Brave New India

October, 12 2008

By Arundhati Roy

 

[ARUNDHATI ROY is the celebrated author of The God of Small Things, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. The New York Times calls her "India's most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence." She is the winner of the 2002 Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom. Her latest books are The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, with David Barsamian, and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. DAVID BARSAMIAN interviewed her in New Delhi on December 29, 2007. David Barsamian is the producer of Alternative Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado.]

 

ALL NATIONS have ideas about themselves that are repeated without much scrutiny or examination: the United States—a beacon of freedom and liberty; India—the world's largest democracy, dedicated to secularism.

 

INDIA HAS done a better job than the United States in recent years. The myth about the U.S. being a beacon of liberty has been more or less discredited amongst people who are even vaguely informed. India, on the other hand, has managed to pull off almost a miraculous public relations coup. It really is the flavor of the decade, I think. It's the sort of dream destination for world capital. All this done in the name of "India is not Afghanistan," "India is not Pakistan," "India is a secular democracy," and so on.

 

India has among the highest number of custodial deaths in the world. It's a country where 25 percent of its territory is out of control of the government. But the thing is that these areas are so dark, whether it's Kashmir, whether it's the northeastern states, whether it's Chhattisgarh, whether it's parts of Andhra Pradesh. There is so much going on here, but it's just a diverse and varied place. So while there are killings going on, say, in Chhattisgarh, there's a festival in Tamil Nadu or a cricket match between India and Australia in Adelaide. Where the light is shone is where the Sensex stock market is jumping and investments are coming in. And where the lights are switched off are the states where farmers are committing suicide—I think the figure is now 136,000—and the killing, in say, Kashmir, which is 68,000 to 80,000. We have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows even noncommissioned officers to shoot on suspicion.

 

It's quite interesting what's going on right now, because we are at the cusp where the definition of terrorism is being expanded. Under the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party—that's the radical Hindu government previously in power—much of the emphasis was on Islamic terrorism. But now Islamic terrorism is not enough to net those that the government wants to net, because the minimum qualification is that you have to be a Muslim. Now, with these huge development projects and these Special Economic Zones that are being created and the massive displacement, the people that are protesting those have to be called terrorists, too. And they can't be Islamic terrorists, so now we have the Maoists. The fact is that both in the case of militancy in Kashmir as well as the expansion of the Maoist cadres, they are both realities—it's not that they are not—but they are realities that both sides benefit from exaggerating. So when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says it's the greatest internal security threat, it allows various state governments to pass all kinds of laws that could call anybody a terrorist. Say, tomorrow, they came into my house here. Just the books that I have would make me qualify as a terrorist. In Chhattisgarh, if I had these books and if I weren't Arundhati Roy, I could be put into jail. Human rights activists, like, say, a very well-known doctor, Binayak Sen, has just been put into jail on charges of being a Maoist. He's being made an example of to discourage people from having any association with those who are resisting this kind of absolutely lawless takeover of land now. Thousands and thousands of acres are being handed over to corporates. So now we're sort of, as I said, on the cusp of expanding the definition of terrorist so that a lot of people who disagree with this mode of development can be actually imprisoned and are being imprisoned.

 

Until recently, even post-1990s, when the sort of neoliberal model was imported into India, we were still talking about the privatization of water, the privatization of electricity, the devastation of the rivers. But when you look at privatization of water and electricity, still these corporate companies had to find their markets here, even if it was for the Indian elite, even if it was just making water and electricity too expensive for local people. But with the opening up of the mineral sector and the discovery of huge deposits of bauxite and iron ore in states like Orissa and Chhattisgarh, we are watching these places turn into what it was like in Africa, what it is like in the Middle East, where you don't have to find a local market. You just take the whole mountain of bauxite and you store it in the desert in Australia and you trade bauxite on the futures market. So the corporates are here, and their guns are trained on these minerals.

 

If you look at a geographical map of India, you will see that the only areas where there are forests are where Adivasis, tribals, live, and under the forests are the minerals. It is these ecologically and socially most vulnerable parts of India that are now in the crosshairs of these big guns. So you have absolute devastation happening in Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Chhattisgarh is like Colombia. The Tatas, who until just a few years ago were trying to be the sort of good-uncle corporation, have now decided to go aggressive and enter the world market big time. So, for example, they signed an MOU, memorandum of understanding, with the Chhattisgarh government for the mining of iron ore. And within days, not by coincidence I'm sure, was the announcement of what's known as the Salva Judum, a people's militia, which purportedly is a spontaneous movement that sprang up to fight the menace of the Maoists. Salva Judum is armed by the government. Something like four hundred villages have been evacuated and moved into police camps. Chhattisgarh is in a situation of sort of civil war, which is exactly what happened in Colombia. And while our eyes are on this supposed civil war, obviously the mining, the minerals, everything can be just taken away.

 

If you look at what's going on in Orissa, the situation is similar. Orissa has bauxite mountains, which are beautiful and densely forested, with flat tops, like air fields. They are porous mountains, which are actually water tanks that store water for the fields in the plains. And whole mountains have just been taken away by private corporations, and, of course, destroying the forests, displacing the tribals, and devastating the land.

 

It's really interesting, what's going on in India today. It's hard to know what to say or how to think about it anymore. We are all well versed in Noam Chomsky's thesis of the manufacture of consent, but actually what's going on now here is we're living in the era of the manufacture of dissent, where you have these corporations who are making so much money. For example, the way the bauxite business works is that the corporates just pay the Orissa government a royalty, a small percentage, and they are making billions. And with those billions they can set up an NGO. Somebody says they're going to set up Vedanta University in Orissa. They will mop up all the intellectuals and environmentalists. Alcan has given a million-dollar environmental award to one of the leading environmental activists in India. The Tatas have the Jamsetji Tata Trust and the Dorabji Tata Trust, which they use to fund activists, to stage cultural events and so on, to the point where these people are funding the dissent as well as the devastation. The dissent is on a leash; it's only apparent. It's a manufactured situation in which everyone is playing out this kind of theater. It's completely crazy.

 

CLEARLY, THE state must be enabling these kinds of situations to occur and to continue.

 

THIS IS the genius of the Indian state. It's an extremely sophisticated state. It has a lot to teach the Americans about occupation, it has a lot to teach the world about how you manage dissent. You just wear people down, you just wait things out. When they want to mow people down, when they want to kill and imprison, it does that, too. Who doesn't believe that this is a spiritual country where everybody just thinks that if it's not okay in this life it will be okay in the next life? Yet it is one of the most devastatingly cruel societies. Which other culture could dream up the caste system? Even the Taliban can't come up with the way Indian civilization has created Dalits.

 

EXPLAIN WHO Dalits are.

 

DALITS ARE the "untouchables" of India.

 

THEY'RE ON the bottom of the economic, social ladder.

 

THEY'RE ON the bottom of everything, everything. They are routinely bludgeoned, butchered, killed. I don't know whether it made it to the American press, but, for example, Dalits, because they have been at the bottom of Hindu society, often have converted and become Muslims, become Christians, become Sikhs. But they continue to be treated as untouchables, even in those religions. It's so pervasive.

 

There was recently a man called Bant Singh, who is a Sikh Dalit. Even in India people would jump at the idea of there being such a thing as a Sikh Dalit. But, actually, 30 percent of Sikhs are Dalits and about 90 percent of them are landless. Because they are landless, obviously they work as labor on other people's farms. Their women are very vulnerable. Upper castes all over India think that they have the right to pick up a Dalit woman and have sex with her or rape her. Bant Singh's young daughter was raped by the upper-caste people in his village. Bant Singh was a member of the CPI (ML), which is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), known as Naxalites, and he filed a case in court. They warned him. They said, "If you don't drop the case, we will kill you." He didn't drop the case, so they caught him and they cut off his arms and his legs.

 

He was in the hospital in Delhi. I went to see him there. It was a lesson to me about how being a political person saved him. He said, "Do you think I don't have arms and legs? I do. Because all my comrades are my arms and legs." He's a singer, so he sang a song about a young girl's father getting her dowry ready for her just before her marriage, her trousseau. And she says to him, "I don't want this sari and these jewels. What will I do with them? Just give me a gun." Unfortunately, more and more, because of, I think, what happened with the Narmada movement and the fact that that nonviolent movement, where people fought for fifteen years and were just flicked aside like chaff, that has resulted in a lot of people saying, "I don't want the bangles, I don't want Gandhi. Just give me a gun."

