about South Asia’s past and future are the instances of its sound and fury: its explosions. The themes are what this sound and fury signifies, where it arises from, and where it will lead.
 
Out of professional obligation and personal curiosity, I wandered for several years across this landscape and this debate, drawn by the needs of the home office disproportionately to the sites of the sound and fury. There was time, too, for sojourns in quieter corners. One of the great privileges of this ultimately circular journey was the ability to cross national borders freely. That is something South Asians, despite common languages and threads of history, can now do only rarely, and even then, what they see of each other frequently seems limited by blinders of enmity, suspicion, and prejudice.
 
It would be ridiculous to argue that the individual destinies of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka are bound by what they have in common. Since even before the end of World War II, when Lord Mountbatten drew lines on the map of Britain’s collapsing Indian empire and scurried home from the subcontinent, these nations have defined and pursued their independence along sharply different paths, and with distinctive results. Yet forty-five years after the empire, South Asians remain in many ways a single people, united by history, culture, geography, and poverty. One of the most obvious features of South Asia’s sound and fury is that it often arises from conflicts in which the combatants know each other too well for their collective good. It is easier to make mischief with an intimate enemy. Not only the region’s assassinations but also its ideological revolutions, counterrevolutions, covert wars, ethnic conflicts, class confrontations, and religious riots often contain a destructive abandonment possible only in a family feud.
 
Some students of South Asia argue that the outside world ought not to be alarmed by this surface noise. They make their case most plausibly with reference to India, South Asia’s unwieldy, chaotic, but oddly stabilizing geographical anchor and the region’s longest-lived constitutional democracy. Philip Oldenburg, an American scholar, wrote in 1901, “The surface of Indian life is indeed chaotic, often violent, connected to the surge of deeper changes that move at a slower pace. Yet the surface chaos also indicates that the system can bend and be molded by those forces, and that the whole need not explode or crack up because of the rigidity of institutions or a powerful ruling class. There is no sense in which one can call the country stagnant. India’s very size and diversity and even lack of discipline ensure that its paths to the future are many.... India’s ‘dark future’ may well be an ever-receding image.”
 
During my journey there were many ways in which I came to embrace the strength of this argument and similar ones, not only about India but about South Asia as a whole. Yet there are also reasons to be wary. While they “need not explode or crack up,” and while they have achieved much about which they are justly proud, South Asia’s indigenous governing elites have also demonstrated ample mendacity, foolishness, and brutality since achieving independence. The intellectuals among them have played a destructively disproportionate role in defining from above the purpose and structure of the postimperial state. Their extraordinary privileges arise from the ways in which the hierarchies of South Asia’s ancient feudal societies have been preserved and sanctified by twentieth-century state-dominated “mixed” socialist ideology, the model expounded by Jawaharlal Nehru during the 1940s and 1950s and implemented in varying forms in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
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From their perches atop society these elites often express self-satisfaction. But states whose very legitimacy is continually challenged by armed insurgents can hardly afford to be complacent about their own righteous viability. This is especially true when, as now, South Asian governments are attempting to revise their basic structure—their stated reasons for being—by shifting rapidly from planned, state-dominated socialism to an as-yet-undefined version of market capitalism.

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