Arundhati Roy Blog: Arundhati's Book, Article, Speech, Video

Arundhati Roy: I am here to understand what you mean by Taliban

2009-05-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

"I am here to understand what you mean by Taliban"

[Celebrated Indian author and social activist Arundhati Roy addresses a gathering at the Karachi Press Club on Friday]

by Salman Siddiqui
Friday, 08 May, 2009

Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region?

I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanisation). In India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask, what do they mean by it.

In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that is being fought? That needs to be clarified.

I think both needs to be fought. But if it’s an ideology it has to be fought differently, while if it’s a person with a gun then it has to be fought differently. We know from the history of the war on terror that a military strategy is only making matters worse all over the world. The war on terror has made the world a more dangerous place. In India, they have been fighting insurgencies military since 1947 and it has become a more dangerous place.

Swat and the Taliban boy

It is very important for me to understand what exactly is going in Swat. How did it start? A Taliban boy asked me why women can’t be like plastic bags and banned. The point is that the plastic bag was made in a factory but so was the boy. He was made in a factory that is producing this kind of mind(set). (The question is) who owns that factory, who funds it? Unless we deal with that factory, dealing with the boy doesn’t help us.

Water is the main issue

One danger in Pakistan is that we talk about the threat of Taliban so much that other important issues lose focus. In my view, the problem of water in the world will become the most important problem. I think big dams are economically unviable, environmentally unsustainable and politically undemocratic. They are a way of taking away a river from the poor and giving it to the rich. Like in India, there’s an issue of SEZs (Special Economic Zones), whereby the land of the people are given to corporations. But the bigger problem is that there are making dams and giving water to the industries. This way the people who live in villages by the streams and rivers have no water for themselves. So building dams is one of the most ecologically destructive things that you can do.

Fight over Siachen glacier

There are thousands of Pakistani and Indian soldiers deployed on the Siachen glacier. Both of our countries are spending billions of dollars on high altitude warfare and weapons. The whole of the Siachen glacier is sort of an icy monument to human folly. Each day it is being filled with ice axes, old boots, tents and so on. Meanwhile, that battlefield is melting. Siachen glacier is about half its size now. It’s not melting because the Indian and Pakistani soldiers are on it. But it’s because people somewhere on the other side of the world are leading a good life….in countries that call themselves democracies that believe in human rights and free speech. Their economies depend on selling weapons to both of us. Now, when that glacier melts, there will be floods first, then there will be a drought and then we’ll have even more reasons to fight. We’ll buy more weapons from those democracies and in this way human beings will prove themselves to be the stupidest animals on earth.

Money and the Indian elections

Whatever system of government you have, whether it is a military dictatorship or a democracy, and you have that for a long time, eventually big money manages to subvert it. That has begun to happen even in a democracy (like India). For example, political parties need a lot of publicity, but the media is also run by corporate money. If you look at the big political parties like the Congress and the BJP, you see how much money is being put out just in their advertising budgets. Now where does all that come from?

RSS and the Indian establishment

The RSS has infiltrated everything to a great extent. In India, we have 120-150 million Muslims and it’s considered a minority…It’s impossible to not belong to a minority of some sort in India. Caste or ethnicity or religion or whatever, in some way everyone belongs to a minority. The fights that many of us are waging against the RSS and against the BJP are to say that we live in a society which accommodates everybody. Everybody doesn’t have to love everybody, but everybody has to be accommodated. The RSS has infiltrated the (Indian) army as much as various kinds of Wahabism or other kinds of religious ideology have infiltrated the ISI or the armed forces in Pakistan. They are human beings like everyone else and they too get influenced.

Indian media and sensationalizing of news coming out from Pakistan

I think the media in both countries play this game. Whenever something happens here, they hype it up there, while when something happens there, they hype the news here. We say that we live in times of an information revolution and free press, but even then nobody gets to know the complete picture…

The Pakistani media is a little different from the Indian media. They stand on a slightly different foundation. But both share the problem of a lack of accountability…The trouble in India is that 90 per cent of their revenue comes from the corporate sector…there’s increasing privatization and corporatization of governance, education, health, infrastructure and water management. So in India you see an open criticism of governance, but very rarely criticism of corporations. It’s a structural problem. It’s not about good people or bad people. It’s just that you can’t expect a company to work against itself. This is a very serious issue which needs to be sorted out.

Is the Indian army a sacred cow?

The Indian army is quite a sacred cow especially on TV and Bollywood. But at the same time if you talk to the people in the Indian army, they say that they feel that the media is very critical of them. I don’t share that view. I think it is a sacred cow. People are willing to give them a lot of leeway.

Women and their fight for justice

When women fight for justice, we must fight for every kind of justice…We must fight for justice for men and justice for children. Because if you fight for one kind of justice and you tolerate another, then it’s a pretty hollow fight. You may not be able to fight every battle, but you should be able to put yourself on the line and say I believe this.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/arundhati-roy-sal-02

Brave New India (By Arundhati Roy)

2008-10-14T13:38:00.002-07:00

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.

Azadi: It's the only thing the Kashmiri wants. Denial is delusion

2008-08-24T19:33:00.002-07:00

Azadi
It's the only thing the Kashmiri wants. Denial is delusion.
By ARUNDHATI ROY

For the past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half-a-million heavily-armed soldiers in the most densely militarised zone in the world.

After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government's worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one is nourished by people's memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been killed, thousands have been 'disappeared', hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, raped and humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, re-bottled and sent back to where it came from.

For all these years, the Indian State, known amongst the knowing as the Deep State, has done everything it can to subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, interpret, intimidate, purchaseand simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people. It has used money (lots of it), violence (lots of it), disinformation, propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of collaborators and informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail and rigged elections to subdue what democrats would call "the will of the people". But now the Deep State, as Deep States eventually tend to, has tripped on its own hubris and bought into its own publicity. It made the mistake of believing that domination was victory, that the 'normalcy' it had enforced through the barrel of a gun was indeed normal, and that the people's sullen silence was acquiescence.

People's movement: Protesters march towards the UN office in Srinagar

The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on people's behalf, informed us that "Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace". What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never clarified. Bollywood's cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films has brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir's sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.

To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace they yearned for, but freedom too. Over the last two months, the carefully confected picture of an innocent people trapped between 'two guns', both equally hated, has, pardon the pun, been shot to hell.

A sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of 100 acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas) suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of petrol. Until 1989, the Amarnath pilgrimage used to attract about 20,000 people who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a period of about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamic militant uprising in the Valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindutva in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase exponentially. By 2008, more than 5,00,000 pilgrims visited the Amarnath cave in large groups, their passage often sponsored by Indian business houses. To many people in the Valley, this dramatic increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian State. Rightly or wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build Israeli-style settlements, and change the demography of the Valley.Days of massive protest forced the Valley to shut down completely. Within hours, the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young stone-pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early '90s. Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal and police firing, while the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing every kind of communal excess, the 5,00,000 Amarnath pilgrims completed their pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by the hospitality they had been shown by local people.

Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the response, the government revoked the land transfer. But by then the land transfer had become what senior separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani called a "non-issue".

Massive protests against the revocation erupted in Jammu. There, too, the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to raise issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian State. (For some odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.) The protests led to the blockading of the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the only functional road link between Kashmir and India. The army was called out to clear the highway and allow safe passage of trucks between Jammu and Srinagar. But incidents of violence against Kashmiri truckers were being reported from as far away as Punjab where there was no protection at all. As a result, Kashmiri truckers, fearing for their lives, refused to drive on the highway. Truckloads of perishable fresh fruit and Valley produce began to rot. It became very obvious that the blockade had caused the situation to spin out of control. The government announced that the blockade had been cleared and that trucks were going through. Embedded sections of the Indian media, quoting the inevitable 'Intelligence' sources, began to refer to it as a 'perceived' blockade, and even to suggest that there had never been one.

Flaming chinars: People climb atop trees to hear Hurriyat leaders

But it was too late for those games, the damage had been done. It had been demonstrated in no uncertain terms to people in Kashmir that they lived on sufferance, and that if they didn't behave themselves they could be put under siege, starved, deprived of essential commodities and medical supplies. The real blockade became a psychological one. The last fragile link between India and Kashmir was all but snapped.

To expect matters to end there was of course absurd. Hadn't anybody noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political suicide.

Not surprisingly, the voice that the Government of India has tried so hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities, their streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable display of raw courage.

Raised in a playground of army camps, checkposts and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a soundtrack, the young generation has suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all, the dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for themselves, represent themselves. For them it is nothing short of an epiphany. They're in full flow, not even the fear of death seems to hold them back.And once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second-largest army in the world? What threat does it hold? Who should know that better than the people of India who won their independence in the way that they did?

The circumstances in Kashmir being what they are, it is hard for the spin doctors to fall back on the same old same old; to claim that it's all the doing of Pakistan's ISI, or that people are being coerced by militants. Since the '30s onwards, the question of who can claim the right to represent that elusive thing known as "Kashmiri sentiment" has been bitterly contested. Was it Sheikh Abdullah? The Muslim Conference? Who is it today? The mainstream political parties? The Hurriyat? The militants? This time around, the people are in charge. There have been mass rallies in the past, but none in recent memory that have been so sustained and widespread. The mainstream political parties of Kashmirthe National Conference, the People's Democratic Partyfeted by the Deep State and the Indian media despite the pathetic voter turnout in election after election appear dutifully for debates in New Delhi's TV studios, but can't muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The armed militants who, through the worst years of repression, were seen as the only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are around at all, seem to be content to take a backseat and let people do the fighting for a change.

Everywhere in chains: But it's no barricade to freedom

The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not leaders so much as followers, being guided by the phenomenal spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people that has exploded on Kashmir's streets. The leaders, such as they are, have been presented with a full-blown revolution. The only condition seems to be that they have to do as the people say. If they say things that people do not wish to hear, they are gently persuaded to come out, publicly apologise and correct their course. This applies to all of them, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani who at a public rally recently proclaimed himself the movement's only leader. It was a monumental political blunder that very nearly shattered the fragile new alliance between the various factions of the struggle. Within hours he retracted his statement. Like it or not, this is democracy. No democrat can pretend otherwise.

Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm around places that hold terrible memories for them. They demolish bunkers, break through cordons of concertina wire and stare straight down the barrels of soldiers' machine-guns, saying what very few in India want to hear. Hum kya chahte? Azadi! We Want Freedom. And, it has to be said, in equal numbers and with equal intensity: Jeevey Jeevey Pakistan. Long live Pakistan.

That sound reverberates through the Valley like the drumbeat of steady rain on a tin roof, like the roll of thunder before an electric storm. It's the plebiscite that was never held, the referendum that has been indefinitely postponed.

On August 15, India's Independence Day, the city of Srinagar shut down completely. The Bakshi stadium where Governor N.N. Vohra hoisted the flag was empty except for a few officials. Hours later, Lal Chowk, the nerve centre of the city (where in 1992, Murli Manohar Joshi, BJP leader and mentor of the controversial "Hinduisation" of children's history textbooks, started a tradition of flag-hoisting by the Border Security Force), was taken over by thousands of people who hoisted the Pakistani flag and wished each other "Happy belated Independence Day" (Pakistan celebrates Independence on August 14) and "Happy Slavery Day".Humour, obviously, has survived India's many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir.

On August 16, more than 3,00,000 people marched to Pampore, to the village of Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down in cold blood five days earlier. He was part of a massive march to the Line of Control demanding that since the Jammu road had been blocked, it was only logical that the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway be opened for goods and people, the way it used to be before Kashmir was partitioned.

Goodbye, fear: A police post being dismantled in Srinagar

On August 18, an equal number gathered in Srinagar in the huge TRC grounds (Tourist Reception Centre, not the Truth and Reconciliation Committee) close to the United Nations Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to submit a memorandum asking for three thingsthe end to Indian rule, the deployment of a UN Peacekeeping Force and an investigation into two decades of war crimes committed with almost complete impunity by the Indian army and police.