 

YOU WERE an active participant in, and observer and reporter on, the NBA, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. It was, of course, trying to fight many of these big dam projects in central India. Well, what happened exactly? Where did it go and where is it today? Is it still active? You once described it, I think, as the greatest nonviolent movement since [India's] independence.

 

YES, I did. But I think people, including myself, are very disillusioned by what happened. And I personally feel that we really need to do a sort of post-mortem. The state did what's in its nature, and it has won that battle. The Supreme Court judgment that came out in 2001 was a devastating blow. But, in my opinion, that should have been the time when people began to question these institutions such as the Supreme Court. Instead, people have gone on and on and on trying to find some embers of hope there and have not broken the faith. I have broken the faith. I don't look to the court for any kind of real help, which is not to say that every single court judgment that comes out is terrible, but there is a systemic problem with the Supreme Court of India, with its views, with its ideologies. This is a huge subject separate to this question and, to me, one of the most important things that needs to be discussed.

 

But the Narmada movement now refuses to question itself, and I think that's a problem. Because it was a wonderful and a magnificent effort, but it wasn't faultless. Unless we try and think about what is it that was wrong, we can't really just move on to something else. In fact, as I said, I think people have felt that there is a futility in these kind of hunger fasts and dharnas, sit-ins, and sitting on the pavement singing songs, because I think the government loves that. Now Sonia Gandhi is talking about satyagraha and Gandhi in Davos. We have satyagraha fairs in Connaught Place where they sell herbal shampoos. And when the government starts promoting satyagraha, it's time for us to think about it.

 

I think it's time to radically question many things, including what this kind of joyful freedom movement of 1947 was about and who did it benefit and was it really a middle-class revolution that, as usual, fired its guns off the shoulders of the poor, which it was. The Indian elites stepped very easily into the shoes of our white sahibs.

 

TALK ABOUT Narendra Modi and Gujarat. In December of 2007, he and his party were reelected. It was Modi in 2002 who presided over a pogrom resulting in the deaths of some two thousand primarily Muslims in Gujarat. What accounts for his ability to be reelected despite this record of promoting communal violence?

 

No, it's not despite, it's because. That po?grom in which between 1,500 to 2,000 Muslims were massacred on the streets, women were gang-raped, 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes and today they live in ghetto conditions, economically and socially ostracized in Gujarat, this was all an election campaign. So I think we really need to question, structurally, what is this democracy? It's kind of pointless to just demonize Modi, because there are going to be people like Modi, who understand that there is a very organic link between democracy and majoritarianism and between majoritarianism and fascism. As I keep saying, there is fire in the ducts. This has to be what's going to happen, because what is a politician spawned by this kind of complex society going to do? He's going to try and forge a majority for himself using the lowest common denominator, which will then be a sort of faithful vote bank. That's what Modi did. Modi is a brilliant politician, and he has the corporates eating out of his hand. So that connection—just like we know happened during the Nazi era in Germany—the connection between the fascists and the big corporations, it's no different here. Tata, Reliance, all these people say Gujarat is the dream destination for capital.

 

The RSS, which is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the cultural guild that spawned the BJP (which is just its political wing) was founded in 1925, and it's been working all these years, sometimes underground, sometimes above ground. It was founded basically on the tenets of Mussolini's Italian fascism—very open about saying that the Muslims of India are like the Jews of Germany. It's the Indian liberals who try and say that it's not fascist, whereas they themselves are very comfortable with the idea of fascism. In fact, there was a ridiculous moment during the Gujarat elections when Sonia Gandhi, campaigning for the Congress, called Modi "maut ka saudagar," which is a merchant of death. And Advani, who is the leader of the BJP, and Modi both came out and said, "We don't mind being called Hitler, that's acceptable, but don't call him a merchant of death." In fact, in the history textbooks and things in Gujarat, Hitler gets quite high marks.

 

So what we are seeing in Gujarat is a kind of fascism, because I keep saying that having a fascist dictator is one thing, but having a fascist democrat elected to power, fattened on the approbation of millions of people, is a different thing. Because we have now millions of little Modis running around in Gujarat. Recently, just before the elections, Tehelka news magazine did a sting operation. It was shown on a major prime-time channel, where you had people coming out saying very openly how they had raped and then pulped Muslim women, how they had hacked to death people and then Modi had given them refuge or sent them out of Gujarat for a while and protected them.

 

THIS WAS all well documented?

 

WELL DOCUMENTED. Tehelka had these guys come out and say it themselves. All the documentation exists in great detail from human rights groups, the People's Union for Democratic Rights, Communalism Combat. But when it was aired on TV, down the line everybody's reaction was, "Oh, what terrible timing. Now Modi is going to win the elections." Because these people are boasting about this kind of massacre. It's going to get him votes. So that's what I meant by saying it's not despite, it's because of.

 

Having said that, it is important, when you look at the election results in some detail, to see that Modi in many constituencies just won by three hundred, five hundred, a thousand votes. It was close. But the thing is that if you look at how this democracy now has begun to function, I really find it chilling.

For example, during the pogrom there was one episode—I'm just telling you one of many episodes—there was an MLA, a member of the legislative assembly, called Ehsan Jafari, a poet, who lived in Ahmedabad in a housing society called Gulbarga. When the mobs began to gather, something like sixty Muslims from that area went and sheltered with him thinking he's an MLA and he's not going to get killed. A mob of some twenty thousand people gathered and started baying for his blood. This man made two hundred phone calls that day, from Modi, to the home minister Advani, to the police, to Sonia Gandhi, saying, "Please help." The police even came there and went away. Ehsan Jafari was pulled out of his house and in front of everyone, in broad daylight, was hacked into pieces. Something like twelve women were gang-raped and killed and everybody was burned alive. And the policeman who was there was promoted. The man who was organizing this now became the police commissioner of Gujarat. The lawyers who were representing the Muslims were actually lawyers who had been the lawyers for the accused. Some of the survivors knew who the killers were. The police refused to write their names in the FIRs, First Information Reports. Just that it was general mob violence.

 

The Supreme Court made some very virtuous sounds at that time, five years ago, saying Modi was like Nero: he was fiddling while Gujarat burned. And then they just clammed up. Nothing happened. And then you have these men come out and boast on prime-time TV of having raped and killed and looted, saying things like, "We know that these Muslims are terrified of being burned. They would need to be buried. That's why we decided to burn them." And nothing happened.

 

So everything just goes on, every single institution has been penetrated by these people and functions, as long as you are open for investments, as long as all the Tatas and Reliance and all the rich people are happy. We're looking at something that no dictator could do. This level of penetration of all these various institutions drives you completely crazy. You sit there and you just don't know what to think. And even the political parties like, say, the Communist Party of India, that opposes Modi, then goes and does a Nandigram.

 

You're really left to be a mad person in the wilderness. People are so disillusioned with the system. They are doing their own fighting. They are taking to arms, they have their own systems of justice, their own understanding of what's right and what's wrong and are turning their backs on this country with the greatest publicity in the world.

 

YOU JUST mentioned Nandigram, which is a small village in West Bengal, a state that is ruled by the Communist Party (Marxist). In 2007 there were killings there. You went to Nandigram. Can you explain what happened and what is going on?

 

Nandigram is not a small village. Nandigram is a district that consists of many, many villages. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CP(M)], which is the main parliamentary Left, which is in coalition with the center right now, has been in power in West Bengal for thirty years unchallenged. I grew up in Kerala, which also has had a communist government, but it's all the time in and out of power. When I went to Bengal, I realized the first thing you do is to question how in this tumultuous place can a party remain in power for thirty years unchallenged. There is something terribly wrong there. It's difficult to explain. I'll try and explain it simply, because obviously it has led to a lot of confusion in the world. This particular Communist Party (Marxist) has been sort of not calling itself that but has been at the level of organizing, say, the World Social Forum in India, saying "Another World Is Possible" and trying to align itself with all the various people's movements that have existed in India for many years. The Communist Party (Marxist), except in Bengal and to some extent in Kerala, does not have any cadres anywhere else in India, so it was consciously trying to sort of associate itself with all these various people's movements, which was why it was so big into the World Social Forum.

