Yet dealing with all of its problems on a daily basis, even as its naval chief contemplated sea power as far away as Mozambique and Indonesia, provided the inhabitants of these awesome government buildings with a sense of modesty that the British, with all of their realpolitik, lacked. Thus, the Indians might occupy this magnificent perch at the confluence of Central Asia and the Hindu plain longer and ultimately more fruitfully than did their predecessors. The real art of statesmanship was to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy.
India stands dramatically at the commanding center of the Indian Ocean, near to where the United States and China are headed for a tryst with destiny. Just as America is evolving into a new kind of two-ocean navy—the Pacific and the Indian oceans, rather than the Pacific and the Atlantic—China, as we shall see in a later chapter, may also be evolving into a two-ocean navy—the Pacific and the Indian ocean, too. The Indian Ocean joined to the western Pacific would truly be at the strategic heart of the world. But before we complete this picture, it is necessary to take a close look at other countries along the Indian Ocean’s littoral, particularly those on the Bay of Bengal. Let’s start with India’s neighbor Bangladesh, which was also part of the Mughal Empire.
* Until the Mughals’ invasion, Bengal itself had been under the less organized Delhi Sultanate from the end of the twelfth century.
* India was expected to surpass China around 2032 as the world’s most populous country.
* The navy’s share of the Indian defense budget had doubled from the early 1990s. Walter C. Ladwig III, “Delhi’s Pacific Ambition: Naval Power, ‘Look East,’ and India’s Emerging Influence in the Asia-Pacific.” Asia Security, vol. 5, no. 2 (May 2009).
* Daniel Twining, “The New Great Game,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 25, 2006. Only in 2005 did India recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet; in return, China recognized Indian sovereignty over the Himalayan state of Sikkim.
† Some Indians liked to point out that China opposed the selling of uranium to India by Australia, for use in India’s nuclear program, which suggested to them that China opposed the very emergence of Indian power.
* Pakistan regularly accuses India of using its newly opened consulates in Afghanistan to support the Baluch separatist movement.
* Facing, in its own view, a missile threat from China and Pakistan, India was also an ally of the United States on the issue of missile defense.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BANGLADESH
THE EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE
The Indian Ocean alone among the world’s great bodies of water is, in the words of Alan Villiers, an “embayed” ocean. While the other oceans sweep from north to south, from Arctic to Antarctic ice, the Indian is blocked by the landmass of Asia, with the inverted triangle of peninsular India forming two great bays, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.1 The Arabian Sea is oriented toward the Middle East; the Bay of Bengal toward Southeast Asia, with the Mughals having a perch on both. But it is the monsoon that truly unites them. It ignores national borders with its vast geographical breadth. Pakistanis in Karachi watch closely the progress of the boisterous southwest monsoon northward along India’s Malabar coast in the Arabian Sea; Bangladeshis do likewise as this monsoon churns its way up through the Andaman Sea off Burma, culminating at the top of the Bay of Bengal. My visits to the Bay of Bengal were almost always during the spring and summer monsoon rains, so these shores have retained a darker, though not unpleasant cast in my mind compared to the other seaboard farther west, that of the Arabian Sea.
The southwest monsoon that arrives in the Bay of Bengal in early summer provides a new dimension to rain. This is the time of tropical cyclones, and it is as though the ocean was continually emptying itself upon you. For days at a time, the sky is a low, claustrophobic vault of angry clouds. Absent sunlight, the landscape—however intrinsically rich in color, with mountains of hibiscus and bright orange mangoes, and the flowing saris of women—becomes scrubbed over in a grainy mist. Mud is the primary color, but it is not depressing. It is the coolness that you notice first, not the leaden darkness. You are filled with energy. No longer are your clothes dissolving in sweat or your knees hollow from the heat. No longer is the air something thick and oppressive that your body needs to push against.
The monsoon—from the Arabic mausim, meaning “season”—is one of the earth’s “greatest weather systems,” generated by the planet’s very rotation, and also by climate. As the landmass on the Indian Ocean’s northern shores near the Tropic of Cancer heats up in the summer, producing spectacularly high temperatures, a low-pressure zone forms near the surface, equalized by cooler air starting to flow in from the sea. When this cool, moist sea air meets the hot dry air of the Asian mainland, the cool moist air rises in upward currents, producing clouds and rain.* There is something truly mathematical about it, as the monsoon’s two branches reach Cape Comorin and Bangladesh around June 1, Goa and Kolkata five days after that, then Mumbai and Bihar five days after that, Delhi in mid-June, and Karachi around July 1. It is the monsoon’s dependability that inspires such awe, and on which agricultures and local economies consequently depend. A good monsoon means prosperity, so a shift in weather patterns due to possible climate change could spell disaster for the littoral countries. There is already statistical evidence that global warming has caused a more erratic monsoon pattern.2
The southwest monsoon in Bangladesh arrived while I was in a shallow draft boat traveling over a village that was now underwater. In its place was a mile-wide channel, created by erosion over the years, which separated the mainland from a char—a temporary delta island formed by silt, that would someday just as easily dissolve. As ink-dark, vertical cloud formations slid in from the Bay of Bengal, the small boat made of rotting wood began slapping hard against the waves. Following days of dense soupy heat, rain fell like nails upon us. The boatman, my translator, and I made it to the char before the channel water that was splashing into the hull, heavy with silt, threatened the boat’s buoyancy. We started bailing. It was a lot of work just to see something that was not there anymore.