The day before the rally the Deep State was hard at work. A senior journalist friend called to say that late in the afternoon the home secretary called a high-level meeting in New Delhi. Also present were the defence secretary and the intelligence chiefs. The purpose of the meeting, he said, was to brief the editors of TV news channels that the government had reason to believe that the insurrection was being managed by a small splinter cell of the ISI and to request the channels to keep this piece of exclusive, highly secret intelligence in mind while covering (or preferably not covering?) the news from Kashmir. Unfortunately for the Deep State, things have gone so far that TV channels, were they to obey those instructions, would run the risk of looking ridiculous. Thankfully, it looks as though this revolution will, after all, be televised.

On the night of August 17, the police sealed the city. Streets were barricaded, thousands of armed police manned the barriers. The roads leading into Srinagar were blocked. For the first time in eighteen years, the police had to plead with Hurriyat leaders to address the rally at the TRC grounds instead of marching right up to the UNMOGIP office which is on Gupkar Road, Srinagar's Green Zone where, for years, the Indian Establishment has barricaded itself in style and splendour.

On the morning of the 18th, people began pouring into Srinagar from villages and towns across the Valley. In trucks, tempos, jeeps, buses and on foot. Once again, barriers were broken and people reclaimed their city. The police were faced with a choice of either stepping aside or executing a massacre. They stepped aside. Not a single bullet was fired.

The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air. Everyone had a banner; houseboat owners, traders, students, lawyers, doctors. One said, "We are all prisoners, set us free." Another said, "Democracy without freedom is Demon-crazy". Demon Crazy. That was a good one. Perhaps he was referring to the twisted logic of a country that needed to commit communal carnage in order to bolster its secular credentials. Or the insanity that permits the world's largest democracy to administer the world's largest military occupation and continue to call itself a democracy.

There was a green flag on every lamp post, every roof, every bus stop and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs to Hazratbal, Batmaloo, Sopore were painted over. Rawalpindi they said. Or simply Pakistan. It would be a mistake to assume that the public expression of affection for Pakistan automatically translates into a desire to accede to Pakistan.Some of it has to do with gratitude for the supportcynical or otherwisefor what Kashmiris see as a freedom struggle and the Indian State sees as a terrorist campaign. It also has to do with mischief. With saying and doing what galls India, the enemy, most of all. (It's easy to scoff at the idea of a 'freedom struggle' that wishes to distance itself from a country that is supposed to be a democracy and align itself with another that has, for the most part, been ruled by military dictators. A country whose army has committed genocide in what is now Bangladesh. A country that is even now being torn apart by its own ethnic war. These are important questions, but right now perhaps it's more useful to wonder what this so-called democracy did in Kashmir to make people hate it so.)

Everywhere there were Pakistani flags, everywhere the cry, Pakistan se rishta kya? La ilaha illa llah. What is our bond with Pakistan? There is no god but Allah. Azadi ka matlab kya? La ilaha illallah. What does Freedom mean? There is no god but Allah.

For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of freedom is hardif not impossibleto understand. I asked a young woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said, "What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?" Her reply silenced me.

She's no terrorist: A woman pelts stones at policemen

Standing in the grounds of the TRC, surrounded by a sea of green flags, it was impossible to doubt or ignore the deeply Islamic nature of the uprising taking place around me. It was equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jehad. For Kashmiris, it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties and confusions that freedom struggles have. This one cannot by any means call itself pristine, and will always be stigmatised by, and will some day, I hope, have to account foramong other thingsthe brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire community from the Kashmir Valley.

As the crowd continued to swell, I listened carefully to the slogans, because rhetoric often clarifies things and holds the key to all kinds of understanding. I'd heard many of them before, a few years ago, at a militant's funeral. A new one, obviously coined after the blockade, was Kashmir ki mandi! Rawalpindi! (It doesn't lend itself to translation, but it meansKashmir's marketplace? Rawalpindi!) Another was Khooni lakir tod do, aar paar jod do (Break down the blood-soaked Line of Control, let Kashmir be united again). There were plenty of insults and humiliation for India: Ay jabiron ay zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do (Oh oppressors, Oh wicked ones, Get out of our Kashmir). Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, woh Kashmir hamara hai (The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood, that Kashmir is ours!).

The slogan that cut through me like a knife and clean broke my heart was this one: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itselfPakistan). Why was it so galling, so painful to listen to this? I tried to work it out and settled on three reasons. First, because we all know that the first part of the slogan is the embarrassing and unadorned truth about India, the emerging superpower. Second, because all Indians who are not nanga or bhookha areand have beencomplicit in complex and historical ways with the cruel cultural and economic systems that make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal.And third, because it was painful to listen to people who have suffered so much themselves mock others who suffer in different ways, but no less intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.

It took hours for Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani to wade through the thronging crowds and make it onto the podium. When they arrived, they were born aloft on the shoulders of young men, over the surging crowd to the podium. The roar of greeting was deafening. Mirwaiz Umer spoke first. He repeated the demand that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Disturbed Areas Act and Public Safety Actunder which thousands have been killed, jailed and torturedbe withdrawn. He called for the release of political prisoners, for the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road to be opened for the free movement of goods and people, and for the demilitarisation of the Kashmir Valley.

Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the Quran. He then said what he has said before, on hundreds of occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said, was to turn to the Quran for guidance. He said Islam would guide the struggle and that it was a complete social and moral code that would govern the people of a free Kashmir. He said Pakistan had been created as the home of Islam, and that that goal should never be subverted. He said just as Pakistan belonged to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to Pakistan. He said minority communities would have full rights and their places of worship would be safe. Each point he made was applauded.

Window of opportunity: Spectators for the march to Srinagar

Oddly enough, the apparent doctrinal clarity of what he said made everything a little unclear. I wondered how the somewhat disparate views of the various factions in the freedom struggle would resolve themselvesthe Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front's vision of an independent state, Geelani's desire to merge with Pakistan and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq balanced precariously between them.

An old man with a red eye standing next to me said, "Kashmir was one country. Half was taken by India, the other half by Pakistan. Both by force. We want freedom." I wondered if, in the new dispensation, the old man would get a hearing. I wondered what he would think of the trucks that roared down the highways in the plains of India, owned and driven by men who knew nothing of history, or of Kashmir, but still had slogans on their tailgates that said, "Doodh maango to kheer denge, Kashmir maango to cheer denge (Ask for milk, you'll get cream; Ask for Kashmir, we'll tear you open)."

Briefly, I had another thought. I imagined myself standing in the heart of an RSS or VHP rally being addressed by L.K. Advani. Replace the word Islam with the word Hindutva, replace the word Pakistan with Hindustan, replace the sea of green flags with saffron ones, and we would have the BJP's nightmare vision of an ideal India.

Is that what we should accept as our future? Monolithic religious states handing down a complete social and moral code, "a complete way of life"? Millions of us in India reject the Hindutva project. Our rejection springs from love, from passion, from a kind of idealism, from having enormous emotional stakes in the society in which we live. What our neighbours do, how they choose to handle their affairs does not affect our argument, it only strengthens it.

Arguments that spring from love are also fraught with danger. It is for the people of Kashmir to agree or disagree with the Islamic project (which is as contested, in equally complex ways, all over the world by Muslims as Hindutva is contested by Hindus).Perhaps now that the threat of violence has receded and there is some space in which to debate views and air ideas, it is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a vision for what kind of society they are fighting for. Perhaps it is time to offer people something more than martyrs, slogans and vague generalisations. Those who wish to turn to the Quran for guidance will no doubt find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Quran does not make place? Do the Hindus of Jammu and other minorities also have the right to self-determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses they have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what India has done to Kashmiris for 61 years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the "complete social and moral code"? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia? Will the cycle of death, repression and bloodshed continue? History offers many models for Kashmir's thinkers and intellectuals and politicians to study. What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?

At a crucial time like this, few things are more important than dreams. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will have consequences that do not bear thinking about. This is not the time for intellectual sloth or a reluctance to assess a situation clearly and honestly. It could be argued that the prevarication of Maharaja Hari Singh in 1947 has been Kashmir's great modern tragedy, one that eventually led to unthinkable bloodshed and the prolonged bondage of people who were very nearly free.

Already the spectre of partition has reared its head. Hindutva networks are alive with rumours about Hindus in the Valley being attacked and forced to flee. In response, phone calls from Jammu reported that an armed Hindu militia was threatening a massacre and that Muslims from the two Hindu majority districts were preparing to flee. (Memories of the bloodbath that ensued and claimed the lives of more than a million people when India and Pakistan were partitioned have come flooding back. That nightmare will haunt all of us forever.)

There is absolutely no reason to believe that history will repeat itself. Not unless it is made to. Not unless people actively work to create such a cataclysm.

However, none of these fears of what the future holds can justify the continued military occupation of a nation and a people. No more than the old colonial argument about how the natives were not ready for freedom justified the colonial project.

Of course there are many ways for the Indian State to continue to hold on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope the people's energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It could try and fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It could extinguish this non-violent uprising and reinvite armed militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half-a-million to a whole million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted assassinations, some disappearances and a massive round of arrests should do the trick for a few more years.

The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnourished population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?

The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all.It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimise Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir. It's all being stirred into a poisonous brew and administered intravenously, straight into our bloodstream.

At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people's liberty with military force?

India needs azadi from Kashmir just as muchif not morethan Kashmir needs azadi from India.

Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving? (By Arundhati Roy)

2007-11-22T18:06:00.002-08:00

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 (By ARUNDHATI ROY)

2007-11-17T09:58:00.011-08:00

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: Arundhati Roy (10/18/2004)

2007-11-17T09:58:00.010-08:00

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 (By Arundhati Roy)

2007-11-17T09:58:00.009-08:00

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.

THE GREATER COMMON GOOD (By ARUNDHATI ROY)

2007-11-17T09:58:00.008-08:00

THE GREATER COMMON GOOD

"If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country." - Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking to villagers who were to be displaced by the Hirakud Dam, 1948.

I stood on a hill and laughed out loud.

I had crossed the Narmada by boat from Jalsindhi and climbed the headland on the opposite bank from where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the tribal hamlets of Sikka, Surung, Neemgavan and Domkhedi. I could see their airy, fragile, homes. I could see their fields and the forests behind them. I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorised peanuts. I knew I was looking at a civilisation older than Hinduism, slated - sanctioned (by the highest court in the land) - to be drowned this monsoon when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir will rise to submerge it.

Why did I laugh?

Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam) had enquired whether tribal children in the resettlement colonies would have children's parks to play in. The lawyers representing the Government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and, what's more, that there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river rushing past and for a brief, brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect.

Let me say at the outset that I'm not a city-basher. I've done my time in a village. I've had first-hand experience of the isolation, the inequity and the potential savagery of it. I'm not an anti-development junkie, nor a proselytiser for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition. What I am, however, is curious. Curiosity took me to the Narmada Valley. Instinct told me that this was the big one. The one in which the battle-lines were clearly drawn, the warring armies massed along them. The one in which it would be possible to wade through the congealed morass of hope, anger, information, disinformation, political artifice, engineering ambition, disingenuous socialism, radical activism, bureaucratic subterfuge, misinformed emotionalism and, of course, the pervasive, invariably dubious, politics of International Aid.

Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don DeLillo's big book and substitute it with reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they're built and what they do.

My first tentative questions revealed that few people know what is really going on in the Narmada Valley. Those who know, know a lot. Most know nothing at all. And yet, almost everyone has a passionate opinion. Nobody's neutral. I realised very quickly that I was straying into mined territory.

In India over the last ten years the fight against the Sardar Sarovar Dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. This has been its strength as well as its weakness. Some years ago, it became a debate that captured the popular imagination. That's what raised the stakes and changed the complexion of the battle. From being a fight over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish? These are huge questions. They are being taken hugely seriously by the State. They are being answered in one voice by every institution at its command - the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the courts. And not just answered, but answered unambiguously, in bitter, brutal ways.

