Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  For much of the following week, Sonia remained a prisoner in her own bungalow, from which rumours emerged that she was about to turn down India’s top job. First, they were whispers. Delhi tittle-tattle, little more. Then, as Sonia used some weirdly ambiguous language to describe her intentions, the whispers turned into frenzied conjecture. Now, thousands of worried Congress supporters converged on 10 Janpath from all over the country, many carrying mattresses to sleep on as they mounted round-the-clock vigils. Others threatened to go on hunger strike if she refused to become prime minister.

  Even senior Congress figures became gibbering wrecks. As a BBC colleague interviewed one party elder live on air, the elder broke down in gushing tears, completely inconsolable. When finally he regained his composure, and retrieved his head from my colleague’s now drenched shoulder, a producer from CNN who had seen his on-screen meltdown pulled him to one side. Would he mind reproducing precisely the same emotional pyrotechnics for a live cross with Atlanta in ten minutes’ time?

  By far the most bravura performance that week came from a former Congress MP, who stood before the crowds outside 10 Janpath on the roof of his chauffeur-driven jeep, manically waving a pistol at his head, as if his arm were made of rubber, and threatening to pull the trigger. So madcap was the scene that this pratfalling performance looked like Bollywood’s take on Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, with the suicidal former MP cast in the role of Bart, the black sheriff.

  While the madness of Queen Sonia played out on the street outside 10 Janpath, the BJP started to mobilise a blatantly xenophobic campaign. Effigies were burnt. One of the party’s chief ministers resigned her post and took to wearing a white sari in mourning. An activist from the RSS, the quasi-paramilitary wing of the BJP, even committed suicide in an act of martyrdom.

  By now, the markets had also been spooked, with investors not only troubled by the sense of uncertainty but also fearful that Congress was about to jump into bed with the communists to secure a working majority in parliament. In a single day, the Bombay Stock Exchange shed 17 per cent of its value, the most dramatic slump in its 129-year history.

  Hoping to soothe the nerves of international investors, the incoming treasurer, Dr Manmohan Singh, granted the BBC an interview in which he argued that there was no need for panic. Mid-sentence, however, as the camera continued to roll, an agitated aide thrust a live mobile phone towards him. It was the outgoing treasurer on the line, warning that the economy was indeed disappearing down the toilet. For a broadcast journalist, there are few worse irritations than a ringing telephone in the middle of an interview. This, then, was a rarity: an interview where an errant mobile provided its highpoint.

  Sonia Gandhi also sought to calm her party, by inviting its new parliamentarians to a garden party on the lawns of 10 Janpath. However, she failed to put in an appearance herself, and kept them waiting for five hours. In her loaded absence, all they had to feed on were rumour and speculation. As dusk faded into night, and waiters wearing small Nehru hats ferried cold water to keep the MPs from fainting in the still-boiling heat, it was left to the ever-reliable Dr Singh to speak on her behalf.

  Once again, he stepped before the cameras, this time without interruption, to assure his party, and a watching nation, that there was no reason for concern. But no one believed him. Sure enough, soon the summons came to gather in the Central Hall of Parliament, where Sonia intended finally to make clear her intentions. In the wood-panelled chamber, where life-size portraits of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi peered down on her like baffled ghosts, their reluctant heiress revealed that her ‘inner voice’ had spoken and told her she should not become the prime minister.

  Immediately, there was uproar, as MPs raced to the lectern to plead with her to reconsider. From the press gallery high above, the scene looked so feverish that it felt like watching an actor’s workshop where the students had been told to improvise on the theme ‘the world will end in 60 seconds’. Amidst this pandemonium, Sonia remained unmoved, like the anti-diva she always was. Her mind was made up. Though she had struggled under the burden of the Gandhis’ dynastic legacy, she could not shoulder the burden of office.

  With Sonia Gandhi turning her back on a job that would have granted her inordinate power, an election that was supposed to turn on economic growth, consumption and greed had ended with an act of selflessness. It also meant that Dr Manmohan Singh, her soft-spoken confidant and counsellor, became prime minister. Thus, the largest job in Indian politics had gone to the politician with the smallest ego.

