Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (7 page)
On the third afternoon, passing two mangled trucks just west of Varanasi, the sprawling metropolis that is the holiest city in Hinduism, we asked Singh gently about the matter of all these road accidents we kept passing. In twelve years, he said indifferently, he has had only one, resulting in a minor shoulder injury. But there are certain risks, he added.
“If you run over a person, the best thing to do is to run away—drive to the nearest police station and turn yourself in, lock yourself into the jail,” he explained. “If you stay at the scene of an accident, the people will burn the truck and beat you to death, especially if it is a child that has been hit. If you strike a cow, they might or might not attack. That depends on whether you are a Muslim. As for pigs and dogs, nobody bothers. You might have to pay some compensation.”
The risks are especially acute for Sikhs adhering to religious tradition, since their turbans and beards make them readily identifiable targets for any excited Hindu mob. Ever since Indira Gandhi’s 1984 assassination by Sikh bodyguards and the subsequent anti-Sikh riots, Sikh drivers on the Grand Trunk Road have traveled in convoys. On our trip, Singh stopped only at dhabas owned or managed by fellow Sikhs. “After 1984, we feel unsafe,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Sikhs will ever become a part of India again. It is not possible.” After parking in a ditch along the road, Singh mulled the question over with other Sikh drivers in his ragged, shifting convoy. They all blamed the Gandhis, Indira and Rajiv, for stupidity and mendacity. And they said the situation was getting worse, not better.
“Today the life has become very dangerous,” said one driver with a tattoo of Sikh visionary Guru Nanak emblazoned on his hand. “Now I would never advise anyone to become a driver, especially not a Sikh. When you travel the roads alone, it is not safe.”
The point was made that evening. Forty miles east of Varanasi, as a pink sun fell over fields of sugar cane, Singh slammed on his brakes, sending us sprawling around the cab. To the left was a truck smashed against a tree. Around it had gathered a large group of villagers, some of whom were milling in the road, slowing traffic. Singh drove several hundred yards farther on and parked under a tree, out of sight. He said it looked as if a small child had been killed by the smashed truck. He thought it would be unwise for him to investigate.
Vinod flagged a bicycle rickshaw and we rolled silently back to the accident site. There we found farmer Ram Prashad, his face streaked with tears. His six-year-old daughter, Lakshmi Devi, had been squatting by the side of the road, relieving herself, when a speeding truck swerved to avoid a bicycle and hit her, killing her instantly. (Public roadsides are sometimes the only available bathrooms for the Indian landless, who in some cases can face severe reprisals if they trespass or relieve themselves on the land of upper-caste neighbors. Children of all classes find the roadside a convenient toilet.) The girl’s body lay wrapped in a cloth sack, covered with flies. The truck driver involved had run to the police for protection and had been arrested. But the villagers were restless.
“What was my mistake? Why did the gods penalize me?” Prashad shouted. “God and this driver have killed her. That bloody bastard—I want to kill him!”
With that, the crowd surged toward the smashed truck. A lone police constable carrying a single-shot rifle tried to hold them back and urged us to leave the scene quickly. Simultaneously pushing and cajoling, the policeman managed to hold the mob back.
Minutes later, after we returned to the truck, Singh rolled us back onto the highway while Santosh lit two sticks of incense for evening prayers. Singh folded his hands toward the pictures of Sikh gurus pasted on his windshield, no easy feat while trying to drive. Santosh climbed onto the dashboard and twirled incense in circles around Singh, the steering wheel, and the gearbox on the floor.
“Our life is in his hands,” said Singh, gesturing to the image of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth and last of the Sikh gurus.
“We must worship the gods for our safety, and for the safety of trucks,” said Santosh.
Beneath a full moon several hundred trucks stood parked in congested lines at the Bihar state border, halted before a police barrier where goods are inspected, taxes imposed, and the wheels of commerce lubricated. Diesel exhaust and smoke from coal fires clouded the air. Vendors of juice and nuts called out prices from beneath kerosene lamps. A bearded medicine man wandered by, offering a bottled cure for eczema from his suitcase.
