As Hindu priests chanted, Rajiv’s son Rahul, a Harvard student, walked seven times around the funeral pyre with a burning torch and then set the wood alight. Soldiers fired three volleys of firearms. Bugles blew. Two vultures circled overhead. And then it was finished. Not many cried.
About a week later, I was in Amritsar, the capital of the Sikh religion, covering the last leg of the national election disrupted by Gandhi’s assassination. Radical Sikh separatists had already assassinated more than twenty candidates in ambushes and bomb attacks. I went with a colleague to see a Sikh professor of political science, Surjeet Singh Narang, at Guru Nanak Dev University. It turned out that while Narang drew his salary from the government of India and spent his days teaching young minds about the nature and conduct of politics, he was openly enthusiastic about the murder of election candidates because it was an expression of Sikh resistance to Indian rule. We asked what he thought about the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
“The feeling is good riddance,” he answered. “The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi is an inspiration.” Then he meditated for a little while on Dhanu, the Tamil assassin. He was impressed with her cunning. “We never thought of a human bomb,” he said. “We thought of other bombs but never a human bomb.”
We left the professor in this state of contemplation. So much yet to do, his wistful voice seemed to be saying, so much yet to learn.
In some ways, the problem with bombers in South Asia, whether professorial or proletarian, is not the actual damage they cause but the sheer noise they make—they drown out so much else that matters. Desperate for effect, the bombers ignite public crises and generate swells of political momentum that wash across a broader, more stable, and more progressive political economy on the subcontinent. This, in fact, is the bombers’ goal: to tranform the immediate chaos of a violent explosion into a sustained wave of political revolution or upheaval. Yet the bombers fail more often than not because for all their smoke, they cannot finally obscure South Asia’s quiet accumulation of ordinary change and ordinary achievement beneath the surface—the slow buildup of forward-looking middle classes, for example, or the countless negotiations within and between families and clans and castes to achieve peaceful social and economic change across generations. The bombers touch and even influence this slower, familiar change in South Asia. And they are abetted by the failures of South Asia’s political institutions and governing classes. But so far, after forty-five years of independence, they have found it maddeningly difficult to actually achieve violent or sudden political revolution in South Asia. So much incremental nonviolent revolution is taking place away from the sound and fury that it is in fact the bombers, and not the great “masses” they seek to stir, who often find it hard to keep up.
This, at least, is what a dour man named Bhajan Singh impressed on me one sultry week in the autumn of 1989 when we climbed into his garishly decorated ten-ton monster truck and set out across the northern Indian heartland for Calcutta, aiming simply to deliver a few piles of Punjabi cloth to a modest clutch of Bengali merchants some nine hundred miles away.
2
The Grand Trunk Road
A line of stalls selling very simple food and tobacco, a stack of
firewood, a police station, a well, a horse-trough, a few trees, and,
under them, some trampled ground dotted with the black ashes of
old fires, are all that mark a parao on the Grand Trunk.... The
police are thieves and extortioners but at least they do not suffer
any rivals.
A
fter tramping through mud and pools of oil, we found Bhajan Singh asleep in a mosquito-infested back room beside his trucking company’s East Delhi office. He was a long, bony, bearded Sikh. A soiled white turban draped his eyes. Rousted from his nap, he led us wordlessly through the fetid night smoke spewed by East Delhi’s factories.
He climbed into the ten-ton Tata truck that was his home. He seemed less than overjoyed about my plan, concocted upon arrival in South Asia in the summer of 1989 and partially appropriated from Kipling, to saturate myself with India by taking a nine-hundred-mile truck journey from New Delhi to Calcutta along the Grand Trunk Road, which spans the breadth of northern India. Later, Bhajan Singh grumbled to my translator, a portly high-caste Brahmin with a waxed mustache who I will refer to here as Vinod, that prior to our departure the trucking company boss had pronounced it essential that we reach Calcutta uninjured, and that furthermore, if this was not achieved, Singh would lose his job. It was hard to tell whether the demand ticked Singh off because he thought it an unreasonable expectation or because it meant that to keep up appearances along the way, he could not drink as much whiskey or smoke as much opium while driving as he might otherwise do.
