I was drawn back to the site by a Buddhist stupa from the Kushan period of the second century A.D.—that is, sixteen centuries after Moenjodaro’s downfall. The stupa soars above the site as if it is the world’s tallest building. Who needed the Empire State Building or the Burj Dubai when you had this inspiring stupa to gaze at? I thought. Though unconnected to Moenjodaro’s Bronze Age civilization, the stupa fit in perfectly with the rest of the ruins, as though a Henry Moore sculpture, accentuating all the symmetry and neat angles of the site, yet electrifying in its stark and penetrating humanity. The stupa was the product of the Kushan dynasty, the easternmost of the Indo-European peoples, which ruled much of northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of Central Asia in the early centuries of the Christian era, and was notable as a force for toleration and syncretism, incorporating into its worldview the pantheons of the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Hindus. It was an example of how cosmopolitanism, though identified with the Indian Ocean, need, of course, not be confined to it.
North of Moenjodaro lie Larkana and Garhi Khuda Baksh, the family mausoleum of the Bhuttos. This is one of the most harshly feudal parts of Pakistan, where, in the words of journalist Mary Anne Weaver, “families live in walled compounds, ringed by rifle sights; where landlords are often brutal and peasants are serfs; where women are in purdah, and men enjoy their whiskey and pheasant shoots.”27 The mausoleum’s white domes make it visible from far away across the alternating desert and the farm fields with their persevering donkeys and water buffaloes. Upon closer inspection, the turquoise lines of the large white tomb were uneven, with white plaster and paint smeared a bit messily over the cracked blue faience. The walls were plastered over with shredded old posters of father and daughter, Zulfikar and Benazir. With the especially big posters of her, this Muslim holy place was replete with graven images. Indeed, there was a noteworthy Sufi-cum-Shiite air to the whole place—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s tomb enclosed by pillars reminded me of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb in south Teheran, to which the faithful come to eat lunch and spend the entire day on the embroidered carpets. There was no landscaping here, no fine attention to detail. Rows of family coffins lay scattered on the floor. The prayer hall was humble, tribal. Benazir Bhutto had been educated at Harvard and Oxford, but there were no airs in this mausoleum. Here the common people ruled and were welcomed. Old men with beards sat around and threw rose petals on her coffin, draped in a carpet or two—a proper tomb would be built later on. Pendants and pictures of her were on sale, and newlyweds came to visit her tomb and pledge faithfulness.
Benazir Bhutto—a daughter of feudal Sindh despite her Western education—was a brilliant thinker and debater with no administrative ability to get anything done. Her two terms as prime minister of Pakistan in the late 1980s and 1990s were merely stations along the way to greater nationwide corruption and chaos that led eventually to the reinstitution of military rule. Yet, because of her rhetoric and promises, she was murdered by Islamists, who saw her as a dangerous symbol of democracy and moderation. But it would take more than symbols to rescue Pakistan, which desperately required the very governing ability that Bhutto lacked. In any case, should Pakistan have a bright future, it will be as a more decentralized state than it has ever been.
Civilizations are “fragile, impermanent things,” writes the anthropologist Joseph Tainter.28 In the Bronze Age, Moenjodaro survived as a highly centralized city-state within what was perhaps a loose and sprawling agricultural confederation. That could well be the future of what we call Pakistan, which will either live up to the deconcentrated cosmopolitan vision of its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, or will decline further. That means, in one form or another, Baluchistan and Sindh must rise in significance, providing enriched local identities for the Arabian Sea ports along the Makran coast, whose own destinies will help determine those of cities far inland. The nineteenth-century traveler and linguist Richard Francis Burton, after a five-year sojourn in Sindh, wrote that the line of ports along the Makran coast, stretching to Iran, would make it possible to “easily collect the whole trade of Central Asia,” with Bombay “as the point to which all these widely-diverging rays would tend.”29 Such a vision, though an imperial one at the time, could yet have a prospect in an age when current frontiers will become increasingly frail.
* Pajama-like trousers (shalwar) gathered at the waist and ankles, and worn underneath a long loose tunic (kameez).
* In November 2007, Pakistani security forces killed Nawabzada Balach Marri, the youngest of Marri’s six sons.
* Punjab means “five rivers”—the Beas, Ravi, Jhelum, Sutlej, and Chenab—in the heavily Persian-influenced Urdu. They all have their origins in lakes in the Himalayas.
* Here took place another depredation of the Portuguese, who sailed up the Indus to Thatta and sacked the city, killing thousands, just because tribute was not paid.
