You Might Be Dangerous

Shoot on sight, and don’t think twice. That seems to be the credo of the Italians on board the Enrica Lexie, unchanged since the European intrusion into our waters in 1498

‘Let’s talk after I shoot, you might be dangerous.’

On 15 February, the Italian ship Enrica Lexie shot and killed two Indian fishermen off the coast of Kochi. Ajith Binkie, 25, and Jelestine, 45, died instantly. The other sailors on board the St Anthony were asleep when the boat was attacked. They woke to find their comrades dying in a pool of blood.

Once past the panic, the fishing community had a larger fear to face. Their way of life had been threatened. The sea is their element, and these fishermen knew its dangers all too well—but never before had they expected to be shot at. It changed their equation with the sea.

Panic and rage soon changed to bewilderment as the Italians claimed to have shot the fishermen in self-defence. I read the reports with incredulity.

At first the Italians justified the murder by claiming they had shot at ‘Somali pirates.’ When the fishermen’s identity was established postmortem, the Italians accused them of ‘aggressive behaviour.’ St Anthony had ignored the warning flares of the Enrica Lexie.

It got clumsier. The Italians suggested the fishermen had been armed. They claimed their ship had been in international waters and this gave them every right to shoot. They filed a case against the Kerala police for arresting the shooters and detaining their ship. When the police remained unrepentant, the Vatican was approached. An Archbishop rashly intervened, then did a quick recant, claiming he had been misquoted. Hastily, money was offered as compensation. Five lakh may be a respectable sum in Indian rupees, but in euros, it is chickenfeed. Perhaps the Italians expected this pittance to be hush money that would make it all go away. It didn’t.

Eventually, after a fortnight of bluster and denial, the Italians seem to have got their eyesight back. Yes, they now concede, those fishermen really were fishermen. Not Somali pirates. Not arms-toting aggressive terrorists. Just fishermen.

Why did they take so long to see that? Why did they react to a small fishing vessel with panic? They were the bigger ship, and armed too. They knew, besides, that these waters were patrolled and unlikely to be swarming with pirates.

They shot because they saw the little boat as an intruder, someone who had no right being there. They reacted the way Europeans historically have in these waters. And Kerala, with its painful memory of the anguish they once inflicted, reacted to this insult with rage.

Xenophobia, literally a dread of the stranger, has been the motive force in conquest and colonisation. But history, as any schoolkid will tell you, was a long time ago. It’s over.

Or is it?

I was pondering this last evening as I walked to a small bookshop in New York City’s Lower East Side where I was to read from my new book.

The audience was mostly loyalist, my daughters’ friends at NYU. Afterwards, my publisher asked me what my daughters were studying. When she heard that my younger daughter Ihaab was interested in law and aspired to politics, she said, “Perhaps this is the wrong bookstore for her to be seen in.” Surprised, I asked her why. “It displays all sorts of political literature, so it’s constantly under FBI surveillance,” she murmured with a nervous look over her shoulder.

“But aren’t dissent and debate the very essence of democracy?” I protested, “this is exactly the kind of bookstore I’d encourage her to visit.”

“Oh well,” was the uneasy response, “if you look at it that way.”

That took me back three years—this time to Paris.

I was to spend the weekend with a friend. She lived on the third floor, and wasn’t answering the complicated bell in the foyer, so I decided to walk up and ring her doorbell.

The stairs were steep and my bags heavy and numerous, so I decided to leave my suitcase on the first floor and come back for it.

I must have been half way up that flight of stairs when a door flew open and a voice barked, “Pick up your suitcase!”

I turned in surprise—first, because she had spoken in English, and then, because it was the first discourteous voice I had heard in that lovely city.

“I’ll come back for it in five minutes,” I assured her. “I’m sure it will be safe!”

Her lips twisted in irony. “Everything is safe in Paris. About you, we don’t know. You may be a terrorist.”

I laughed. But there was no answering humour in her eyes. They drilled me with hate till I picked up the suitcase.

Lasgt month I had a frightening encounter that showed me how inexorable xenophobia could be.

One morning there was a tremendous uproar. Every crow in the world seemed to be cawing its head off. The reason dangled from the electrical cable. A crow had torn its wing, and swung entangled in a snarl of wire. All its friends and relations were lined up on adjoining terraces and balconies, flapping around with encouraging caws—at least, that’s what I thought their intent was.

Despite the hour, a rescue operation was swiftly organised. All sorts of stratagems were employed, none worked.

The watchman roared at the bird from the top of a stepladder as tall as a pylon, but he was still too far to grab it. After about an hour of intense endeavour, a passing kid threw a lasso from the top of the pylon. It didn’t touch the bird, but somehow disentangled the snarl of wire, and the crow came plummeting down. Mr Xav, the electrician (who had provided the stepladder), quickly dropped a cloth on the bird, grabbed the bag I was carrying, and scooped the crow into it, just in time.

But its friends and relations were not going to be cheated of their prey. They descended in a raucous black cumulus, intent on attack. “Run!” gasped Xav, and we raced, bag in hand, pursued by, quite literally, a murder of crows.

