An Indian In Kabul

Man's World/ August 2008

Aunohita Mojumdar

ON 8 AND 9 JULY, SANDEEP KUMAR, the Deputy Chief of Mission in the Indian embassy in Kabul, participated in the Mr Afghanistan body building contest. By now this was not an unusual event. Sandeep, as this magazine had reported earlier, is an unusual diplomat. But even for Sandeep this was an extraordinary moment. A day earlier, the Indian embassy had been bombed and two of his colleagues and his own driver as well as two ITBP jawans had been killed along with 42 other Afghans in the deadliest blast that Kabul had ever seen.
Sandeep went to the body building competition the next day urged by the ambassador and other colleagues in the embassy for one simple reason: to send a clear and unequivocal message to Afghans that the Indian community stood with them and was here to stay and help. “I told them that we stood in solidarity with Afghanistan and the Afghans in the reconstruction of their country,” says Sandeep, recalling how difficult it was to perform as a participant following the emotional shock. Both the message and the gesture were extremely unusual. The international community was on red alert following the blast and many embassies had sent out security alerts that minimised the movement of their staff. The Indian embassy’s approach was different, a fact that was recognised by the Afghans — Sandeep was presented with a ‘Chapaan’, the decorative long coat bestowed by Afghans as the highest accolade of respect.
Being an Indian in Afghanistan has always been a different cup of tea. Though the roles of ‘internationals’ and ‘nationals’ are almost always mutually exclusive, many Indians manage to go beyond the limitations of a single identity.
In my five years in Afghanistan, I have always found myself straddling two characters. Falling between two stools can be maddening as one belongs nowhere, but it is also liberating. Though I miss the anchor of a group identity, I also enjoy the freedom of not belonging, finding it much easier to move between the two groups with greater ease. Much of it has to do with being an Indian, since Afghans, especially in Kabul and the North, see India as a good friend. “I am not a foreigner. I am an Indian,” I will often say, and what’s more, it often works, whether it is about bargaining for trinkets on Chicken Street or discussing politics and human rights.
In a strange way though, living in Afghanistan has anchored me more deeply in what I see as my regional identity. Of course, every country in the region is distinctly different, none more so perhaps than Afghanistan, which lies at the cusp of Central Asia, but there are also immense similarities in the region in the nature of the complexities we live with.
The multitude of identities, languages, ethnicities, the challenges of economic development, the aspirations of people, the tensions between modernity and tradition, between culture and individual rights: it is all played out in Afghanistan, only at a much more acute and intense level. It is this intensity that, perhaps, draws people to this country against all odds and those who are captured by the intensity return again and again.
I had just walked out of my job with an English daily in New Delhi and still had to find gainful employment when I came here in 2003. As a journalist, going to a conflict zone is part of the job and Afghanistan seemed interesting. I was curious to see a country in the process of transition, to observe the building of a nation state with all its complexities.
An international NGO asked me to bring out reports on the working conditions of the Afghan media - something that seemed right up my street. I thought it was for a short time. But a UN official more prescient than me, brushed off my final goodbyes at the end of two months, insisting I would be back. I laughed it off then.
The more I saw of this country the more fascinated I became and the fascination has not dwindled. As a journalist I’m always interested in observing a society in transition. While all societies everywhere are in some form of transition, the transition is usually so slow that documenting it is typically the job of an anthropologist or a historian or at best, a scholar. But imagine this process of decades and centuries compressed into days and weeks. It is like watching a series of film rushes whizzing past leaving you gasping for breath, sometimes horrified at the scenes, sometimes amazed and sometimes awed.
Living here, I watch a country being built brick by brick, both literally and figuratively and I know of no other privilege as this for a journalist. Each day I wake up with half a dozen story ideas, wishing I had the resources to follow them and the outlets to publish them. I have reported from Punjab and Kashmir, covered Parliament and ministries at the Centre, state governments and foreign affairs. But what happens here in Afghanistan in a week doesn’t happen in most places in a year and I am not even including the military conflict. The building of institutions like democracy, the making of policy, and the changing social structures and relationships provide a sharp and fascinating view into humanity or the lack of it.
It is not merely a compressed form of reconstruction. It is also a bringing together of several different eras in time and of several different peoples. There are those who stayed at home because they couldn’t leave. They have their own story. There are those who left the country as refugees. They have theirs. There are those who were displaced internally, forced to move homes within Afghanistan. Those who left the country voluntarily. Those who grew up in the refugee camps of Iran or Pakistan and those who grew up in exile in Switzerland or France. There are those who are now part of a distinct Afghan diaspora in the country where they settled, like my friend Fariba from the Bay Area in California. Now the circumstance of history has brought all these people together in one melting pot as they try and make sense of what it means to be an Afghan and I am a privileged observer of this process.
My work with the NGO ended years ago but what began as a series of short encounters with this country has now turned into full-time journalism and a long-term stay. This year, we planted trees in the garden. I now have three bookshelves groaning with books, which, for me, is always a sign of settling in. I feel a sense of pride in the airport renovation and the first cheese factory of Afghanistan. My stay here does not have an end date in sight. Yet, the end, in some ways, is always a hair trigger away. As a journalist I rationalise that the violence is sporadic and unpredictable and that I will escape it unless I am unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same logic I used while reporting on Kashmir.
But the tension under the surface is always there, felt viscerally in the gun-toting guards outside the houses, the high fences and barbed wire, the cement blocks to absorb the shock of bombs and the blocked roads. The army vehicles that scream down the roads and the Humvees and armoured personnel carriers of the international forces with the soldiers sitting atop them, machine guns pointing out, their dark goggles and their body armour making them look alien, almost Martian. I know that at any point the tenuous peace could unravel. I do not fear a Taliban invasion, but as I see the seething anger of the people I feel there could be violent uprisings in which the alien, the other, the foreigner would be the first target.
On a day-to-day basis, however, it is the economic costs of living here that may drive me away sooner rather than insecurity.
A nation destroyed by 30 years of war has very little left in the way of goods and services or human resources. Almost everything is available here, but at a price. For most internationals, working for international organisations ensures that these costs are absorbed by their offices which provide housing, transport, electricity and, of course, fat salaries to compensate the war zone. Take, for example, this particular moment in time. I am writing on a laptop I power with a solar panel which might run out any time. When I send the story I will have to go out anyway since my rather basic Internet service provider has not been working for the last few days. To get faster speeds I would have to make a start-up payment of $1,500 to $2,000 and $400 to $500 every month. And remember, this is just one cost.
Of course, when it comes to paying for stories, media outlets, especially in India (with honourable exceptions), feel they ought to get the stories cheap from what looks like a run-down Third World country, not realising that the lack of goods and services does not make for cheap living but the contrary.

