Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  Somewhat to my surprise, I completed my two years and a bit in the FCO on good terms with my colleagues, without having caused a diplomatic crisis, and with a big store of invaluable experience. I had no wish to stay on: Olympia and I would have dreaded the claustrophobia of embassy life, and my ambitions would not have been satisfied with a gong at the end of twenty-five years of service. My attempts to find a role in the private sector failed, however, and I went off to direct research on trade and development, especially in India.

  Chapter 8

  A Passage to India

  The decade or so of my life as a professional politician is what, if anything, I am likely to be remembered for. But the decades of political exile that preceded it were enriching in a different way.

  Satisfactory careers provide intellectual challenge and emotional satisfaction and integrate rather than separate professional and private life. I found those different elements in work on economic development and its links with international economics. One of the most fundamental economic questions is why some countries, and individuals, prosper and others live in poverty. That question leads to another: how can the world be better ordered to help countries and individuals escape from poverty? Years spent working in or on East Africa, then Latin America, then India, in academia, government, intergovernmental organizations and a multinational company, gave me a distinctive perspective both as an analyst and as an advocate. And through Olympia’s extended family I was able to see the world not just through the windows of international hotels and taxis and the eyes of my professional contacts, but through a network of close and evolving personal relationships in India, Africa and the UK.

  It is easy to feel a sense of despair and disgust about the abject poverty, rampant corruption and casual violence that disfigures so much of the developing world. But the big story of my lifetime has been the way in which the lives of billions of people, mainly in Asia, but also in southern Europe and parts of Latin America and even Africa, have been changed for the better; and the potential that an open international economy and liberal values have for doing much more. The current economic crisis may have the effect of changing the direction of economic travel, but it is unlikely to affect the growing relative importance of the big Asian countries. The economic and political transformation of India in the four decades over which I have visited it is both an example and a metaphor for this experience, although there is an understandable preoccupation with the part of the glass that is empty rather than the part that is full (or fuller).

  My fascination with the process of development started with an overland student trek to India, via the USSR, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in a VW van. I shall always be indebted to Jim Potter, later a successful Cambridge-based businessman, and Geoff Heal, now a US-based economist of some renown, who invited me along for the ride. There were some abiding impressions, particularly once we had crossed the Soviet frontier. Visitors from the West were a rarity in the villages of the Ukraine and we aroused great curiosity, and also hostility and stone-throwing which we attributed to our German vehicle, this being barely twenty years years after millions had died in the Great Patriotic War. Soviet officialdom showed continuing interest in our papers and photographic equipment and where exactly we had spent each night, though the intrusiveness eased as we moved away from the main population centres. Nonetheless, I did manage to create a diplomatic incident when I struck up a brief friendship, conducted in pidgin German, with a pretty and flirtatious young woman on an open-air dance floor in a park in Kiev. I suspect that her gold teeth and my odour from weeks without a bath would have inhibited any deeper relationship in any event, but we got only as far as a vigorous rock and roll jive which was taken up enthusiastically by the rest of the dancers. Scandalized apparatchiks appeared and I was escorted away and given an angry lecture by one English-speaking guardian of public virtue on ‘Western degeneracy’. I feared for the young woman, but I last saw her giggling helplessly with her friends.

  These fierce standards did not seem to apply in the Soviet deep south and we discovered in Georgia decent food and wine for the first time, and managed to get hopelessly lost in Armenia along a road outside a missile base, to be offered some friendly map-reading from the guards. When we approached the Iranian frontier, it was politely explained that it wouldn’t be a good idea to wander across the minefields and we were loaded on to a train with blackened windows and dropped at a frontier crossing point in the Iranian semi-desert.

  Oil wealth, religious revolution and war have since reshaped Iran, but the Iran of the shah was orderly and moderately prosperous, with constant reminders of its great history in the well-laid-out cities and the magnificent blue-tiled mosques of Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Mashad (as foreigners we were not allowed to visit the holy city of Qum). Even in a short visit it was possible to pick up some of the tensions behind the placid exterior: in the sudden flashes of crowd anger we experienced in small incidents in the Tehran bazaar, where we stayed with a local family in proximity to the Shia shrines. (A week or so before we visited Mashad, a German tourist had been killed by a mob for showing disrespect.)

  The Afghans across the border reacted to us quite differently. Instead of the Iranians’ disconcerting mixture of obsequiousness and aggression, there was proud indifference. The cities of Herat, Kandahar and Kabul have since been largely destroyed by war but were then enjoying a long period of stability during which the country was courted by the USA and USSR with generous, competing, aid. In Herat, my friends fell ill from contaminated meat, which I had luckily avoided, and I spent the best part of a week ‘discovering’ the town. I found in the mosque a haven of cool tranquillity and spent many hours reading or daydreaming. Like the cathedrals of Christendom, the great mosques of Islam have the ability to inspire a sense of religious awe even in those who do not subscribe to their faith.