Some days later, in order to see a series of dam collapses that had been progressing inland, and which had led to the evacuation of more than a dozen villages, I rode on the back of a motorcycle along an interminable maze of embankments that framed a checkerwork of paddy fields glinting mirror-like in the steamy rain. Once again, the sight at the end of my journey—a few crumbled earth dams—was not dramatic, unless you had a “before” picture with which to compare it.
Climate change and attendant sea-level rises provide few straightforward visuals. Pictures of Arctic ice melt are dramatic only because the Arctic is itself dramatic. As sudden as the changes may be in geological time, to us they still occur in slow motion. Rivers will shift course overnight, and dams will collapse instantly, following a slight but pivotal rise in hydraulic pressure. But in such cases you have to be there when it happens.
Yet, from one end of Bangladesh to the other, in the early weeks of the monsoon, I saw plenty of drama, registered in this singular fact: remoteness and fragility of terrain never once corresponded with a paucity of humanity. Even on the chars, I could not get away from people cultivating every inch of alluvial soil. Human beings were everywhere on this dirty wet sponge of a landscape traversed by narrow, potholed roads and grimy, overcrowded ferries, where the beggars and peddlers appeared to sleepwalk between the cars in the pouring rain.
I went through towns that had a formal reality as names on a map, but were little more than rashes of rusted, corrugated iron and bamboo stalls under canopies of jackfruit, mango, and lychee trees. These towns teemed with men wearing traditional skirtlike longyis and baseball hats, and women who over the years were increasingly garbed in Muslim burkas that concealed all but their eyes and noses. Between the towns were long lines of water-filled pits, topped with a green scum of algae and hyacinths, where the soil had been removed in order to raise the road a few feet above the unrelenting, sea-level flatness.<
br />
Soil is so precious in Bangladesh that riverbeds are dredged in the dry season to find more of it. It is a commodity that is always on the move. When houses are dismantled, the ground on which they stand is transported through wet “slurry pipes” to the new location. “This is a very transient landscape, what’s water one year can be land the next, and vice versa,” explained an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Dhaka, the capital. “A man can dig a pit, sell the soil, then raise fish in the new pond.”
In every respect, people were squeezing the last bit of use out of the earth. One day I saw a man carried on a stretcher moments after he had been mauled in the face and ear by a royal Bengal tiger. It is not an uncommon occurrence, as fishing communities crowd in ever closer on to the tigers’ last refuge in the mangrove swamps of the Bangladeshi-Indian border area, even as salinity from rising sea levels has led to a sharp reduction in the deer population on which the tigers feed. Neither man nor tiger has anywhere else to go.
The earth has always been unstable. Throughout geological history flooding and erosion, cyclones and tsunamis have been the norm rather than the exception. But never before have the planet’s most environmentally frail areas been so crowded. Although the rate at which world population grows continues to drop, the already large base of population guarantees that absolute rises in the number of human beings have never been greater in countries that are most at risk. This means that over the coming decades more people than ever before, in any comparable space of time save for a few periods like the fourteenth century during the Black Death, are likely to be killed or made homeless by Mother Nature. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 was a curtain raiser for disasters ahead.
People joke sometimes about how thousands of people displaced by floods in Bangladesh equals, in news terms, a handful of people killed or displaced closer to home. But that comparison, in addition to its cruelty, is blind to where natural events may be headed. The U.S. Navy may be destined for a grand power balancing game with China in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but it is more likely to be deployed on account of an environmental emergency, which is what makes Bangladesh and its problems so urgent.
With 150 million people living packed together at sea level, the lives of many millions in Bangladesh are affected by the slightest climatic variation, let alone by the dramatic threat of global warming. The possibility of an eight-inch rise in sea level in the Bay of Bengal by 2030 would devastate more than ten million people, notes Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. The partial melting of Greenland ice alone over the course of the twenty-first century could inundate more than half of Bangladesh in salt water. Although such statistics and scenarios are hotly debated by scholars, one thing is certain: Bangladesh is the most likely spot on the planet for the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in history. And as I saw, it would affect almost exclusively the poorest of the poor.
Yet as the case of Bangladesh shows, the future is not strictly about rising sea levels. It is about the interrelationship between them and political phenomena such as religious extremism and the deficiencies of democracy.
Atop the Bay of Bengal, the numberless braids of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers have formed the world’s largest, youngest, and most dynamic estuarial delta. Squeezed into a territory the size of Iowa—20 to 60 percent of which floods every year—lives a population half that of the United States and larger than the population of Russia. Bangladesh’s Muslim population alone (83 percent of the total) is nearly twice that of Egypt’s or Iran’s. Bangladesh is considered small only because it is surrounded on three sides by India. Actually, it is vast: a veritable aquatic culture where getting around by boat and vehicle, as I learned, can take many days.
