Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Certainly, prosperity was no guarantor of progress. Consider what unfolded in Gujarat, one of India’s richest states, where communal rioting erupted in 2002 that led to the slaughter of almost 800 Muslims and over 250 Hindus. With homicidal fury, Hindu mobs, wearing saffron bandanas and brandishing swords, iron bars and trishuls, tore through the streets of Ahmedabad, the state capital, and a string of towns destroying mosques and setting alight Muslim-owned businesses.

  Then they murdered their owners and gang-raped the women and children, 20 men at a time. One Muslim man who tried to protect his sister-in-law and young child had his skull cracked open with a sword and his eyes doused with diesel oil. Then he was set alight. His sister-in-law was stripped and raped, then drenched in kerosene and burnt alive. Then, the three-month-old baby that she had cradled in her lap was dumped into the flames. Afterwards, the local gravedigger told of finding the bodies of three pregnant women by the side of the road, with their stomachs slashed open and the foetuses hanging out. From survivors also came testimony of how young Muslim girls cast themselves onto the fire rather than being held down and raped.

  To their shame, the police and state authorities did nothing to prevent the violence. Indeed, the accusation has always been that they were accomplices to the slaughter and allowed the mass murders in revenge for an arson attack on a train returning Hindu pilgrims from the holy town of Ayodhya in which at least 58 people were killed. The chief minister of Gujarat, the Hindu extremist Narendra Modi, was also accused of taking no action to prevent the riots.

  In India, the burning of a train was always likely to provoke an especially grotesque response, for it recalled the horrors of partition. Some of the worst violence took place within metres of police stations, where unmanned switchboards echoed to the noise of the violence outside and the sound of ringing phones. The first pogrom of the new India age, what was especially alarming was how technology had been co-opted by the murderers. They used computer printouts of voter-registration lists to identify the homes and businesses owned by Muslims, along with mobile phones and texts to better coordinate their attacks.

  If wealth and prosperity had failed to eradicate the savagery of communalism, it had actually aggravated another Indian problem that had been handed down through the ages: female foeticide, the abortion each year of 500,000 female foetuses. Not wanting to be saddled with expensive dowries or run the risk of losing their landholdings when their daughters got married, parents who discovered they were expecting a baby daughter regularly opted to pay 500 rupees ($10) for a quick abortion.

  Here, increased prosperity brought increased access to prenatal ultrasounds and sonograms, which, in turn, brought increased rates of female foeticide. Already, there was a welter of statistics to show that sex selection was worst in the most affluent parts of the country: Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and South Delhi, the middle-class haven that was the home to most foreign correspondents. While the Indian Government had enacted laws to prevent expectant parents finding out the sex of their child, doctors were rarely prosecuted for revealing the results of ultrasound tests. Instead, the same spirit of consumerism that was driving the Indian economy was also depressing the female birth rate. Moderately well-off Indians could choose the sex of their babies just as easily as they could select the colour of their new Marutis.

  In a Punjabi village just a couple of hours’ drive from Chandigarh, the state capital, it was easy to find evidence of female foeticide. The village birth register from the past 12 months showed that 34 boys had been born compared with just 19 girls. Since January, just one female name had been added to the ledger, and now it was almost November. Cars equipped with mobile ultrasound machines drove from village to village, so women did not even have to leave home to find out the sex of their foetus.

  Local women spoke openly about having abortions, with little sense of shame and no fear of prosecution. At the local maternity hospital, we were allowed to film a mother giving birth, and we arrived in the operating theatre just as the young mother, Neelam, was being administered a trickle of anaesthetic to numb the pain from her Caesarean section. Neelam had already given birth to a daughter and desperately wanted to give her husband a son. So there was a heightened sense of tension in the operating theatre as the surgeon slid his scalpel across her stomach and pulled from her womb the tiny infant. With the Caesarean section a complete success, the safe arrival of such a beautiful ball of life should have been greeted with delight. Sadly, it was a joyless birth. Neelam had produced a second baby girl.

  Handed the little girl, not yet ten minutes old, the women of the family were disapproving and edgy, fretful perhaps of how they would break the news to the menfolk, who had not even come to the hospital. On the maternity ward a few minutes later, as Neelam slowly came round from her anaesthetic, one of the ladies – her sister, I think – approached us and thrust the newborn towards us. ‘Would you like to name the baby?’ she asked. We laughed off the suggestion and prepared to leave. But just as we were saying our goodbyes, the same woman came towards us and thrust the baby at us more determinedly. ‘Could you take the child?’ In another time, the family might have thrown the unwanted baby down a well. A visiting film crew offered a tidier means of disposal. That very week, a dear Australian friend had suffered the unspeakable agony, after several rounds of IVF, of giving birth to a stillborn child; and here was a family blithely trying to give away their newborn.

  A couple of years later, in 2007, India marked the 60th anniversary of its independence. By then, Pratibha Patil, India’s first female president, was the country’s ceremonial figurehead, while Sonia Gandhi stood at the head of Congress, India’s once-more-dominant political party. Women proliferated in the upper ranks of Indian society and even ran a couple of its most thrusting companies. But what of that little baby girl in Punjab? All that we could hope for was that she had just celebrated a birthday of her own.