  There was a certain poetic justice in all this. A former DPhil in economics from Oxford, who had served both as the governor of the Reserve Bank of India and then as finance minister in the early 1990s, no Indian had done more to prepare the ground for the country’s rapid spurt of economic growth. So it was entirely fitting that he ended up the ultimate victor in the ‘India Shining’ election, although he himself was far too self-effacing ever to make so bold a claim. Just as importantly, he also became India’s first Sikh prime minister. To requisition the BJP’s failed slogan, perhaps India was now truly shining: the country’s economy was in the safest of hands, and so, too, was its secular ideal.

  Automatic gunfire is accompanied by such deafening acoustics that when it erupted in the Kashmir Valley late that afternoon we feared gunmen had stormed the hotel lobby three floors down, when, in actual fact, they were a good half-mile away. Ever since the insurgency against Indian rule began in 1989, visits to Srinagar were regularly interrupted by bursts of shooting that bounced off the mountains encircling the city with a numb echo. Never before, however, had we been so close at the start of a gun battle between Islamist militants and the Indian Army.

  Our first, uneasy instinct was to haul from their black carry bags our sky-blue bullet-proof vests stamped with the word ‘PRESS’, which were always on hand during visits to Kashmir, the only Indian region with a Muslim majority. Next, we ran downstairs to place the source of the gunfire.

  It was April 2005, and days before we had flown into Srinagar to cover the opening of a historic new bus service linking Indian-administered Kashmir and Pakistani-administered Kashmir, the first time locals had been able to make legal crossings between the two since the first Kashmir war in the late-1940s. Islamic militants, who feared this goodwill gesture might serve to quell the revolt, had vowed to turn the buses heading in either direction into ‘coffins on wheels’. Now, on the eve of the inaugural journeys, they mounted a pre-emptive strike. The passengers about to make the crossing had been billeted overnight in a tourism centre in the heart of Srinagar, which temporarily became the most heavily protected building in Kashmir. To our astonishment, the bursts of gunfire appeared to be coming from that very complex.

  In the three minutes or so it took to rush there, the battle subsided, which was usually an indication that Indian commandos had either killed the militants or surrounded them. So we used this lull in the fighting to edge as near as we could get, since it was rare to get the chance to film a stand-off at such close range. A narrow passageway led to a courtyard in the centre of the building, where the fighting had sounded the fiercest. But, at the very moment we entered, the gunfire opened up again. With the passageway acting like an echo chamber, the noise was so thunderous that it sounded as if a militant was standing at the other end, spraying bullets in our direction.

  In panicked unison, we all turned on our heels and scrambled for whatever cover we could get. On the street side of the passageway was a military checkpoint stacked with sandbags, so I dived inside for cover and found myself pressed up against an Indian soldier. But immediately I realised that I should have kept on running.

  Along with this lone soldier, I was stranded in the middle of what instantly had become a no-man’s-land – a 30-metre gap between the Indian military’s positions and the militants running rampant inside. To make a dash for it now was to risk being fired upon by the Indian soldiers crouched behind their armoured jeeps with their guns trained on the building. To
stay put risked being picked off by the militants. In the mad tumble, we had taken shelter directly below a row of first-floor windows, and a gunman could have hit us with a grenade with the most effortless of lobs. No wonder the Indian soldier raised his finger slowly to his mouth, almost maternally, like a mother putting down a newborn, so that we would not make a noise.

  At this moment of frozen indecision, with so much flying lead in the air, I feel almost honour bound to say something along the lines of ‘This was when my training kicked in’, or ‘These kinds of situations went with the territory’. As a foreign correspondent, are these not the adrenalin-saturated moments that we live for? When life seems real? When the surge of epinephrine released by the fight or flight response feels like a narcotic?

  Alas, my neurotransmitters often let me down in such situations, and my body and mind succumbed to something nearing numbness. I was not hugely invigorated, but neither was I hugely fearful. The events did not unfold before me in complete slow motion, but neither did it feel like real-time speed. It was not quite the sensation of being a spectator, but neither did I consider myself fully to be a participant, because the events before me seemed oddly distant. Indeed, always in these life or death situations I experienced a strange feeling of apartness. At once real and unreal, it was akin to having an out-of-body experience without going the whole hog. A feeling, as you can no doubt tell from this tortuous circuitousness, that I struggled to make sense of.