 

IT WAS held in Mumbai in 2005.

 

BUT EVEN the ones that were held in Porto Alegre, very many people who were associated with the CP(M) were involved. And then a year and a half or two years ago, the Indian government announced this. And, of course, the CP(M) has always had as its war cry anti-U.S., anti-imperialism, and all that, and anti this whole neoliberal project.

 

But then the government announced this whole policy of SEZs, which are Special Economic Zones, an acronym that has spawned many sarcastic forms, such as Slavery Enabled Zones. These SEZs are huge economic enclaves, I don't know the exact figure but there are hundreds. India used to be a feudal society, with huge feudal zamindars.

 

BIG LANDOWNERS.

 

AND THEN there was a failed process of land reform in states like—actually, the state where the most successful land reforms happened, oddly enough, was Kashmir, and Kashmiris are still enjoying the benefits of that. But in places like Bengal and elsewhere there were some land reforms. And now this whole business of SEZs is almost reversing that whole process and taking away land and giving it to big corporations, like Reliance and Tata.

What the Communist Party (Marxist) has been doing is vociferously opposing SEZs, and then suddenly in West Bengal turning around to create one of the biggest SEZs, which is to be this chemical hub in the district of Nandigram. An Indonesian corporation called the Salim Group was its sort of front, and it was going to make this chemical hub. Nandigram is right near Haldia port.

 

Trouble started in West Bengal first with the Tatas in a place called Singur, where the government gave the Tatas something close to 1,000 hectares of land to make small cars. You can imagine the communist government wanting to make small cars, the people's car. You know who else made the people's car. So there was firing. People were killed in Singur. There was a huge resistance.

 

But then it announced this chemical hub in Nandigram, and notices went out for land acquisition. This was something like 18,000 hectares. Thousands and thousands of people were going to be affected. And Nandigram just rose up in revolt. It was interesting, because Nandigram used to be a CP(M) stronghold. I think it was a case of a party being so unused to any kind of opposition that it just misread the situation and thought it could do exactly what it wanted. It resulted basically in the party having what the people in Nandigram call the cadre police, which is party people dressed in police uniforms going in and committing acts of violence and even murder.

 

The first uprising was in March. It's a whole mess of all kinds of politics, but basically it was a fantastic resistance. They dug up the roads, they refused the police entry, and they said, "You can't come in and you can't have our land."

 

I'll just tell you what happened when I was there. The government kept saying the people barricaded Nandigram and, "They're not allowing us in to do development work, they're not allowing the police in, we can't give polio drops." They kept saying this thing about polio drops. There is not a single health center in all those villages. The nearest hospital is in Nandigram town, which is very, very far for people to go. All these years, no electricity, none of that. And suddenly you're talking about polio drops. Really what it is about is regaining complete control.

 

The second time I went, which was just last week, the people I had met the first time sent messages saying, "Please don't come to us, please don't recognize us, because we'll just be eliminated." They just dare, and anyone who pops their head up, it's off with their heads. So, in fact, just a few days ago, the last thing I did when I came out of Nandigram was I was present at the exhumation of a body in a field that had its legs smashed and two bullets in its back, and his wife had identified the body. The neighbor said to me that this man was a member of the Bhoomi Ucched Pratrirodh Committee, which is the resistance organization, and had been told several times that he must join the CP(M), otherwise he would be killed. And when he didn't, he was made an example of.

 

I really salute the resistance there. I think it is so important for everyone else in India that they force the government to say they will not build the hub, even though nobody believes it. But even if it's a temporary victory, it's a great thing. It's so important for the CP(M) government to keep saying, "Oh, it was the Maoists. It wasn't the local people, it was outsiders." And this whole bullshit about outsiders. How dare a communist party come and say outsiders. What do they mean by outsiders? Beyond the district or outside Bengal? If they believe in that kind of rhetoric, what gives them the right to comment about Gujarat or fascism or the BJP or anything?

 

KASHMIR IS an area of conflict, but it's largely unreported, particularly in the United States. The framework of the little information that is available is usually that these are Islamic extremists, terrorists. Now, since September 11, they're labeled as Taliban and al-Qaeda. You have been going to Kashmir. What have you learned?

 

KASHMIR IS one of those places where every time I hear people say, "Oh, it's more complicated than that," I get a rash, because all you need to do is to get out of the airport to see that here is a small valley where there are—I keep saying that to fight a full-blown war in Iraq, the Americans have 135,000 troops, and in Kashmir it's something like 700,000 security personnel of different kinds: the army, the police, the paramilitary, the counterinsurgency, all the various kinds of people that are operating there. Certainly the situation has been made complicated with spies and double agents and informers and money being poured in by intelligence agencies from India and Pakistan.

 

But the bottom line is that it is the people's will that the Indian government is seeking to subvert. Why is it so frightened of a referendum? Firstly, how can you talk about holding democratic, free, and fair elections in a place where a person isn't even allowed to breathe without an AK-47 being stuck up his nostril? So what is it that so frightens the Indian government that they do not wish to assess what the people really want? In a way, it's been complicated by the instrument of accession, genuine or not. Supposing it was genuine. Supposing it was.

 

THE TRANSFER from the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian union in 1947.

 

RIGHT. I'M just saying that what is it that the people want now? If we are going to be talking about democracy as being the foundation, the keystone of democracy being the will of the people, everybody seems to feel that they can speak on behalf of the will of the people, but nobody wants to ascertain what is the will of the people. Though, of course, I think that we're not going to have an idealistic solution to the problem of Kashmir. India is never going to give up anything. Right now it's stronger than it ever was. So how that fight, how that battle is joined still remains to be seen. But it's clear that after having almost lost a whole generation of young people, the Kashmiris are nowhere close to saying "We give up." Of course, there is an elite that's been co-opted that's being made to feel like its stakes in peace are huge. But I think India is as far away from a solution to Kashmir as America is from a solution to Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

THE J&K Coalition of Civil Society has published numerous reports about human rights violations, disappear?ances, torture, molestation and rapes of women, and extrajudicial execu?tions. What kind of attention has this attracted in civil society in the rest of India?

 

ALMOST NONE.

 

Because?

 

BECAUSE THIS whole rhetoric of Muslim terrorism and so on is very deep. So you will see trucks going past that on the back say "Doodh mango to kheer deingay, Kashmir mango to cheer deingay." It means, Ask for milk and we'll give you cream. Ask for Kashmir and we'll disembowel you. Every part of the state machinery, including the press, is fully into the propaganda. At least Kashmiris have the hope, even if it's never realized, of freedom inside them. At least they have the dignity that they are doing battle. What do you do for the people in Chhattisgarh or the Muslims in Gujarat? Where are they going to go? Kashmir is in some ways an old-world, classical battle for freedom, like Algeria.

 

I experienced one of the most beautiful moments of my life recently in Kerala. I heard that four thousand Dalit and Adivasi families captured a corporate rubber estate, about two hours away from where my mother lives. So I went there. It was amazing to me to watch the place that I had grown up in, to see a kind of nation rise up before me of people who are just disappeared by our society. It was just an amazing sight. It was the opposite of Nandigram, where the corporates are grabbing people's land. Here the people are grabbing corporate land. Each of them has a little blue plastic sheet that they've made into a hut under a rubber tree. They've been there for something like three hundred days. There are twenty thousand people, women and children, and each of them says that they have a 5-liter can of petrol in their house, and "If the police come, we are just going to immolate ourselves, because we have nowhere else to go."

 

When I heard them speak and I saw that civilizational rage in them, it makes things very simple. They just said, "Look, this corporation has thirty-three estates. It has some 55,000 to 60,000 hectares of land. I have nowhere to sleep. I'm taking it." And I suddenly thought, someone like myself—I write, I've got all these figures and footnotes and statistics—am I turning into a clerk? Is this the way I want to fight? Because eventually who is one trying to convince? These people who read these things are never going to give up what they have. They have to be forced to.

 

That is the battle that's coming here in India. The government is spawning these private militias. In Chhattisgarh you have the Salva Julum. In Gujarat you have the Bajrang Dal. In West Bengal you have the CP(M) cadre police. In Orissa the corporates have their own thugs. That's what's going on. And never mind that they are not even talking about what's happening in the northeast of India, an ongoing situation since 1947, which is worse than Kashmir.