For the people of the valley, the fact that the stakes were raised to this degree has meant that their most effective weapon - specific facts about specific issues in this specific valley - has been blunted by the debate on the big issues. The basic premise of the argument has been inflated until it has burst into bits that have, over time, bobbed away. Occasionally a disconnected piece of the puzzle floats by - an emotionally charged account of the Government's callous treatment of displaced people; an outburst at how the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), 'a handful of activists', is holding the nation to ransom; a legal correspondent reporting on the progress of the NBA's writ petition in the Supreme Court.

Though there has been a fair amount of writing on the subject, most of it is for a 'special interest' readership. News reports tend to be about isolated aspects of the project. Government documents are classified as 'Secret'. I think it's fair to say that public perception of the issue is pretty crude and is divided crudely, into two categories:

On the one hand, it is seen as a war between modern, rational, progressive forces of 'Development' versus a sort of neo-Luddite impulse - an irrational, emotional 'Anti-Development' resistance, fuelled by an arcadian, pre-industrial dream.

On the other, as a Nehru vs Gandhi contest. This lifts the whole sorry business out of the bog of deceit, lies, false promises and increasingly successful propaganda (which is what it's really about) and confers on it a false legitimacy. It makes out that both sides have the Greater Good of the Nation in mind - but merely disagree about the means by which to achieve it.

Both interpretations put a tired spin on the dispute. Both stir up emotions that cloud the particular facts of this particular story. Both are indications of how urgently we need new heroes, new kinds of heroes, and how we've overused our old ones (like we overbowl our bowlers).

The Nehru vs Gandhi argument pushes this very contemporary issue back into an old bottle. Nehru and Gandhi were generous men. Their paradigms for development are based on assumptions of inherent morality. Nehru's on the paternal, protective morality of the Soviet-style Centralised State. Gandhi's on the nurturing, maternal morality of romanticised village Republics. Both would work perfectly, if only we were better human beings. If only we all wore khadi and suppressed our base urges - sex, shopping, dodging spinning lessons and being unkind to the less fortunate. Fifty years down the line, it's safe to say that we haven't made the grade. We haven't even come close. We need an updated insurance plan against our own basic natures.

It's possible that as a nation we've exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that's what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me.

I was drawn to the valley because I sensed that the fight for the Narmada had entered a newer, sadder phase. I went because writers are drawn to stories the way vultures are drawn to kills. My motive was not compassion. It was sheer greed. I was right. I found a story there.

And what a story it is.

"People say that the Sardar Sarovar Dam is an expensive project. But it is bringing drinking water to millions. This is our lifeline. Can you put a price on this? Does the air we breathe have a price? We will live. We will drink. We will bring glory to the state of Gujarat."

- Urmilaben Patel, wife of Gujarat Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel, speaking at a public rally in Delhi in 1993.

"We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all."

- Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong Dam in 1961.

"Why didn't they just poison us? Then we wouldn't have to live in this shit-hole and the Government could have survived alone with its precious dam all to itself."

- Ram Bai, whose village was submerged when the Bargi Dam was built on the Narmada. She now lives in a slum in Jabalpur.

In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru's famous "Dams are the Temples of Modern India" speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime), his footsoldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with Nation-building. Their enthusiasm alone should have been reason enough to make one suspicious. Not only did they build new dams and new irrigation systems, they took control of small, traditional systems that had been managed by village communities for thousands of years, and allowed them to atrophy. To compensate the loss, the Government built more and more dams. Big ones, little ones, tall ones, short ones. The result of its exertions is that India now boasts of being the world's third largest dam builder. According to the Central Water Commission, we have three thousand six hundred dams that qualify as Big Dams, three thousand three hundred of them built after Independence. One thousand more are under construction. Yet one-fifth of our population - 200 million people - does not have safe drinking water and two-thirds - 600 million - lack basic sanitation.

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them - the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they're being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They're uncool. They're undemocratic. They're a Government's way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They're a guaranteed way of taking a farmer's wisdom away from him. They're a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they're in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

Big Dams haven't really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man's ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It's common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do - the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.

For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it's exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides.

On the one hand, the Indian Government, every Indian Government, rails self-righteously against the First World, and on the other, actually pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like Colonialism was. It has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our leaders welcome it with slavish smiles (and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging self-esteem).

Over the last fifty years India has spent Rs.80,000 crores on the irrigation sector alone. Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods and rapid disenchantment with the Green Revolution (declining yields, degraded land), the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the (always phenomenal) costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were.

The Government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of foodgrain or edible oils the country produces and how much more we produce now than we did in 1947. It can tell you how much bauxite is mined in a year or what the total surface area of the National Highways adds up to. It's possible to access minute-to-minute information about the stock exchange or the value of the rupee in the world market. We know how many cricket matches we've lost on a Friday in Sharjah. It's not hard to find out how many graduates India produced, or how many men had vasectomies in any given year. But the Government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of 'National Progress'. Isn't this astounding? How can you measure Progress if you don't know what it costs and who paid for it? How can the 'market' put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the real cost of production?

According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it's all we have, let's try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let's halve the number of people. Or, let's err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It's an improbably low figure, I know, but ...never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 =

33 million. That's what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren't say so, because it isn't official. It isn't official because we daren't say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can't be, I've been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can't be true. I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a 'sixties hippie dropping acid ("It's the System, man!"), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?

Fifty million people.

Go on, Government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something.

I feel like someone who's just stumbled on a mass grave.

Fifty million is more than the population of Gujarat. Almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number of refugees that Partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The Western world today is convulsed over the future of one million people who have fled from Kosovo.

A huge percentage of the displaced are tribal people (57.6 per cent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam). Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it's about 60 per cent. If you consider that tribal people account for only eight per cent, and Dalits fifteen per cent, of India's population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic 'otherness' of their victims takes some of the pressure off the Nation Builders. It's like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India's poorest people are subsidising the lifestyles of her richest.

Did I hear someone say something about the world's biggest democracy?

What has happened to all these millions of people? Where are they now? How do they earn a living? Nobody really knows. (Last month's papers had an account of how tribal people displaced by the Nagarjunasagar Dam Project are selling their babies to foreign adoption agencies. The Government intervened and put the babies in two public hospitals where six babies died of neglect.) When it comes to Rehabilitation, the Government's priorities are clear. India does not have a National Rehabilitation Policy. According to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended in 1984), the Government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person anything but a cash compensation. Imagine that. A cash compensation, to be paid by an Indian government official to an illiterate tribal man (the women get nothing) in a land where even the postman demands a tip for a delivery! Most tribal people have no formal title to their land and therefore cannot claim compensation anyway. Most tribal people, or let's say most small farmers, have as much use for money as a Supreme Court judge has for a bag of fertilizer.

The millions of displaced people don't exist anymore. When history is written they won't be in it. Not even as statistics. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times - a dam, an artillery proof range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. Once they start rolling, there's no resting place. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labour (that builds more projects that displace more people). True, they're not being annihilated or taken to gas chambers, but I can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than in any concentration camp of the Third Reich. They're not captive, but they re-define the meaning of liberty.

And still the nightmare doesn't end. They continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovels by government bulldozers that fan out on clean-up missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi, they run the risk of being shot by the police for shitting in public places - like three slum-dwellers were, not more than two years ago.

In the French Canadian wars of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada's Native Indians by offering them blankets infested with the small-pox virus. Two centuries on, we of the Real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends.

The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White America and French Canada and Hitler's Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we're told that it's being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. That it's being done in the name of Progress, in the name of National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we're told. We believe that it benefits us to believe.

Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this, because it's important that you understand. If you find reason to disagree, by all means take the other side. But please don't ignore it, don't look away.

It isn't an easy tale to tell. It's full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not any more. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point.

Trust me. There's a story here.

It's true that India has progressed. It's true that in 1947, when Colonialism formally ended, India was food-deficit. In 1950 we produced 51 million tonnes of foodgrain. Today we produce close to 200 million tonnes.

It's true that in 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30 million tonnes of unsold grain. It's also true that at the same time, 40 per cent of India's population - more than 350 million people - were living below the poverty line. That's more than the country's population in 1947.

Indians are too poor to buy the food their country produces. Indians are being forced to grow the kinds of food they can't afford to eat themselves. Look at what happened in Kalahandi District in Western Orissa, best known for its starvation deaths. In the drought of '96, people died of starvation (16 according to the Government, over a 100 according to the press). Yet that same year rice production in Kalahandi was higher than the national average! Rice was exported from Kalahandi District to the Centre.

Certainly India has progressed but most of its people haven't.

Our leaders say that we must have nuclear missiles to protect us from the threat of China and Pakistan. But who will protect us from ourselves?

What kind of country is this? Who owns it? Who runs it? What's going on?

It's time to spill a few State Secrets. To puncture the myth about the inefficient, bumbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial, essentially democratic, Indian State. Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people. Nor can Karma. Let's not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless and one hundred per cent man-made.

The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India's resources - its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air - and re-distributed it to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite. Consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling nice. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people, in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame - Ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defence strategists. Of course, we make it easy for them, we, its beneficiaries. We take care not to dig too deep. We don't really want to know the grisly details.

Thanks to us, Independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the Rulers, won't pause to look up from our heaving table. We don't seem to know that the resources we're feasting on are finite and rapidly depleting. There's cash in the bank, but soon there'll be nothing left to buy with it. The food's running out in the kitchen. And the servants haven't eaten yet. Actually, the servants stopped eating a long time ago.

India lives in her villages, we're told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That's bullshit. It's just another fig leaf from the Government's bulging wardrobe. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens' vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

This impression we have of an overstretched State, struggling to cope with the sheer weight and scale of its problems, is a dangerous one. The fact is that it's creating the problem. It's a giant poverty-producing machine, masterful in its methods of pitting the poor against the very poor, of flinging crumbs to the wretched, so that they dissipate their energies fighting each other, while peace (and advertising) reigns in the Master's Lodgings.

Until this process is recognised for what it is, until it is addressed and attacked, elections - however fiercely they're contested - will continue to be mock battles that serve only to further entrench unspeakable inequity. Democracy (our version of it) will continue to be the benevolent mask behind which a pestilence flourishes unchallenged. On a scale that will make old wars and past misfortunes look like controlled laboratory experiments. Already fifty million people have been fed into the Development Mill and have emerged as air-conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits - subsidised air-conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits (if we must have these nice things, and they are nice, at least we should be made to pay for them).

There's a hole in the flag that needs mending.

It's a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith - we have no hope. To hope, we have to break the faith. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways and we have to fight to win.

Listen then, to the story of the Narmada Valley. Understand it. And, if you wish, enlist. Who knows, it may lead to magic.

The Narmada wells up on the plateau of Amarkantak in the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh, then winds its way through 1,300 kilometres of beautiful broad-leaved forest and perhaps the most fertile agricultural land in India. Twenty-five million people live in the river valley, linked to the ecosystem and to each other by an ancient, intricate web of interdependence (and, no doubt, exploitation). Though the Narmada has been targeted for "water resource development" for more than fifty years now, the reason it has, until recently, evaded being captured and dismembered is because it flows through three states - Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. (Ninety per cent of the river flows through Madhya Pradesh; it merely skirts the northern border of Maharashtra, then flows through Gujarat for about 180 km before emptying into the Arabian sea at Bharuch.)

As early as 1946, plans had been afoot to dam the river at Gora in Gujarat. In 1961, Nehru laid the foundation stone for a 49.8-metre-high dam - the midget progenitor of the Sardar Sarovar. Around the same time, the Survey of India drew up new, modernised topographical maps of the river basin. The dam planners in Gujarat studied the new maps and decided that it would be more profitable to build a much bigger dam. But this meant hammering out an agreement first with neighbouring states.

The three states bickered and balked but failed to agree on a water-sharing formula. Eventually, in 1969, the Central Government set up the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. It took the Tribunal ten years to announce its Award. The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard.

