Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  A story about two friends, both born in Srinagar in 1967, puts the tragedy of Kashmir in human terms. Both members of prosperous, middle-class professional families, Ashfaq Majid Wani and Nadeem Khatib were best friends during the 1970s and early 1980s. Together they attended the best grammar school in the city, where they were both bright students and fine athletes. While Ashfaq’s ambition was to be a doctor, his friend Nadeem had ambitions to be an airline pilot. In his late teens, Ashfaq became interested in politics and, fired with this new enthusiasm, he joined the numerous demonstrations that took place in Srinagar at the end of the 1980s. On 23 March 1987, he was one of the hundreds of opposition activists arrested in police crackdowns across Indian-controlled Kashmir. He was released after nine months, but it is now apparent that his period in prison made him bitter. After his release, he was found to have cigarette burns all over his body, and he promptly left home and ‘disappeared’. He never came home again, but in 1989 he emerged as a household name in Kashmir. He was now a leading member of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. By early 1990, when government authority had collapsed in the Kashmir Valley, the insurrection had just started and Ashfaq Wani was one of the most wanted men in India. On 30 March, the Indian security forces tracked him down in the old city of Srinagar. There was a fierce exchange of fire, in which he was killed.42 He had lost his life at the age of twenty-three.

  Meanwhile Nadeem, Ashfaq’s childhood friend, was pursuing his dream of becoming a pilot. In March 1992, he left Srinagar to join a flying school near Delhi. From there he went to a flying school in Georgia, in the United States. He returned to Srinagar in 1994, but left again in 1996, telling his parents that he was going back to the United States, where he would find a job as a pilot for an American airline. His parents kept in touch. They received many calls back from their son, who they believed was living a prosperous and contented life in America. In 1999, there occurred one of the frequent fierce exchanges of fire between Indian troops and Kashmiri guerrillas in a remote mountainous area of the region. Nadeem Khatib was killed at the age of thirty-two. He had left America to go to Pakistan, where he learned how to be a guerrilla fighter. Ominously, it was his experience in America which had turned him into a radical Islamist. There, according to his mother, he ‘used to brood a lot on America’s exploitation of Muslim countries’.43

  Beyond the personal tragedies, there lies the dangerous political situation, which continues to have serious implications for international politics. One curious legacy of the British Empire has been a strong Kashmiri community in England, which has been described as the ‘real fountainhead of secessionism’.44 Even more dangerously, the region is one of the places where the threat of nuclear war is still very real. On 11 and 13 May 1998 India carried out a series of underground nuclear tests at Pokhran. On 28 and 30 May, Pakistan conducted its own series of nuclear tests. Some sort of confrontation seemed likely. The Japanese Prime Minister, Keizo Obuchi, spoke of the urgency of resolving the ‘root cause’ of the Indo-Pakistan conflict–Kashmir.45 More recently, Kashmir has been host to all types of Islamic terror groups, who find in the state’s lawlessness a convenient cover for their activities. Between 26 and 29 November 2008, Mumbai witnessed more than ten shooting and bombing attacks, in which 173 people were killed. The group responsible for the attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, had been active in Kashmir for more than a decade. One of the attackers mentioned Kashmir in a rambling interview with the India TV news channel during the siege of the Taj Mahal Hotel. ‘Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?’ This is an excuse which in itself proves nothing, except how politically sensitive the issue of Kashmir still remains.46

  The Kashmir dispute from the very beginning has been a battle of different ideas of what constitutes a state. Pakistan was built as an avowedly Muslim state, whose basis is the religion which, it was believed, united the country. India, under its Congress leaders, has always proudly maintained its secular status. According to one writer, the battle of Kashmir is an ‘uncompromising . . . struggle of two ways of life, two concepts of political organization, two scales of values, two spiritual attitudes’.47 It was exasperating for Indian leaders like Nehru to have to justify India’s control of Kashmir, given that the religious argument in favour of Pakistan seemed so obvious. It is ironic that since 1947 religion, in the form of militant Islamism, has, if anything, become a stronger current in international politics. At the end of 1948, Nehru complained that ‘people cannot get rid of the idea that Kashmir is predominantly Muslim and therefore likely to side with Muslim Pakistan’.48 This has always been at the core of the Pakistan case. It was the same argument made by Lord Mountbatten to the Maharaja in the summer of 1947, before Hari Singh’s fateful decision to accede to India. It is the same argument that is heard from the mouths of Pakistani politicians today. Secular India, however, sees no reason why a majority Muslim state should not remain as part of India. Recent history has not moved in India’s way in this respect. International politics in today’s world, especially after 11 September 2001, has been dominated by ethnic and religious conflict, by people identifying with religion to a greater degree than any enlightenment thinker could have imagined. As George Orwell wrote in 1941, the ‘energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions–racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war–which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms’. 49 The dispute in Kashmir is highly representative of the ‘energy that actually shapes the world’.

