Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  Many Afghans I spoke to felt that people in the West, absorbed with Iraq, had already grown indifferent to their fate or saw in Afghanistan only what they wished to see, the dawn of democracy and freedom. But as Dr. Sima Samar, the leading human rights activist in Afghanistan, suggested recently, “Democracy and freedom are meaningless without justice and the rule of law.” The parliamentary elections may appear another milestone in the grand march to democracy and freedom, but they are also likely to give greater legitimacy to warlords, who are presently better placed than anyone else in Afghanistan to form political parties and influence voters.

  For many Afghans, however, the future still appears to be full of opportunities. When I returned to Kabul, Karzai had announced his new cabinet. He had managed to exclude the more powerful warlords, Fahim and Dostum, and to choose what Massouda Jalal called “qualified people,” including of course Dr. Jalal herself, who was asked to be the minister for women’s affairs two weeks after I met with her. The job seemed to have little political or financial power, and it would last only until the parliamentary elections, but she had accepted it.

  I went to see her on her first day at work. On the afternoon I’d first met her it had been intensely cold and damp in her apartment in a Soviet-style housing estate. There was no power, and when she spoke of the “dark ages” of the Taliban, a time that she spent largely at home, it had been hard to imagine a bleakness more lowering than the one she lived with. Now, at the ministerial chambers, brilliantly lit and expensively carpeted, her husband queued with many women waiting to be received by Dr. Jalal.

  The minister was busy, her assistant said, but granted me time for one question. As she stood smiling and chatting with bouquet-laden visitors, I asked Dr. Jalal what she thought the international community, which she had previously criticized, ought to do. It was the wrong question. Dr. Jalal had yet to adjust her political opinions to her new official role, and she struggled briefly while the Afghan women around her stared at me. Then she blurted out, “Don’t forget us.” As I left, she appeared slightly embarrassed by the sentimental words. But they expressed well, I thought later, the weary but still hopeful mood of many Afghans as they compete for the attention and goodwill of an easily distracted world.

  PART THREE

  NEPAL

  The “People’s War”

  In Kathmandu in March 2005, I met a Nepalese businessman who said he knew what had provoked Crown Prince Dipendra, supposed incarnation of Vishnu and former pupils at Eton, to mass murder. On the night of June 1, 2001, Dipendra appeared in the drawing room of the royal palace in Kathmandu, dressed in combat fatigues, apparently out of it on Famous Grouse and hashish, and armed with assault rifles and pistols. In a few frenzied minutes, he killed his parents, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, a brother, a sister, and five other relatives before putting a pistol to his head. Anointed king as he lay unconscious in hospital, he died two days later, passing his title to his uncle Gyanendra.

  Dipendra’s obsession with guns at Eton, where he was admired by Lord Camoys as a “damn good shot,” his heavy drinking, which attracted the malice of the Sun, his addiction to hashish, and his fondness for the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger—all this outlines a philistinism and a potential for violence, commonplace among scions of third world dynasties (Suharto, Nehru-Gandhi, Bhutto). And it is not so hard to believe the semiofficial explanation for his actions: that his parents disapproved of his fiancée. However, the businessman, who claimed to know the royal family, had a more elaborate and intriguing theory.

  We sat in a rooftop café in Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist center, a few hundred feet from the royal palace. March, the businessman said, was a good season for tourists in Nepal. “But look,” he continued, pointing to the alleys below us, where the bookshops, trekking agencies, cybercafés, bakeries, malls, and restaurants were empty. In recent years, the tourist industry has been damaged by news in the international press about the Maoist guerrillas, who model themselves on the Shining Path in Peru, and whose “people’s war” has claimed more than eleven thousand lives since 1996. Even fewer tourists have ventured to Nepal since February 1, 2005, when King Gyanendra, citing the threat presented by the Maoists, grounded all flights, cut off phone and Internet lines, arrested opposition politicians, and imposed censorship on the media.