To apportion shares in the waters, the first, most basic thing the Tribunal had to do was to find out how much water there was in the river. Usually this can only be estimated accurately if there is at least forty years of recorded data on the volume of actual flow in the river. Since this was not available, they decided to extrapolate from rainfall data. They arrived at a figure of 27.22 MAF (million acre feet). This figure is the statistical bedrock of the Narmada Valley Projects. We are still living with its legacy. It more or less determines the overall design of the Projects - the height, location and number of dams. By inference, it determines the cost of the Projects, how much area will be submerged, how many people will be displaced and what the benefits will be. In 1992 actual observed flow data for the Narmada which was now available for 44 years (1948 -1992) showed that the yield from the river was only 22.69 MAF - eighteen per cent less! The Central Water Commission admits that there is less water in the Narmada than had previously been assumed. The Government of India says: It may be noted that clause II (of the Decision of the Tribunal) relating to determination of dependable flow as 28 MAF is non-reviewable.(!)

In other words, the Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the Government of India commands it to produce.

Its proponents boast that the Narmada Valley Project is the most ambitious river valley project ever conceived in human history. They plan to build 3,200 dams that will reconstitute the Narmada and her 41 tributaries into a series of step reservoirs - an immense staircase of amenable water. Of these, 30 will be major dams, 135 medium and the rest small. Two of the major dams will be multi-purpose mega dams. The Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in Madhya Pradesh will, between them, hold more water than any other reservoir on the Indian sub-continent.

Whichever way you look at it, the Narmada Valley Development Project is Big. It will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India's biggest rivers. For better or for worse, it will affect the lives of twenty-five million people who live in the valley. Yet, even before the Ministry of Environment cleared the project, the World Bank offered to finance the lynch-pin of the project - the Sardar Sarovar Dam (whose reservoir displaces people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, but whose benefits go to Gujarat). The Bank was ready with its cheque-book before any costs were computed, before any studies had been done, before anybody had any idea of what the human cost or the environmental impact of the dam would be!

The 450-million-dollar loan for the Sardar Sarovar Projects was sanctioned and in place in 1985. Ministry of Environment clearance for the project came only in 1987! Talk about enthusiasm. It fairly borders on evangelism. Can anybody care so much?

Why were they so keen?

Between 1947 and 1994 the Bank received 6,000 applications for loans from around the world. They didn't turn down a single one. Not a single one. Terms like 'Moving money' and 'Meeting loan targets' suddenly begin to make sense.

Today, India is in a situation where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayments of principal than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), after the arithmetic, India paid the Bank 478 million dollars more than it received. Over the last five years ('93 to '98) India paid the Bank 1.475 billion dollars more than it received. The relationship between us is exactly like the relationship between a landless labourer steeped in debt and the local Bania - it is an affectionate relationship, the poor man loves his Bania because he's always there when he's needed. It's not for nothing that we call the world a Global Village. The only difference between the landless labourer and the Government of India is that one uses the money to survive. The other just funnels it into the private coffers of its officers and agents, pushing the country into an economic bondage that it may never overcome.

The international Dam Industry is worth 20 billion dollars a year. If you follow the trails of big dams the world over, wherever you go - China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala - you'll rub up against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam-jargon for the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental Consultants (who are usually directly employed by or subsidiaries of dam-builders), and, more often than not, the friendly, neighbourhood World Bank. You'll grow to recognise the same inflated rhetoric, the same noble 'Peoples' Dam' slogans, the same swift, brutal repression that follows the first sign of civil insubordination. (Of late, especially after its experience in the Narmada Valley, The Bank is more cautious about choosing the countries in which it finances projects that involve mass displacement. At present, China is their Most Favoured client. It's the great irony of our times - American citizens protest the massacre in Tiananmen Square, but the Bank will use their money to fund the Three Gorges Dam in China which is going to displace 1.3 million people.)

It's a skilful circus and the acrobats know each other well. Occasionally they'll swap parts - a bureaucrat will join The Bank, a Banker will surface as a Project Consultant. At the end of play, a huge percentage of what's called 'Development Aid' is re-channelled back to the countries it came from, masquerading as equipment cost or consultants' fees or salaries to the agencies' own staff. Often 'Aid' is openly 'tied'. (As in the case of the Japanese loan for the Sardar Sarovar Dam, tied to a contract for purchasing turbines from Sumitomo Corporation.) Sometimes the connections are more sleazy. In 1993 Britain financed the Pergau Dam in Malaysia with a subsidised loan of 234 million pounds, despite an Overseas Development Administration report that said that the dam would be a 'bad buy' for Malaysia. It later emerged that the loan was offered to 'encourage' Malaysia to sign a 1.3-billion-pound contract to buy British Arms.

In 1994, U.K. consultants earned 2.5 billion dollars on overseas contracts. The second biggest sector of the market after Project Management was writing what are called EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments). In the Development racket, the rules are pretty simple. If you get invited by a Government to write an EIA for a big dam project and you point out a problem (say, for instance, you quibble about the amount of water available in a river, or, God forbid, you suggest that perhaps the human costs are too high), then you're history. You're an OOWC. An Out Of Work Consultant. And Oops! There goes your Range Rover. There goes your holiday in Tuscany. There goes your children's private boarding school. There's good money in poverty. Plus Perks.

In keeping with Big Dam tradition, concurrent with the construction of the 138.68-metre-high Sardar Sarovar Dam began the elaborate Government pantomime of conducting studies to estimate the actual project costs and the impact it would have on people and the environment. The World Bank participated whole-heartedly in the charade - occasionally they knitted their brows and raised feeble requests for more information on issues like the resettlement and rehabilitation of what they call PAPs - Project Affected Persons. (They help, these acronyms, they manage to mutate muscle and blood into cold statistics. PAPs soon cease to be people.)

The merest crumbs of information satisfied The Bank and they proceeded with the project. The implicit, unwritten but fairly obvious understanding between the concerned agencies was that whatever the costs - economic, environmental or human - the project would go ahead. They would justify it as they went along. They knew full well that eventually, in a courtroom or to a committee, no argument works as well as a Fait Accompli. (Mi' lord, the country is losing two crores a day due to the delay.) The Government refers to the Sardar Sarovar Projects as the 'Most Studied Project in India', yet the game goes something like this:

When the Tribunal first announced its Award, and the Gujarat Government announced its plan of how it was going to use its share of water, there was no mention of drinking water for villages in Kutch and Saurashtra, the arid areas of Gujarat. When the project ran into political trouble, the Government suddenly discovered the emotive power of Thirst. Suddenly, quenching the thirst of parched throats in Kutch and Saurashtra became the whole point of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Never mind that water from two rivers - the Sabarmati and the Mahi, both of which are miles closer to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada, have been dammed and diverted to Ahmedabad, Mehsana and Kheda. Neither Kutch nor Saurashtra has seen a drop of it.) Officially the number of people who will be provided drinking water by the Sardar Sarovar Canal fluctuates from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million (1989) - nice touch, the decimal point! - to 40 million (1992) and down to 25 million (1993).

The number of villages that would receive drinking water was zero in 1979, 4,719 in the early eighties, 7,234 in 1990 and 8,215 in 1991. When challenged, the Government admitted that these figures for 1991 included 236 uninhabited villages!

Every aspect of the project is approached in this almost cavalier manner, as if it's a family board game. Even when it concerns the lives and futures of vast numbers of people.

In 1979 the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir was estimated to be a little over 6,000. In 1987 it grew to 12,000. In 1991 it surged to 27,000. In 1992 the Government declared that 40,000 families would be affected. Today, it hovers between 40,000 and 41,500. (Of course, even this is an absurd figure, because the reservoir isn't the only thing that displaces people. According to the NBA the actual figure is 85,000 families - about half a million people.)

The estimated cost of the project bounced up from Rs.6,000 crores to Rs.20,000 crores (officially). The NBA says that it will cost Rs.40,000 crores. (Half the entire irrigation budget of the whole country over the last fifty years.)

The Government claims the Sardar Sarovar Projects will produce 1450 Mega Watts of power. The thing about multi-purpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is that their 'purposes' (irrigation, power production and flood-control) conflict with each other. Irrigation uses up the water you need to produce power. Flood control requires you to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an anticipated surfeit of water. And if there's no surfeit, you're left with an empty dam. And this defeats the purpose of irrigation, which is to store the monsoon water. It's like the riddle of trying to ford a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. The result of these mutually conflicting aims, studies say, is that when the Sardar Sarovar Projects are completed, and the scheme is fully functional, it will end up producing only 3 per cent of the power that its planners say it will. 50 Mega Watts.

In an old war, everybody has an axe to grind. So how do you pick your way through these claims and counter-claims? How do you decide whose estimate is more reliable? One way is to take a look at the track record of Indian Dams.

The Bargi Dam near Jabalpur was the first dam on the Narmada to be completed (1990). It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About 70,000 people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but when they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the Government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could, and watched their houses being washed away. 114,000 people were displaced. There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were given meagre cash compensations. Many got absolutely nothing. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to Government publicity, an 'ideal village'. Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir, or moved to slums in Jabalpur. The Bargi Dam irrigates only as much land as it submerged in the first place - and only 5 per cent of the area that its planners claimed it would irrigate. Even that is water-logged.

Time and again, it's the same story - the Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II scheme claimed it would displace 63,000 people. When completed, it displaced 150,000 people. The Gujarat Medium Irrigation II scheme displaced 140,000 people instead of 63,600. The revised estimate of the number of people to be displaced by the Upper Krishna irrigation project in Karnataka is 240,000 against its initial claims of displacing only 20,000.

These are World Bank figures. Not the NBA's. Imagine what this does to our conservative estimate of thirty-three million.

Construction work on the Sardar Sarovar Dam site, which had continued sporadically since 1961, began in earnest in 1988. At the time, nobody, not the Government, nor the World Bank were aware that a woman called Medha Patkar had been wandering through the villages slated to be submerged, asking people whether they had any idea of the plans the Government had in store for them. When she arrived in the valley all those years ago, opposing the construction of the dam was the furthest thing from her mind. Her chief concern was that displaced villagers should be resettled in an equitable, humane way. It gradually became clear to her that the Government's intentions towards them were far from honourable. By 1986 word had spread and each state had a peoples' organisation that questioned the promises about resettlement and rehabilitation that were being bandied about by Government officials. It was only some years later that the full extent of the horror - the impact that the dams would have, both on the people who were to be displaced and the people who were supposed to benefit - began to surface. The Narmada Valley Development Project came to be known as India's Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. The various peoples' organisations massed into a single organisation and the Narmada Bachao Andolan - the extraordinary NBA - was born.

In 1988 the NBA formally called for all work on the Narmada Valley Development Projects to be stopped. People declared that they would drown if they had to, but would not move from their homes. Within two years, the struggle had burgeoned and had support from other resistance movements. In September 1989, some 50,000 people gathered in the Valley at Harsud from all over India to pledge to fight Destructive Development. The dam site and its adjacent areas, already under the Indian Official Secrets Act, was clamped under Section 144 which prohibits the gathering of groups of more than five people. The whole area was turned into a police camp. Despite the barricades, one year later, on the 28^th of September 1990, thousands of villagers made their way on foot and by boat to a little town called Badwani, in Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their pledge to drown rather than agree to move from their homes. News of the people's opposition to the Projects spread to other countries. The Japanese arm of Friends of the Earth mounted a campaign in Japan that succeeded in getting the Government of Japan to withdraw its 27-billion-yen loan to finance the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (The contract for the turbines still holds.) Once the Japanese withdrew, international pressure from various Environmental Activist groups who supported the struggle began to mount on the World Bank.

This, of course, led to an escalation of repression in the valley. Government policy, described by a particularly articulate Minister, was to 'flood the valley with khakhi'.

On Christmas Day in 1990, some 6,000 men and women walked over a hundred kilometres, carrying their provisions and their bedding, accompanying a seven-member sacrificial squad who had resolved to lay down their lives for the river. They were stopped at Ferkuwa on the Gujarat border by battalions of armed police and crowds of people from the city of Baroda, many of whom were hired, some of whom perhaps genuinely believed that the Sardar Sarovar was 'Gujarat's lifeline'. It was an interesting confrontation. Middle Class Urban India versus a Rural, predominantly Tribal Army. The marching people demanded they be allowed to cross the border and walk to the dam site. The police refused them passage. To stress their commitment to non-violence, each villager had his or her hands bound together. One by one, they defied the battalions of police. They were beaten, arrested and dragged into waiting trucks in which they were driven off and dumped some miles away, in the wilderness. They just walked back and began all over again.