First come the spring floods from the north, originating with the snowmelt in the Himalayas, swelling the three great rivers. Then in June, and lasting for three months, comes the monsoon from the south, up from the Bay of Bengal. Calamity threatens when the amount of water arriving by river, sea, or sky is tampered with, whether by God or by man. Nepal, India, and China are all ravished by man-made deforestation. The result is silt, or loose soil, that traps water in place: hence waterlogging, which prevents water from flowing onward into the great rivers. Moreover, India and China, are appropriating Ganges and Brahmaputra water for irrigation schemes, thus further limiting freshwater flows into Bangladesh from the north, causing drought. Meanwhile, to the south, in the Bay of Bengal, global warming appears to be causing a sea-level rise. This brings salt water and sea-based cyclones deeper inland. Salinity—the face of global warming in Bangladesh—kills trees and crops, and contaminates wells. And with insufficient fresh river water coming down from India and China, this hydrological vacuum is only quickening the ingress of salt water northward into the countryside.
But Bangladesh is less interesting as a basket case than as a model of how humankind copes with an extreme natural environment, for weather and geography have historically worked to cut one village off from another here. Credible central government arrived only with the Mughals from Central Asia in the sixteenth century. But neither they nor their British successors were truly able to penetrate the countryside. The major roads were all built after independence. Hence, this is a society that never waited for a higher authority to provide it with anything. The very isolation effected by floodwaters and monsoon rains has encouraged institutional development at the lowest level. The political culture in rural Bangladesh is more communal than hierarchical, in which women especially play a significant role.
A four-hour drive northwest of Dhaka, I found a village in a mixed Muslim-Hindu area where the women had organized themselves into separate committees to produce baskets and textiles, and invest the profits in new wells and latrines. They showed me a cardboard map they had made of where they would install them. They received help from a local nongovernmental organization that, in turn, had a relationship with CARE. The initial seed money came from outside, but the organizational heft was homegrown.
In a tiger-infested mangrove swamp in the southwest, I found a fishing village where people lived in bamboo-thatched huts along a river. Here I watched a play performed by a local NGO, which taught about climate change, the need to conserve rainwater through catchments, and the importance of planting trees to prevent erosion. Hundreds of villagers were present; I was the only foreigner. Afterwards, they showed me the catchments that they had built to direct rainwater into the wells.
Through similar bottom-up, purely voluntary means, the population growth rate in Bangladesh has been cut from 7 percent per year after independence to 1.5 percent now—an unprecedented achievement, given the value placed on children as laborers in a traditional agricultural society. Polio has been nearly eradicated several times, failing only because of perennial reinfection from India. Despite all of its predicaments, Bangladesh has risen from a state of famine in the mid-1970s to a nation that now feeds itself.
The credit for coping so well under the circumstances rests ultimately with NGOs. NGOs have become a familiar acronym because of the work of relief charities like Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, and so on. But in Bangladesh the word connotes a new organizational life-form, in which thousands of local NGOs help fill the void between a remote, badly functioning central government and village committees.
Because they are nonprofit enterprises with for-profit elements, some ethical questions have been raised about Bangladeshi NGOs. Take Muhammad Yunus, who, along with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering micro-credit schemes for poor women; he also operates a cellphone and Internet service. Then there is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), which besides its bounteous relief work, operates dairy, poultry, and clothing businesses. Its head offices, like those of Grameen, occupy a skyscraper that constitutes some of Dhaka’s most expensive real estate. Yet to concentrate on the impurities of these NGOs is to ignore their transformative function.<
br />
“One thing led to another,” explained Mushtaque Chowdhury, BRAC’s deputy executive director. “In order not to be dependent on Western charities, we set up our own for-profit printing press in the 1970s. Then we built a plant to pasteurize milk from the cattle bought by poor women with the loans we had provided them. Now we’ve become a kind of parallel government, with a presence in sixty thousand villages.”
Just as cellphones have allowed third world countries to make an end run around the need for a hard-wired communications infrastructure, Bangladesh shows how NGOs can make an end run around too often dysfunctional third world governments. Because local NGOs are supported by international donors, they have been indoctrinated with international norms to an extent that not even the private sector in Bangladesh has been.
The linkage between a global community on the one hand and a village one on the other has made Bangladeshi NGOs intensely aware of the worldwide significance of their country’s environmental plight. “Come, come, I will show you the climate change,” said Mohan Mondal, a local NGO worker in the southwest, referring to a bridge that had partially collapsed because of rising seawater. To some degree, this is a racket in which every eroded embankment becomes part of an indictment against the United States for abrogating the Kyoto accords. But in almost every other way Muslim Bangladeshis are pro-American—the upshot of historical dislike of former colonial Britain, frequent intimidation by nearby India and China, and lingering hostility toward Pakistan stemming from the 1971 liberation war.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 17