  Nothing had fully prepared me for the culture shock of the Indian subcontinent: the heaving towns and cities of the Pakistani and Indian Punjab, bustling, squalid, noisy, smelly and garish. Every few yards held a surprise: some new variant of human or animal life. A narrow strip of tarmac across northern India – the Grand Trunk Road – served as an expressway, cricket pitch, public lavatory, shopping arcade, cow pasture, prayer mat, bedroom, garage forecourt, laundry and promenade. To navigate it was a feat of endurance and every stop produced a curious crowd.

  The Punjab of the mid-1960s was not the prosperous economic powerhouse of later decades. It had barely recovered from the ravages of partition. The green revolution had not yet (quite) arrived. The year we passed through had seen a crop failure and there were hungry, destitute people everywhere; every temple or gurdawara or railway station was a Mecca for beggars.

  The mood of the educated Indians we met oscillated between on the one hand prickly pride and insistence that India’s problems stemmed from British rule, and on the other a fatalistic despair. The shine had worn off the independence generation of Congress politicians – Gandhi, Nehru, Patel were dead – and corruption was reputedly rife. The armed forces had been routed by the Chinese three years earlier. A system of socialist planning had made little impact on poverty and India was stuck in what was called the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Even Pakistan seemed to be doing better. There were secessionist movements building up. A growing revolt by violent Naxalites among the rural poor was raising the possibility of a communist-style revolution; indeed, a genre of fashionable books like John Lewis’s Quiet Crisis in India prophesied precisely such an outcome.

  It was a relief to escape the chattering classes of Delhi, delightfully hospitable though they were. Our party split up and I headed off through Rajasthan to Bombay with Geoff Heal in the van. He became seriously ill, however, and we were rescued by a Methodist missionary in Baroda who undertook to send him back to Delhi on a train while I took over the vehicle. With all the impetuosity of youth I decided to explore the country on my own, heading directly east a thousand miles across the large waistline of India, aim
ing to meet the Calcutta–Delhi road somewhere in Bihar. My large-scale map suggested that India was traversed laterally by roads but, had I been more careful, I would have inquired what happened when the roads met India’s rivers flowing north to south and feeding into the Ganges. When road signs, and sometimes the road, disappeared, I found my way with the help of endlessly friendly and curious villagers. After initial spasms of panic and fear, I came to trust India and developed a confidence that behind the alien masks of language and custom there was no malice and much goodness. I needed such confidence, because once I had passed the agricultural centres of Gujarat and cities like Indore, I was frequently lost and lonely.

  I dealt with loneliness by picking up a stream of hitch-hikers. I learned a lot from a ‘dry state’ liquor inspector whose job was to identify contraband crossing state boundaries (which were, and are, in their tax and regulatory barriers to trade, a mockery of the idea that India is a single market). I gave lifts to several ‘tribals’, the Indian term for the original, or aboriginal, population, who occupy a position at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy outside the caste system but alongside the ‘scheduled caste’ (‘untouchables’ or Harijans). I acquired a role as a makeshift ambulance driver, taking expectant women to the nearest midwife or, on one occasion, a bleeding body, more dead than alive, which had been on the receiving end of a wild animal. With ample spare tanks of petrol, a simple but adequate diet of chapattis, bananas and marsala tea (boiled with milk and spices), and using the van as a roadside hotel, I was able to cover substantial distances without mishap.

  The rivers, swollen by monsoon rains, presented serious problems, however. There were no bridges or fords, only manually propelled ferries, like small rafts, designed for pedestrians and bicycles. The ever-inventive villagers realized that the rafts could just about carry a small van, which had to be loaded by driving along two narrow parallel planks. After great drama and the near disappearance of the van into a Ganges tributary, I managed to get it on to the first raft and off again; and then had to repeat the trick several times more. Eventually I reached an approximation to my destination; and headed back via Benares to Delhi, to a reunion with my friends.

  There was a non-stop rush back for the beginning of term, but we had one more piece of drama. As we approached the Wagga crossing in Punjab, it was clear that there was something wrong. The traffic had thinned to non-existence and there were tanks and other military vehicles everywhere. We were reluctantly admitted into Pakistan but told that we were fortunate to be the last people allowed out of India before the frontier closed. War broke out the next day and the journey through Pakistan was punctuated by air raids and blackouts. In one small town we were detained for a couple of days as ‘suspicious’. But the dash then continued and we arrived back, exhausted, ill and exhilarated in equal measure. I was left with abiding memories of India and a wish to return and to understand better what I had seen.

