A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (3 page)

Before we can begin the exploration of the past century’s greatest struggles, we first need to understand a bit about how we mentalize—meaning how we all try to enter into someone else’s head—and we need to know about heuristics—the decision-making shortcuts we all employ. One powerful example of each can be found in the story of an eighteen-year-old orphan who had a chance to win a fortune. With the spotlights on and cameras rolling, the young man had to mentalize about a stranger. Riches were in reach. All he had to do was to penetrate the mind of the enigmatic TV host who was offering a cryptic clue.

Slumdog Strategist

Jamal was on the spot. He had just two options left. If he chose wisely, he would win 10 million rupees and advance to the final round. If he chose poorly, he would lose it all. The entire Indian nation was watching. The problem was that Jamal did not know the answer. He had no choice but to guess.

In the blockbuster film
Slumdog Millionaire
, a young man from the Mumbai slums lands a spot on a popular game show. By an amazing run of good luck, despite his lack of formal education, Jamal is asked a series of questions to which he always knows the answers. The show’s host, however, continues to belittle Jamal’s success, demeaning him as a mere tea server from the slums. By the penultimate round the stakes have grown exceedingly high, and Jamal is stuck. Which cricketer has scored the most first-class centuries in history? His options are reduced to B or D. A commercial break allows the tension to stretch out. It also presents Jamal with a strategic conundrum.

During the break, Jamal and the host meet in the men’s room. Jamal admits that he is clueless and will lose. To our surprise, the
host encourages Jamal, telling him that if he selects the right answer, he will become the most fortunate slum dweller in India, the only person other than the host himself to have risen from extreme poverty to riches and fame. The host tells him not to lose heart. Before exiting the men’s room, the host cryptically suggests: “Perhaps it is written.” Jamal then sees that in the steam on the bathroom mirror the host has traced the letter B.

Jamal now needs to think strategically. If he trusts the host and believes he is giving him the correct answer, he can choose B with confidence. But if he thinks there is a chance that the host could be lying, wanting him to lose, then Jamal’s situation becomes infinitely more complex. He cannot simply choose D, the cricketer Jack Hobbs, and be sure that this is correct. He must instead assess his enemy on two counts: how clever is the host, and how clever does the host think Jamal is.

The host might be setting a trap. The correct answer might in fact be B, but the host could be psyching Jamal out, giving him the right answer but expecting that Jamal will choose D just because it is the opposite of what the host advised. Of course, if Jamal thinks that the host expects him to expect this trap, then Jamal should instead choose D. At this point, Jamal could fall into an impossibly complicated loop of “if he thinks that I think that he thinks,” ad infinitum.

But does anyone really think this way?
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In fact, we almost never do. Instead, we all rely on heuristics—shortcuts for decision-making. Because no one can keep track of so many levels of second-guessing, heuristics help us to simplify strategic decisions with rules of thumb.

Jamal chose D, the cricketer Jack Hobbs, and he was right. The host had fed him the wrong answer in the mirror. Obviously, we cannot know for certain what Jamal, a fictional character, used for a shortcut to reach his decision, but the film does give us a number of clues. Up to this point we have witnessed flashbacks of key moments in Jamal’s life, and they have been painful to watch. As a young boy he lost his mother to rampaging Hindu nationalists. He was nearly blinded by a cruel orphanage operator who drugged the children and scooped out their eyes with a spoon, then used them to beg for money on street corners. And his own brother separated him from the woman he loved. Given the information we have about Jamal, it is likely that he employed a simple heuristic: Trust no one.

Like Jamal, leaders also use heuristics in the game of international affairs, even though they have vastly more to lose than in a quiz show. Sometimes national leaders formulate their heuristics as maxims: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Sometimes their heuristics are analogies: If aggressors are appeased, they will become as aggressive as Hitler after Munich. However dubious they might be, heuristics ease decision-making by simplifying the thinking process. Jamal’s experience spotlights a hidden truth: When the stakes are high, we all need shortcuts for predicting our enemy’s moves.

