Unlocking South Asia

Ending a six-year stint in the region, South Asia correspondent for the London-based Guardian and the Observer relates a compelling story of a region of culture, conflict, democracy and diversity :

by Jason Burke

Late at night, after sending a story to London, I often walk around the small neighbourhood of Delhi that has been home for nearly six years. Here, in the centre of this metropolis of 20 million people, the central point of this busy, restive region in which a quarter of the world’s population live, it is quiet.

There is the noise of traffic – this is Delhi, after all – and the barking of the feral dogs that own many of the narrower streets. Sometimes there is music. Perhaps a thudding Bollywood theme tune from a distant wedding, or even the discordant blare of a band. More often, it is a haunting Sufi-influenced qawwali, or a folk tune from distant villages, played on the tinny phones of the late-night watchmen who sit, swathed against what passes for nocturnal chill, outside every other door. But otherwise there is little noise, except the wailing horns of the trains, down at the mainline station only a few hundred yards away.

Diverse region

It was on such trains, as well as a few multi-coloured buses, that I first travelled across South Asia in the early 1990s. By the end of the decade, I was back as a reporter, fulfilling a childhood dream. Much of my time was spent in Afghanistan, reporting on the last years of the Taliban’s rule, driving on battered tracks through deserts and hills, meeting warlords in bunkers and clerics in ministries, covering earthquakes and skirmishes, and writing about a little-known militant group called al-Qaida. In Pakistan, where I was based, I watched as the economy slumped, politicians squabbled and the military took power.

In India, however, I saw a boom begin to take hold. When I had first visited, India was only slowly waking from decades of economic torpor. Factories idled, machines rusted gently. Bookshops were full of Marxist-Leninist tracts and Dickens. Stations doubled as dormitories for tens of thousands.

Kolkata and other cities of the North were desperately poor. Rural areas, if often picturesque, were even worse. There were crowds, of course, but of people who did little because there was little for them to do.

When I returned, as the Observer and the Guardian’s South Asia correspondent, economic growth had rendered much of it unrecognisable. In the cities, life was lived at a frenetic pace.

When the relative quiet comes now for a few short night hours, it is all the more shocking against the otherwise constant background of deafening noise.

Much is said overseas about the emergence of a new Indian middle class. Such a status is defined differently outside Britain. However measured, there has been a massive increase in wealth. This is, of course, badly distributed and, if there is less abject poverty, there is much greater inequality.

Good or bad? Positive or negative? Neither, or both. This is a region where the good and bad, the uplifting and the ugly, the old and the new, do not just exist alongside each other, but are so enmeshed as to be indivisible.

Daily violence

Whatever the boosters and marketers claim, there is still an extraordinary level of daily violence. This is all the more dispiriting because many of the major conflicts in the region – in Sri Lanka and Nepal, for example – have now ended while others – such as the unrest in Kashmir – have diminished markedly. Nor is this violence limited to the places where you expect death and destruction: in insurgent-hit Afghanistan, or in perennially unstable Pakistan, or even Bangladesh, where street battles have long been an extension of politics.

For India, too, can be a brutal place. One of the first stories I covered was an upsurge of violence surrounding local elections in the state of West Bengal. I interviewed the widow of a man killed as a spy by Maoist extremists, a victim of a savage power struggle over power and money more than ideology. The dead man’s six-year-old daughter gazed at a newspaper lying on the dirt floor of their poor home, an image of her father’s corpse on its front page.

Then there was sexual violence. In Delhi, in December 2012, a student was gang-raped on a bus and later died of horrific injuries. This prompted a week or so of demonstrations and a slightly longer debate on the causes of the wave of such attacks, and the daily harassment of women, in Indian cities. It also altered the narrative about India around the world, much to the irritation of those for whom India was shining.

Then there were the continuing attacks rooted in India’s still tenacious social hierarchy of caste or motivated by sectarian identity. In October, a Muslim man suspected of eating beef was beaten to death by a Hindu mob. The minister I met at the scene – only an hour’s drive from Delhi – referred to the incident as a ‘misunderstanding’. Some suggest such attacks have become more common since Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist of humble origins, took power after a landslide election in 2014. Others say, sectarian violence has always occurred but is now receiving more media attention. Neither possibility is very heartening.

Paradise lost?