  Two years in Kenya and several working on Latin America had increased my understanding of the complexity of development. Then, two events – one personal, one professional – drew me back to India. For several years after my marriage to Olympia both our fathers had ostracized us and declared that they would see us again over their respective dead bodies. Mr Rebelo was the first to show signs of flexibility and the reasons for the exclusion of Olympia from the family circle were being rapidly overtaken by events. By this time Mr and Mrs Rebelo had left Kenya to rebuild the family home in Goa and the suggestion was made that we might visit. The first opportunity was the wedding, in 1975, of their second son Celso, who alone of the seven children had resolved to marry a Goan girl from a good family and the right caste. Preparations were put in train for a family wedding at the village chapel in Verna, and our two young children were to have pride of place as page and bridesmaid.

  Olympia had a deep emotional attachment to India but had never visited it, except as a child when she was sent to a Goan boarding school but was soon repatriated back to Nairobi, protesting bitterly about the heat and the food. Olympia’s memories of heat boils and mine of tropical, post-monsoon conditions led us to assume that India was hot – period – and we dressed accordingly. We had, however, decided to start the visit in Delhi, which was experiencing an exceptionally cold winter. It was bitterly cold and our children suffered considerably from their parents’ failure to appreciate the seasonal geography of north India.

  There had also been a big political change in the decade since I had last visited. Mrs Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, had emerged as prime minister after a power struggle with the old guard of Congress and had won an election based on a populist programme of nationalization (of the banks) and spending promises. There was mounting unrest over a deteriorating economic situation and law and order seemed to be slipping out of control. She declared a state of emergency with dictatorial powers and we arrived in Delhi with the emergency in full swing. We saw a few glimpses of what that entailed. Olympia went to observe proceedings at a treason trial of a leading trade unionist, George Fernandes, who appeared in court in manacles. Opinion was divided among the people we met as to whether the emergency was an undemocratic outrage or a blessed relief. Those who took the latter view were particularly enthusiastic about the mass sterilization of many of India’s poorer men, a campaign led by Mrs Gandhi’s son Sanjay, which blurred the distinction between volunteering and compulsion.

  For us tourists, the emergency meant the disappearance of beggars from the streets and taxis charging a standard fare. Trains, Mussolini-style, ran on time, and we travelled around north India on the railway before heading off to Bombay to visit the bride’s family. They lived in a middle-class suburb, Chembur, which, I later discovered, had recently been monitored as the most atmospherically polluted spot on earth on account of a petrochemical plant established nearby. The air was heavy with sulphurous smoke and most of the residents seemed to be dependent on asthma inhalers. But conditions there were heavenly compared with the settlement nearby which formed part of the largest slum in Asia, Dharawi, where the pungency of modern chemicals blended with the more ancient smells of tanneries and sewage. My hypersensitive Western nostrils and digestive system took some time to adjust to the overpowering stench and squalor, but I was reassured by my hosts that those Indians who had made it to a shack in this foetid rabbit warren of humanity were the lucky ones, having joined the conveyor belt of opportunity in a big city. Indeed, with each succeeding visit, the number of TV aerials and mopeds multiplied even faster than the size of the slum itself. There was also a prickly pride in the smells and smoke that symbolized industrial modernity, though a few years later Union Carbide would dispel such innocence. The film Slumdog Millionaire depicts life in this corner of Bombay (now Mumbai), then as now.

  Olympia’s brother Celso was one of the pioneers of this industrial revolution: a medical student, turned microbiologist, turned manager of one of India’s newest breweries, in the township of Uran across Bombay harbour. To reach it we took a tiny, crowded ferry which ducked and weaved between the cargo ships and oil tankers before depositing us on a jetty nearby. In the monsoon season especially, such vessels had a bad habit of capsizing, but this one made it. The only forms of transport on land were an occasional trap pulled by a horse of such decrepitude that it seemed likely to collapse at any time, or a rickshaw pulled by a human being with even less flesh than the horse. We took the ethically dubious decision not to inflict the burden of carrying two adults, two children and several suitcases on the wretched man – probably thereby depriving his family of a meal. On subsequent visits a fleet of India’s motorcycle rickshaws had arrived, but on this occasion the horse got us to the brewery.

  The factory was remarkably well fortified, which, we discovered, was attributable to local labour relations. Like many of the islands on India’s industrial archipelago, this one was populated by trade unions that claimed adherence to a particularly violent and uncompromising variant of Marxism–Leninism. My brother-in-law was a tough, unc
ompromising operator, whose skill in dealing with the unions had kept him and his colleagues from too much strike action or the dreaded gherao, when management would be locked in their offices without food, water or toilet facilities until they gave in to the latest demands. His job also required him to deal with the innumerable bureaucrats in Bombay or Delhi whose refusal to issue one of dozens of licences or permits could bring the factory to a halt, and these formalities were accomplished with the help of a suitcase full of rupee notes. We were exposed to the full force of India’s angry managerial middle class, whose rage and frustration over bureaucracy, corruption and industrial unrest provided much of the dynamic behind Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial emergency. Celso was a particular fan of Mrs G.