  The legendary BBC correspondent Mark Tully had by far the best answer for anyone who made the mistake of asking him how he coped with the poverty or suffering in India. He merely reported on the plight of slum-dwellers, he would pointedly reply, and its true victims were those who lived with it every day.

  If anything, the subcontinent had long been one of the more aristocratic of foreign postings, and even though news organisations had applied razors to their foreign budgets, we continued to enjoy lives of luxury compared with the correspondents who had gone before. When one of the BBC’s former India men arrived in Delhi to report on the British handover in 1947, he was instructed always to wear a cholera belt – ‘a swaddling band of flannel worn around the waist’ – and a sturdy pith helmet whenever he stepped into the sun. Despite these precautions, he still came out in a rash of angry boils and became so frustrated that he cast his ‘inflaming corselet’ aside.

  Back then, light relief for the international press corps occasionally came from a poker-playing American reporter, a former colonel who worked for the Associated Press, who enlivened card schools by sporadically yelling ‘Guess I’ll sweeten the freakpot’ and ‘Red threes are wild!’. With martial proficiency, he also took the lead in organising field trips outside of the capital. ‘Equipment to include portable typewriter, bedding roll, two bottles Scotch (NOT Indian), light reading and cash for poker (minimum stake Re 1),’ he instructed his colleagues on the eve of a railway journey to Bombay. ‘NB: DO NOT forget Scotch, Bombay is PROHIBITION TERRITORY.’

  By contrast, we hardly had to suffer for our art. I lived in a gated community directly opposite Lodi Gardens, a gorgeous parkland dotted with palm trees, Mogul tombs, green parakeets, young lovers reclining furtively against its trees and corpulent 50-something fitness fanatics who marched around its perimeter with the exaggerated arm and leg movements of the honour guards at the Wagah border crossing.

  Though the BBC no longer footed the bill for a full complement of domestic staff, it was easy enough to afford out of your own pocket a cook and cleaner. My ‘Man Friday’ was a diminut
ive Punjabi called Satay Singh, who made a mean paratha for breakfast and put such razor-sharp creases into my regulation foreign-correspondent khaki chinos that I had to be careful when walking near parked cars.

  I did not bother with a driver, much preferring to take my chances with the Michael Schumacher wannabes from the taxi rank on Lodi Road. In a city lacking in excitement, screeching around the roundabouts and tree-lined boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi in their black, green and yellow Ambassadors was sure to get the blood pumping at the start of the day.

  My only other member of staff was an elderly security guard who insisted on saluting whenever I entered my apartment, even though I almost begged him not to. Some salute it was too: ramrod straight, as if clenching a 500 rupee note between his buttocks, with his quivering palm angled, Benny Hill-style, into his right temple. His primary role was to be the first line of defence against Kashmiri insurgents or, perhaps, disgruntled Naxalites. After arriving home late at night, however, I was usually half-undressed and about to get into bed by the time he stirred from his slumbers in his sentry box at the gate.

  When it came to recreation, I had arrived in Delhi on the cusp of change. Reporters in search of a cooling libation no longer had to rely solely on the bar at the Imperial Hotel, with its barmen dressed in black turbans and scarlet tunics set off with shimmering gold epaulettes. Nor the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a dingy hangout memorable only for a wonderful black-and-white photograph that hung in its hallway showing Rajiv Gandhi and his beautiful young bride, Sonia, sharing ice-cream cones at India Gate – a snapshot of innocence from the days when all he wanted out of life was to fly jetliners and all she hoped for was to live in suburban obscurity.

  Now, fashionable new bars and restaurants were opening all over town, many of which would not have looked out of place in SoHo, Brooklyn or TriBeCa. I also became a fairly regular, if reluctant, participant on the Delhi cocktail circuit, which was educational from both an anthropological and an anatomical viewpoint. Indian women, I soon learnt, were usually about ten times as interesting as their husbands, while a serving tray piled high with steaming basmati rice was something best avoided. Not being entirely au fait with the Delhi scene, I also found myself on occasions chitchatting away to highly placed VIPs without ever knowing it. One night, it was a ludicrously pompous elderly gentleman, with a toxic wit, skin like it had already been embalmed and an ear for his own voice. Just before I went for the humdrum conversational ice-breaker ‘So what do you do?’, I suddenly realised: I was speaking to the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, who offered proof that you should never judge an author by his cover photo.

  With my journeys through India often taking on the feel of a gastronomic safari, I soon came to realise that curries neither had to blister the walls of your mouth nor be coloured shocking red, and also that they were best enjoyed before consuming ten pints of lager, rather than vice versa. If it was Punjab, then it was dal makhani for supper. If it was Calcutta, then it was fish curry, a Bengali macher jhol. Though Lucknow would argue, Hyderabad served up the finest biryanis, while Chennai opened up a whole new world of dosas, hoppers and the other delights of Tamil cuisine. What de Gaulle said of cheese in France was even truer of India’s local delicacies: how could anyone hope to govern a country with over 246 varieties of curry? Trying to sample as many of them as possible became a mission and hobby.