While Jamal’s story gives us a hint of how we all try to strategize in high-stakes situations, that fictional tale can only take us so far. It’s time to examine a true Indian hero, upon whom the eyes of every Indian, and indeed the entire world, were fixed. Mahatma Gandhi holds special interest in a study of strategic empathy precisely because he managed to win his nation’s freedom without ever firing a single shot.

I
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The Conscience of an Empire

Gandhi and the British Character

GENERAL REGINALD E. DYER
thought he would teach the natives a lesson. On April 13, 1919, approximately 25,000 Punjabis assembled in the Jallianwala Bagh, a public square in Amritsar, for a festival celebration. The square, a mostly barren ground roughly 200 yards long and about as wide, had at its center a large well nearly twenty feet wide. The square was surrounded by the high walls of houses and apartments. There were just five narrow entryways to the grounds, some with locked gates, making it almost impossible to escape. Dyer positioned his troops to block the main exit. On a raised platform, the editor of an Amritsar newspaper was gesticulating, decrying the recent actions of colonial authorities. The silent crowd, absorbed in the speaker’s words, had no reason to expect what happened next.

Dyer ordered his troops to open fire, directly into the heart of the assembled mass. As people screamed and fled to the sides of the square, Dyer directed his soldiers to aim at the walls and corners where they were concentrated. He instructed his men to continue firing until their ammunition was spent: all 1,650 rounds. The terror lasted between ten and fifteen minutes. Some died instantly; others were trampled to death in the frenzied scramble for cover. People piled atop one another, ten or twelve bodies deep, suffocating those beneath them. More than 100 others, desperate to avoid the bullets, leapt to their deaths down the well. From the rooftops and windows of the surrounding homes, residents looked down in horror.
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When the killing spree at last abated,
nearly 400 were dead, including a six-week-old baby. Dyer and his troops withdrew, leaving more than 1,000 wounded to fend for themselves. Astonishingly, Dyer did not stop there. Still intent on preventing rebellion from spreading, he instituted a crawling order, requiring any Indian who passed through the street where a British schoolteacher had been attacked to slither on his belly through the muck. There were no exceptions. Over the following weeks, hundreds were beaten, tortured, arrested, and imprisoned, nearly all without trial or evidence against them.
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Mahatma Gandhi faced a conundrum. In order to lead his nation to freedom, he had to adopt effective, long-term strategies of resistance to colonial authority. But to accomplish that, he needed to read the British correctly. Amritsar presented an opportunity. The massacre was a definite break in the pattern of British rule. Though colonial forces had often employed brutality, nothing this extreme had occurred since 1857, when British troops savagely crushed an Indian mutiny. Since then, lower levels of repression had remained the norm. But now General Dyer’s attack marked a dramatic spike in the level of violence. In its wake Gandhi had to decide whether the majority of British leaders supported or opposed General Dyer’s form of control. If it were the former—if Britain were a country governed by leaders who would not hesitate to gun down unarmed civilians in cold blood—then nonviolent disobedience had little chance to succeed.

Amritsar and its aftermath formed a pattern break, one that revealed much about the British as an enemy. Pattern breaks are teachable moments. They are the times when one side in a conflict reveals what it values most, hinting strongly at what it plans to do. What makes the Amritsar pattern break so compelling is that Gandhi actually determined that the majority of British leaders were not, in fact, supportive of harsh repression, yet he repeatedly said the opposite.

