I’ve just finished this spring’s reissue of Steve Coll’s On the Grand Trunk Road:A Journey Into South Asia. Written starting twenty years ago in the dying days of the Cold War and long before the “World was Flat,” Coll was the Delhi bureau chief for the Washington Post and traveled widely throughout the region during his tenure. While a lot of books on South Asia tend to focus solely on the Indo-Pak/Kashmir dimension, Coll thankfully includes the wayward states of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. He needed only to have included the Maldives and Bhutan to round it out. Many of the characters present in the book are either still the most prominent people in South Asia today in what I often term the area’s “Hereditary, feudal democracies” or have been assassinated. In South Asia where even the most perfidious, blatantly corrupt leaders become martyrs upon death, the Bhuttos and Gandhis of the world live on. It’s hard to say whether it is prophetic or pathetic, but twenty years after Coll’s journey along the Grand Trunk road began, a lot has changed very little. India has unchained itself from the Nehruvian ideal under the helms of PM’s Rao and Singh while the nations on it’s periphery seem to consistently slide into the abyss.
To me the two most noteworthy parts of the book were Coll’s bizarre page-turner as he looks into the death of Pakistani General Zia ul-Haq, who’s dual Cold Warrior and Islamization policies shaped Pakistan muc as we know it today, and his chapter on Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Marxist People’s Liberation Front. Sri Lanka is normally looked at through the lens of the government’s war against the LTTE in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Coll highlights Sri Lanka’s and South Asia political and ethnic complexity with the story of the Janathā Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the government death squads that are out to eliminate their cadres. (Inexplicably Coll describes the JVP as Maoist on one page and Marxist on the next?) On the Grand Trunk Road is a must read for those waiting to jump into the “AfPak” fray in the Obama era. Neophyte journalists and junior diplomats will have to immerse themselves in an obscure past if they are to navigate a present facade of anarchy where blood is being spilled and children are being killed. Coll’s fifteen-year old book is a good primer and an unfortunately utterly relevant one at that. The Indian subcontinent and it’s Hindu core cannot be fully understood without a firm grasp of it’s burning Buddhist and Muslim periphery. There can be no comprehension of Bangalore without the context of Bangladesh. Get reading.