Tardip Kumar of Supreme Commission Agents, which operates from a roadside wooden stand, climbed into the cab, asked for our papers, and said he would try to clear us across the border within an hour. His fee was twenty rupees, of which he said half would be paid in bribes and the rest pocketed by his agency. Small change, but despite his promises we were stuck in place for nearly four hours. Impatient, Vinod and I wandered around looking for somebody to bribe. We were told that the officers in charge were taking a dinner-and-nap break and could not be disturbed. That night I slept on top of the truck and tried to drift off while listening to Van Halen full blast on my Walkman. It had become clear that to sleep at truck stops, you needed something loud to drown out all the competing tapes of screeching Hindi film songs wherein damsels sing of love and honor and revenge.
The next afternoon we pushed into the jungles of central Bihar, where the roads have been ripped away by floods and hijackers are said to rule the mountains. Singh rounded a bend and spotted a truck lying upside down in a pit, wheels in the air, as if in a state of rigor mortis. Beside the wreck three men sat before a pup tent, cooking lunch on an open fire. Singh honked and waved as he drove past. “Those are the drivers of the truck,” he said of the men outside the tent. “They’ve been living there for a month. They’re waiting for a crane.”
All along the road we saw the carcasses of crashed vehicles, resting like fossils in the exact position in which their accidents left them. Repairing smashed trucks can take a long time. Often, drivers refuse to leave their vehicles unattended, fearing that bandits or corrupt police will loot the cargo. So the wreckage sits, week after week.
From the jungle hills the road fell slowly into coal country, heartland of Bihar’s organized crime syndicates, a region of strip mines choked in black smoke. At brick depots along the highway, shirtless laborers hoisted large bowls of coal on their backs and carried them up ramps to load fleets of Tata trucks, which poured onto the road. Traffic slowed to a crawl.
At last, shortly after dawn on the fifth day, the coal towns yielded to cool, green rice fields on the western edge of the Ganges delta. In hours Singh would reach the outskirts of Calcutta’s urban chaos. He would deliver his crates of cloth and garments to the office. Vinod would search for his absconding truck drivers. Santosh would visit his fourteen-year-old mistress.
Then a mob attacked us. It happened in an instant. Driving close behind an unfamiliar truck with Bihar license plates, Singh turned into Memari village, a tiny hamlet of grass-topped huts thirty miles or so west of the Calcutta city line. Suddenly villagers were all around us, banging on the doors, pounding on the engine, shouting for us to stop. Somebody called for vengeance and smacked the door of the truck with his fist. Shouts went up. Somebody yelled that there had been a traffic accident and they wanted Singh to carry a wounded man to the hospital. Most of the crowd seemed furious, however, and some blocked the truck’s path. Singh pointed at me in the center of the cab and shouted,
“Sahib hai! Sahib hai!
,
”
which means roughly, “There is a white man, an officer, here!” Confused, the crowd fell back slightly. Singh jammed the gearshift and roared ahead. Some villagers chased the truck briefly but let us go.
“Sahib hai! Sahib hai!
,
”
which means roughly, “There is a white man, an officer, here!” Confused, the crowd fell back slightly. Singh jammed the gearshift and roared ahead. Some villagers chased the truck briefly but let us go.
“I don’t know what happened,” Singh said a few minutes later, after snapping his fingers for some chewing tobacco from Santosh. “There must have been an accident. Something had gone wrong, though.”
Singh himself appeared unconcerned—about himself, his truck, the allegedly wounded man, or the village mob. Twenty minutes later he saw a driver from his company coming down the highway from Calcutta, carrying a load to New Delhi. Singh flagged the man down and the two talked for half an hour, gossiping about a driver in trouble with the boss, another who had left his suitcase in Calcutta, and about conditions on the road. Singh never mentioned the incident in Memari.
An hour later, as we finally reached the Calcutta line, I asked him why he hadn’t told his friend about the crowd that attacked him in the village.
Singh laughed at me. “Oh, that was a minor thing,” he said. “Happens all the time.”
3
The Gravy Train
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny. And now the time
comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full
measure, but very substantially.