Frederick Douglass once said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, it never will."

 

For myself, I think it's very important for us to also continue to question ourselves and what we do and our role in it. Today in India it's very easy for everybody to keep saying the Maoists are terrible, the government is also terrible, all violence is bad, one is the other side of the coin, these platitudes that are being mouthed. But today, unless I'm prepared to take up arms, I'm not in a position to tell others to take up arms. But unless I'm in a position where I'm at the other end of this battering ram, I'm also not going to sit around saying, "Let's go on a hunger strike" and "Let's go and sing songs outside the Ministry of Water Resources." I'm through with all that.

 

AT THE World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul in June of 2005, you made some comments about resistance and the right of resistance that raised a few eyebrows. Have your views on that evolved since then?

 

MY VIEWS on that have not changed since then. Maybe they've evolved. I think that it's very important for us to understand that every day people are being decimated now. I was one of the people who said that the globalization of dissent was the way to fight the globalization of corporate capital. But that was the era of the World Social Forum. But I think things have changed since then, because the World Social Forum has been taken over. So what has happened is a kind of corporatization of dissent. And the globalization of dissent then ends up creating hierarchies, where you pick and choose your genocide or you pick and choose the worst thing that's happening. Is what's happening in Nandigram worse than what happened in the Congo? Of course it's not. Everything gets slotted in and people locally get disempowered.

 

Everyone is looking for star recommendations from the superstars of resistance. Even someone like me. I'm always being asked to say something about things I don't know enough about. I feel that it's very important not to disempower people who are fighting and not to tell them how to fight. For example, in India it's come to a stage where the only thing that people can do is to really do what the people in Nandigram did, dig the roads up and say "You can't come in," because the minute they go in, the minute they start taking over, they co-opt, they pick off the leaders, they buy off someone, it's over. There is a certain amount of brutality now that even resistance has to have, because the co-optation is amazing, the NGO-ization is amazing.

 

I'll tell you a very interesting story. A lot of the royalties from my work I put into a trust. A few of us, friends, activists, run it. The only money that comes into it is the money from my writing and so on, because it's not about trying to raise money, it's just trying to give it out in solidarity to people who don't know how to write proposals and work the system. It's called Zindabad. Long live. We got a letter recently from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which is an institute that sometimes is like the post office to disburse funds given to various activists and movements by the Tata trusts. So on one hand you have Tatas, the capitalists, and on the other hand you have these trusts, as I told you, who are funding all these activists and so on. The letter says, "Dear Zindabad Trust, The tribals of Madhya Pradesh are grateful to the Tatas for having supported their struggles for rights and livelihood." And now, in order to expand their base, they want to have a seminar in the India International Centre to which judges and bureaucrats and activists and Adivasis will be invited.

And there is a budget where, obviously, the bureaucrats' and judges' travel allowances are huge and the Adivasis' and activists' is very small. And there is a list of the activists and Adivasis, all of whom are funded by the Tatas. They are asking us to fund that seminar. It's like a frog open on a dissecting table. You see how the world works. And I said, Let's write to them and say basically we can't afford to fund the seminar, but why not call the survivors of the people that were shot in Kalingnagar and Singur for Tata projects to put their views across and disseminate them.

 

IN THE last couple of years, India has had an expanding military relationship with the United States and Israel. What are the implications of that?

 

AFTER BEING part of the nonaligned movement, India is now part of the completely aligned movement. The government of India never tires of saying, Israel and the U.S. are its natural allies. So the nuclear deal, joint military exercises, the Indo-U.S. knowledge exchange, all these are ways of tying itself intricately to America by governments that have no idea of what has been the history of America's non-white allies. I just find it insane that they don't just do a quick Google search on the various despotic regimes that have been supported and then deserted by the United States.

 

But the thing is, in India we know that, for example, before the coup in Chile the Americans actually had a whole posse of young Chilean students taken to the Chicago school under Milton Friedman and taught free-market economics. In India, they don't have to do it. We are willing to do it. The Indian elite are just wagging their tails and lining up. Because, as I keep saying, the most successful secessionist movement in India has been the secession of the elite into this kind of global community. Almost every bureaucrat, every politician, every senior member of the judicial, of industry, of the business class, of the academic, everybody would have a very, very close relative, as in a son or a daughter or a brother, in America. So we are organically tied and linked.

Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, has never won an election in his life, has no imagination outside that of the IMF and the World Bank. He doesn't sound to me like he's ever read a primary textbook on history. He's probably the only prime minister in the history of the world of a former colony that goes to Cambridge and in his speech thanks colonialism for democracy and thanks the British for every institution of state repression that India has today—the colonial police, the bureaucracy, everything. So it is a country that's run on the lines of a colonial state, equally extractive, except that the colonizers are the upper caste.

 

This is something Frantz Fanon wrote about in The Wretched of the Earth, that the old colonial masters would be replaced by their native equivalents.

 

ABSOLUTELY. IT'S just like a comic book over here.

 

WHAT IS the nuclear deal that you referred to that would tie India to the United States? And you didn't mention Israel in terms of its growing relationship with India as well.

 

We know that Israel is the largest beneficiary of American aid, and it's like the American outpost in the Middle East, so I don't think that you need to see the two, Israel and America, as conceptually separate. I think it's a package. And it also helps to understand it because of the huge anti-Muslim feeling in the majority in India, the huge communal animosity toward the Muslims and terrorism, which just dovetails into all of that beautifully.

 

The nuclear deal, just to put it simply, ties India's civil nuclear program entirely to America. Nuclear energy being the answer to India's energy problems is not something that's ever been studied in any kind of detail. Right now it's almost as good as nothing, civilian nuclear energy's contribution to the power grid. So what we're talking about is a situation in which India invests hugely into civilian nuclear reactors and then is held to ransom. Even if the nuclear deal only purports to deal with the supply of fissile material and so on, actually what it does is puts India itself in a position where it's entirely held to ransom on anything. If you don't sign this, we will renege on that. How absurd to put yourself in such a position.

 

Unfortunately, all the criticism of it has been very unprincipled, even within India, even, say, the Communist Party, which once opposed nuclear weapons. Now its criticism is to say that we are a nuclear state and we mustn't surrender our sovereignty. It's almost standing on its head.

 

I REMEMBER your saying it is dangerous to be a tall poppy. One such tall poppy was Hrant Dink, an Armenian Turkish journalist who was murdered by a Turkish nationalist in the streets of Istanbul in January of 2007. You've been asked to speak on the occasion of his death anniversary [Speech published in ISR 58, March-April 2008]. I know you're bombarded with requests from all over the world. What factors go into your making a decision? Why go to Istanbul?

 

FIRST, A bulk of the bombardment of interviews has recently had to do in some slimy way or another with the promotion of India, and just on principle I am not prepared to do that. We are re-creating India in such-and-such a town and such-and-such a place. And it's all to do with corporate capital and it's all to do with this cuddly toy, teddy bear we have, this wonderful, colorful, bumbling nation where we have cricket and Bollywood, and even the queen of dissent, Arundhati Roy. We actually are really a happy family sort of thing.

 

But about why I agreed to go to Istanbul. Partly because I think, once again, I am partial to going to places that are not just Europe and America, because that, too, can become a supermarket show—that we have everything, and everyone comes to us. Secondly, I think Turkey is fascinating, because it's so similar to India in terms of its aggressive secular elite, its religious fundamentalism, its ugly nationalism. I think it's far less subtle in some ways in its present-day self. It needs to take some lessons from the Brahmins. But it doesn't have this sort of hippy paradise bit.

 

It fascinates me. How do you survive as a writer in a society like this? Recently in India, when this whole Nandigram issue erupted, one of the clever things that the CP(M) thought it did was to conjure up a protest against Taslima Nasrin, whose book Dwikhondito had been published four years ago and was on bestseller lists, and no one had anything to say about it.

 

THE BANGLADESHI novelist?