The confrontation continued for almost two weeks. Finally, on the 7th of January 1991, the seven members of the sacrificial squad announced that they were going on an indefinite hunger strike. Tension rose to dangerous levels. The Indian and International Press, TV camera crews and documentary film-makers, were present in force. Reports appeared in the papers almost every day. Environmental Activists stepped up the pressure in Washington. Eventually, acutely embarrassed by the glare of unfavourable media coverage, the World Bank announced that it would institute an Independent Review of the Sardar Sarovar Projects - unprecedented in the history of Bank Behaviour.

When the news reached the valley, it was received with distrust and uncertainty. The people had no reason to trust the World Bank. But still, it was a victory of sorts. The villagers, understandably upset by the frightening deterioration in the condition of their comrades who had not eaten for 22 days, pleaded with them to call off the fast. On the 28th of January, the fast at Ferkuwa was called off, and the brave, ragged army returned to their homes shouting "Hamara Gaon Mein Hamara Raj!" (Our Rule in Our Villages).

There has been no army quite like this one, anywhere else in the world. In other countries - China (Chairman Mao got a Big Dam for his 77^th birthday), Brazil, Malaysia, Guatemala, Paraguay - every sign of revolt has been snuffed out almost before it began. Here in India, it goes on and on. Of course, the State would like to take credit for this too. It would like us to be grateful to it for not crushing the movement completely, for allowing it to exist. After all what is all this, if not a sign of a healthy functioning democracy in which the State has to intervene when its people have differences of opinion?

I suppose that's one way of looking at it. (Is this my cue to cringe and say 'Thankyou, thankyou, for allowing me to write the things I write?')

We don't need to be grateful to the State for permitting us to protest. We can thank ourselves for that. It is we who have insisted on these rights. It is we who have refused to surrender them. If we have anything to be truly proud of as a people, it is this.

The struggle in the Narmada Valley lives, despite the State.

The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence, its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To wear out the opposition. The State never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay.

But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old. Even the young age prematurely. For twenty years now, since the Tribunal's award, the ragged army in the valley has lived with the fear of eviction. For twenty years, in most areas there has been no sign of 'development' - no roads, no schools, no wells, no medical help. For twenty years, it has borne the stigma 'slated for submergence' - so it's isolated from the rest of society (no marriage proposals, no land transactions). They're a bit like the Hibakushas in Japan (the victims and their descendants of the bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The 'fruits of modern development', when they finally came, brought only horror. Roads brought surveyors. Surveyors brought trucks. Trucks brought policemen. Policemen brought bullets and beatings and rape and arrest and, in one case, murder. The only genuine 'fruit' of modern development that reached them, reached them inadvertently - the right to raise their voices, the right to be heard. But they have fought for twenty years now. How much longer will they last?

The struggle in the valley is tiring. It's no longer as fashionable as it used to be. The international camera crews and the radical reporters have moved (like the World Bank) to newer pastures. The documentary films have been screened and appreciated. Everybody's sympathy is all used up. But the dam goes on. It's getting higher and higher...

Now, more than ever before, the ragged army needs reinforcements. If we let it die, if we allow the struggle to be crushed, if we allow the people to be punished, we will lose the most precious thing we have: Our spirit, or what's left of it.

"India will go on," they'll tell you, the sage philosophers who don't want to be troubled by piddling Current Affairs. As though 'India' is somehow more valuable than her people.

Old Nazis probably soothe themselves in similar ways.

The war for the Narmada Valley is not just some exotic tribal war or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It's a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honoured and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers... The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

Anyway, back to the story.

In June 1991, the World Bank appointed Bradford Morse, a former head of the United Nations Development Program, as Chairman of the Independent Review. His brief was to make a thorough assessment of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. He was guaranteed free access to all secret Bank documents relating to the Projects.

In September 1991, Bradford Morse and his team arrived in India. The NBA, convinced that this was yet another set-up, at first refused to meet them. The Gujarat Government welcomed the team with a red carpet (and a nod and a wink) as covert allies.

A year later, in June 1992, the historic Independent Review (known also as the Morse Report) was published.

It unpeels the project delicately, layer by layer, like an onion. Nothing was too big, and nothing too small for them to enquire into. They met Ministers and bureaucrats, they met NGOs working in the area, went from village to village, from resettlement site to resettlement site. They visited the good ones. The bad ones. The temporary ones, the permanent ones. They spoke to hundreds of people. They travelled extensively in the submergence area and the command area. They went to Kutch and other drought-hit areas in Gujarat. They commissioned their own studies. They examined every aspect of the project: hydrology and water management, the upstream environment, sedimentation, catchment area treatment, the downstream environment, the anticipation of likely problems in the command area - water-logging, salinity, drainage, health, the impact on wildlife.

What the Morse Report reveals, in temperate, measured tones (which I admire, but cannot achieve) is scandalous. It is the most balanced, un-biased, yet damning indictment of the relationship between the Indian State and the World Bank. Without appearing to, perhaps even without intending to, the report cuts through to the cosy core, to the space where they live together and love each other (somewhere between what they say and what they do).

The core recommendation of the 357-page Independent Review was unequivocal and wholly unexpected:

"We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed... it seems clear that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the Projects to the exclusion of human and environmental concerns... India and the states involved... have spent a great deal of money. No one wants to see this money wasted. But we caution that it may be more wasteful to proceed without full knowledge of the human and environmental costs. We have decided that it would be irresponsible for us to patch together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the Projects are as obvious as they seem to us. As a result, we think that the wisest course would be for the Bank to step back from the Projects and consider them afresh. The failure of the bank's incremental strategy should be acknowledged."

Four committed, knowledgeable, truly independent men - they do a lot to make up for faith eroded by hundreds of other venal ones who are paid to do similar jobs.

The Bank, however, was still not prepared to give up. It continued to fund the project. Two months after the Independent Review, it sent out the Pamela Cox Committee which did exactly what the Morse Review had cautioned the Bank against. It suggested a sort of patchwork remedy to try and salvage the operation. In October 1992, on the recommendation of the Pamela Cox Committee, the Bank asked the Indian Government to meet some minimum, primary conditions within a period of six months. Even that much the Government couldn't do. Finally, on the 30^th of March 1993, the World Bank pulled out of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Actually, technically, on the 29^th of March, one day before the deadline they'd been given, the Indian Government asked the World Bank to withdraw.) Details. Details.

No one has ever managed to make the World Bank step back from a project before. Least of all a rag-tag army of the poorest people in one of the world's poorest countries. A group of people whom Lewis Preston, then President of The Bank, never managed to fit into his busy schedule when he visited India. Sacking The Bank was and is a huge moral victory for the people in the valley.

The euphoria didn't last. The Government of Gujarat announced that it was going to raise the 200-million-dollar shortfall on its own and continue with the project. During the period of the Review, and after it was published, confrontation between people and the Authorities continued unabated in the valley - humiliation, arrests, lathi charges. Indefinite fasts terminated by temporary promises and permanent betrayals. People who had agreed to leave the valley and be resettled had begun returning to their villages from their resettlement sites. In Manibeli, a village in Maharashtra and one of the nerve-centres of the resistance, hundreds of villagers participated in a Monsoon Satyagraha. In 1993, families in Manibeli remained in their homes as the waters rose. They clung to wooden posts with their children in their arms and refused to move. Eventually policemen prised them loose and dragged them away. The NBA declared that if the Government did not agree to review the project, on the 6th of August 1993 a band of activists would drown themselves in the rising waters of the reservoir. On the 5th of August, the Union Government constituted yet another committee called the Five Member Group (FMG) to review the Sardar Sarovar Projects.

The Government of Gujarat refused them entry into Gujarat. The FMG report (a "desk report") was submitted the following year. It tacitly endorsed the grave concerns of the Independent Review. But it made no difference. Nothing changed. This is another of the State's tested strategies. It kills you with committees.

In February 1994, the Government of Gujarat ordered the permanent closure of the sluice gates of the dam.

In May 1994, the NBA filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court questioning the whole basis of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and seeking a stay on the construction.

That monsoon, when the water level in the reservoir rose and smashed down on the other side of the dam, 65,000 cubic metres of concrete and 35,000 cubic metres of rock were torn out of a stilling basin, leaving a 65-metre crater. The riverbed powerhouse was flooded. The damage was kept secret for months. Reports started appearing about it in the press only in January of 1995.

In early 1995, on the grounds that the rehabilitation of displaced people had not been adequate, the Supreme Court ordered work on the dam to be suspended until further notice. The height of the dam was 80 metres above Mean Sea Level.

Meanwhile, work had begun on two more dams in Madhya Pradesh: the Narmada Sagar (without which the Sardar Sarovar loses 17-30 per cent of its efficiency) and the Maheshwar Dam. The Maheshwar Dam is next in line, upstream from the Sardar Sarovar. The Government of Madhya Pradesh has signed a Power Purchase Agreement with a private company - S.Kumars - one of India's leading textile magnates.

Tension in the Sardar Sarovar area abated temporarily and the battle moved upstream, to Maheshwar, in the fertile plains of Nimad.

The case pending in the Supreme Court led to a palpable easing of repression in the valley. Construction work had stopped on the dam, but the rehabilitation charade continued. Forests (slated for submergence) continued to be cut and carted away in trucks, forcing people who depended on them for a livelihood to move out.

Even though the dam is nowhere near its eventual, projected height, its impact on the environment and the people living along the river is already severe.

Around the dam site and the nearby villages, the number of cases of malaria has increased six-fold.

Several kilometres upstream from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, huge deposits of silt, hip-deep and over two hundred metres wide, have cut off access to the river. Women carrying water pots now have to walk miles, literally miles, to find a negotiable entry point. Cows and goats get stranded in it and die. The little single-log boats that tribal people use have become unsafe on the irrational circular currents caused by the barricade downstream.

Further upstream, where the silt deposits have not yet become a problem, there's another problem. Landless people (predominantly tribal people and Dalits) have traditionally cultivated rice, fruit and vegetables on the rich, shallow silt banks the river leaves when it recedes in the dry months. Every now and then, the engineers manning the Bargi Dam (way upstream, near Jabalpur) release water from the reservoir without warning. Downstream, the water level in the river suddenly rises. Hundreds of families have had their crops washed away several times, leaving them with no livelihood.

Suddenly they can't trust their river anymore. It's like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I'll be rapped on the knuckles if I continue in this vein. When we're discussing the Greater Common Good there's no place for sentiment. One must stick to facts. Forgive me for letting my heart wander.

The State Governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra continue to be completely cavalier in their dealings with displaced people. The Government of Gujarat has a rehabilitation policy (on paper) that makes the other two states look medieval. It boasts of being the best rehabilitation package in the world. It offers land for land to displaced people from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and recognises the claims of 'encroachers' (usually tribal people with no papers). The deception, however, lies in its definition of who qualifies as 'Project Affected'.

In point of fact, the Government of Gujarat hasn't even managed to rehabilitate people from its own 19 villages slated for submergence, let alone the rest of the 226 in the other two states. The inhabitants of these 19 villages have been scattered to 175 separate rehabilitation sites. Social links have been smashed, communities broken up.

In practice, the resettlement story (with a few 'ideal village' exceptions) continues to be one of callousness and broken promises. Some people have been given land, others haven't. Some have land that is stony and uncultivable. Some have land that is irredeemably water-logged. Some have been driven out by landowners who sold land to the Government but haven't been paid yet.

Some who were resettled on the peripheries of other villages have been robbed, beaten and chased away by their host villagers. There have been occasions when displaced people from two different dam projects have been allotted contiguous lands. In one case, displaced people from three dams - the Ukai Dam, the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the Karjan Dam - were resettled in the same area. In addition to fighting amongst themselves for resources - water, grazing land, jobs - they had to fight a group of landless labourers who had been sharecropping the land for absentee landlords who had subsequently sold it to the Government.