One popular image of Gandhi is of a man devoted to truth, simplicity, and love, a gentle soul peacefully spinning his yarn while defying an empire. And while he was indeed these things, Gandhi was also a British-trained lawyer, possessed of a clever mind and a potent dose of strategic empathy, which he had developed in part through years of immersion in British culture.
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Because he had studied British patterns of behavior, he was therefore more attuned to their behavior at pattern
breaks. Although Gandhi was appalled by what Dyer had done, he soon grasped the incident’s enormous value for opposing British colonial rule, and he skillfully employed the massacre to serve multiple strategic ends. In Gandhi’s rhetoric, Amritsar became a rallying point for Indian independence, a source of Hindu–Muslim unity, and a weapon in his battle for British hearts and minds. In 1920, referring to the British response to the massacre, Mahatma Gandhi called the Empire’s representatives “dishonest and unscrupulous,” proclaiming that he could “no longer retain affection for a Government so evilly manned as it is nowadays.”
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As chief author of the Indian National Congress’s investigative report into Dyer’s actions, he labeled the massacre a crime against humanity. In speeches across India, Gandhi rallied his countrymen by demanding redress for the events in the Punjab,
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and in his 1927 autobiography, he reiterated the same scathing words, asserting that the Congress report “will enable the reader to see to what lengths the British Government is capable of going, and what inhumanities and barbarities it is capable of perpetrating in order to maintain its power.”
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Gandhi stuck to that line for as long as he could. As late as 1931, when the American journalist William Shirer asked Gandhi if he still had faith in British promises, the Mahatma replied: “I had faith in them—until 1919. But the Amritsar Massacre and the other atrocities in the Punjab changed my heart. And nothing has happened since to make me regain my faith.”
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By repeatedly stoking Indian anger over Amritsar, Gandhi simultaneously fueled the self-rule movement while elevating himself and his cause to international prominence.
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In fact, in the very same document in which he charged the British government as being “evilly manned,” Gandhi also remarked that his speeches were “intended to create disaffection” in order that the Indian people would feel ashamed if they cooperated with the government.
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Throughout the 1920s, Gandhi heaped his criticism of the British upon the pyres of Indian nationalism, hoping to inflame Indian opinion. The massacre, coupled with the perceived injustice over Dyer’s light punishment, could hardly have been better suited to the task.

Gandhi also strove to keep the memory of Amritsar alive in order to foster Hindu–Muslim unity, since members of both religions had been killed there.
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In this way, he used General Dyer’s atrocity to serve the cause of independence. Building and maintaining amity between India’s
two largest religious groups remained one of Gandhi’s prime objectives throughout his long drive for independence. He understood that a country riven by internal hatreds could not and would not survive intact, and he was determined to prevent the fracturing of India along religious lines. By encouraging all Indians to contribute money to a Jallianwala Bagh memorial, Gandhi believed he could construct a monument to religious harmony that would be a symbol of joint suffering at the hands of a common foe. In February 1920, Gandhi wrote: “In visiting the Bagh, our purpose is not to remind ourselves of General Dyer’s cruelty. Men have always made mistakes. We do not want to keep alive the memory of General Dyer’s wrong and thereby feed our hatred.” Instead he saw it as a chance to raise the nation to a higher cause. And then he added: “Maybe we cannot bring about such a miraculous result from the slaughter of the innocent people in the Jallianwala Bagh; the event, however, will always be recognized as a potent influence in uniting Hindus and Muslims and in creating an awakening throughout the land.” On February 18, 1920, Gandhi reiterated that the massacre must serve Hindu–Muslim unity. This, he insisted, was the primary meaning of the memorial. He reminded his readers that the blood of the Mohammedan had mixed with that of the Hindu, signifying their shared sacrifice. “The memorial,” he opined, “should be a national emblem of an honest and sustained effort to achieve Hindu–Muslim unity.”
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General Dyer had meant to quash a rebellion, but instead he fueled a movement that would eventually bring down the Raj. Gandhi deployed the massacre’s memory to sting the British conscience over the injustice of colonial rule—and it worked.
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Yet despite all his assertions of British evil and injustice, the Mahatma knew that most British leaders were repelled by what Dyer had done. Having had many years of exposure to British society, both from studying law in London and through interactions with British administrators in South Africa, Gandhi had developed a familiarity with various strands of British thinking about liberalism and empire. The question he now faced was which strand would prove stronger in the Dyer debate.