Picador £16.99 pp439

In the winter of 2000, when the writer Pankaj Mishra travelled to a small town near Srinagar in Indian Kashmir, he drew a crowd. Some villagers walked four miles to see him. Not because Mishra is famous in those parts or because he had anything material to offer. They were drawn to him because he arrived in a car and carried a notebook. To their minds, this meant he must be some kind of government official, so they asked him for help. They explained that for eight days they had been without water. The appointed engineer was nowhere to be found and the police didn’t want to know. “For those who live in Kashmir, the expectations of justice, rarely fulfilled in the Indian subcontinent, are more than optimistic: they belong to fantasy,” writes Mishra.

It is just one of many episodes in this ambitious and illuminating journey through the sociopolitical landscape of South Asia that illustrates the helplessness of the region’s masses and their daily struggle against inept, corrupt and often tyrannical authorities. Mishra’s subcontinent is in turmoil. In India, the tectonic upheaval of the old caste structure has widened the faultiness of society. Corruption is endemic, reptilian politicians stir religious hatred, the media is at best spineless, and minorities (including no fewer than 120m Muslims) try to keep their heads down, but are periodically hacked to pieces.

Pakistan is worse off. Politicians have wrecked its “frail democratic structures” and the country is “alarmingly replete” with fanatics. Afghanistan, too, remains in the hands of bad sorts, mostly warlords and heroin dealers propped up by American muscle. As for Nepal, Mishra finds that “there are few places in the country untouched by violence — murder, torture, arbitrary arrest — and most people live perpetually in fear of both the army and the Maoists”.

If his take on South Asia sounds unbalanced or exaggerated that’s possibly because, as westerners living in our cosy bubble of stability, we remain blissfully removed from the daily grind of millions of people. It takes a huge disaster to stir us. Even then it has to be something really big, like a tsunami. Or an earthquake (small ones don’t count; thousands have to die). Or much worse: a terrorist attack on our own interests.

Mishra’s book is a timely reminder of the effect that European and American policy and culture have had, and continue to have, on this part of the world. He finds a region still reeling from two centuries of British deindustrialisation and the deadly rivalry of the cold war. The history woven through his sharply written reportage shows how a phenomenon such as the rise of jihadi terrorism is the consequence of past events in which the West has played a decisive role. The repercussions of British divide and rule are still being felt, as is the trauma caused by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent American intervention.

In Kabul, Mishra finds we continue to get it wrong: pursuing our own interests to the detriment of the Afghan people. The UN warns that Afghanistan is fast turning into a failed state run by drug cartels, yet “the Bush administration considers warlords indispensable to its war on terror, and thus undercuts President Karzai’s authority”.

Mishra, who is 36, is hardly the first Indian or Pakistani commentator to point out the inherent hypo-crisy of western foreign policy. But he is in a different league to most of his peers. His writing is eloquent and insightful. And, refreshingly, he calls a spade a spade. The effects of western imperialism and consumerism may have taken their toll, but the region’s politicians and intelligentsia have utterly failed the people, too. He is especially good on India. Travelling with local politicians during the last national elections, he shows how quick they are to exploit caste and religious divisions. He hits the campaign trail with one Mr Patel who is after the Dalit (untouchable) vote and rages against “Brahmanical forces”. But it turns out that he’s not Dalit at all and owns a large agricultural estate. “A new class of professional politicians has been steadily added since 1947,” writes Mishra. “A large number of them are criminals.”

He also writes bravely on Kashmir. The subject is extremely sensitive in India, and the national press offers very little objective reporting from the state. Hindus mostly perceive Kashmiri Muslims as traitors. They are content to let the Indian armed forces do whatever it takes to keep them in check. Mishra discovers that this translates into daily atrocities. Tens of thousands have been killed; tens of thousands more have been tortured, raped or gone missing. He investigates an incident in which the Indian armed forces are seeking to implicate someone — anyone — for the high-profile killing of Sikh villagers during Bill Clinton’s visit to India in 2000. They round up a group of innocent Kashmiri men, murder them, burn the bodies and issue a statement saying they died during “an encounter”.

Mishra has been denounced by senior Indian columnists for pandering to “pro-Muslim audiences in the West” in his reporting on Kashmir, and his parents have been interrogated by the Indian Intelligence Bureau about his “pro-Pakistan proclivities”. India, it seems, is nowhere near confronting its own failings and home-made Frankensteins. But the region needs more voices such as Mishra’s. And we in the West should take heed of his findings. Our democratic systems might work well for us at home, but our policies abroad often play havoc with millions of lives.

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