Then there was Sri Lanka and the Maldives, each usually seen as an example of a ‘tropical paradise.’ In Colombo, the wife of a journalist described his abduction during the repressive regime of former ruler Mahinda Rajapaksa.

At an adjacent table, British honeymooners ordered mojitos. If the end of the brutal 25-year civil war was a boon for every ethnicity or faith community in the island nation, there are still deep problems.

In Malé, the overcrowded capital of the Maldives, a world away from the luxury resorts, a leader of one of the country’s gangs described how it imported heroin and maimed competitors with machetes. On another visit, I investigated surging support for Islamic State.

This violence seeps through much else, like monsoon rains through a poorly maintained roof, or the toxic polluted air of South Asian cities into a classroom. Power is raw and often brutally deployed here to coerce, not convince, or to extract, not redistribute.

This is true whether its source is wealth, office, or birth. Depressingly, the three often go together.

Yet, for all of this, my times in South Asia have been consistently uplifting. I now leave more optimistic, about the region, and about our world, than when I arrived. In this region you are a witness to a story that is opening, growing, developing in a multitude of inspiring ways.

One frequently asked question is: What will India or Bangladesh or any of the other countries of the region look like in 10 or 20 years? The assumption is often that all are on a journey towards life or urbanism or economy as it is in the west.

They are not. The region continually creates its own solutions to its own myriad problems, and the results do not and will not resemble anything seen before anywhere else. But they are solutions nevertheless.

One consequence is that, rightly or wrongly, hundreds of millions of people in South Asia believe their lives to be happier and more comfortable than those of their parents. Many – indeed most – believe that life for their children will be better still. I only need to spend a few weeks in Europe to be reminded of what a difference this makes.

It was perhaps most evident in Bangladesh. Even after weeks there reporting one of the grimmest stories of my career – the collapse of a factory making clothes for western high street stores in which more than a thousand workers died – it is the bustling, restless energy of Dhaka I remember as much as the sorrow and grief.

In Mumbai, I spent an afternoon with sex workers who, despite the horror of their daily lives, spoke proudly of their children’s education.

In Delhi, in the slum where those who raped and killed the student had lived, I found a teenage girl studying fashion with ambitions to join her country’s extraordinarily successful creative elite.

And in Nepal, following two long weeks covering the terrible earthquake in April last year, I interviewed Mira Rai, a 25-year-old former guerrilla turned successful international trail runner who runs to lift her family out of poverty, to send a message to all other women in her conservative country and simply for the love of the sport.

High on the flanks of Everest, the younger generation of Sherpa is now wealthy entrepreneurs who are taking control of the industry of high-altitude climbing. “We don’t carry loads. We make money and learn,” they told me.

Functional democracy

And, for all its flaws, South Asia’s version of democracy remains strong. The increasingly repressive and populist rule of Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka was ended through the ballot box. In Pakistan, the 2013 general election saw the first peaceful democratic transfer of power by an elected government that had served a full term to another. I covered, on the eastern fringes of the region, changes in Myanmar that brought an end to isolation and, eventually, a visit from Barack Obama.

In India, I covered a general election in 2014 that many described as one of the most important polls in the country’s history.

From Srinagar to Varanasi, from Chennai to Meerut, I followed the campaign, the personalities and the weeks of phased voting by hundreds of millions. I watched the results in the headquarters of the victorious Bharatiya Janata Party, and then, story filed, joined the inevitable crowds.

It is among this crowd that I have lived for more than half a decade, and it has been part of my life for more than 20 years. It is difficult to communicate what joy this raucous, boisterous, impossibly chaotic assembly can bring.

This crowd was there when I, wearing clothes more suited to a beach due to a confusion over timing, had tea with India’s vice-president. It was there in Kathmandu when I wandered a few weeks before the earthquake, and when I was trekking with two small children under Annapurna.

It was there when drinking whisky with truckers in the Punjab, eating vindaloo with fishermen in Goa, interviewing politicians in Jaffna, talking to Tibetan refugees, arguing on TV news shows and it is certainly there, in one of my favourite places on the planet, on Juhu beach, in Mumbai, among the talking, singing, laughing thousands who throng the rubbish-strewn sand at weekends for a little light exercise and that most South Asian thing of all: an extraordinary vital conversation. It is a conversation in which, for six years, and more, I have had the huge privilege of being not just a listener, but, on occasion, a participant too.

- The Observer. UK