There's another category of displaced people - people whose lands have been acquired by the Government for Resettlement Sites. There's a pecking order even amongst the wretched - Sardar Sarovar 'oustees' are more glamorous than other 'oustees' because they're occasionally in the news and have a case in court. (In other Development Projects where there's no press, no NBA, no court case, there are no records. The displaced leave no trail at all.)

In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds which are furnaces in summer and 'fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry river beds which, during the monsoon, turn into fast-flowing drifts. I've been to some of these 'sites'. I've seen film footage of others: shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of charpais, while swirling waters enter their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them to retrieve what they can.

When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush. The ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes, carefully stacked away like postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten and unusable.

Forty households were moved from Manibeli to a resettlement site in Maharashtra. In the first year, thirty-eight children died.

In today's papers (The Indian Express, 26^th April '99) there's a report about nine deaths in a single rehabilitation site in Gujarat. In the course of a week. That's 1.2875 PAPs a day, if you're counting.

Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world. Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometres to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and women), offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale.

Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed - food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing material - they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day with which to feed and keep their families. Instead of a river, they have a hand pump. In their old villages, they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they're a heartbeat away from destitution.

In Vadaj, a resettlement site I visited near Baroda, the man who was talking to me rocked his sick baby in his arms, clumps of flies gathered on its sleeping eyelids. Children collected around us, taking care not to burn their bare skin on the scorching tin walls of the shed they call a home. The man's mind was far away from the troubles of his sick baby. He was making me a list of the fruit he used to pick in the forest. He counted forty-eight kinds. He told me that he didn't think he or his children would ever be able to afford to eat any fruit again. Not unless he stole it. I asked him what was wrong with his baby. He said it would be better for the baby to die than to have to live like this. I asked what the baby's mother thought about that. She didn't reply. She just stared.

For the people who've been resettled, everything has to be re-learned. Every little thing, every big thing: from shitting and pissing (where d'you do it when there's no jungle to hide you?) to buying a bus ticket, to learning a new language, to understanding money. And worst of all, learning to be supplicants. Learning to take orders. Learning to have Masters. Learning to answer only when you're addressed.

In addition to all this, they have to learn how to make written representations (in triplicate) to the Grievance Redressal Committee or the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for any particular problems they might have. Recently, 3,000 people came to Delhi to protest their situation - travelling overnight by train, living on the blazing streets. The President wouldn't meet them because he had an eye infection. Maneka Gandhi, the Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, wouldn't meet them but asked for a written representation (Dear Maneka, Please don't build the dam, Love, The People). When the representation was handed to her, she scolded the little delegation for not having written it in English.

From being self-sufficient and free, to being impoverished and yoked to the whims of a world you know nothing, nothing about - what d'you suppose it must feel like? Would you like to trade your beach house in Goa for a hovel in Paharganj? No? Not even for the sake of the Nation?

Truly, it is just not possible for a State Administration, any State Administration, to carry out the rehabilitation of a people as fragile as this, on such an immense scale. It's like using a pair of hedge-shears to trim an infant's finger nails. You can't do it without shearing its fingers off. Land for land sounds like a reasonable swap, but how do you implement it? How do you uproot 200,000 people (the official blinkered estimate) of which 117,000 are tribal people, and relocate them in a humane fashion? How do you keep their communities intact, in a country where every inch of land is fought over, where almost all litigation pending in courts has to do with land disputes?

Where is all this fine, unoccupied but arable land that is waiting to receive these intact communities?

The simple answer is that there isn't any. Not even for the 'officially' displaced of this one dam.

What about the rest of the three thousand two hundred and ninety-nine dams?

What about the remaining thousands of 'PAPs' earmarked for annihilation? Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it over with?

Jalud, in the Nimad plains of Madhya Pradesh, is the first of sixty villages that will be submerged by the reservoir of the Maheshwar Dam. Jalud is not a tribal village, and is therefore riven with the shameful caste divisions that are the scourge of every ordinary Hindu village. A majority of the land-owning farmers (the ones who qualify as PAPs) are Rajputs. They farm some of the most fertile soil in India. Their houses are piled with sacks of wheat and daal and rice. They boast so much about the things they grow on their land that if it weren't so tragic, it could get on your nerves. Their houses have already begun to crack with the impact of the dynamiting on the dam site.

Twelve families, mostly Dalits, who had small holdings in the vicinity of the dam site had their land acquired. They told me how when they objected, cement was poured into their water pipes, their standing crops were bulldozed, and the police occupied the land by force. All 12 families are now landless and work as wage labour.

The area that the people of Jalud are going to be moved to is a few kilometres inland, away from the river, adjoining a predominantly Dalit and tribal village called Samraj. I saw the huge tract of land that had been marked off for them. It was a hard, stony hillock with stubbly grass and scrub, on which truckloads of silt were being unloaded and spread out in a thin layer to make it look like rich, black cotton soil. The story goes like this: at the instance of the S. Kumars (Textile Tycoons turned Nation Builders), the District Magistrate acquired the hillock, which was actually village common grazing land that belonged to the people of Samraj. In addition to this, the land of 10 Dalit villagers was acquired. No compensation was paid.

The villagers, whose main source of income was their livestock, had to sell their goats and buffaloes because they no longer had anywhere to graze them. Their only remaining source of income lies (lay) on the banks of a small lake on the edge of the village. In summer, when the water level recedes, it leaves a shallow ring of rich silt on which the villagers grow (grew) rice, melons and cucumber.

The S. Kumars have excavated this silt to cosmetically cover the stony grazing ground (that the people of Jalud don't want). The banks of the lake are now steep and uncultivable.

The already impoverished people of Samraj have been left to starve, while this photo-opportunity is being readied for German funders and Indian courts and anybody else who cares to pass that way.

This is how India works. This is the genesis of the Maheshwar Dam. The story of the first village. What will happen to the other fifty-nine? May bad luck pursue this dam. May bulldozers turn upon the Textile Tycoons.

Nothing can justify this kind of behaviour.

In circumstances like these, even to entertain a debate about Rehabilitation is to take the first step towards setting aside the Principles of Justice. Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water to 40 million - there's something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is Fascist Maths. It strangles stories. Bludgeons detail. And manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.

When I arrived on the banks of the Narmada in late March (1999), it was a month after the Supreme Court suddenly vacated the stay on construction work of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. I had read pretty much everything I could lay my hands on (all those 'secret' Government documents). I had a clear idea of the lay of the land - of what had happened where and when and to whom. The story played itself out before my eyes like a tragic film whose actors I'd already met. Had I not known its history, nothing would have made sense. Because in the valley there are stories within stories and it's easy to lose the clarity of rage in the sludge of other peoples' sorrow.

I ended my journey in Kevadia Colony, where it all began. Thirty-eight years ago, this is where the Government of Gujarat decided to locate the infrastructure it would need for starting work on the dam: guest houses, office blocks, accommodation for engineers and their staff, roads leading to the dam site, warehouses for construction material.

It is located on the cusp of what is now the Sardar Sarovar reservoir and the Wonder Canal, Gujarat's 'lifeline' , which is going to quench the thirst of millions.

Nobody knows this, but Kevadia Colony is the key to the World. Go there, and secrets will be revealed to you.

In the winter of 1961, a government officer arrived in a village called Kothie and informed the villagers that some of their land would be needed to construct a helipad. In a few days a bulldozer arrived and flattened standing crops. The villagers were made to sign papers and were paid a sum of money, which they assumed was payment for their destroyed crops. When the helipad was ready, a helicopter landed on it, and out came Prime Minister Nehru. Most of the villagers couldn't see him because he was surrounded by policemen. Nehru made a speech. Then he pressed a button and there was an explosion on the other side of the river. After the explosion he flew away. That was the inauguration of the earliest avatar of the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

Could Nehru have known when he pressed that button that he had unleashed an incubus?

After Nehru left, the Government of Gujarat arrived in strength. It acquired 1,600 acres of land from 950 families from six villages. The people were Tadvi tribals, but because of their proximity to the city of Baroda, not entirely unversed in the ways of a market economy. They were sent notices and told that they would be paid cash compensation and given jobs on the dam site. Then the nightmare began. Trucks and bulldozers rolled in. Forests were felled, standing crops destroyed. Everything turned into a whirl of jeeps and engineers and cement and steel. Mohan Bhai Tadvi watched eight acres of his land with standing crops of jowar, toovar and cotton being levelled. Overnight he became a landless labourer. Three years later he received his cash compensation of 250 rupees an acre in three instalments.

Dersukh Bhai Vesa Bhai's father was given 3,500 rupees for his house and five acres of land with its standing crops and all the trees on it. He remembers walking all the way to Rajpipla (the district headquarters) as a little boy, holding his father's hand. He remembers how terrified they were when they were called in to the Tehsildar's office. They were made to surrender their compensation notices and sign a receipt. They were illiterate, so they didn't know how much the receipt was made out for.

Everybody had to go to Rajpipla but they were always summoned on different days, one by one. So they couldn't exchange information or compare amounts.

Gradually, out of the dust and bulldozers, an offensive, diffuse configuration emerged. Kevadia Colony. Row upon row of ugly cement flats, offices, guest houses, roads. All the graceless infrastructure of Big Dam construction. The villagers' houses were dismantled and moved to the periphery of the colony, where they remain today, squatters on their own land. Those that created trouble were intimidated by the police and the construction company. The villagers told me that in the contractor's headquarters they have a 'lock-up' like a police lock-up, where recalcitrant villagers are incarcerated and beaten.

The people who were evicted to build Kevadia Colony do not qualify as 'Project-Affected' in Gujarat's Rehabilitation package.

Some of them work as servants in the officers' bungalows and waiters in the guest house built on the land where their own houses once stood. Can there be anything more poignant?

Those who had some land left tried to cultivate it, but the Kevadia municipality introduced a scheme in which they brought in pigs to eat uncollected refuse on the streets. The pigs stray into the villagers' fields and destroy their crops.

In 1992, after thirty years, each family has been offered a sum of 12,000 rupees per hectare, up to a maximum of 36,000 rupees, provided they agree to leave their homes and go away! Yet 40 per cent of the land that was acquired is lying unused. The government refuses to return it. Eleven acres acquired from Deviben, who is a widow now, have been given over to the Swami Narayan Trust (a big religious sect). On a small portion of it, the Trust runs a little school. The rest it cultivates, while Deviben watches through the barbed wire fence. On the 200 acres acquired in the village of Gora, villagers were evicted and blocks of flats were built. They lay empty for years. Eventually the Government hired it for a nominal fee to Jai Prakash Associates, the dam contractors, who, the villagers say, sub-let it privately for 32,000 rupees a month. (Jai Prakash Associates, the biggest dam contractors in the country, the real nation-builders, own the Siddharth Continental and the Vasant Continental in Delhi.)

On an area of about 30 acres there is an absurd cement PWD 'replica' of the ancient Shoolpaneshwar temple that was submerged in the reservoir. The same political formation that plunged a whole nation into a bloody, medieval nightmare because it insisted on destroying an old mosque to dig up a non-existent temple thinks nothing of submerging a hallowed pilgrimage route and hundreds of temples that have been worshipped in for centuries.

It thinks nothing of destroying the sacred hills and groves, the places of worship, the ancient homes of the gods and demons of tribal people.

It thinks nothing of submerging a valley that has yielded fossils, microliths and rock paintings, the only valley in India, according to archaeologists, that contains an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Old Stone Age.

What can one say?

In Kevadia Colony, the most barbaric joke of all is the wildlife museum. The Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Centre gives you a quick, comprehensive picture of the Government's commitment to Conservation.