 

SHE WAS sort of thrown out of Bangla?desh and moved to Calcutta. The first people to ask for a ban were the CP(M). Then the high court lifted the ban. The book was published. Nothing happened. And then just at the time when massive protests erupted against the CP(M) for the first time in thirty years—because of Nandigram, where the bulk of the peasants to be displaced were Muslims, suddenly everything was sought to be distracted by suddenly saying "Taslima Nasrin insults Islam" and "Get her out of here." It was just a piece of currency put into the democratic negotiations that were going on.

So how do you function in societies like Turkey and India as a writer? How do you continue to say the things you say? How do you try your best not to get killed? How do you understand that the countries that speak loudest and longest and have the most complex legislation about free speech, such as America, don't have any real free speech but have managed to hypnotize people into thinking that they do. All these things interest me.

 

Obviously, the denial of the Armenian genocide is so blatant. Why do they deny it? Is it an admission that it's such a horrendous thing to do that you need to deny it? Is it the best form of acceptance, denial? That you can't bear to think that there was such a thing in your past? It's interesting.

 

MAYBE IT has some analogy with the Indian government's stand vis-à-vis Kashmir.

 

I don't think it has an analogy, because the government is quite proud of what it does in Kashmir. I don't think we've come to the stage where the government feels bad about it.

 

I MEANT in terms of denying history and denying self-determination and those kinds of issues.

 

The government is not denying its cruelties in Kashmir. The press doesn't report much and doesn't know much, but there's pretty proud parading of how we are dealing with the terrorists, even amongst people in India. For example, I was talking about Gujarat. There is a proud owning up to that killing. There is a proud thing about "This is what these Muslims deserve." So it's quite interesting, the psyche of these things. Which is what I was saying. When you deny something, inherently that denial is the acceptance that it's a terrible thing, which is why you're denying it. But in Gujarat it's not thought of as a terrible thing right now. It's thought of as a great thing.

 

YOU CONTINUE writing your political essays. What about fiction? Have you gotten back to it?

 

I'm trying to. As I said, I don't really want to continue to do the same thing all the time. And I feel a bit of a prisoner in the footnotes department right now. One is constantly being co-opted. I could be forever on mainstream TV in India debating people and putting across my point of view, but eventually you're just adding to the noise. That is part of the racket here right now, this wonderful, messy, noisy, argumentative, cutesy stuff that's going on. I'm not denying the fact that we need very incisive collections of things, but personally, as a writer, I feel that much of my writing was for myself to understand how it works. And now, if I were to write, it would be a reiteration of my understanding. I want to do something that does something with that understanding rather than just collates it. So fiction I think is that place. I want to surprise myself. I want to see what comes out without knowing in advance.

 

WHAT WAS that comment you made about fiction and truth?

 

THAT FICTION is the truest thing there ever was.

 

Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving?

By Arundhati Roy

It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on something." After a tour d'horizon, the author of The God of Small Things calls for a “minimum agenda" as well as a plan of action that prioritises global resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Here is the text of her speech at the opening Plenary of the World Social Forum in Mumbai on January 16, 2004:

Arundhati Roy

LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared — reiterated — that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs — to further what many call The Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to `debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a `market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value — oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of 2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the Government that oversaw them was re-elected ... all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.

Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, like Saddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV.

But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.

Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is `natural ally' — India, Israel and the U.S. are `natural allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.

A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.

In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants.

Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents — corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)

That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.

In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be that the U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa bean produce only 5 per cent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?

For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance.

No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.

This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in the world will exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the Movement for Global Justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's Salt March was not just political theatre. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow non-violent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre. It is a very precious weapon that needs to be constantly honed and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.

It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people in five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15th was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonised — as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we — all of us gathered here and a little way away at Mumbai Resistance — need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an over-arching pre-ordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.

If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.

Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that — after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.

So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?

How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba'athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?)

We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.

Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S. government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.

I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.

The Project For The New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.

For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.

©Arundhati Roy

 

The Greater Common Good II Arundhati Roy accepts B.G. Verghese's compliments on her poetic writing, but refutes his rebuttal of the randomly selected facts from her argument ARUNDHATI ROY

 