—Jawaharlal Nehru
T
he headlines in South Asia today splash news of the ongoing attempt to reform, reconstitute, resuscitate, redeem, and otherwise rescue-before-it-is-too-late the Nehruvian state, an entity that surely exists but is not so easy to define or explain. Poor Nehru—for being eloquent and historic, he gets blamed for many things he had nothing to do with. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, for example, have constructed, between independence and the present day, political economies that in many ways can be called Nehruvian, but Nehru himself contributed little to them directly. Jinnah, Ayub, Bhutto, Mujib, Ershad, Zia, Bandaranaike, Jayewardene—these are some of the leaders who deserve credit and blame for what is happening today on the geographical rim of Britain’s former subcontinental empire. Even in the heartland of independent India, Nehru’s home turf, much of what is now referred to as the Nehruvian state consists of structures, policies, and attitudes inherited from the British colonies and the indigenous feudals and babus through whom the British sometimes ruled. Also, what Nehru built upon as India’s first and most important prime minister has been undermined by politicians who came to power after his death in 1964, including Nehru’s direct political and familial heirs, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv. Yet as the dominant, defining South Asian statesman of his time, and as the man who stood in a New Delhi assembly hall at the “midnight hour” of independence on August 14, 1947, promising in stirring rhetoric to “redeem our pledge” after decades of struggle for freedom, Nehru is the individual most commonly and most justly memorialized as the architect of the modern South Asian state.
he headlines in South Asia today splash news of the ongoing attempt to reform, reconstitute, resuscitate, redeem, and otherwise rescue-before-it-is-too-late the Nehruvian state, an entity that surely exists but is not so easy to define or explain. Poor Nehru—for being eloquent and historic, he gets blamed for many things he had nothing to do with. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, for example, have constructed, between independence and the present day, political economies that in many ways can be called Nehruvian, but Nehru himself contributed little to them directly. Jinnah, Ayub, Bhutto, Mujib, Ershad, Zia, Bandaranaike, Jayewardene—these are some of the leaders who deserve credit and blame for what is happening today on the geographical rim of Britain’s former subcontinental empire. Even in the heartland of independent India, Nehru’s home turf, much of what is now referred to as the Nehruvian state consists of structures, policies, and attitudes inherited from the British colonies and the indigenous feudals and babus through whom the British sometimes ruled. Also, what Nehru built upon as India’s first and most important prime minister has been undermined by politicians who came to power after his death in 1964, including Nehru’s direct political and familial heirs, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv. Yet as the dominant, defining South Asian statesman of his time, and as the man who stood in a New Delhi assembly hall at the “midnight hour” of independence on August 14, 1947, promising in stirring rhetoric to “redeem our pledge” after decades of struggle for freedom, Nehru is the individual most commonly and most justly memorialized as the architect of the modern South Asian state.
The Nehruvian state is what Bhajan Singh drives through in his ten-ton Tata truck several times each month. It is what he and some other Sikhs in Punjab—not to mention dozens of other South Asian separatist communities—aspire to break free from, though no doubt they would replicate many of its features if they did. It is what Sri Lankan revolutionaries wish to overthrow, what Indian Hindu revivalists wish to reinvent, what Pakistani Muslim radicals wish to replace with an Islamic theocracy. Indeed, what matters most about the state in South Asia these days is that it is under assault and looking none too stalwart—badly indebted, over-extended, systematically abused, demonstrably unjust and inequitable, threatening at times to fall down of its own weight.
As the mild-mannered, bookish cousin of the domineering Bolshevik state, the Nehruvian state has been deeply unnerved by its relative’s sudden and spectacular death—and just when cousin Bolshevik appeared to be striding along with such vim and vigor. Yet the death of bolshevism has had a salutary effect on the subcontinent. Stimulated by fears of mortality and revolution, the Nehruvian state’s various keepers have undertaken late-in-life fitness regimens, slimming down and toughening up in reluctant recognition that self-discipline may be necessary to avoid their cousin’s cataclysmic end. Whether or to what degree the region’s elites can succeed with this reform, economically and politically, is an overarching question about South Asia’s future.
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