Doggone Cossacks
My wife carefully scrutinises the menu at the Korean restaurant to which we have been taken by our protocol host for lunch on our first day in Astana, the Kazakh capital. She triumphantly picks the “Korean National dish, meat prepared with special Korean spices”. Our host looks doubtful. “That’s dog meat,” he intones sadly. Thank God for the one million Koreans who migrated to Kazakhstan. His family came over two generations ago. Otherwise, we might have been puking dog meat all the way back to Delhi.
We are in Kazakhstan (pronounced “Kaa-zakh-sthaan) for a global disarmament conference. Why Kazakhstan: land of the fierce Cossacks, whose historical ancestors included Chengiz Khan and Halaku, the Huns and Babar’s cohorts? Because when Kazakhstan became independent of the USSR in ’91, it inherited the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal. And, completely incongruous with its militant past, promptly decided to renounce it all, dismantling all its nuclear facilities and giving away its huge stock of enriched uranium—because it felt safer and more secure without nuclear weapons than with them. That’s the kind of wisdom the world needs—and Mahatma Gandhi’s India has ratted on.
Two Worlds, Apart
Visiting Astana is a bit like Star Trek—boldly going where no man has gone before—utterly futuristic, created anew in the last 15 years entirely of the most elaborate postmodern structures designed by ace architects from Italy, Germany, Japan, China, the US, you name it. The Kazakh President’s ‘White House’ surmounted with a blue dome; ministerial offices of unprecedented magnificence; theatres, museums, convention centres, shopping malls and, above all, stunning mosques dressed like the Taj Mahal in dazzling white marble; towers rising into the sky, the famous egg of Kazakhstan, representing the globe, nestling in the ‘Qutb Minar’ conceived after Kazakhstan’s national tree, the poplar. Broad boulevards, six to ten lanes wide, cross at perfect right angles forming rectangular blocks; footpaths bordering grassy verges and cycle tracks on the far side; six bridges over the city’s river artery, horse and reindeer rampant at either end, symbols of the Kazakh people; beautifully maintained parks and gardens, gay with seasonal pansies. Rome and Paris, Singapore and Beijing, move over. Astana has come.
And yet, the Indian official in Almaty informs us dourly that the excellence of the roads in the main cities is matched only by the wretchedness of the countryside. The next day, we are flown to Semey, or what’s left of it after having been near where the Soviets tested nearly 500 nuclear bombs, each with over 1,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, under- and above-ground, and in the air, from 1948 to 1962. That was half a century ago. But the hospitals and clinics of Semey are still filled with two-headed children, boys without arms or legs, disfigured girls and all the horrible detritus of genetic distortion that remains in circulation even 50 years on—and, indeed, won’t disappear for the next 100, 200, countless years, who knows? As for Semey itself, we are back in the Third World: potholed streets, ramshackle lean-tos, weather-beaten housing, much of it dating back to Soviet times. Petroleum and authoritarianism have made Astana, like tea and colonialism made possible Lutyens’ Delhi.
Skewed Worries
Aboard a helicopter to the heart of the testing site, my mind is on the radiation hazard. The British MP, on her first helicopter trip it seems, nervously asks if this is my first time too. I tell her that having worked in the prime minister’s office, this is perhaps my 2,000th heli trip. The rotors of the helicopter start revving up. “Are they not going to give us any emergency instructions?” she asks, quite alarmed. “There won’t be any time to follow instructions,” I grimly remind her. But after we land and take off about six times that morning, she is quite as insouciant as I am.
We attend a ceremony to mark the 21st anniversary of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site closing down. The memorial grounds are dominated by the moving monument of a mother bending over her child in the gash created by a nuclear explosion splitting the earth apart. The path to the podium is lined with Kazakhs of all ages waving flags and banners, held back by adolescents in army uniforms. It’s 67 years after WW II and the female:male ratio is still around 65:35 because Kazakhstan is yet to recover from the culling of nearly a quarter of its male population in the war. Seeing the proud young toy soldiers and an aged veteran sporting over 20 medals, my mind goes to that Battle of Stalingrad flick, Enemy at the Gates, where the first boy is given a rifle and a clip of bullets and a second only the clip of bullets and told that when the first falls, he was to take up his rifle and fill in. That is the horror against which Kazakhstan today takes a stand. More power to their elbow!
My Wife’s
Encounter with dog meat reminds me of my favourite politically incorrect tale: “How can an American tell his home has been burgled by a Vietnamese boat person? Simple really. The dog’s gone. And the homework’s done!”
Mani Shankar Aiyar is a diplomat-turned-politician
