The second stage on my India trip took me to one of the most dynamic places in the world: Mumbai. Hyderabad is a great Indian city; Mumbai is a global metropolis. With more than 20 million people in the metro area, it’s about as big as cities get, and as the financial and entertainment capital of India, it’s the richest city in South and West Asia and has about as much going on in it as New York, Tokyo or Shanghai.
What that means, of course, is that even with the help of the US consulate, a visitor isn’t going to get more than small sampling of the life and thought of Mumbai in a short visit and, regrettably, there was no room in the schedule for a Bollywood tour. I did learn that Bollywood has plans to go 3D; the possibilities for choreography alone are staggering.
Mumbai had changed some since my last visit six years ago. Most dramatically, the Banda-Worli Sea Link is an expressway over the ocean, sweeping off the coast and around the waterfront to allow traffic to get into downtown without the endless snarls on overcrowded access routes I remember from the past. There’s also a huge push of development away from the old, overcrowded city center.
But some things don’t change: the incredible diversity of a city where the Parsi “tower of silence” exposes the bodies of the dead for traditional open-air burial, Hindu festival processions wind past mosques where worshipers stream in for Friday prayers, and jet-setting industrialists and financiers speed past some of the world’s largest informal settlements while throngs of homeless and destitute people still struggle to live from day to day.
I went to a lunch with some Indian think-tankers and policy wonks—people like my old friend Manjeet Kriplani, who has started a major foreign policy research group after a distinguished journalistic career. I met a group of young (mostly thirty-something) Indian academics, writers and business people who are working to help the rising generation think through India’s role in the world. I gave a talk at the same college President Obama addressed on his visit to Mumbai—the Hogwarts-like Xavier College where the Oxonian archways and tropical foliage in the courtyards somehow work together. I think the President had a bigger audience than I did, but the fifteen questions I took from the mix of undergrad and grad students were as interesting, tough and well-informed as I’ve heard from any students anywhere in the world.
There was one subject on almost everyone’s mind in Mumbai: Pakistan. Over the decades, there have been many terror attacks in India. In 2008, gunmen launched a wave of attacks across Mumbai, ultimately killing 164 people in a horrific series of attacks. It’s pretty clear that Pakistan’s fingerprints were on the murder weapons; it drives many people in Mumbai crazy that the US still gives Pakistan aid. Over and over people would ask me how we can be sure that some of the money we give Pakistan doesn’t go for terror attacks against India.
To many Indians, it’s incomprehensible that the US can be claiming to fight terror while it works so closely with one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
I don’t insult their intelligence by trying to tell them that the US knows that none of our aid to Pakistan has been misused. I don’t read the secret cable traffic, but I expect that some of our aid does go to places where the sun doesn’t shine. What I ask them to do instead is to think about what India’s real goals are in Pakistan, and how US policy matches those goals.
This usually leads to an interesting discussion in which Indians come to the conclusion that India doesn’t want Pakistan to collapse. (Some Indians understand this intuitively; others have to work out the logic, but just about everybody I talk with on this subject comes to agree with this conclusion.) A totally failed Pakistan would see terror groups without control, masses of refugees, nuclear weapons going God knows where, and many other things that India doesn’t want.
India has a stake in Pakistan’s success, and when Indians really think about it, virtually all of them agree. To the extent that there is any hope for real improvements in this tangled and dangerous relationship, it lies in this truth: India needs for Pakistan to succeed.
I don’t see much Kumbaya-singing on the Kashmir Line of Control anytime soon, but over time as this realization penetrates into Indian political culture and the Pakistanis start to believe it, there’s a chance for a different dynamic to develop in South Asia. In the meantime, when Indians really think about this, they start to see a little more method in America’s Pakistan madness. They also hope, frankly, that the US is doing its best to figure out where Pakistan’s nukes are, and that if worst comes to worst we will be able to ensure that the truly bad guys don’t get their hands on them.
It was Krishna’s birthday while I was in Mumbai. Teams of young men (and in some enlightened places, teams of young women) form human pyramids as they try to reach pots of money or other prizes on cranes or otherwise high above street level. With the hulking big guys on the bottom and light young kids up top, the pyramids can reach seven levels. Politicians often sponsor these events, and the streets were filled with teams marching, riding motorcycles or sitting in the backs of open trucks as they headed for the competition. Around and between them, Muslims were streaming to mosques for the Friday prayers. This year, a freak of the calendar put the Hindu feast into the midst of the Muslim fast; probably not the best recipe for communal harmony.
A few days after I left the city, a riot did break out. Still during Ramadan, a protest of local Muslims against the treatment of Muslims in India’s northeast turned into a riot that left two dead and fifty injured. Both police and members of the media were targeted by the rioters. Hindu parties took the issue to the national parliament, charging foreign intervention and demanding an investigation.
Even if Pakistan and India come to a better understanding, the question of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Indian subcontinent will remain. Later in the trip I’ll be visiting Kashmir, where many of these problems come to a head, but after my visit to Mumbai I headed for South India, where different issues and different questions occupy the public mind.