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Maybe We Must Remember

One was a Pearl. The other, to friends and family, Joy. One American, the other Indian. Both were in their late 30s. One had a wife and two young children, the other a wife and their child growing in her. One was sucked into the maelstrom that is Pakistani politics; the other into the maelstrom that is Indian politics. Both were murdered: Sanjoy Ghose in India in 1997, Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

People disappear. People die. All the time, the world over. From Rwanda to Godhra, from Chechnya to NYC to Bombay. And in that seamless expressway of blood and shame and grief, of injustice and death, Pearl and Joy are not even milestones. Not even speedbumps. Just blips. Two incidental incidents. Two more deaths of two more men. Mourned for a while. Missed for a while. Overtaken by more murders, by other shattering events. Forgotten.

Maybe we must remember.

I never knew Danny Pearl. Yet after he's gone, after we've seen and seen again that smiling photograph, that other one in chains with a gun at his head, after our stomach has heaved at what happened to him -- I find he was a sort of one-step-away presence. Someone who came for dinner some months ago wrote a tribute to him in a paper. Someone at whose home I once dined spoke to the press of her grief at his death. Turns out he once jammed with a band in an impromptu session at a restaurant a schoolmate of mine runs.

In Pakistan, General Musharraf has already suggested that this one-step-away father-to-be had been investigating matters he "should not have". Matters, that is, that made certain powerful people uncomfortable. Musharraf didn't say so in so many words, and he still promises he will track down Pearl's murderers. But the message in his words is unmistakable. There are certain issues, he meant, that are off limits for journalists. If they do dig nevertheless, there is a price to pay. Pearl paid it.

I'm sure he didn't mean to, but Musharraf managed to put his finger right on what Pearl should indeed have been investigating: precisely the issues men like Musharraf think journalists "should not" touch. Still without meaning to, Musharraf confirmed that whatever Pearl was chasing, he was pursuing his calling, doing his job and doing it well. For a man who writes stories that the authorities agree he "should" write is no journalist, but a PR flunkie. A journalist must produce discomfort. Or he is no journalist.

So say some words for Daniel Pearl. No, I never met him. But I know now, even better than tributes might tell me, his calibre at what he did.

In India, Pearl's abduction and murder embodied to us all that we think is wrong with Pakistan: out-of-control "religious" groups, an equivocating leadership, criminals enjoying official patronage, widespread corruption. We watched from the sidelines, gloating silently and not-so-silently about Pakistan's predicament after his death. Miserable little country, we think. We Indians are such a much more mature nation, we think.

What happened to Pearl, we are sure, could never happen here.

Except that it did. Maybe we must remember Joy.

I did know Sanjoy Ghose. We first met towards the end of our school days. He and I once shared a college festival stage in a competition I've long forgotten -- perhaps because he beat me. In those days, I would stay with his family when I passed through Delhi. Five years before he disappeared, he wrote to invite me to work with him at the development organisation he headed in Rajasthan. For various reasons, I had to turn him down then, a decision I still look back on with regret. And he too was a one-step-away presence: over several years that we were out of touch, I would run into people who knew him, who would fill me in on what he was up to.

When ULFA abducted Joy from Assam's Majuli Island in mid-1997, I was angry and desolate for weeks. In truth, I still am. The futile loss of someone I knew and admired is one reason. But it also seemed to me that what happened to Joy embodied so much that is wrong in India: corrupt administrations, equivocating leadership, criminals enjoying official patronage, and a certain alacrity in branding questions and dissent as anti-national.

For years, we remained deaf and blind to the grievances of people in our northeastern states. Groups rose up to articulate those grievances: ULFA, the United Liberation Front of Asom, is one such. At first, they used democratic methods, questioning and protesting. We still remained deaf and blind, dismissed them as just another group of dissatisfied misfits.

Meanwhile, governments in those states, like governments across this land, grew steadily more corrupt and indifferent. That only added to grievances. Joy himself once commented on the easy claims that groups like ULFA are "influenced by Western notions of individual freedoms and human rights", and therefore somehow un-Indian. From there, the jump to calling them anti-national terrorists, collectively posing a "threat to national security", was not a long one. That justified the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act under which the Northeast has lived for nearly half a century.

The result of all this is such a deep alienation that practically every ethnic group in our northeast now demands autonomy or independence from India.

But with time, groups like ULFA changed. As its influence spread in Assam, its members found that crime and extortion came easy. Today, ULFA has moved very far from its roots as a people's movement, from articulating the public grievances it used to.

This was the climate in which Joy began work in Assam in 1995, heading an NGO, AVARD-NE, on Majuli. Their newsletter, Dweep-Alok, regularly carried news of the corruption they stumbled on in development projects. News that implicated the government, contractors -- and that one-time voice of the people, ULFA. Sure enough, it wasn't long before they ran into powerful opposition. "We are bound to question the policies of the state," wrote Joy once, "and if that is taken to be anti-national, so be it."

In 1997, ULFA began threatening AVARD-NE staff and plastered Majuli with posters that called them "enemies of Assamese nationalist aspirations". In an appeal for support in the wake of these threats, AVARD-NE wrote: "There are other people involved [in the threats] as well -- some contractors, politicians and disgruntled officials. The fury of the reaction has surprised us."

A month later -- on July 4, 1997 -- Joy was abducted.

Assam's chief minister, Prafulla Mahanta -- like ULFA, himself a product of Assamese student protest groups -- quickly announced that Joy was "safe" and his government was working for his release. There followed a blizzard of rumours, assurances and contradictory reports. Till August, when the army claimed to have intercepted an ULFA message about his death. ULFA itself confirmed a few days later that Joy had died.

Upon which Mahanta revealed that he had actually received "bad news" about Joy days before -- before! -- he announced that Joy was "safe". And we had to wonder, what did he mean by saying he was working for Joy's release when he knew he was dead? What kind of grimy game was Mahanta playing?

All in all, a murky, sordid, tragic episode that has never been adequately explained. Being so, it's one that speaks lucidly for our Indian condition, whether slippery ministers or widespread corruption. One that says things about us as surely as Pearl's murder does about Pakistan.

Yes, how we like to think we are in every way superior to Pakistan! What happened to Joy, we are sure, could never happen here.

Except that it did. It does.

Dilip D'Souza