  A portly man wearing a cotton tunic, tight trousers, and a cloth cap, the businessman had the prejudices of his class, the tiny minority of affluent Nepalese whose wealth comes largely from tourism and foreign aid, and that morning, the spring sun growing warm and burning off the smog over the Kathmandu Valley, the vendors of carpets, Gurkha knives, pirate DVDs, and Tibetan prayer flags sullenly eyeing a stray tourist in tie-dye clothes, he aired them freely.

  He said that Maoists had bombed the private school he sent his children to; he worried that his servants might join the guerrillas, who controlled 80 percent of the countryside and were growing strong in the Kathmandu valley. He said that he was all for democracy—he had been among the protesters demanding a new constitution in the spring of 1990—but peace and stability were more important. What the country needed now, he declared, was a strong and principled ruler, someone who could crush the Maoists. He said that he missed Dipendra; he was the man Nepal needed at this hour of crisis.

  According to him, Dipendra’s three years as a schoolboy in Britain had radicalized him. Just as Pandit Nehru had discovered the poverty of India after his stints at Harrow and Cambridge, so Dipendra had developed a new political awareness in England. He had begun to look, with mounting horror and concern, at his homeland. Returning to Nepal, he had realized that it would take more than tourism to create a strong middle class, accelerate economic growth, build democratic institutions, and lift the ninth-poorest country in the world to the ranks of modern democratic nations. As it turned out, he had been thwarted at every step by conservative elements in the royal palace. He had watched multiparty democracy, introduced in 1991, grow corrupt and feeble while enriching an elite of politicians and bureaucrats; equally helplessly, he had watched the new rulers of Nepal fail to tackle the Maoists. Frustration in politics rather than love, the businessman claimed, had driven Dipendra to alcohol, drugs, guns, and, finally, regicide.

  It’s often hard to know what to believe in Nepal, the only Hindu kingdom in the world, where conspiracy and rumor have long fueled a particularly secretive kind of court politics. Independent newspapers and magazines have been widely available only since 1990, and though intellectually lively, the press has little influence over a largely illiterate population easily swayed by rumor. In December 2000, news that a Bollywood actor had insulted Nepal incited riots and attacks on Indians and Indian-owned shops across the country. Little is known about Dipendra, apart from his time at Eton, where his fellow pupils nicknamed him Dippy. There is even greater mystery surrounding Pushpa Kamal Dahal, or Prachanda, the middle-aged, articulate leader of the Maoists, who has been in hiding for the last two decades.

  King Gyanendra appeared on national television to blame the palace massacre on a “sudden discharge by an automatic weapon.” A popular conspiracy theory, in turn, blamed it on the new king himself, who was allegedly involved in smuggling artifacts out of Nepal, and on his son, Paras, much disliked in Nepal for his habits of brandishing guns in public and dangerous driving; he has run over at least three people in recent years, killing one. More confusingly, the Maoists claimed that they had an “undeclared working unity” with King Birendra and accused Gyanendra, and Indian and American imperialists, of his murder.

  This atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue seems to have grown murkier since February 2005, when Gyanendra adopted the Bush administration’s rhetoric about “terrorism” and assumed supreme power. Flights to Nepal were resumed after only a few days, and the king claimed to have lifted the emergency on April 30, but most civil rights are still suspended today. When I arrived in Kathmandu, fear hung heavy over the street crossings, where soldiers peeped out from behind niachine-
gun emplacements. Men in ill-fitting Western suits, with the furtive manner of inept spies, lurked in the lobby of my hotel. Journalists spoke of threatening phone calls from senior army officers who tended to finger as Maoists anyone who didn’t support the king. Many of the people I wanted to meet turned out to be in prison or in exile. Appointments with underground activists, arduously made, were canceled at the last minute, or people simply didn’t turn up.