I am glad it's none other than B.G.Verghese who has written an (official?) rejoinder in Outlook (A Poetic Licence, July 5) to my essay The Greater Common Good. Glad, only because I trust that he is an honourable man defending long-held beliefs and not a venal one seeking to line his wallet. So at least we have the semblance of a debate on our hands. What more can one ask for? Almost everyone who wants to rubbish my argument begins by paying me extravagant, back-handed compliments about my 'poetic writing'. Almost as though poetry by definition is imprecise, unsubstantiated mush. Not something that Real Men who build Big Dams dabble in. "The poetry was charming. The facts wrong," Mr Verghese says. The poetry may have been charming (though it's not an adjective that I would choose), but the facts are right. I won't restate my case, let me simply say that I stand by every single fact that Mr Verghese has tried to dispute. Every single argument. The Greater Common Good is now available as a book. Each fact is backed up by sources independent of the nba (whose cause he accuses me of "parroting") and listed in the end-notes of the book. I don't expect someone like Mr Verghese who has served on the Narmada Planning Group and spent a good part of his life advocating Big Dams to suddenly screech to a halt and jettison his point of view. But it's bad strategy on his part to try and derail a huge, and hugely necessary, national debate by picking out at random facts from the tail end of the argument, turning it into techno-jargon, stirring in some personal invective and serving it up as a whole new kind of soup. The Sardar Sarovar dam, I continue to maintain, is an economic, technological, ecological, and human disaster in the making. The benefits that its proponents promise it'll bring-both in terms of power generation and irrigation-have been exaggerated to laughable levels. In my essay I have shown how the politically powerful lobbies-sugar farmers, five-star hotels, water-parks and urban centres-are already poised to siphon off the irrigation water from the main canal long before it reaches Kutch and Saurashtra-the billboards of the Gujarat government's Thirst Campaign. Mr Verghese says that the "planned irrigation delta will not permit cane farming which is discouraged". (There's a difference between 'not permitting' and 'discouraging'.) He says that the 14 existing sugar factories are outside the command area. What he doesn't mention is that licences have been issued for about a dozen new ones, many of them in the command area. The chief promoter of one of them, the Sardar Sugar Factory, is Sanat Mehta, who was chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for several years. The chief promoter of another was Chimanbhai Patel, former chief minister of Gujarat, who (along with his wife) was the most vocal, ardent proponent of the Sardar Sarovar dam. He liked to call himself 'Chhota Sardar'. The people of Kutch and Saurashtra, who have endured water-shortages for years, have begun to recognise government propaganda for what it is. Civil unease is stirring as realisation dawns that the Sardar Sarovar is mopping up their money but is not going to solve their water problems.That the solution lies not with the government but with themselves. The Gujarat Land Development Corporation estimates that there is at least 15 to 20 million acre feet of rainwater that can be harvested by local watershed harvesting schemes in Kutch and Saurashtra. (The Sardar Sarovar promises, on paper, 3 million acre feet to these areas.) In several villages, entirely through peoples' initiatives, successful water harvesting schemes are already under way. Hundreds of thousands of wells are being recharged with rainwater that was flowing away unused. So much for the government of Gujarat's claims that there are no alternatives to the Sardar Sarovar. Recently, a people's organisation-the Kutch Jalsankatan Nivaran Samiti-filed a case against the government of Gujarat and the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam in the Gujarat High Court, asking for clarification of when, where and how much water will be delivered to the districts of Kutch. Meanwhile, what does Mr Verghese suggest we do about the fact that there's a possibility that the people who are supposed to benefit from the project-the people in whose name the frenzy is being drummed up-may not, after all, get any water at all? "Why not wait and see?" he says! You bet. Why not submerge a civilisation, uproot a few hundred thousand people, make the people of Kutch and Saurashtra linger on in hope for a couple more decades, shell out another few thousand crores of rupees of public money and see how it all pans out. Is this an argument? Mr Verghese was upset about the fact that I scoffed at the government's scheme of a centralised electronic irrigation system to deal with problems of potential water-logging. I admit I scoffed. How can one not? But that apart, I did suggest that they try it out in a pilot scheme before using public money to experiment on the 1.8 million hectares of the Sardar Sarovar command area. Why not, for instance, experiment in the Bargi command area where the dam irrigates only five per cent of the area it promised it would? Or in the Tawa command, where after 27 years, the capacity utilisation (the amount of area it actually irrigates compared to the amount of area it was designed to irrigate) is 54 per cent (government figures)? Or pick any section of the millions of hectares of water-logged land all over India-in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan. If you include the costs of command area drainage and drinking water distribution systems so that the Sardar Sarovar Projects can at least pretend to achieve what they promise, we're talking about thousands of crores of rupees of public money. Enough, probably, to fund local water harvesting schemes in every village in Gujarat. As for his defence of 'compensatory afforestation' as a way of atoning for schemes that destroy natural, old growth forest-it sounds quite reasonable doesn't it? Cut down a forest and plant one somewhere else. Except that to assume that a natural forest is the sum of its trees is an absurd notion. You don't need a PhD in ecology to tell you-not in the '90s-that you cannot cut down millions of years of evolutionary adaptation and conjure it up somewhere else. It's like trying to compensate the loss of a wildlife reserve with a poultry farm. The submontane dry deciduous forests that clothe the Satpuras and the Vindhyas are among the most endangered sub-tropical ecosystems. I'm afraid canal plantations just don't make the cut. Mr Verghese also keeps very quiet about where all the land for compensatory afforestation is going to come from. Whose land will it be, I wonder? This brings me to the saddest, most cruel part of his 'Rejoinder'-Mr Verghese's attitude towards the human price that is being paid for Big Dams in general and the Sardar Sarovar in particular. It's chilling to see a private citizen, a thinking private citizen, so readily regurgitate State Publicity. It's ludicrous to portray the nba as a terrorist organisation that parades government officers naked and obstructs justice. There is a full-blown civil disobedience movement in the Narmada Valley. And it's happening on a scale that cannot be artificially staged, or manipulated. Please Mr Verghese. Come to the valley with us in July. Open your eyes and try and see like a subject instead of a spokesperson of the State. If it's all true, this vision of sunshine and roses that Mr Verghese and the Gujarat government want us to believe in, then what's all the secrecy about? Why not release all the studies that have been done into the public domain (including the unfavourable ones)? Why not have them peer reviewed? Why not publish a detailed break-up of the costs? Why not account for the amount spent so far? Why not clarify where the remaining money is going to come from, on what terms? Why block every attempt at a review? Why prevent the fmg Committee from entering Gujarat? Why ransack the nba office and burn its documents? Why prevent the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes from going to the dam site? Why refuse permission to the World Commission on Dams to visit the dam site? Why prevent a committee appointed by the Central government from investigating the impact of the closure of the sluice gates? Why prevent the Union welfare ministry from assessing the r&r situation? What's the paranoia all about? After all, the government of Madhya Pradesh (the state through which 90 per cent of the river flows, and the state in which the remaining 3,199 dams envisaged by the Narmada Valley Development Project are going to be built) is willing to listen. It has filed a case in the Supreme Court admitting that there is less water in the river than when the plan was first conceived. It has agreed to review all the projects that are still on the anvil (except, strangely, the Maheshwar dam). It is actively funding and encouraging local water-harvesting schemes. Why is the government of Gujarat (and its spokesperson) so stubborn? Why do they insist on repeating their old, obsolete illogic? "Dams displace," B.G. Verghese says. "So does acute deprivation in the Narmada Valley, but in a far higher ratio." He then goes on to suggest that displacement is the government's way of relieving acute deprivation! That the major beneficiaries of the Sardar Sarovar dam are "tribals, marginal farmers and women". (As though being a woman precludes you from being a tribal or a marginal farmer.) Mr Verghese wants us to believe that the State is actually doing people a favour by uprooting them, taking them away from their forests and their river, submerging their lands and homes, drowning their sacred sites, smashing their ancient community links and resettling them against their will. He doesn't just want to destroy a civilisation. He wants to spit in its face while he's at it. Anybody who argues against this, according to him, is "glorifying the noble savage". I, for one, am accused of wanting them to spend their lives "grubbing for roots, deprived, impoverished and 'protected' by the nba". Why not add the word "grunting", Mr Verghese? "Grunting and grubbing for roots"-doesn't that sound more like it? Suitably bestial? The tribal people whose villages are slated to be submerged by the Sardar Sarovar Reservoir are very, very poor people. But they have enough to eat. They are self-sufficient. They have a river that gives them water and fish and fertile land, they have a forest that provides them with fruit, medicine and fodder for their cattle. They don't have pinstriped suits, but they are at least insured against famine and drought. Resettlement will rend the social and ecological links that help them survive. It can only impoverish them further. Is it possible that Mr Verghese really believes that they can be better off in a city slum? If Mr Verghese is right about the State having the well-being of tribal people uppermost in its mind, why is it that for 50 years there have been no roads, no schools, no clinics, no wells, no hospitals in the areas where they live? Why is it that for all these years the State didn't bother to take steps to equip the people they care so deeply about, for the world they were going to be dumped in? Why is it that the first sign of 'development'-a road-brought only terror, police, beatings, rape, murder? Why must the offer of 'development' always be conditional, ie: you give up your lands, your homes, your fields, your language, your gods, and we'll give you 'development'. Why doesn't the State help people in the Narmada Valley and the people of Kutch and Saurashtra to harvest their rainwater and recharge their groundwater? Let's not be coy. Let's give this a name. It's not social engineering that Mr Verghese is after. It's garbage disposal. It's not even a particularly sanitary method. Occasionally people die in the bins they've been dumped in. Like the seven not so long ago, in the Rameshwarpuram site. Of contaminated drinking water. Of chronic malnutrition. (Publish the report!) He claims that 88 per cent of the families that will be affected when the dam is 85 metres high have already been resettled. (This, when the governments of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh are giving out mixed, muddled signals about the availability of land for this purpose). Never mind that the dam is already 88 metres high if you include the hump. Never mind that in May '99, two months before the monsoons, the Narmada Control Authority was still waiting for the various states to report to it on the progress they had made on assessing land availability for those whose villages are likely to be submerged! Never mind that the calculations of which village will be submerged when, are invariably wrong. For instance in the monsoon of '94, when the dam was only 69 metres high, a village that was slated for submergence at 90 metres, came under water. Here we are, 15 years after the project began, still scrabbling around for land to offer people being displaced by this one dam when it's still far from its final projected height. What about the rest of the three thousand several hundred serial dams planned on the same river? What about the millions of potential 'oustees'? Are our cities ready to receive them? It's so sad to see a man of Mr Verghese's stature work so hard to elide the main argument of the essay he takes issue with. His silence on the big things is more eloquent than his specious arguments about the small ones. How gratefully he grasps at government statements, government statistics, government promises. This when dam after dam has shown how benefits are inflated, costs deflated and the number of displaced people consistently, grossly, underestimated. He doesn't even address the issue I raised about the government's definition of who it considers 'project-affected'-of how the number of people actually affected is more than double what they say it is. The truth is that our differences have little to do with technical data. They have to do with a fundamental difference in worldview. Here is a man who believes that mammoth, State-supervised engineering projects are the solution to human problems. I disagree. With its philosophy and method. With the scale of the operation. With its fundamental premise. Fifty years on, hard as it may be for some of us, we have to admit that Big Dams have let this country down. They are monuments to political corruption and social inequity. Big Dams are just not what they promised to be when B.G. Verghese was a young man. India is the world's third largest dam builder with 3,600 large dams, 3,300 of them built after independence, a 1,000 more are under way. Yet today, there are more drought-prone and flood-prone areas than there were in 1947! Big Dams have generated electricity, certainly. Yet more than 80 per cent of rural households have no electricity. 250 million people have no access to safe drinking water, and over 350 million live below the poverty line. Food production has risen, but according to a paper presented to the World Commission on Dams by Himanshu Thakker, Big Dams can claim the credit for only 12 per cent of this. Since Independence, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 and 40 million people. Most of them are either Dalits or tribal people. (Yet India does not have a National Rehabilitation Policy). What Big Dams have done is to sequester resources from the vast majority of the people who live in rural India and divert them to the cream of the crop that lives in urban India. Anybody who wants to defend this position should not hold back. Let them say that this is the way things ought to be. That villages should subsidise cities. That the poor must subsidise the rich. Let them say that it's acceptable for forty million people to be driven from their homes in order that we, the metropolitan elite, continue to have an unlimited supply of electricity and running water. Let whoever wants to defend Big Dams drop this comfortable mask-this civilise-the-savage missionary position-and come right out and stand up for feudal values. The climate seems terrifyingly right. Soon somebody just might. The savagery of the civilised. I can't let this go without commenting on Mr Verghese's snide remarks about my essay on the nuclear tests. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm assuming from his tone that he doesn't lose sleep over the bjp government's programme of nuclear weaponisation. To a man who is comfortable with the idea of a wasted world, what's a wasted valley?