APART FROM THE EXTERNAL costs there are other costs to living. Take for example, electricity. It is only when you don’t have power for days that you realise how dependent modern life is on power, turning your fridge into a cupboard, rendering your mobile phone and laptop useless and running taps dry because the water pump won’t work. It is worse in winter. Winters of -20ºC with only two hours of power every fourth day and frozen water pipes are difficult, and it is only now, after five winters, that I actually know how to light a wood fire somewhat successfully.
But above all the difficulties I experience here the worst are those of being a woman in Afghanistan. There is very little understanding of a woman’s role or participation in public space and little respect. The dominant culture of this country at its most conservative form expects that a woman will not step out of her home for ANY reason whatsoever – not even for medical emergencies. Liberalism denotes leaving home either with a male escort of the family or at least with the permission of the head of the household. Afghan women who work in jobs now are hemmed in by many caveats. Therefore women like me – even though we have enormous freedoms comparatively – are still looked at askance – whether at the work space, in public offices or on the streets. Indian women readers will perhaps remark that this is no different from many places in India. But it is, even if by degree.
Imagine walking scantily clad down a crowded bazaar in a middle-class area of a small town and dealing with the repercussions of that act. This is what it is like every day, day after day, year after year, something that can steadily corrode your sense of wellbeing and happiness. It is not that all women in India have all their freedoms. But even in small towns and villages, there are multiple roles that women have, some more or some less. Here, there is only one role that is socially sanctioned and there are no peer groups, no spaces that allow other identities. For me this translates into a sense of a loss of control over my own life. The right to go out, walk, to enter public offices, demand my rights and confront bad behaviour is extremely circumscribed. Without the cocoon of the international organisations that most foreigners here live within, I feel disenfranchised as a citizen just like all the other Afghan women who may have known an alternative and no longer have a choice. Many don’t.