CHAPTER SIX
THE TROUBLED RISE OF GUJARAT
If the spirit of modern India has a geographical heartland it is Gujarat, the state in the northwest bordering Sindh in Pakistan. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Mahatma (Sanskrit for “Great Soul”) was a Gujarati, born in Porbandar on the Arabian Sea in 1869. The signal event of the Indian independence movement, which has attained the status of a foundation myth, was the Salt March that Gandhi, joined by thousands, led in March 1930 across Gujarat from the Sabarmati Ashram 241 miles south to Dandi on the Gulf of Cambay. Here, in defiance of British law, Gandhi picked up a handful of salt on the beach, challenging the prohibition against the collection or sale of salt except by the colonial authorities. “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor,” Gandhi wrote. So “I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil.”
Gandhi’s identification with the poor was intrinsic to his universalist philosophy, which was best condensed into the following statement, perhaps the most politically revealing he ever made: “I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. It means in its nakedness that in order to achieve the supposed good of 51 percent, the interest of 49 percent may be, or rather should be, sacrificed. It is a heartless doctrine and has done harm to humanity. The only real, dignified human doctrine is the greatest good of all.”
So to protect the poor against the ravages of capitalism, which benefits only the majority rather than everyone, India would adopt socialism after independence. More to the point, though the Hindus would dominate numerically, the rights of tens of millions of Muslims would not and must not be trampled on. Indeed, though India is swathed in an aura of religiosity and mysticism, the “greatest good” necessitated that the conscience of the new nation and the ruling Congress Party would be avowedly secular. Gandhi’s rustic, semi-naked appearance notwithstanding, he is symbolic of the universalist spirit of the Indian Ocean, which he transferred in large measure to India’s party of independence.
But the spirit of India has undergone an uneasy shift in this new era of rampant capitalism and ethnic and religious tensions, which arise partly as violent reactions against the very homogenization of societies that globalization engenders. Gujarat, among the handful of Indian states most identified with the long commercial history and traditions of the Indian Ocean, has found itself once again at the heart of what is roiling India, and this time what singularly menaces its rise to great global power status.
Let me be clear: I am very bullish on India, believing that its democracy has demonstrated sufficient elasticity to withstand future outbreaks of insurrection and localized anarchy to a degree that China’s authoritarian system may not be able to match. India’s democracy is ultimately a moderating force. Moreover, India is the birthplace of several religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians have lived in India for hundreds and thousands of years. The Tibetan
Dalai Lama has resided here for decades. India has elected three Muslim presidents. It is nothing if not free and eclectic. Hence, consider the following as a long and cautionary tale, not a prediction of India’s demise but, rather, an investigation into what might still go wrong with the country’s otherwise extraordinarily hopeful story.
India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan. Tolerable inter-communal relations are the sine qua non of Indian stability and ascendancy, for throughout India and particularly in a mercantile state like Gujarat, Hindus and Muslims must interact in business transactions daily. India has more to lose from extremist Islam than arguably any other country in the world. Yet, in Gujarat—as well as in some other places in India—Hindus and Muslims have lately begun to segregate themselves. Children have left schools that lay on the wrong side of inter-communal lines, and are growing up for the first time without friends from the other religion. Muslims in significant numbers have turned their back on the rich Subcontinental tradition of religious syncretism and begun dressing in beards, skullcaps, and burkas. “The Hindu-Muslim divide here is worse than at any time since the partition,” lamented historian Dwijendra Tripathi, who lives in Gujarat. Not coincidentally, this is occurring even as Gujarat booms economically, with brand-new malls, multiplexes, private ports, and highways, positioning itself as a pulsing region-state athwart Indian Ocean trade routes.
And yet Gujarat’s religious tensions have a more specific source than merely the rigors of economic development. They stem from “2002,” as everybody in Gujarat and the rest of India simply refers to it. That year in the local lexicon has attained a symbolism perhaps as resilient as the word “9/11” has to Americans. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, that has been etched deeply into the collective memory, becoming a myth in its own right that constitutes a hideous rebuke to Gandhi’s Salt March. The notoriousness of these events is all the more shocking given that India regularly experiences spectacular violence among religious groups, castes, and tribes, yet these somehow all dissolve into the larger, messy stew that is this country’s admired democracy.
What human rights groups here label the “pogrom” had its origin in the incineration of fifty-eight Hindu train passengers on February 27, 2002, in Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population that is a stop on the rail journey from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. The Muslims who started the fire were apparently the victims of taunts by other Hindus from Gujarat, who had previously passed through the station, en route to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, to demonstrate for a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a demolished Mughal-era mosque. It was at this juncture that the recently installed chief minister of Gujarat, the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, immediately decreed February 28 a day of mourning, so that the funerals of the passengers could be held in the streets of Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. “It was a clear invitation to violence,” writes the Financial Times correspondent in India, Edward Luce, in his book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India.1 “The Muslim quarters of Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat subsequently turned into death traps as thousands of Hindu militants converged on them.” In the midst of the riots, Chief Minister Modi quoted Newton’s third law: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” The statement removed all restraint from the killers. Mobs coalesced and raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, who were then set on fire. The males were forced to watch the ritualistic killings before they, too, were put to death. The figures and some of the details of what happened are subject to great controversy. Some reports claim that as many as 400 women were raped, 2000 Muslims murdered, and 200,000 more made homeless throughout the state.