 

Enough Rope, with Andrew Denton
Episodes   - 18 October 2004

 

Arundhati Roy's first novel, the Booker Prize-winning 'God of Small Things', sold six million copies internationally when it was published in 1997. Since then, she's put fiction aside to deal with more pressing issues, giving voice to ordinary people squeezed by the march of globalisation. For her views, she's been criticised and even sentenced to jail, but as often happens with people who question the status quo, the more she's been shouted down, the louder her voice has become. She'll be in Australia next month to accept the Sydney Peace Prize. Tonight, we speak to her from her home in New Delhi. Please welcome Arundhati Roy.

ANDREW DENTON: Arundhati, welcome to the show. You say that there's a wilderness of mind in India that we have lost. What is it that we don't see in the West that you can see so clearly from India?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think, basically, the fact that, you know...in the fact that, say, the media or any kind of state institutions haven't managed to completely penetrate the countryside and the underbelly of the city. Because people are so poor, they can't really afford to buy the things that globalisation - corporate globalisation - is pushing at them, including the water and including the electricity. So what that leaves is a kind of un-barcoded wilderness, you know? So you have a situation...

Like, say you take the case of a place like Italy, where the prime minister sort of controls 90 per cent of the television viewer-ship, he controls the newspapers, many big newspapers, he controls publishing houses as well as bookstore chains. You have a process of indoctrination that people are hardly aware of the fact that they are being indoctrinated. But here, because of the poverty and the anarchy and the...you know, the religious anarchy as well, you just have a situation where even the boot-stamping fascists can't all agree about one thing.

ANDREW DENTON: A world without barcodes. That's very dangerous talk, Arundhati, and I would ask you not to repeat that, thank you very much.

(ARUNDHATI ROY LAUGHS)

ANDREW DENTON: When you were young, you grew up in Kerala, in the south of India, and to quote you, you were the worst thing you could be, which was "thin, black and clever," and you described growing up in a village as a nightmare. Why was that?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, because, I mean, that was also partly because I was, you know...my mother was married... She came from a very traditional community, called the Syrian Christians, who believed that, you know, they were converted to Christianity when Saint Thomas came to Kerala in the first century, and they are a very small, closed, parochial community, and she then married outside the community. She married a Bengali Hindu, and then, worse, divorced him and came back to live in the village and was just completely unaccepted. And so my brother and I grew up in an atmosphere of, you know, being on the edge of this very parochial community, which was never going to offer us the assurances that it offered, you know, other middle-class children. So in a way, now, obviously, in retrospect, it was great, but at the time, one only dreamt of escape - you know, leaving somehow and not having to sort of conform to the expectations of those people, and particularly those men.

ANDREW DENTON: When you left home at 16, what was in your heart?

ARUNDHATI ROY: The main thing was I needed, very desperately, to, you know, find a foothold which would make me independent, because for a whole lot of reasons, I was very terrified and very vulnerable at that age, because, you know, of a lot of things. And so, when I came to Delhi, the first year in the school of architecture changed my life, because I suddenly realised that I could...you know, I could survive on my own. I didn't need the people there at all, and it was just such a huge weight off my shoulders.

ANDREW DENTON: You did many things over the next 20 years - architecture, as you said. You were you were a hippie in Goa, you foraged for beer bottles in the rubbish tips of New Delhi, you wrote for television. When the Booker Prize happened in 1997, did your world change completely?

ARUNDHATI ROY: The Booker wasn't the big thing, you know? The thing was when I finished writing 'The God of Small Things', and when I finished writing it...and suddenly, I didn't know what it was, because I'd worked for five years not really, you know, talking about it to anyone. So when I finished it, I didn't know whether it would even be comprehensible to anyone but myself. And when it happened that, you know, suddenly publishers around the world wanted to publish it, and when that book was published, when I saw copies of it, I think that did do something very beautiful and important for me. It wasn't like winning a sporting event, you know, where you just have the pure joy of winning that. It was mixed with so much other stuff, so I don't know. I mean, I'm ambiguous about it still.

ANDREW DENTON: One of the things about winning the Booker, of course is - and all those sales - is suddenly, to use your words, you have money spewing at you, and you decided to give a lot of that away. Now, that probably is a lot harder to do than it is to say. What are the mechanics of actually giving money away?

ARUNDHATI ROY: The fact is that it's a very delicate operation to give money away, 'cause you can also destroy initiative. It's like the World Bank can come in and throw money at some, you know, joint forest management program, not realising that it's just been siphoned off by the corrupt...you know, the big fish that come to feed at the source. So it's a very, very, very delicate operation, and one that you have to do politically and carefully.

The first thing is that I understand that for one person to be rewarded with money in the way that I am, for whatever it is that I've done, whether it's a book or whatever it is, it's somehow a manifestation of there being something very wrong with the world. You can't, you know...nobody deserves to have so much when so many have so little. So the first thing is to see it as a political thing. You know, not as your money, but as something that is there as a political thing, and then see how to use it, you know, carefully and slowly and quietly, without making a song and dance about it. And I have seen it damage, you know, movements and people and initiatives. So you've just got to be very careful about it. I think that's the fundamental thing. And also, always at the scale of operations in that place, you know? So if you go somewhere and you see that, OK, look, this is a great group of people doing wonderful work. It would be great for them to have a computer or it would be great if they could just pay their activists a little bit of money every month just to keep, you know, ends...to make ends meet, and things like that.

So, you know, A, you can't do it alone - you've got to do it with a group of people and you have to do it with people who have the same political commitment and understanding. And you have to also understand that to receive for people is as careful a thing as to give.

ANDREW DENTON: One of the groups you became very involved with, they were protesting a big dam building project in the Narmada Valley. What was it that drew you to this?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, basically, what was happening was here you had a river called the Narmada in central India, and a project called the Narmada Valley Development Program, where they were thinking of building something like 3,500 dams on the river, of which four of these dams were going to be mega-huge dams, which would displace between them, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, submerge hundreds of thousands of acres of prime forest, in the name of giving irrigation and supplying electricity and water to various, you know, parts of India.

And so it was the big question - is this the model of development that is ecologically, economically and politically the right thing to do or not? And the story that emerged is hard for me to just, you know, explain it on TV, but it was absolutely astounding and shocking to me that, you know, in the face of the resistance of people who were being displaced, the least the establishment could have done was to come up with some studies that said, "Look, here it is. Here's what we're saying," you know? But no - nothing. No figures, no studies, just these empty promises which were broken time after time.

Big dams are a way of centralising resources and siphoning them off.

ANDREW DENTON: Even though the battle for the main dam - I think it was called the Sardar Sarovar dam - was lost, you said this gave you real pride in your people and your land. Why was that?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, how do you define a battle that's lost and a battle that's won? It's a very, very complicated thing. Because if you come to India and you see the way ordinary people in villages, Adivasi people, Dalits, are terrorised by the state, by the police, by the establishment, and you go into a place like the Narmada Valley where the people have been fighting for their rights for years, even though the dam is being built, even though the up-rootment is happening in a completely brutal way with the institutional support of the courts, of the police, of the government, you still see that what has been won is a tremendous spirit among the people, you know? They're not broken. They're just being born, in a way.

You see, all across India now, violent armed struggles are taking over, you know, and this is what I think is a fundamental question raised by the anti-dam resistance, which is not just about dams but about the notion of non-violence itself.

And the onus, eventually, is on the states. If a state refuses to acknowledge, or even be open to being moved by, reasoned non-violent resistance, then really it can't claim to be against terrorism because it's opening the doors to armed struggle in this way. So I think this is a question that lies at the heart of the world today. Very, very, very, very important for all of us, you know?