“These drivers—Muslims, Jats, Sikhs—are very rough, very rude,” Vinod explained in a condescending tone that night. “They are subjugated by everyone—bosses, financiers, police, tax authorities. So they fight back.”
Anyone who has weaved through the chaos and carnage of South Asia’s phantasmagoric intercity roads might reasonably be nervous about riding shotgun in a Tata truck—a two-axle, six-wheel, top-heavy steel box that looks to drivers of oncoming cars like one of those carnivorous contraptions from the
Mad Max
movies. But after I climbed into the cab, the butterflies subsided. Looking down through the panoramic windshield decorated with swirling stickers depicting Sikh gurus, roses, and fish, I suddenly realized: It was not
we
who should be nervous about careening down the highway in this metal monster. It was everybody else on the road who should be worried about us.
Singh jammed his gears and pulled out from the mud lot, weaving down the night road through dust and diesel smoke, blasting his horn to overtake cows, taxis, camel carts, bicycles, motorcycles, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws, water buffalo, dogs, zippy Maruti economy cars, and pedestrians. The animals, objects, and people meandered backward, forward, and sideways in what seemed a continuous choreographed dance of near-miss. Singh did his bit and managed not to hit anyone.
The unlit, unlined, undivided road fell in small receding patches beneath the Tata’s headlights. Tall stands of eucalyptus trees flanked the highway on the flat stretches. Roadside restaurants with illicit bars and brothels attached flashed past. Chimneyed brick kilns loomed in the moonlight. To the sides, we could sometimes see sleeping villages nestled in the shadows. Not only did the truck have no seat belts, it had no doors, so we leaned to and fro in the rushing air, gripping our seats on the heavy bends. Eucalyptus, industrial effluent, burning dung, spices and incense assaulted our nostrils. Horns—ours, theirs, everybody’s—blasted all around.
On South Asian roads, where the chance of being accidentally blind-sided is high, horn-honking is an act of courtesy. Should it ever become an Olympic event, the Indians would have a leg up for technical prowess, but the Pakistanis, who like to wire snippets from Western popular songs into their steering columns, would score well for creativity. Once, stuck at the Khyber Pass, I listened to a Pakistani truck driver push his way through a traffic jam leading into Afghanistan by using a horn that played at deafening volume the refrain from
Never on Sunday.
Cars and trucks peeled out of his way just so they wouldn’t have to listen to the damned tune anymore.
Inside our spacious Tata cab, Singh kept his distance and projected a hard, lonely demeanor. He deferred to Vinod and myself and worried about our comfort. At the same time he bullied his assistant driver, a poor Bihari named Santosh, unmercifully. This seemed to reflect the unspoken hierarchy of our traveling party, with myself at the top by virtue of being a foreign guest, Vinod next by virtue of his Brahmin birth, which he advertised at every opportunity, then Singh, and at the bottom Santosh, who was of a caste similar to his boss’s but earned one tenth his salary and suffered in apprenticeship. Whether one chose to see this hierarchy in terms of old identities such as caste or new identities such as economic status, there was no denying its palpable presence inside our truck. Among my three companions, groveling deference from below and spiteful bullying from above seemed to be the guiding principles.
Hunched with hooded eyes over the steering wheel, Singh spoke laconically about his past. He said he was born as a Jat Sikh, an unruly subset of India’s minority Sikh religious group, whose male members traditionally wear turbans and never cut their hair. (Jats are a peasant farming caste group that can be either Sikh or Hindu.) On the small farm in rural Punjab where Singh grew up, his status was ordained by tradition but his opportunities were defined by modernity. His ancestors had been farmers and soldiers, but after dropping out of high school, he took to trucking because the money was good. Now he was independent, even upwardly mobile. He wore a shiny gold watch and said he sent one hundred rupees a month home to Punjab to his wife, whom he wed in an arranged marriage in 1984. Those he left behind in the village were trapped now in the Sikh separatist insurgency, in which more than five thousand people, mostly Sikhs, die in shootouts, bomb explosions, and police killings each year. In any event, apart from the war, farming bored him, Singh said. He preferred to be on the move. “I’ll drive until my body quits.”