The killers—again, according to some reports—were dressed in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the uniform of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Organization of National Volunteers), the umbrella group of the Hindu nationalist movement, and came armed with swords and gas cylinders. The rioters were also equipped with electoral registers and computer printouts to identify Muslim homes. They even had the addresses of Muslim-owned businesses that had hidden behind Hindu business partners. Luce, the influential writer Pankaj Mishra, and many others have observed that the high degree of planning and efficiency to the murders indicated official culpability. “Surveys were done some weeks before indicating where Muslims lived,” said Prasad Chacko, who runs a human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO), in Ahmedabad. “The police were complicit. There was the attitude of waiting for a pretext to let people vent their feelings. The quality of the killings, if not the numbers, indicate a state-sponsored genocide.”
Indeed, the police stood by and observed the killings, and in some cases, according to Human Rights Watch, helped the rioters locate Muslim addresses. As for the 200,000 made homeless, the Gujarati state government provided little or nothing in the way of relief, or compensation for the loss of life and businesses. Many secular NGOs stayed on the sidelines, afraid to incur the wrath of the central authorities. Muslim charities—Jamaat-e-Islami, Tabliqe Jamaat, and Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind—provided for the shelters, and these organizations subsequently became a vehicle for the radicalization of young Muslims in the wake of the carnage. Modi, whom the riots had made a household word throughout India, later called the Muslim relief camps “baby-making factories.”2
“The events of 2002 have reverberated years later because of the involvement of the Gujarati state authorities in the killings, and the fact that until this day there has been no public remorse,” Sofia Khan, the head of a local Muslim NGO, told me. “There has been no moral reckoning,” declared Ramesh Mehta, a retired judge. As one Hindu activist coldly rationalized to me, “If the train in Godhra had not been burnt, the riots would not have happened.” His was an attitude I heard particularly from educated Hindus throughout Gujarat. While it is true that Indian political parties have for decades played the communal card—one could argue that the Congress Party stoked anti-Sikh violence after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984—there was a particular blatancy and transparency in the way that the Gujarati authorities helped orchestrate anti-Muslim violence. And afterwards, as Johanna Lokhande, an activist who helps victims of the massacre, told me, the local government was “averse to the whole idea of providing justice.”
More tellingly, 2002 continues to echo precisely because of Chief Minister Modi’s very success as a politician in the intervening years. He has never apologized, never demonstrated regret of any sort for 2002, and has thus become a hero to the Hindu nationalist movement, reelected several times as chief minister. Furthermore, his seeming incorruptibility, his machine-like efficiency, and his penchant for dynamic leadership of the government bureaucracy have lately made Gujarat a mecca for development, garnering more internal investment than any other state in India. To travel to Sindh and then to Gujarat is to comprehend at a very tangible level how Pakistan is a failed state and India a very successful one, with the ability to project economic and military power throughout the Indian Ocean region. And this impression, as imperfect as it may be, is to a significant extent due to the way Modi has governed.
Migrants, both Hindus and Muslims, from throughout India have been streaming into Gujarat in recent years to find work at its expanding factories. There is an element of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in Modi’s Gujarat. What’s more, his hypnotic oratory, helped by a background in the theater, has led some to compare him to Adolf Hitler. Modi is not only the most dangerously charismatic politician in India today, he may be the only charismatic one, and the first to emerge in decades since Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.
Of course, Narendra Modi is neither Lee Kuan Yew nor Hitler. He is what he is, a new kind of hybrid politician—part CEO with incredible management abilities, part rabble-rouser with a fierce ideological following—who is both impressive and disturbing in his own right. Developments in mass commu
nications have led to an evolution in leadership styles, and just as Barack Obama gives hope to millions in the new century, a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go wrong: with unbreachable psychological divisions between religious groups masked by a veneer of cold bureaucratic efficiency. And that is why he is so important. Representing a spirit very different from that of Gandhi, he is very much part of the Indian Ocean story.
Leaders often sum up the geographical, political, and social landscapes out of which they specifically arise, so before I delve further into the character of Narendra Modi and describe my long conversation with him, let me provide a picture of Gujarat, a microcosm in more intense form of twenty-first-century India and the Indian Ocean world itself.
Gujarat has “tremendous locational advantage,” explains historian Dwijendra Tripathi. It is near the Indian Ocean’s midpoint, yet still close enough to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula to refine oil from there, and reexport it. With two great gulfs—those of Kutch and Cambay—Gujarat has the longest coastline and best natural harbors in India. This immense seaboard fronts westward toward the Middle East and Africa, so throughout history Gujarat has been a land of trade and the broad-based movement of peoples.3 Camões writes in The Lusíads:
See the most fertile land of Sind
And the deep-seated Gulf of Kutch
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