  Sitting in her gloomy office, a human rights activist described the routine torture and extrajudicial killing of suspected Maoists, which had risen to a startling average of eight a day. Nothing was known about the more than twelve hundred people the army had taken from their homes since the beginning of the “people’s war,” the highest number of unexplained disappearances in the world. She spoke of the “massive impunity” enjoyed by the army, which was accountable only to the king. She claimed that the governments of India, the United States, and the U.K. had failed to understand the root causes of the Maoist phenomenon and had decided, out of fear and ignorance, to supply weapons to the Royal National Army: twenty thousand M-16 rifles from the United States; twenty thousand rifles from India; helicopters from the U.K.

  She said that the “international community” had chosen the wrong side in a conflict that in any case was not likely to be resolved by violence. Though recently expanded and mobilized against the Maoists in 2001, the army was no more than eighty-five thousand strong and could not hold the countryside, where, among the high mountains, ravines, and rivers—almost perfect terrain for guerrillas—it faced a formidable enemy.

  She spoke with something close to despair. Much of her work, particularly risky at present, depended on international support. But few people outside Nepal cared or knew enough about its human rights record, and the proof lay in her office, which was austerely furnished, with none of the emblems of Western philanthropy—new computers, armed guards, shiny four-wheel drives in the parking lot—that I had seen in December 2004 in Afghanistan.

  “People are passing their days here,” she said as I left her office, and the remark, puzzling at first, became clearer as I spent more time in Kathmandu. In the streets, where all demonstrations were banned and any protest was quickly quashed by the police, a bizarre feeling of normality prevailed, best symbolized by the vibrant billboards advertising mobile phones (banned since February 1). Adverts in which companies affirmed faith in King Gyanendra appeared daily in the heavily censored newspapers, alongside news of Maoist bombings of police stations, unverified reports of rifts between Maoist leaders, promotional articles about Mercedes-Benz cars and Tag Heuer watches, and stories of parties and fashion shows and concerts in Kathmandu.

  Thamel opened for business every day, but its alleys remained empty of tourists. Months of Maoist-enforced blockades and strikes were also beginning to scare away the few foreign investors who had been deceived by the affluence of Kathmandu into thinking that Nepal was a big market for luxury consumer goods. Interviewed in a local newspaper, a Dutch investor described the Nepalese as an “extremely corrupt, greedy, triple-faced, myopic, slow, inexperienced and uneducated people” and declared that he was taking his hair replacement business to Latvia. Western diplomats and United Nations officials, darting in their SUVs from one walled compound to another, speculated about a possible assault on the capital by guerrillas.

  But it is the middle-class Nepalese, denounced by the Maoists as “comprador capitalists,” who appear to live most precariously, their hopes and anxieties echoed in the newspapers by royalist journalists who affirm daily that Nepal needs a strong ruler and Gyanendra is best placed to defend the country, by means of a spell of autocratic rule, from both Maoist “terrorists” and corrupt politicians.

  Often, while listening to them, I would remember the businessman I had met in Thamel and what he had told me about Dipendra, and I would wonder how the crown prince, if he had indeed been sensitized to social and economic distress during his three years in Thatcher’s England, had seen his strange inheritance, a country where almost half of the twenty-six million people earned less than a hundred dollars a year and had no access to electricity, running water, or sanitation, a country whose small economy, parasitic on foreign aid and tourism, had to be boosted by the remittances of Nepalese workers abroad, and where political forces seen as anachronisms elsewhere—monarchy and communism—fought for supremacy.