  An enthusiastic cricketer, I also joined the Foreign Correspondents’ Club XI, but I proved an abject failure with both bat and ball. Instead, I owed my continued selection to a small but salient technicality: in a team packed with local journalists, I was the only foreign correspondent. In younger days, I was a belligerent, if somewhat agricultural, middle-order batsman, who peppered the famed ‘cow corner’ with one inelegant boundary after another. But on subcontinental pitches against subcontinental spin bowlers, I found it impossible to locate that presumably sacred section of the ground.

  It did not help that, because of the high demand for manicured pitches, games often started before breakfast on a Sunday morning. It meant that while I was chasing balls that pitched way outside off-stump, the effects of the previous night’s Kingfishers were still chasing me.

  Though rarely able to last more than a couple of overs in the middle, at least I got to spend time with my favourite teammate, a business reporter who chatted away in the manner in which many Indian journalists continued to write. Chronically dependent on British idioms, storms for him usually came in teapots, mountains rose up out of molehills, leopards never changed their spots and stable doors were always closed long after the horses had bolted. On the field, he could also be relied upon to turn in a performance noticeably more hapless than mine. Indeed, he always seemed to play the game on the stickiest of wickets.

  Much of my cricket came to be viewed from the boundary, and on occasions even counted as work. For a time, cricketing ties between India and Pakistan were not just part of the Indo-Pak peace process, they pretty much were the Indo-Pak peace process. But perhaps the most exacting test of this cricketing détente came later in Ahmedabad, the state capital of Gujarat. It was not only the city that had witnessed the worst atrocities during the 2002 genocide but also the ground where Imran Khan had led his Pakistan team onto the pitch wearing batting helmets to protect them from missiles hurled from the stands.

  Gathering material for a radio news report, I stepped into the commentary box hoping to record some atmospheric sound effects. Alas, my arrival came around the time that a real-life BBC cricket reporter was scheduled to offer a brief spell of expert summary. Seeing the letters BBC on the laminated credentials dangling from my neck, the commentator naturally assumed I was the said reporter, so he beckoned me over to the vacant chair alongside him and handed me an open microphone.

  Here, I should pause briefly to emphasise the coveted seat that I now occupied. On Indian television at that time, one of the most popular reality shows was a cricketing version of Pop Idol, where thousands of youngsters competed for the chance to become a full-time cricket commentator. One of the most frequently aired commercials featured a young woman who had longed all her life for the chance to climb into the commentary gantry, a dream that came miraculously true when she applied a coat of Fair and Lovely skin whitener. The climactic scene showed the young woman seated in the Test-match commentary box, with microphone in hand and with skin unblemished, as her mother looked on proudly from the sofa at home, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

  As for my own commentary career, it started with the gentlest of full tosses: I was asked to pass judgement on the blossoming innings of the great Sachin Tendulkar, a subject I was more than happy to rhapsodise on for the time it took the bowler to walk back to his mark and to start his run-up. Unfortunately, tougher questions followed that I should probably have let go through to the wicketkeeper without offering a shot. What did I make of the state of the pitch? What was a realistic target for the Indians? How about the inconsistent batting form of the then Indian captain Sourav Ganguly? ‘Form is temporary, class is permanent’ was all I could summon up, as I started to tread the dark path of sporting cliché.

  What I lacked in expertise, I made up for in praise for the Indians, knowing that kind of material would go down well with the listeners at home. But all it seemed to do was irritate my fellow commentator, who I now noticed was rationing my airtime. Realising I had perhaps overstayed my welcome, I made my excuses and left, and noticed on the way what might have been the source of annoyance. I had been absolutely convinced that I was broadcasting on All India Radio. Regrettably, I had actually stepped into the commentary booth of Radio Pakistan.

  ‘Do not drink from a bottle labelled “Strong Indian Beer” and never predict the outcome of an Indian election.’

  Soon after arriving in Delhi, a kindly fellow correspondent passed on these two pieces of irreproachable advice. Needless to say, I disregarded both. I cannot remember the consequences of my Strong Indian Beer lapse, which I suppose rather neatly made his
point, but when it came to Indian politics at least I had a defence. The 2004 election could easily be foretold, for near universal was the view that the governing party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, would romp home to victory. The BJP was ideally placed to profit not only from the booming economy but also from its happy slogan, ‘India Shining’, which encapsulated the optimistic spirit of the times.

  A 79-year-old prime minister, with two artificial knees and a penchant for fried trout, the party’s leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, could hardly be said to personify its thrusting message. Yet by the standards of India’s political gerontocracy – his deputy, Lal Krishna Advani, was also in his late-70s, a group of 50-somethings were dubbed the party’s Young Turks and one of the country’s former leaders, Morarji Desai, did not become prime minister until the age of 81 – he had not yet reached the crest of the hill, and was still a half-decade or so away from being considered over it.

  The BJP’s image-makers also did their best to make him look as sprightly as possible, even going so far as to bully camera crews at his rare press conferences into not shooting his wobbly knees. From walking ten minutes each day on the treadmill to going cold turkey on the fried trout, Vajpayee himself tried to appear as vigorous as his faltering body would allow.