So apart from the thrills of reporting the ‘sexy’ story is invariably one that deals with conflict — the military operations, the intricacies of the Taliban network, the daily diet of violence — I believe this is being done well enough by enough people and see no need to add to this reportage. It is the transformation of people and society that fascinates and I feel a regional perspective on this is almost entirely missing even in our own media. Apart from two other journalists working for state-owned broadcasters there are no other regional journalists in Afghanistan.
Most of our media report on this country using Western news agencies. While theirs is a valuable perspective, it is not the only one. Living and reporting from here has only strengthened my conviction that there’s need for more regional voices from here – bringing with it the multiplicity of pluralistic voices rather than the polarities that the Western experience often brings.
Take, for example, the simple issue of the headscarf. Wearing the burkha is mandatory for many and some families are so strict that they will insist on women covering their heads even inside the household.
There are no laws that govern clothing, but custom demands women cover their heads in public spaces, and since I chose to live outside the car-to-car, door-to-door lives of many expats, I do wear a dupatta or chunni on my head, just the way I did while reporting from the villages of Punjab or Kashmir. Coming from India I neither equate it with Islam, nor do I see rejection of the scarf as an automatic means of emancipation as many of my Western or Westernised colleagues do.
Or take the issue of traditional and liberal values. In the struggle between contending forces with contending values, those opposing empowerment of women or rejecting development of a jurisprudence based on human rights will often cite the fact that Afghanistan is not a Western nation. Very often, Western diplomats will accept this argument, condoning or tolerating the most heinous abuses in the name of cultural relativism. This is not something that we in the region need to accept. We in India strive to accommodate tradition and freedom at the same time, respect for other cultures and religions with respect for fundamental rights and respect for the rule of law while seeking to transform a more conservative society.
It is this feeling of shared complexities and questions rather than a superior culture with all its answers that enables me to both accept and challenge Afghan society on equal terms and on the same terms that I would challenge my own culture and society.
It is, perhaps, this simple empathy that gets across in ways that no amount of politeness and nice words can. It was an empathy that was brought home to me suddenly and fiercely earlier this month. Used to taking the much-touted fondness for Bollywood and Indians with a pinch of salt, it came as somewhat of a jolt for me to realise just how deep the empathy for Indians runs when the embassy was targeted in the blast.
It was a day that staggered me more than I could have imagined. Though as a journalist I have always kept my distance from government, here in Kabul the relationship with the embassy and its officials was much stronger. There were a handful of diplomats here in Kabul and as one of the two Indian journalists here I know them and count some amongst them as friends. Venkat Rao, Brigadier Mehta and the driver of their car Niamat were amongst those I knew and who lost their lives that day. As I battled to reconcile the personal emotions with the professional needs of a journalist, the words of the Afghans I met and spoke to proved to be a soothing balm.
They were shocked about the bombing. The sadness was genuine. The condolence carried with it a sense of apology and responsibility, as if a loved guest had been harmed in their home. I had not expected this. I see Afghans dying everyday in the violence and I know that almost every Afghan family has been touched deeply by personal tragedy. One of the Afghans who expressed condolence has been interring the bones of his entire family from a mass grave unearthed recently. It was the ability of these peoples to go beyond their own devastating tragedies and console me that touched and humbled me enormously. “It happens to Afghans everyday,” I told one young Afghan who expressed sorrow that I had lost a friend. “Yes, but when it happens to you when you are in a foreign land, in a different country it is hard,” he said. It was at that minute that I knew that in some strange way I was home, if not in my country, in my ‘southasianness’.