  Psychologists have a clearer take. What I am describing is a state of emotional detachment that comes not from a lack of emotion but from an excess of it; a defence mechanism that kicks in during extremely traumatic circumstances. In this most vivid, noisy and hazardous of situations, where the events could hardly have been more threatening or real, I was going through a process of derealisation.

  As the stand-off continued, fire quickly engulfed the building where the militants were holed up, and with choking black smoke spewing from the upstairs windows we judged it was now time to make a dash for it. Our hope was that the Indian soldiers crouched behind their armoured vehicles would have had sufficient time to compose themselves, so they would identify me as a journalist rather than a gunman trying to escape.

  Equally, the bursts of gunfire coming from the building were more intermittent and distant, suggesting the jihadists were either cornered or in retreat. At a lull in the fighting, we leapt up from the sandbagged bunker and performed a kind of crouched sprint, as if we were dashing from a crashed helicopter about to explode. Weighed down by the heavy flak jackets, it was not a particularly flattering sight, and it was expunged from our later news stories. Yet local cameramen providing material for the main news agencies, Reuters and APTN, thought the footage of our scrambled escape was sufficiently dramatic that it was soon all over CNN, which unleashed a spew of mocking emails from former colleagues in Washington. Rarely have I run 50 metres so quickly, but rarely have I looked so pathetic doing so. Though my pride was injured, at least my flak jacket survived unblemished, for the Indian soldiers could make out that I was a portly journalist making a mad dash for safety rather than a homicidal gunman hell-bent on destruction.

  Even after we had crossed the Indian lines and found ourselves using their armoured vehicles as shields, we were not entirely out of harm’s way. The next sustained rattle of gunfire came from a soldier a few yards away, whose knee and upper leg was now drenched in blood. Often in Srinagar, militants disguise themselves in military fatigues, so for a brief slice of time we thought a jihadist might be in our midst. But the soldier had mistakenly let off his weapon, badly wounding himself, and was now being reprimanded by his commanding officer. Despite his writhing pain, the soldier was apologising profusely, a sure sign he was a bona-fide Indian infantryman. We had lived to file another day.

  For all its occasional dangers, the consolation of reporting from trouble spots in South Asia was that most of them were impossibly beautiful. Srinagar was not only ringed by saw-edged Himalayan mountains but also nestled on the banks of Dal Lake, whose antique houseboats, shikara water taxis, lotus flowers and giant water lilies were once again luring tourists prepared to brave the insurgency.

  In Sri Lanka, the most fiercely fought-over isthmus in the civil war went by the dreamy name of Elephant Pass. In the mountain kingdom of Nepal, Maoist insurgents fought an ugly war with the Royal Nepalese Army amidst the most breathtaking scenery anywhere on the subcontinent, if not the world. Its frontlines were the most glorious of vistas. Pakistan and India also fought over Himalayan highlands. More than 20,000 feet above sea level, the Siachen Glacier had become the world’s most altitudinous battlefield as well as its most pointless. In temperatures of minus 60 degrees, a greater number of soldiers were lost to the elements than to enemy action, and by 2003, when a ceasefire was declared, India and Pakistan had lost some 2000 personnel between them, mainly from hyperthermia, frostbite and avalanches. Much closer to sea level, the Maldives was fighting a battle of sorts, and an existential one at that. Its low-lying atolls were being inundated by rising seawater, and to visit the country was to witness its watery eradication from the map.

  At a time when the post-9/11 world was commonly framed as a clash of civilisations between the secular and Islamic worlds, South Asia’s battlefields were also a timely reminder that other forces were at play, whatever the thinking in Washington.

  Take Nepal. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration feared that the rooftop of the world might one day become a safe haven for groups such as al-Qaeda if the Maoists won the civil war. It had therefore decided to shore up the country’s authoritarian monarch, King Gyanendra, by providing his troops with night-vision equipment and some 20,000 M16 rifles. But Maoist leaders thought this reasoning was laughable.