I mean, it's... And it's not only in India, you know? You obviously are so fully aware of the same thing happening in Australia with the Aboriginal people - the ways in which they're being brutalised and marginalised and really snuffed out. These are questions we must ask ourselves. You know, on which side will we fight? Whether we win or lose is a separate matter. On which side will we fight? On whose side will we fight?

ANDREW DENTON: It is, as you say, an ongoing battle and it certainly was for you personally. As a result of protesting the Supreme Court decision that allowed that large dam to be built, you went through a year-long court case and were eventually found guilty of contempt. You served a day and a night in jail, paid the fine and got out. Did you consider serving the three-month sentence to make your point?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Just to give you a short background of what that was about. There's a law called the contempt of court law in India. Part of it is just about not carrying out Supreme Court orders, which is fine, but the other section of it has to do with not being allowed to criticise the court or to criticise any judge. This means that even if you had documentary evidence of, say, a judge being corrupt, you cannot bring it to court because it undermines the dignity of the court and therefore it's contempt of court, in which case, in this case, even truth is not a defence.

So judges can do anything, but they are above the law in some way. And my point was, how can you have such an undemocratic institution in a democracy?

When the people of the valley came to protest the decision of the Supreme Court outside the gates of the Supreme Court, basically a group of five thugs, lawyers, filed a police case against me and a couple of others saying we had tried to kill them outside the gates of the court in full view of 300 policemen. The policemen didn't accept the FIR, the first information report, because they knew it was a lie, but the Supreme Court of India accepted it and asked me to appear as a criminal, you know, in front of the court.

So I did, and I didn't have a lawyer, and I said, "Look, I think that this is absolutely unacceptable," you know? And of course that...they charged me with further contempt and then, you know, asked me to apologise, which I wouldn't do.

And so they sentenced me, after a year-long trial, which meant...which was a message to other journalists and writers that, "If you mess with us you're going to have to hire criminal lawyers, you're going to have to face a criminal trial, you might lose your job and, you know, God knows how long you'll be sentenced for."

ANDREW DENTON: I don't wish to be critical, but I would point out that they're not just a court, Arundhati, they're a Supreme Court and maybe you need to show them more respect because they have the word 'Supreme' in front there.

ARUNDHATI ROY: (Laughs) They had...they used to throw my book, you know, from one judge to the other and refer to me as "that woman", so I used to refer to myself respectfully as "the hooker that won the Booker".

And then, when it came out, when the time came, you know, to sentence me, they realised that they were in a bit of a bind because, you know, to put, you know, a known writer into prison would be bad publicity and yet they...you know, they couldn't really back off. So they started shouting, saying, "But she's not behaving like a reasonable man." So from being "the hooker that won the Booker", I became "not a reasonable man". But anyway...

ANDREW DENTON: You're particularly sacrilegious about the holy trinity - the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Why don't you believe in them?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, they're not...they're not, you know, sort of religious institutions and they are...

ANDREW DENTON: I beg your pardon, Arundhati!

ARUNDHATI ROY: Their function... (Laughs) So if their whole purpose is to push through unequal, unfair economic trade, then we don't want them. But the point is, as much... It's, of course, a great thing to have multilateral trade agreements, but not if they're unfair. It's better not to have them if they're going to be unfair. It's better not to have them if what they oversee is America taxing a tailor from Bangladesh 20 times more than a garment made by a tailor in Paris or in London, you know? So the point is that these kind of inequalities just drive a deep wedge between the rich and the poor in the world, which is why, today, you have corporations that are richer than most countries. And it's not an accident of fate that this is happening. It's a system that's in place that must be challenged.

ANDREW DENTON: When President Bush said, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists," what did you see as your options?

ARUNDHATI ROY: I remember when I wrote my essay called 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', and, you know, I said this is not a choice that the people of the world have to or ought to be made to make, you know, because we don't have to choose between a malevolent Mickey Mouse and the mad mullahs.

Today, if you look at the campaign that the Republicans are running in America, they are really saying, "If you don't vote for us, there'll be another terrorist attack." And they are creating a situation in which the brutality of what they do can only be matched by the insane brutality of an opposition, and all reasonable people are coopted, you know?

If you look at what is happening in, say, Iraq, today, under the occupation, they are creating a situation in which the only people who are crazy enough to oppose them are people who normal people wouldn't want to really align themselves with. So, by default, you're with "us", as in Bush and company.

You know, it's a very, very dangerous business and I think one of the things I keep talking about is the fact that we must break that, we must mount our own resistance. We don't have to support the Madhi army, but we have to become the Iraqi resistance. We can't just keep quiet and say, you know, "We don't like either side and we're just so pristine and wonderful and our principles are all in order," because everything is being usurped while we say that.

ANDREW DENTON: How to break that cycle, though, which as you say is a vicious one? 10 million people marched around the world to stop the war in Iraq and it didn't stay the hand of war for even a day. Is Gandhi's non-violence still appropriate or is a different response now necessary?

ARUNDHATI ROY: The fact that 15 million people marched on February...sorry, 10 million people marched on February 15, was a wonderful thing. But if we think that by marching on a weekend we're going to stop a war which is necessary to fuel the machine on which the world works today... It needs that oil. And we can't expect to march on a weekend and expect that, "Oh, my goodness, we marched, we went all of Saturday from 10:00 to 4:00 and still the war didn't stop." That's an absurd assumption to make.

I think what we do need to do is to understand that nobody can actually...no country, not even the whole of Europe together, can actually match or oppose American military power, but certainly the economic outposts of empire are vulnerable. Even...I really feel it's important to shut down the corporations that have taken over and raped Iraq and are doing it now. I think this is what activists and resistance movements need to do - to understand that Iraq is engaging the front lines of empire, and we have to, you know...we have to throw our weight behind the resistance.

ANDREW DENTON: Your critics would say that you're naive, an appeaser, anti-progress, anti-American. How do you plead?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the anti-American thing is...you know, it's a bit old hat now because I've just come back from America where I spoke at a number of places, and I'm actually in awe of the fact that the American dissent is in very good shape. I really admire American people who have been the staunchest critics of their own government.

I was in New York on the 29th of last month. 500,000 people marched against the Republican convention. You know, if you stood in a place it took six hours for the march to walk past. That was such a phenomenal display. So it's a bit silly, but strategic for them, to say I'm anti-American, you know?

But I think, on the other hand, it's important for those of us who come from countries that call themselves democracies, you know, whether it's Australia, whether it's America or England, even India - even though I don't know that India's a democracy, but still, it is in ways - but I think that it's important for us to understand that we are responsible for the acts of our governments. If John Howard comes to power in Australia, the people of Australia are responsible for his actions - they are actually confirming and affirming that he took part in the war against Iraq. They are affirming his policies against refugees and Aboriginals and everything. So we can't always separate ourselves from our governments in democracies.

People in Iraq, people in Afghanistan, I don't think it's fair to hold them responsible for the actions of Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, as the coalition is doing, you know, killing them in their hundreds of thousands. So that, I think, is something we need to think about.

ANDREW DENTON: Arundhati, we're just about out of satellite. My last question, which is to do with the rigour of language, and it's your language - you say that a that a new world is not only possible, it's actually on its way, and on a quiet day you can hear it breathing. Is the language of hope stronger than the language of fear?

ARUNDHATI ROY: I think where there is a fear, there will... I mean, where there is fear, there'll always be hope. Where there is oppression, it will always be challenged by those of us who will challenge it with greater intensity, you know? So that's why I don't believe that there can ever be peace without justice, you know? The two go together. And there cannot be peace in the world with full-spectrum dominance or, you know, nuclear warfare or any of those things. They won't help, because always there will be people who demand dignity, who demand justice, who demand their rights.

And, you know, that is as much physics as the physics of people who want power and who try to usurp it - it is the physics of those of us who will challenge it, and we'll always be around.

ANDREW DENTON: In the '60s, it was burning draft cards, in the '70s it was burning bras and it was burning effigies. Now I think you're suggesting burning the barcodes.

Arundhati Roy, when you come to Australia I hope you enjoy your time here. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Thanks, Andrew.

 

The algebra of infinite justice

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengeance

Arundhati Roy
Guardian

Saturday September 29, 2001

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them." It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice", but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it". Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or alive".

From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.

From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks - that he is the inspirational figure, "the CEO of the holding company". The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.