Or until the road kills him. Daring and reckless behind the wheels of their massive vehicles, India’s truck drivers are modem heirs to the traders, conquerors, robbers, and religious seers who have traveled the Grand Trunk Road for centuries. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mauryan emperors laid the first tombstone-shaped mileage markers between Kabul and Calcutta. In some ways, not much has changed on the highway since then. As ever, the road is vividly dangerous. More than one thousand truck drivers, passengers, and pedestrians die in accidents along the highway each year. Its shoulders reveal an almost surreal display of wreckage: trucks lying smashed and upside down in ditches every thirty to thirty-five miles, buses wrapped around trees, vans hanging from bridges, cars squashed like bugs. Sections of the road are controlled by bandits who hijack trucks several times a month, sometimes killing the drivers. Corrupt policemen demand bribes at every checkpoint and throw drivers in jail if they don’t oblige. And in rural areas, if a cow or pedestrian is run over, mobs of villagers attack, burn trucks, and lynch drivers in revenge—a peril of which Bhajan Singh would twice be reminded on the road ahead.
In some ways, the Grand Trunk depicts what is unsettled and unfinished in South Asia. The road is the backbone of commerce in the northern subcontinent, and commerce is perhaps the most powerful force churning up change in the region these days—raising expectations, dashing expectations, rearranging old caste, class, political, and religious orders. V. S. Naipaul traveled around India recently and described what he saw and heard as “a million mutinies now.” At least half a million of them concern money.
We paid our first bribe almost immediately. An inspector waved us down and demanded tax papers. In India’s Nehruvian, “mixed socialist” economy, taxes on commercial goods are supposed to be paid by truckers at every state and city border. The system is partly a legacy of the old European feudal idea, carried abroad by the European colonialists, that whoever controls the road—bandit, prince, thug, foreign imperialist—takes his tribute. In India, the tax goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, the Nehruvian state has claimed authority but has shared its booty with the bandits and thugs, some of whom are in its employ, others of whom just rush in where the state has left a void. Modem truckers, like the traders of old, have adapted nicely to the system, foraging inexorably toward profit wherever it can be found. Since following the official rules and paying all the official taxes would bankrupt most transporters and bring commerce to a halt, the trucking companies have developed an intricate, shifting system of bribes paid to bureaucrats and police to keep the wheels turning. Private tribute has been substituted for public tribute. The Nehruvian state may be going broke as a consequence, but its employees and their allies are doing rather well.
Our first inspector glanced at the truck’s papers and asked for a modest five rupees. Santosh, the assistant driver, slipped him the note while leaning out the doorless cab into the enveloping darkness. Bhajan Singh didn’t even bother to slow the truck as Santosh handed out the cash.
Some miles on, a policeman waved us down with a flashlight. Singh leaned out and shouted the name of his trucking company, whereupon the policeman stepped aside and waved us through. “The boss pays him eight hundred rupees per month for all vehicles,” Singh explained, driving on. “If you are a newcomer, it would cost one hundred rupees—for nothing, just so he will not inspect.”
Vinod elaborated. “The trucking companies all pay about forty thousand to fifty thousand rupees to the police per month, handled from the home office, so they do not check for sales tax. He pays because he can’t afford not to. There are massive systemic bribes to avoid sales-tax checks. That’s why we’re waved through.... A friend of mine in Agra has become a multimillionaire mostly because his savings are on sales tax. Bogus permits let you save. That is where the money lies. Freight is nothing.”