  The role of history, of the British Empire, in all this is clear to see. Accidents and decisions made on a personal, almost whimsical, level have had a massive impact on international politics. The empire in its belief in the individual action of its servants, with very little supervision and without any real central philosophy, created an environment in which a parcel of land was sold to a very rich man, with enormous repercussions. The family of that rich man ruled Kashmir for a hundred years because it was convenient for the British that that family should do so. It is ironic that revisionist historians have pointed to Indian democracy as the British Empire’s greatest legacy. Democracy in Kashmir never existed; the system of Indian princes, which is directly responsible for the Kashmir problem, was the absolute opposite of democracy. The personal rule of the Hindu maharajas of Kashmir accorded with the snobbery of Victorian England, the belief in natural aristocrats, the love of pageantry and pride in lineage. These are not modern ideas, but owe their origin more to a feudal, medieval past than to the secular, democratic liberalism of the modern West. In Kashmir, the Maharaja’s decision was final. It was that decision which has shaped, and will continue to influence, the fate of this troubled region. As Hari Singh himself wrote, in his clumsy, pompous style, ‘to which Dominion the state should accede–strictly speaking–according to the Government of India Act, I alone am the authority to decide’.50 In many ways, Hari Singh was indeed a modern-day Louis XIV, echoing the famous remark attributed to the French King: ‘L’État, c’est moi.’

  PART III

  BURMA: LOST KINGDOM

  8

  White Elephant

  The old King, Mindon, was happy in his palace, from which he had ruled the kingdom of Upper Burma since 1853. Having annexed Lower Burma, the area round Rangoon and the Irrawaddy Delta, in the 1850s, the British were content for Mindon to rule Upper Burma as an independent sovereign. Mindon was clever enough to understand who possessed real power in his part of the world. The old man was a pious Buddhist who had an extensive family; some people claimed that he had a hundred wives, though this is evidently incorrect, because only fifty-three wives have been attested to, thirty-nine of whom bore children. Altogether, Mindon had 110 children, of whom forty-eight were boys and sixty-two were girls.1

  Mindon, as a local king, had experienced the power of the British at first hand, because his brother, Pagan Min, the previous king, had been an unpredictable and wild ruler who had been defeated by the British in battle. When it took over the souther
n part of the Burmese kingdom, Britain forced Pagan Min to abdicate. Pagan had been the worst kind of ruler for the British and had begun his reign by massacring a hundred members of his own family to secure his rule. He was devoted to cockfighting and debauchery of all kinds. According to British observers, the ‘acts of cruelty and extortion perpetrated in his reign have never been surpassed’.2

  The family which now ruled Burma were relative upstarts. In 1752, Alaungpaya, an obscure village chief, launched a successful rebellion against the King of the Mon people, who had deposed Burma’s ruling family, the Taungoo dynasty. Alaungpaya then crowned himself king and, in 1755, founded Rangoon. His last campaign was an invasion of Siam (Thailand), during which, in April 1760, he besieged the historic capital, Ayutthaya. During the siege, a cannon he was watching exploded and wounded him, and he died on the way back to Burma. He was not yet forty-six years old, but his career, though short, had been brilliant. ‘In eight years he rose from the position of a petty village headman to that of one of the most powerful monarchs of the East.’3

  Mindon was a less warlike, more conciliatory ruler than the founding father of his dynasty had been. He was also a pragmatic man who ‘knew and feared’ Britain’s power.4 Unfortunately, he was deluded in thinking that he could maintain a relationship with the British on equal terms. In his own eyes, and according to the propaganda of the court, he was still ‘the lord of all the Great Umbrella-bearing chiefs’, the ‘King of the Rising Sun’, and ‘lord of the Celestial Elephant’; most important of all, he was the ‘lord of the White Elephant’, a phrase which itself has entered the English language to mean something expensive but useless, but which, in Burmese eyes, was the ultimate symbol of royal authority. More widely in South-east Asia–in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma itself–the White Elephant was a symbol of royalty. As long as a king possessed a white elephant, he was deemed to be a just ruler. This tradition derived from the time of the Buddha, whose mother was supposed to have dreamed of a white elephant the night before she gave birth. The white elephant gave her a lotus flower, the symbol of wisdom and purity. To be given a real white elephant was a blessing, but it was also a curse. It was a holy animal, a symbol of purity and royal favour, yet, for this very reason, there was no practical use for the animal, which was not allowed to work in the fields or do any other work.

  As ‘lord of the White Elephant’, Mindon felt he had the same status as any monarch in the world. His ambition was to ‘establish direct diplomatic relations between himself and the British Government without the interference of the Viceroy’, who resided in India.5 Mindon was very sensitive to breaches of protocol. He demanded respect and anyone entering his presence was required to take off his shoes. Often there were mildly humorous exchanges. General Horace Browne recorded a visit to Mindon’s capital, Mandalay, in 1872: ‘At the steps of the Audience Hall we had, as usual, to submit to the process of unshoeing, as our Government has not yet seen fit to make a stand against this un-Occidental custom.’6 Browne was also wearing a hat, and a palace guard kindly asked him to take that off too. He replied, ‘No, my friend, give me back my shoes, and I will take my hat off, but I am not going to uncover both ends at once.’