  Histories of South Asia rarely describe Nepal except as a recipient of religions and ideologies—Buddhism, Hinduism, communism—from India; even today the country’s sixty ethnic and caste communities are regarded as little more than a picturesque backdrop to some of the world’s highest mountains. This is partly because Western imperialists overlooked Nepal when they radically remade Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  While a British-educated middle class emerged in India and began to aspire to self-rule, Nepal remained a country of peasants, nomads, and traders, controlled by a few clans and families. Previously dependent on China, its high-caste Hindu ruling class courted the British as they expanded across India in the nineteenth century. As in the so-called princely states of India, the British were keen to support despotic regimes in Nepal and even reward them with territory; it was one way of staving off potentially destabilizing change in a strategically important buffer state to Tibet and China. The country was also a source of cheap mercenaries. Tens of thousands of soldiers recruited by the British from the western hills of Nepal fought during the Indian Mutiny, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the two world wars. The Gurkhas also helped the British suppress political dissenters in India and then, more violently, Communist anticolonialists in Malaya in the 1950s.

  As the movement for political independence grew in India, Nepal came to be even more strongly controlled by Hindu kings and the elites they created by giving land grants to members of the high castes, Bahun and Chhetri, which make up less than 30 percent of the population. The end of the British Empire in Asia didn’t lead to rapid change in Nepal or end its status as a client state. Indian-made goods flooded Nepalese markets, stifling local industry and deepening the country’s dependence on India. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the cold war intensified, Nepal was the forward base of the CIA’s operations against China.

  American economists and advisers trying to make the world safe for capitalism came to Nepal with plans for “modernization” and “development,” then seen as strong defenses against the growth of communism in poor countries. In the so-called Rapti Zone, west of Kathmandu, where, ironically, the Maoists found their first loyal supporters in the 1990s, the U.S. government spent about fifty million dollars “improving household food production and consumption, improving income-generating opportunities for poor farmers, landless laborers, occupational castes and women.”

  Modernization and development, as defined by Western experts during the cold war, were always compatible with, and often best expedited by, despotic rule. Few among the so-called international community protested when, after a brief experiment with parliamentary democracy in the 1950s, King Mahendra, Dipendra’sgrandfather, banned all political parties. A new constitution in 1962 instituted a partyless Panchayat system of “guided democracy” in which advisers chosen or controlled by the king rubber-stamped his decisions. The representatives of the Panchayat, largely from the upper castes, helped themselves to the foreign aid that made up most of the state budget and did little to alleviate poverty in rural areas. The king also declared Nepal a Hindu state and sought to impose on its ethnic and linguistic communities a new national identity by promoting the Nepali language.

  Such hectic nation building could have lulled Nepal’s many ethnic and linguistic communities into a patriotic daze had the project of modernization and development not failed, or benefited so exclusively and egregiously an already privileged elite. During the years of autocratic rule (1962–1990), a few roads were built in the countryside, infant mortality was halved, and the literacy rate went up from 5 percent in 1952 to 40 percent
in 1991. But Nepal’s population also grew rapidly, further increasing pressure on the country’s scarce arable land, and the gap between the city and the countryside widened fast.

  What leads the sensitive prince to drugs and alcohol often forces the pauper to migrate. Millions of Nepalese have swelled the armies of cheap mobile labor that drive the global economy, serving in Indian brothels, Thai and Malaysian sweatshops, the mansions of oil sheikhs in the Gulf, and, most recently, the war zones of Iraq. Many more have migrated internally, often from the hills to the subtropical Tarai region on the long border with India. The Tarai produces most of the country’s food and cash crops and accommodates half of its population. On its flat alluvial land, where malaria was only recently eradicated, the Buddha was born twenty-five hundred years ago; it is also where a generation of displaced Nepalese began to dream of revolution.

  In Chitwan, one of the more densely populated districts in the Tarai, I met Mukti Raj Dahal, the father of the underground Maoist leader Prachanda. Dahal was one of the millions of Nepalese to migrate to the Tarai in the 1950s. His son was then eight years old. He had traveled on to India, doing menial jobs in many cities, before returning to Chitwan, which American advisers and the Nepalese government were then developing as a “model district” with education and health facilities. In Chitwan, Dahal bought some land and managed to give his eight children an education of sorts. Though he is tormented by stomach and spinal ailments, he exuded calm as he sat on the veranda of his two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead.