Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (36 page)
A Westerner may find it difficult to resist being seduced by the spectacle of South Asia’s politicized faiths—the Hindu shock troops with their painted faces and thrusting tridents, or the white-bearded mullahs leading great crowds to burn their enemies in effigy (and sometimes in the flesh). But ultimately, what is so interesting about South Asia’s modern politicized religious movements is just how ordinary their leaders really are, how easily they are subsumed by the public culture of patronage, clan, graft, and manipulation.
This is another trick the secular, socialist Nehruvian elite learned from the British imperialist: how to buy off your opponents by tempting them to become more like you. Among the recent revolutionary claimants to South Asia’s future, be they Marxist or separatist or religious, only the most pathologically committed—Wijeweera of Sri Lanka’s People’s Liberation Front, for example—have proved able to resist this sort of temptation extended by the mothering, smothering state. And these exceptions, by the very extremity of their actions, defeat themselves by inviting the state’s full wrath and violence, which ultimately is backed by a public consensus that a revolutionary as extreme as Wijeweera simply does not understand how the system works, and thus cannot have the greater good at heart.
Of course, this process of counterinsurgency depends fundamentally on democracy and a functional state. Without the authority that even a wounded democracy provides its elected elite, and the chances a democratic system offers to reslice the state pie, an inexorable momentum can shift to the insurgents, as the British colonialists discovered with the Indian independence movement in the 1930s and Pakistan’s generals rediscovered in 1971 with Bangladesh’s Sheikh Mujib and in 1989 with their own Benazir Bhutto.
In the present cases of Hindu revivalism in India and Islamic radicalism in Pakistan, the doctrines of the religious insurgents have been around a lot longer than Maoism, Bengali nationalism, or even democracy, and so the attached popular emotions are easier to exploit by conjuring myths such as the legend of the Gyanwapi Mosque. Yet South Asian rulers have been buying off and fobbing off religious radicals for a lot longer than they have been coping with vicious Marxist revolutionaries or beautiful, debonair democrats, so the state’s keepers are considerably more skilled at achieving their goals. From the standpoint of a counterrevolutionary, the wonderful thing about religion is that anybody can claim to have it.
India could learn about this from Pakistan. To preserve and protect themselves against the international tide of Islamic radicalism symbolized by the 1979 Iranian revolution, governments in Pakistan have made a virtual science out of appropriating symbols of Islam—Benazir with her modest scarves, Zia with his public lashings and executions—so as to deprive the radical clergy of the symbols’ political power. The long self-appointed rule of an Islamic middle-class army in Pakistan has further undermined the clergy’s political power—the debate over Islam and politics has taken place within the Pakistani state’s structures, rather than as a confrontation between governments and outsiders. At the same time, sufficient public and political capital has been poured into the mosques to ensure that a majority of clergy come to regard national religious revolution, with all its nasty ferreting out of heretics, as a potential lifestyle inconvenience. There is a legitimate question whether Pakistan’s internalization of religious politics has carried too high a price—some argue that it helped push the country toward its 1971 breakup by institutionalizing unresolved, competing demands about ethnic and religious identity. But in the present day, the trick looks to have been more successfully played by the full range of Pakistan’s politicians than by India’s.
In India, the government’s relationship with the Hindu clergy and its political allies has been similar in a few ways but far less complete. Troubled secular politicians presiding over the Indian state apparatus since Nehru’s death, such as Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, have periodically “played the Hindu card,” as the Indians put it, by rushing to and fro to deliver prayers at Hindu temples in advance of an election. (By most accounts, Indira is regarded as a true religious believer, Rajiv as more of a political opportunist.) But both Gandhis were less attentive over the years to seducing and buying off the hard-core networks of Hindu radicals centered around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a secretive network of right-wing Hindu nationalists. The Gandhis felt they had no need to bother about the RSS. Although its roots date to the 1920s, for most of the time since then, the RSS has been a small, marginal, and popularly abhorred political force. But in the late 1980s, as the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty tottered and the political economy it built foundered, the RSS and the political party it created, the BJP, at last came in from the wilderness. Indeed, they thundered to center stage in Indian politics and society, preaching their sermons and chanting their chants to large and enthusiastic crowds. They stirred mobs of Hindus to hit the streets in northern cities, attack disputed mosques with hammers and sticks, and punch it out with their Muslim neighbors with greater enthusiasm than before. On this wave of brutal violence the BJP rode to sudden and unexpected political influence, promising to tame the very destructive forces of religious violence that they had helped to unleash. “Riding the tiger” is what the Hindu radical leaders call their political art.
The tiger’s ferocity may arise in part from the subcontinent’s storied past of religious war and conquest, but its present bite comes, too, from contemporary competition in a society where the established Nehruvian order is under pressure from many sides. Just as during the medieval period Islam and Hinduism provided a language and mythology that galvanized rival interest groups to battle over decidedly earthly matters of conquest and power, so, too, in the 1980s and early 1990s, religion has become one organizing principle in conflicts that are not by any means confined to spiritual disagreement. Again, Desmond’s summary is cogent. On his list of factors feeding the outburst of Hindu nationalism in the late 1980s he includes the rising prominence of Indian Muslims in urban centers, especially after many of them returned with bundles of cash earned while working as laborers, engineers, nurses, hoteliers, and drivers in the rich Arab states around the Persian Gulf. At the same time, he writes, “India’s rate of economic growth nearly doubled, creating a new consumer economy.... India’s middle class was no longer an elite, Westernized group, as it was at partition, but a highly acquisitive, anxious class whose members only vaguely comprehended the point of secularism while very sharply feeling a grievance against any group with a supposed special status—especially Muslims.”
In some respects the problem is not that the postindependence Nehruvian elites in South Asia did too little to foster mobility beneath them, but rather that they did too much, raising expectations the state could not fulfill. India’s Hindu movement seems in many ways an example. One of the credibility gaps the Hindu revivalist BJP had to overcome as it bid for power in the late 1980s was its reputation as the political party of urban Hindu petty traders, an enterprising but acquisitive class dismissed by the older Nehruvian elite for their notorious love of money. Yet it was precisely this affinity for traders and trading that helped to attract many of India’s emerging urban middle class to the BJP—these urban Indians were often capitalist in orientation and wished for a more stable, less corrupt polity than the secular Congress Party under the Gandhis could provide. The BJP promised to address these aspirations, and its coffers were showered with middle-class and industrial money to help extend the party’s reach.
With success, the BJP has discovered a new predicament. The Congress Party, fractured but still clinging to power, has moved decisively to recapture middle-class loyalties by adopting free-market economic reform, long a distinguishing feature of the Hindu revivalist platform. This thunder-stealing by Nehru’s heirs in the Congress pushes the BJP further toward obscurantist religious radicalism as a means of distinguishing itself from its rivals—mosque—breaking being a proven tactic along these lines. But this sort of persistent Hindu radicalism may in the future look all the more ridiculous to the Indian middle class when it sees the recently elected preacher-politicians rolling around in their state-sponsored chauffeured Ambassadors or doling out jobs and land through the Nehruvian state patronage networks. Yet whether the Hindu movement has in fact peaked depends partly on whether India’s Congress government can deliver to India successful reform of the bloated economy and of itself, a prospect no Hindu trader is likely to bet his savings on for now.
Apologists for Hindu revivalism employ the rationales of the failing Nehruvian state, or the injustices of history, or the modest programs of affirmative action granted to Muslims, or the yearnings of Hindus for a nationalism that will at last succeed decisively. But in the towns and cities the Hindu movement and its Muslim counterpart often tangle over far more pedestrian and nasty business: land-grabbing, business rivalry, extortion, and other enterprises of the criminal underground. Thug-politicians of familiar character and methods see religious revival as a new path to an old end.