  On one occasion, we drove deep into the countryside to one of the deprived villages that had become a nursery of the Maoist rebellion, where we waited for a small group of revolutionaries dressed in combat fatigues and carrying weapons stolen from the Royal Nepalese Army to emerge from the forestland. The local Maoist leader, a hawk-featured young man who arrived wearing a Nike baseball cap, considered hilarious the suggestion that this Hindu kingdom would ever provide a bolt-hole for jihadists. The Maoist fight, he said, was against the monarch rather than against President Bush, and he mocked the notion that they had become appendages to the axis of evil. ‘Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were creations of America,’ he laughed. ‘They’re of no concern to us.’

  Harder to characterise than a simple case of good versus evil, Nepal was in the throes of an ideological and feudal power struggle, the central figure in which was the king. Always the best time to observe him was on Army Day in Kathmandu, when the huge military parade ground in the heart of the city reverberated to the sound of bagpipes, billed in the program as ‘soothing military music’ – a phrase that seemed doubly oxymoronic. Dressed in his green ceremonial uniform, his left breast pocket a blaze of medals, and a crimson-banded cap taking the place of his usual plumed emerald crown, King Gyanendra watched from a ceremonial stand as his troops performed parachute drops, a feu de joie, bomb-disposal exercises and quicksilver drills with the famed Gurkha kukri knives swirling extravagantly around their heads. Then, after dusk, he would appear before his subjects from the ramparts of Durbar Square, the old royal palace.

  It was here in June 2001 that the king had been crowned, following an extraordinarily bloody royal massacre in which his nephew, Crown Prince Dipendra, unleashed his M16 and MP5K guns on the king, the queen, seven other family members and then himself – a shooting rampage memorably described by a foreign-aid official as a combination of Shakespeare, Ruth Rendell and Quentin Tarantino.

  Gyanendra’s ascension to the throne made him not only the monarch and commander-in-chief of the Royal Nepalese Army but also a living Hindu god. So, on Army Day, thousands of his more worshipful subjects gathered beneath the ramparts with heads bowed, carrying tea lights and burning incense. Fragrant though the air was, it was i
mpossible to ignore the stench of democratic decay. Fearful of a popular uprising, the king had recently declared a state of emergency and placed many of the kingdom’s politicians under house arrest. He had become a ruthless despot, known as much for his iron fist as for his emerald crown.

  Just as the conflict in Nepal did not fit the post-9/11 template, the root causes of the Sri Lankan civil war were found in ethnic identity and nationalism – or ethno-nationalism, to use the inelegant phraseology favoured by academics who had studied the decades-old fight.

  In a country whose name literally meant the ‘Blessed Land’, many Tamils whose ancestors had been brought from India by the British to work on the coffee and tea plantations yearned for their own homeland. When the country achieved independence in 1948, however, the Buddhist-Sinhala majority, who believed the British had discriminated against them, was determined to assert its dominance and relegated the Tamils to being second-class citizens.

  Fiercely nationalistic then and now, successive Sinhala-dominated governments refused to countenance the division of their teardrop-shaped island. So, in the early 1980s, long-simmering ethnic tensions erupted into full-blown civil war between the army and the Tamil Tiger rebels – what turned out to be a 26-year conflict that claimed between 80,000 and 100,000 lives.

  With the help of Norwegian negotiators, a ceasefire agreement had been hammered out in 2002 granting the Tamils a measure of self-rule over a large swathe of land in the north. But more recently the truce had fallen into disrepute.

  To visit the rebel capital Kilinochchi was to see a state in embryo form. Though many of its buildings were half-ruined, derelict and pockmarked with bullets, post-war reconstruction was well underway. The town was dotted still with statues of Tamil war heroes, one of the biggest of which was a memorial celebrating the first female suicide bomber, but it could also boast a newly established police force whose smartly dressed officers were former rebels. They patrolled the streets in brand-new Toyota Land Cruisers with paint jobs that juxtaposed the word ‘POLICE’ with the paramilitary’s fearsome insignia, a sharp-fanged tiger roaring ferociously.