The Sardar Sarovar reservoir, when the dam is at its full height, is going to submerge about 13,000 hectares of prime forest land. (In anticipation of submergence, the forest began to be felled many greedy years ago.) Environmentalists and conservationists were quite rightly alarmed at the extent of loss of biodiversity and wildlife habitat that the submergence would cause. To mitigate this loss, the Government decided to expand the Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary that straddles the dam on the south side of the river. There is a hare-brained scheme that envisages drowning animals from the submerged forests swimming their way to 'wild-life corridors' that will be created for them, and setting up home in the New! Improved! Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary. Presumably wildlife and biodiversity can be protected and maintained only if human activity is restricted and traditional rights to use forest resources curtailed. Forty thousand tribal people from 101 villages within the boundaries of the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary depend on the forest for a livelihood. They will be 'persuaded' to leave. They are not included in the definition of Project Affected.

Where will they go? I imagine you know by now.

Whatever their troubles in the real world, in the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Centre (where an old stuffed leopard and a mouldy sloth bear have to make do with a shared corner) the tribal people have a whole room to themselves. On the walls there are clumsy wooden carvings - Government-approved tribal art, with signs that say 'Tribal Art'. In the centre, there is a life-sized thatched hut with the door open. The pot's on the fire, the dog is asleep on the floor and all's well with the world. Outside, to welcome you, are Mr. and Mrs. Tribal. A lumpy, papier mache couple, smiling.

Smiling. They're not even permitted the grace of rage. That's what I can't get over.

Oh, but have I got it wrong? What if they're smiling voluntarily, bursting with National Pride? Brimming with the joy of having sacrificed their lives to bring drinking water to thirsty millions in Gujarat?

For twenty years now, the people of Gujarat have waited for the water they believe the Wonder Canal will bring them. For years the Government of Gujarat has invested 85 per cent of the State's irrigation budget into the Sardar Sarovar Projects. Every smaller, quicker, local, more feasible scheme has been set aside for the sake of this. Election after election has been contested and won on the 'water ticket'. Everyone's hopes are pinned to the Wonder Canal. Will she fulfil Gujarat's dreams?

From the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the Narmada flows through 180 km of rich lowland into the Arabian Sea in Bharuch. What the Wonder Canal does, more or less, is to re-route most of the river, turning it almost 90 degrees northward. It's a pretty drastic thing to do to a river. The Narmada estuary in Bharuch is one of the last known breeding places of the Hilsa, probably the hottest contender for India's favourite fish. The Stanley Dam wiped out Hilsa from the Cauvery River in South India, and Pakistan's Ghulam Mohammed Dam destroyed its spawning area on the Indus. Hilsa, like the salmon, is an anadromous fish - born in freshwater, migrating to the ocean as a smolt and returning to the river to spawn. The drastic reduction in water flow, the change in the chemistry of the water because of all the sediment trapped behind the dam, will radically alter the ecology of the estuary and modify the delicate balance of fresh water and sea water which is bound to affect the spawning. At present, the Narmada estuary produces 13,000 tonnes of Hilsa and freshwater prawn (which also breed in brackish water). Ten thousand fisher families depend on it for a living.

The Morse Committee was appalled to discover that no studies had been done of the downstream environment - no documentation of the riverine ecosystem, its seasonal changes, biological species or the pattern of how its resources are used. The dam-builders had no idea what the impact of the dam would be on the people and the environment downstream, let alone any ideas on what steps to take to mitigate it.

The government simply says that it will alleviate the loss of Hilsa fisheries by stocking the reservoir with hatchery-bred fish. (Who'll control the reservoir? Who'll grant the commercial fishing to its favourite paying customers?) The only hitch is that so far, scientists have not managed to breed Hilsa artificially. The rearing of Hilsa depends on getting spawn from wild adults, which will, in all likelihood be eliminated by the dam. Dams have either eliminated or endangered one-fifth of the world's freshwater fish.

So! Quiz question - where will the 40,000 fisher folk go?

E-mail your answers to the government_that_cares.com

At the risk of losing readers (I've been warned several times - 'How can you write about irrigation? Who the hell is interested?'), let me tell you what the Wonder Canal is - and what she's meant to achieve. Be interested, if you want to snatch your future back from the sweaty palms of the Iron Triangle.

Most rivers in India are monsoon-fed. About 80-85 per cent of the flow takes place during the rainy months - usually between June and September. The purpose of a dam, an irrigation dam, is to store monsoon water in its reservoir and then use it judiciously for the rest of the year, distributing it across dry land through a system of canals. The area of land irrigated by the canal network is called the command area. How will the command area, accustomed only to seasonal irrigation, its entire ecology designed for that single pulse of monsoon rain, react to being irrigated the whole year round? Perennial canal irrigation does to soil roughly what anabolic steroids do to the human body. Steroids can turn an ordinary athlete into an Olympic medal-winner, perennial irrigation can convert soil which produced only a single crop a year into soil that yields several crops a year. Lands on which farmers traditionally grew crops that don't need a great deal of water (maize, millet, barley, and a whole range of pulses) suddenly yield water-guzzling cash crops - cotton, rice, soya bean, and the biggest guzzler of all (like those finned 'fifties cars), sugar-cane. This completely alters traditional crop-patterns in the command area. People stop growing things that they can afford to eat, and start growing things that they can only afford to sell. By linking themselves to the 'market' they lose control over their lives.

Unfortunately, ecologically, this is a poisonous payoff. Even if the markets hold out, the soil doesn't. Over time it becomes too poor to support the extra demands made on it. Gradually, in the way the steroid-using athlete becomes an invalid, the soil becomes depleted and degraded, the agricultural yields begin to wind down. In India, land irrigated by well water is now almost twice as productive as land irrigated by canals. Certain kinds of soil are less suitable for perennial irrigation than others. Perennial canal irrigation raises the level of the water-table. As the water moves up through the soil, it absorbs salts. Saline water is drawn to the surface by capillary action, and the land becomes water-logged. The 'logged' water (to coin a phrase) is then breathed into the atmosphere by plants, causing an even greater concentration of salts in the soil. When the concentration of salts in the soil reaches one per cent, that soil becomes toxic to plant life. This is what's called salinization.

A study by the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University says that one-fifth of the world's irrigated land is salt-affected.

By the mid-80s, 25 million of the 37 million hectares under irrigation in Pakistan were estimated to be either salinized or water-logged or both. In India the estimates vary between 6 and 10 million hectares. According to 'secret' government studies, more than 52 per cent of the Sardar Sarovar command area is prone to water-logging and salinization.

And that's not the end of the bad news.

The 460-kilometre-long, concrete-lined Sardar Sarovar Wonder Canal and its 75,000-kilometre network of branch canals and sub-branch canals is designed to irrigate a total of two million hectares of land spread over 12 districts. The districts of Kutch and Saurashtra (the billboards of Gujarat's Thirst campaign) are at the very tail end of this network.

The system of canals superimposes an arbitrary concrete grid on the existing pattern of natural drainage in the command area. It's a little like re-organising the pattern of reticulate veins on the surface of a leaf. When a canal cuts across the path of a natural drain, it blocks the natural flow of the seasonal water and leads to water-logging. The engineering solution to this is to map the pattern of natural drainage in the area and replace it with an alternate, artificial drainage system that is built in conjunction with the canals. The problem, as you can imagine, is that doing this is enormously expensive. The cost of drainage is not included as part of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. It usually isn't, in most irrigation projects.

David Hopper, the World Bank's vice-president for South Asia, has admitted that the Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation projects in South Asia because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are not economically viable. It costs five times as much to provide adequate drainage as it does to irrigate the same amount of land. The Bank's solution to the problem is to put in the irrigation system and wait for salinity and water-logging to set in. When all the money's spent, and the land is devastated, and the people are in despair, who should pop by? Why, the friendly neighbourhood Banker! And what's that bulge in his pocket? Could it be a loan for a Drainage Project?

In Pakistan the World Bank financed the Tarbela (1977) and Mangla Dam (1967) Projects on the Indus. The command areas are water-logged. Now The Bank has given Pakistan a 785-million-dollar loan for a drainage project. In India, in Punjab and Haryana it's doing the same.

Irrigation without drainage is like having a system of arteries and no veins. Pretty damn pointless.

Since the World Bank stepped back from the Sardar Sarovar Projects, it's a little unclear where the money for the drainage is going to come from. This hasn't deterred the Government from going ahead with the Canal work. The result is that even before the dam is ready, before the Wonder Canal has been commissioned, before a single drop of irrigation water has been delivered, water-logging has set in. Among the worst affected areas are the resettlement colonies.

There is a difference between the planners of the Sardar Sarovar irrigation scheme and the planners of previous projects. At least they acknowledge that water-logging and salinization are real problems and need to be addressed.

Their solutions, however, are corny enough to send a Hoolock Gibbon to a hooting hospital.

They plan to have a series of electronic groundwater sensors placed in every 100 square kilometres of the command area. (That works out to about 1,800 ground sensors.) These will be linked to a central computer which will analyse the data and send out commands to the canal heads to stop water flowing into areas that show signs of water-logging. A network of 'Only-irrigation', 'Only-drainage' and 'Irrigation-cum drainage' tube-wells will be sunk, and electronically synchronised by the central computer. The saline water will be pumped out, mixed with mathematically computed quantities of freshwater and re-circulated into a network of surface and sub-surface drains (for which more land will be acquired). To achieve the irrigation efficiency that they claim they'll achieve, according to a study done by Dr. Rahul Ram for Kalpavriksh, 82 per cent of the water that goes into the Wonder Canal network will have to be pumped out again!

They've never implemented an electronic irrigation scheme before, not even as a pilot project. It hasn't occurred to them to experiment with some already degraded land, just to see if it works. No, they'll use our money to install it over the whole of the two million hectares and then see if it works. What if it doesn't? If it doesn't, it won't matter to the planners. They'll still draw the same salaries. They'll still get their pension and their gratuity and whatever else you get when you retire from a career of inflicting mayhem on a people.

How can it possibly work? It's like sending in a rocket scientist to milk a troublesome cow. How can they manage a gigantic electronic irrigation system when they can't even line the walls of the canals without having them collapse and cause untold damage to crops and people?

When they can't even prevent the Big Dam itself from breaking off in bits when it rains?

To quote from one of their own studies, "The design, the implementation and management of the integration of groundwater and surface water in the above circumstance is complex."

Agreed. To say the least. Their recommendation of how to deal with the complexity:

"It will only be possible to implement such a system if all groundwater and surface water supplies are managed by a single authority."

Aha!

It's beginning to make sense now. Who will own the water? The Single Authority. Who will sell the water? The Single Authority. Who will profit from the sales? The Single Authority. The Single Authority has a scheme whereby it will sell water by the litre, not to individuals but to farmers' co-operatives (which don't exist just yet, but no doubt the Single Authority can create co-operatives and force farmers to co-operate?) Computer water, unlike ordinary river water, is expensive. Only those who can afford it will get it.

Gradually, small farmers will get edged out by big farmers, and the whole cycle of uprootment will begin all over again.

The Single Authority, because it owns the computer water, will also decide who will grow what. It says that farmers getting computer water will not be allowed to grow sugarcane because they'll use up the share of the thirsty millions at the tail end of the canal. But the Single Authority has already given licences to ten large sugar mills right near the head of the canal. On an earlier occasion, the Single Authority said that only 30 per cent of the command area of the Ukai Dam would be used for sugarcane. But sugarcane grows on 75 per cent of it (and 30 per cent is water-logged). In Maharashtra, thanks to a different branch of the Single Authority, the politically powerful sugar-lobby that occupies one-tenth of the state's irrigated land uses half the state's irrigation water.

In addition to the sugar growers, the Single Authority has recently announced a scheme that envisages a series of five-star hotels, golf-courses and water parks that will come up along the Wonder Canal. What earthly reason could possibly justify this?

The Single Authority says it's the only way to raise money to complete the project!

I really worry about those millions of good people in Kutch and Saurashtra.

Will the water ever reach them?

First of all, we know that there's a lot less water in the river than the Single Authority claims there is.

Second of all, in the absence of the Narmada Sagar Dam, the irrigation benefits of the Sardar Sarovar drop by a further 17-30 per cent.