I came across this in Hapur, a squalid, swelling market town on the road between Delhi and Aligarh. The first and overwhelming impression the city makes is of chaotic, booming commerce: tinkling bells of bicycle rickshaws, squawking motorcycle horns, belching water buffaloes, and singing pushcart vendors. Hapur is a subcontinental Dodge City—only it is not a lone bustling outpost on windswept plains but one of dozens of interlocking overpopulated market centers in the northern belt, where agriculture and industry have found prosperous intersections. Land prices have soared in the last decade, far outstripping inflation. Wheat, potatoes, shoes, cloth, machine and auto parts pour in and out of town on bullock carts, camel carts, motor rickshaws, rusting flatbed trucks, and towering ten-ton Tatas. With the goods come people, villagers migrating temporarily or permanently from the countryside in search of work. Two thirds of the population is Hindu, one third Muslim. They jam into tenements with relatives or pitch tar-paper shanties on the edge of town. Through this scene wander the usual array of fast-buck artists: property dealers, labor contractors, wholesale traders, insurance salesmen. Some have inherited their trade from earlier generations but many more are striking out on their own, pushing into neighborhoods and businesses where they have not been before. In the moribund Indian political economy, I tended to view this sort of commercial trail-blazing as heroic, since it was the key to job creation and rising incomes, and potentially to national upliftment. But, as a thirty-two-year-old property dealer named Saleem Ahmed discovered, it can bring a businessman face-to-face with strange and dangerous forms of competition.
I went to Hapur initially because of a snake. The Delhi papers had made a celebrity of a five-foot black cobra who started a Hindu-Muslim riot by slithering into a peepul tree and nesting in its leafy branches. The snake’s arrival, which occurred auspiciously at the start of a Hindu religious snake festival in an impoverished quarter of Hapur, prompted an outpouring of Hindu religious fervor. Egged on by local preacher-politicians who drove about with leaflets and megaphones to herald the snake’s appearance as a miracle, thousands of Hindus poured from their homes and worshiped for days at the peepul tree. They threw money and jewelry at the snake, laid out bowls of milk for it to drink, chanted and sang religious songs. The preacher-politicians said that the snake was Lord Shiva incarnate and that he wanted a temple built at the base of the peepul tree. Preparations were made and garlanded idols duly placed beneath the snake’s nest. But residents of a Muslim slum fifty yards down a dusty lane objected. When the police, attempting to enforce the Muslims’ legal rights, ordered the idols and temple paraphernalia removed from the peepul tree, the Hindus rioted. In bursts of rage, knife-wielding mobs raced into the Muslim quarter and stabbed anyone they found on the streets. At least half a dozen Muslims died. A few Hindus also were killed when the police, facing down the mob, lowered their rifles and opened fire.
The snake was certainly a catchy angle, but to a skeptic concerning religious miracles, what seemed more pertinent was the question of land. This is what Mark Fineman of the
Los Angeles Times
and I began to ask about when we arrived to examine why the snake riot had occurred.
Los Angeles Times
and I began to ask about when we arrived to examine why the snake riot had occurred.
Hindus who lived in the brick tenements around the peepul tree said that the land where the cobra appeared had originally been owned by the Patwaris, a local Hindu trading family. The vacant lot at issue was not much to look at—an acre of so of half-flooded swamp at the intersection of dirt lanes surrounded by teeming, teetering slums. Nonetheless, the lot would fetch serious money in a town like Hapur. It had been empty for many years; nobody in the surrounding slums was quite sure why the Patwaris had sold it. But they had the impression, imparted by the Hindu preacher-politicians on loudspeakers during the snake’s miraculous appearance, that the Patwari family had always intended to build a temple on the site but just had not been able to get around to it yet. Thus the snake’s appearance during the recent Hindu festival had confirmed that a temple on this land was ordained.
In fact, the Patwaris had no such plans, or so said Anil Kumar Patwari, who turned out to be a young, enterprising wholesale trader who specialized in shoes. In his shop half a mile away he explained to us what had happened. Patwari had inherited the peepul-tree lot from his parents and had sold it five months earlier to raise capital for family businesses, which he said were expanding rapidly because of a general economic boom in Hapur. The buyer was Saleem Ahmed, a Muslim property dealer who intended to subdivide the land and resell it as building lots to Muslim families and businessmen. Patwari said it never occurred to him to be concerned that the buyer was a Muslim. “I believe in living peacefully with everyone,” Patwari said. “I’m just sitting here in my shop—I have no concern with all this religious feeling. I did it just for the money. We got six hundred twenty thousand rupees [about $22,500] for it. All this business about a temple is just a week old. Nobody talked about a temple on that land. This is just in the last week. The snake did not just suddenly appear. This was all stage-managed. A local snake man got the snake and the people put it there because they wanted the temple.”
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