Luckily I had the car keys on me. We got in somehow, and I burst past the birds pecking at the windshield. They followed us for almost half a kilometre. We stopped at a clearing several streets away and Xav shook out the bag.

The bird emerged with a surprised squawk, and staggered about. Then, with a determined shake of its wings, it took off—in the direction away from home. It knew there was no going back.

“Once a bird gets injured,” said Xav, “it becomes a stranger. No mercy towards strangers.”

No mercy towards strangers. Shoot on sight, and don’t think twice. That seems to be the credo of the Italians on board the Enrica Lexie, unchanged since the European intrusion into our waters in 1498.

Vasco da Gama’s cruelties on his second voyage in 1502 are well known.

The dhow Meri bringing home Hajis from Mecca was unfortunate enough to encounter Vasco who demanded money—there’s no point dressing that up as treasure or tax or whatever. He was extorting money.

The Meri paid—but not enough.

Vasco set fire to the ship, watching as women held up their babies and begged for mercy.

Three hundred and eighty men, women and children died on the Meri.

The incident frightened the Zamorin of Kozhikode enough to welcome Vasco with a delegation of peace. But Vasco could be appeased only if the Zamorin expelled every Mussalman from his kingdom and uproot the centuries-old tradition of syncretic trade and culture.

Vasco did not wait for the Zamorin’s response. To show what he meant, he swooped down on the wharf and captured traders and fishermen busy at their boats. He cut off their hands and feet, ears and noses, and when the Zamorin sent an envoy, Vasco cut off his hands too, then sent him drifting back in a boat full of the body parts collected from his hostages and a rude message in Arabic advising the Zamorin to make a curry of these bits of flesh and feed on it.

Vasco’s xenophobia was so intense that it injured not just the victims of his insatiable greed, but his own men as well, a fact that’s usually overlooked by history.

On his voyage that established the sea route to India, Vasco lost half of the 118 men who sailed with him. All of them died of scurvy. Scurvy, caused by a deficiency of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) was known in medieval Europe. But it was known on land, not at sea.

Vasco’s voyage was a round trip of nearly two years: by six weeks, if Vitamin C is absent from the diet, the body begins to show signs of scurvy.

Vasco’s belligerence made enemies everywhere his ship made port along the African coast. ‘Bombards’ were fired, there were regular skirmishes: ‘when we tired of these, we returned to dine on board’ wrote the Unknown Sailor who kept a diary.

After 95 days at sea, with more than 30 dead, when they put in at Mombasa, the king sent a welcome gift of oranges, limes and other fruit. In three days the sick men had recovered.

Yet, on the journey back, Vasco made no heed of keeping his men supplied with fruit. By the time they had crossed the Arabian Sea, almost all were sick. ‘Thirty of our men were dead, and thirty more had died previously, and those able to navigate each ship were only seven or eight, and even these were not as well as they should have been’. And yet Vasco would not relent. Finally, either because the ships could not be manned, or else because he was among the suffering, Vasco sent for fruit. For many, the oranges arrived too late.

Why was Vasco da Gama so pig-headed? Clearly, he knew what alleviated the tortures of scurvy, but he was adamant in not keeping his men supplied with fruit.

All along the African and Arabian coast it was traditional to welcome sailors with a boatload of fresh fruit. Ibn-e-Batuta documents the custom more than a century before Vasco da Gama—on whom the courtesy was clearly wasted. His arrogance did not permit him to countenance any spark of intelligence in the pagans and infidels he encountered. They were all subhuman.

That attitude was not peculiar to Vasco da Gama. Almost every atrocity committed by colonisers had its roots in this view.

Five lakh Indian rupees, about €7,500, will buy you a single bedroom rental in Tuscany for a month. As blood money, it speaks of the contempt in which the Italian government holds an Indian life. True, we are a poor nation. What else could we be after enriching Europe for five centuries? It is very well for Europeans to observe our rags and sores and go back to make millions off our shame. But they have their shame too, crimes repugnant in their enormity, crimes of having raped, impoverished and decimated all other world cultures that they now damn as corrupt, amoral and unprincipled.

The prurient righteousness of a rich nation’s view of a poor one is not a recent phenomenon. Dominique Lapierre, Gregory David Roberts and Katherines Mayo and Boo write in the tradition of medieval European travellers who sent home postcards full of reassuring horrors. One of the earliest celebrants

of gonzo journalism was Ludovico Varthema whose travelogue delights and entertains till you realise he’s writing about us. Sadly, we do know enough about India in his life and times to call his bluff.

That doesn’t seem to happen often enough. We turn a deaf ear to our own, and listen agog to the neo-Orientalist who purveys our social evils as missionaries of an earlier age purveyed our moral decadence. This is the new colonialism, subtler, and therefore more effective than the older brand.

Of course we’re a lousy nation, and I am supp’d full of horrors every day. Also, by all means, atithi, being devo bhava, should certainly be fed on spaghetti aio e oio and tiramisu. But please, this is the third millennium. After centuries of unwilling osmosis with other cultures, surely Europe can be, at least, a little civilised. The trigger-happy savage can no longer get away by saying, “Sorry, we thought you might be dangerous.”

About The Author

Kalpish Ratna

Kalpish Ratna is the author of The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017) and Synapse (2019)