  This mildly jocular spirit had hardened by the end of the 1870s, when a greater degree of formality and protocol prevailed in Britain’s relations with foreign powers. In Asia, in particular, with its widely differing cultures, diplomats were expected by local rulers to be sensitive to the demands of custom. In 1875, Sir Douglas Forsyth, the head of the mission to Mandalay, had been asked to conform to the Burmese court etiquette and invited to remove his shoes. He complied with this request reluctantly and, afterwards, expressed his indignation. The Viceroy’s government in India then gave instructions that, in future, the British Resident in Mandalay should not take off his shoes on entering an audience with the King. This was a humiliation for Mindon.7 He refused to compromise on the issue. When Robert Shaw, the British Resident (and Francis Younghusband’s uncle), was equally intransigent and refused to take off his shoes, he was barred from the palace.

  The hardening of British attitudes to Burma in the 1870s formed only part of a progression towards greater imperialism. It was at this time, after all, in 1877, that Queen Victoria was given the title ‘Empress of India’ by Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, whose jingoism was then highly popular. Rivalry between European powers spilled over into contests in Asia and Africa, and Burma was caught up in this competition. Lord Cranborne, who as Lord Salisbury later became prime minister, had declared as early as 1867 that it was ‘of primary importance to allow no other European power to insert itself between British Burmah and China’, since Britain’s ‘influence in that country ought to be paramount’.8 Cranborne’s view was that ‘an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China’ was ‘an object of national importance’.

  In the 1860s and 1870s, the prospect of a vast increase in trade with the hundreds of millions who were subjects of the Chinese Emperor was very alluring. Speculators and adventurers dreamed of building railways, which would connect Rangoon to western China. One of these speculators was a crank named Captain Richard Sprye who had badgered the British government with his schemes since the 1850s. British merchants were particularly enthused by the China trade. As Horace Browne wrote in his diary on 31 July 1874, ‘the discovery of a north-east passage between Burma and China has long been agitating the minds of the Anglo-Burman and English mercantile world’. Captain Sprye had been the first to draw attention to this possibility. He was dubbed the ‘apostle of the overland route to China’, an accurate if not very pithy description. His idea was simple. As Browne observed, ‘Any schoolboy with atlas in hand can demonstrate that a straight line drawn from Rangoon to the nearest point of the Chinese Empire [in Yunan province] has a length of about 500 miles, half of which lies in British territory.’ The line even came to be known as ‘Sprye’s Route’.

  The problem was that Captain Sprye had been in Burma in the 1840s and had never ‘explored a single mile of the line himself’. He was the very model of an armchair general. ‘From his armchair in London he glorifies himself as the . . . Lesseps of Indo-China.’9 (Ferdinand, Vicomte de Lesseps was the French engineer who had built the Suez Canal in 1869 and who was very much an international hero of the 1870s.) For his part, Sprye had ‘been riding his hobby for fifteen years or more’. He wrote ‘interminable letters to every Government office in any way concerned’ and was generally viewed as ‘an intolerable bore’.10

  The problem with building a railway which connected Rangoon with the populous El Dorado of western China was the terrain. The route projected may have been only 500 miles, but it would have to cross rugged, mountainous ground. It was extremely difficult territory, as Yunnan itself, the Chinese province closest to Burma, was a land of ‘high mountain ridges which were over 8,000 feet even at the lowest points and whose river valleys were sheer crevasses’.11

  The lure of Chinese riches, then as now, continued to beguile the minds of greedy entrepreneurs. All through the 1870s and early 1880s, self-appointed Burma experts, as well as the British merchant community in Rangoon more generally, were salivating at the prospect of commerce with China. ‘Supposing that the entire commerce of south-west China and independent Burma were added to that of British Burma, we may conceive what a vast opening there would be for the merchants of Great Britain.’ In Rangoon, merchants had already calculated that ‘the Chinese provinces neighbouring Burma contained approximately 103 million inhabitants and that such a vast population was hardly touched by European commerce’. The Chinese trade in tea, silk, tobacco, sugar and oil, everybody felt, would be enormous. Already in the 1870s, the British were clamouring to do business with the ‘teeming millions’ of China, which was regarded as ‘a nation of born traders’.12

  The logic of trade involved Britain in Burmese affairs to a greater extent, a logic which even King Mindon acknowledged. He was only too aware of the Burmese folk tale o
f the python and the virgin daughter. This was about an old widow who once found a python asleep under a fig tree. For some reason, she thought it was a bewitched prince, so she brought it home for her daughter. The widow asked her virgin daughter to marry the snake, promising that it would turn into a handsome prince after the marriage. They were put together in the same bed on the wedding night. Soon the young woman cried, ‘The snake is swallowing me!’ The widow rushed to see her daughter and said, ‘Your husband loves you; he is merely teasing you.’ The snake swallowed her up to the waist. The young woman again cried, ‘The snake is swallowing me!’ The widow rushed in and said the same thing: ‘Your husband loves you.’ After another hour, the young woman had been swallowed up to her neck. She cried out for the last time, but it was too late.13