Third of all, the irrigation efficiency of the Wonder Canal (the actual amount of water delivered by the system) has been arbitrarily fixed at 60 per cent. The highest irrigation efficiency in India, taking into account system leaks and surface evaporation, is 35 per cent. This means it's likely that only half of the Command Area will be irrigated. Which half? The first half.

Fourth, to get to Kutch and Saurashtra, the Wonder Canal has to negotiate its way past the ten sugar mills, the golf-courses, the five-star hotels, the water parks and the cash-crop growing, politically powerful, Patel-rich districts of Baroda, Kheda, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Mehsana. (Already, in complete contravention of its own directives, the Single Authority has allotted the city of Baroda a sizeable quantity of water. When Baroda gets, can Ahmedabad be left behind? The political clout of powerful urban centres in Gujarat will ensure that they get their share.)

Fifth, even in the (one hundred per cent) unlikely event that water gets there, it has to be piped and distributed to those eight thousand waiting villages.

It's worth knowing that of the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas. This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometres of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps and treatment plants that would be needed to provide drinking water to scattered rural populations is prohibitive. Nobody builds Big Dams to provide drinking water to rural people. Nobody can afford to.

When the Morse Committee first arrived in Gujarat they were impressed by the Gujarat Government's commitment to taking drinking water to such distant, rural outposts. They asked to see the detailed drinking water plans.

There weren't any. (There still aren't any.)

They asked if any costs had been worked out. "A few thousand crores," was the breezy answer. A billion dollars is an expert's calculated guess. It's not included as part of the project cost. So where is the money going to come from?

Never mind. Jus' askin'.

It's interesting that the Farakka Barrage that diverts water from the Ganga to Calcutta Port has reduced the drinking water availability for 40 million people who live downstream in Bangladesh.

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take water away from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to bring water to 40 million people.

Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?

The last person I met in the valley was Bhaiji Bhai. He is a Tadvi tribal from Undava, one of the first villages where the government began to acquire land for the Wonder Canal and its 75,000 kilometre network. Bhaiji Bhai lost seventeen of his nineteen acres to the Wonder Canal. It crashes through his land, 700 feet wide including its walkways and steep, sloping embankments, like a velodrome for giant bicyclists.

The Canal network affects more than two hundred thousand families. People have lost wells and trees, people have had their houses separated from their farms by the canal, forcing them to walk two or three kilometres to the nearest bridge and then two or three kilometres back along the other side. Twenty-three thousand families, let's say a hundred thousand people, will be, like Bhaiji Bhai, seriously affected. They don't count as 'Project-affected' and are not entitled to rehabilitation.

Like his neighbours in Kevadia Colony, Bhaiji Bhai became a pauper overnight.

Bhaiji Bhai and his people, forced to smile for photographs on government calendars. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, denied the grace of rage. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, squashed like bugs by this country they're supposed to call their own.

It was late evening when I arrived at his house. We sat down on the floor and drank over-sweet tea in the dying light. As he spoke, a memory stirred in me, a sense of deja vu. I couldn't imagine why. I knew I hadn't met him before. Then I realised what it was. I didn't recognise him, but I remembered his story. I'd seen him in an old documentary film, shot more than ten years ago, in the valley. He was frailer now, his beard softened with age. But his story hadn't aged. It was still young and full of passion. It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it. I could tell he had told it over and over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck. Or God.

Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry? When will you stop waiting? When will you say `That's enough!' and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be> When will you show us the whole of your resonant, terrifying, invincible strength?

When will you break the faith? Will you break the faith? Or will you let it break you?

* * *

To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers who doesn't. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easliy you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewher else. You use caprice to fracture a people's faith in the ancient things - earth, forest, water, air. Once that's done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you're all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There's no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And Powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.

This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic-sounding constitutions. It's wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, no despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilisation has had access to weapons like these.

Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb - almost without our knowing it, we are being broken.

Big Dams are to a Nation's 'Development' what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link - the understanding - between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

Can we unscramble it?

Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada Valley.

This July will bring the last monsoon of the Twentieth Century. The ragged army in the Narmada Valley has declared that it will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir rise to claim its lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, whether you want it or you don't, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that's being paid for it. That you have the courage to watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.

Our dues. Our books. Not theirs.

Be there.

ARUNDHATI ROY
April 1999

Brutality smeared in peanut butter : Why America must stop the war now. By Arundhati Roy

2007-11-17T09:57:00.011-08:00

'Brutality smeared in peanut butter'

Why America must stop the war now. By Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy
Guardian Unlimited

Tuesday October 23, 2001

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday October 7 2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of cruise missiles, stealth bombers, tomahawks, "bunker-busting" missiles and Mark 82 high drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamouring for new video games.

The UN, reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn't even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, "We will behave multilaterally when we can, and unilaterally when we must.") The "evidence" against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the "coalition".

After conferring, they announced that it didn¹t matter whether or not the "evidence" would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.

Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's resistance movements - or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world.

Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed.

Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments.

Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond - they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.

There is no easy way out of the spiralling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever.

Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war - these words have taken on new meaning.

Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said: "We're a peaceful nation." America¹s favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people."

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire."

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

Certainly it does not tire - this, the most free nation in the world.

What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things.

Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate usually in the service of America¹s real religion, the "free market". So when the US government christens a war "Operation Infinite Justice", or "Operation Enduring Freedom", we in the third world feel more than a tremor of fear.

Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.

The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin and landmines in the backwash of the cold war. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war.

Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45bn (£30bn) worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society.

Young boys many of them orphans - who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise women, they don't seem to know what else to do with them.

Years of war has stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. Now they've turned their monstrosity on their own people.

They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down around them.

With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilisation - our art, our music, our literature - lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they will all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about good v evil or Islam v Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural.

Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It¹s like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets.

"First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second, we're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is ..." This was greeted with gales of laughter in the briefing room.

By the third day of the strikes, the US defence department boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan" (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan's planes?)

On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance - the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the international coalition's newest friend - is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record is not very different from the Taliban's. But for now, because it's inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, "acceptable" leader of the alliance, Ahmed Shah Masud, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.

Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5% of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the coalition's help and "air cover", it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all.

Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.

Among the global powers, there is talk of "putting in a representative government". Or, on the other hand, of "restoring" the kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year old former king Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That's the way the game goes - support Saddam Hussein, then "take him out"; finance the mojahedin, then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to "put in" a representative government? Can you place an order for democracy - with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)

Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5m, according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not both.

As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 500,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for half a million people out of the several million in dire need of food.

Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile.

First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.

Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim dietary law (!) Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.

After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean, the US government¹s attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.

Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kebabs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudi Guiliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10m from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury that only the rich are entitled to?

Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the box once you've let them out. For every "terrorist" or his "supporter" that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.

Where will it all lead?

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what "terrorism" is. One country's terrorist is too often another¹s freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world's deep-seated ambivalence towards violence.

Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world.

The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained and armed the mojahedin who, in the 80s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Today, Pakistan - America's ally in this new war - sponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as "freedom-fighters", India calls them "terrorists". India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka - the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism.

(Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989.)

It is important for governments and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people - including their own.

People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text - from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita - can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.

This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be.

But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us?

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many emails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence - small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India's nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom - that precious, precious thing - will be the first casualty. It's already hurt and haemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People's Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested.

The rightwing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Islamic Students Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti- terrorist Act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, have more or less rolled over, allowing themselves to be tickled on the stomach with press handouts from military men and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted, "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money's worth.

Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the coalition¹s weapons manufacturers. It wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group - described by the Industry Standard as "the world's largest private equity firm", with $13bn under management.

Carlyle invests in the defence sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defence secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A Baker III, George Soros and Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel - says that former president George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets.

He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make "presentations" to potential government-clients.

Ho hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family.

Then there's that other branch of traditional family business - oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the north-west of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney - then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry - said, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight." True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative "emerging markets" in south and south-east Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs travelled to America and even met US state department officials and Unocal executives in Houston. At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now.

Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration.

Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry's big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defence deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the "clash of civilisations" and the "good v evil" discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been - a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders - have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty?

Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear - without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?

Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy

2007-11-17T09:57:00.010-08:00

Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on September 21, 2004, Printed on November 17, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/19936/

Over the last few years Arundhati Roy has become a powerful and important global citizen writing and speaking out against the excesses of corporate globalization, privatization of essential resources, and United States imperialism. Naomi Klein says "with her writing and her actions, Roy has placed herself in opposition to anyone who treats people as collateral damage – of a mega-dam, a terrorist attack, or a military invasion," and Roy has described herself as "a black woman from India speaking about America to an American audience."

Roy was catapulted to fame in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, "The God of Small Things." She is trained as an architect, worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays for two films. In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam project, but received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.

Roy has also become known internationally for her literate and powerful political essays in books like "Power Politics," "War Talk," "The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile" (interviews with David Barsamian), and her latest, "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire."

Terrence McNally: You are now both a writer and an activist. How did your work and your role in the world evolve?

Arundhati Roy: I usually shy away from defining myself as one thing or another, because I always find that limiting, and it doesn't really matter. People look at it from the outside, and they see first I studied architecture and then I worked at cinema and then I wrote a novel and now I write political essays. It could seem as though I'm really doing very different things, but in fact, right from the time that I was studying architecture or even earlier, this political way of looking at the world began. These are just each a means of expressing that politics differently. The essence of what one is looking at is deeply political, but how one chooses to express that can change – if for no other reason than that one wants to keep experimenting and not bore oneself to death, you know.

I understand. When you found yourself writing essays and speaking in front of thousands and on the air, people asking you less about literature than about the world situation – how has that transition occurred and what does it say to you?

Actually, you know, I did write non-fictional essays before I wrote "The God Of Small Things." It's just that I wasn't that well-known a person. When people define me as a writer and an activist, I say that sounds like a "sofa-cum-bed" or something. In fact, isn't literature supposed to be placed at the heart of the world? What you do and what you look at and what you write about, whether it's personal or social or political, whether it's about an insane aunt or whether it's about the invasion of a country – I don't think you can avoid looking at it as a comment on society and on yourself... more on your self.

No writer can dodge the glare of literature. Most people see it as something I'm sacrificing in order to do something else, but I don't see it that way. I'm a pretty instinctive person and I know that when I'm ready to write another novel, I will write it. I'm not suffering through this process of writing non-fiction, even though the act of writing fiction is a more joyful act than these essays which address very searing situations. You do feel that they're wrenched out of you in some way, but at the same time they're both writing and I don't think I've ever not been a writer. That is my medium and that's what I do. I'm not endorsing any action or any kind of politics. I'm not a football star that's endorsing the fact that we shouldn't cut down the rainforest or something. I'm not external to myself in this. I'm doing what I do.

You're writing your truth...

I just keep doing what I think I do best.

Let me shift things a bit. When I saw you speak at UCLA a year ago, I understood you to say that events like the World Social Forum are valuable as rallies, but that the current situation demands a new wave of civil disobedience to non-violently confront and damage the momentum of global corporate domination. Millions all over the world marched against Bush's invasion of Iraq, and it didn't even seem to slow him down. What do people do with that kind of reality? And what do you foresee that will make a difference?

I would l be surprised if the millions who marched against the war in Iraq actually expected that the march could stop the war. I don't see that as something that was likely or possible, but I think that that march was really important. It expressed the fact that millions of people on every continent were against the war, and it indicated that to those governments who decided to go ahead and invade Iraq anyway. Obviously governments have learned to wait out these demonstrations. Resistance movements, on the other hand, have been hijacked in a way by their need to perform for the media. The theatrical aspect of civil disobedience, which is a very important aspect, has actually severed itself from the roots of real civil disobedience. So we've got to find those roots again, and we have to find the means by which we can actually get a foothold into this smooth cliff, this military industrial complex that is the engine of empire.

When non-violent resistance is shut down by governments, then by default, that act privileges violence. It's as important for governments to show themselves to be open to non-violent dissent as it is for people to find ways of being effective using the techniques of non-violent resistance. It isn't something that's making a lot of headway now. My feeling is that the most important things to strike at are those corporations who have profited from the destruction of Iraq. The fact that those same corporations have operations across the world gives people a foothold to actually go in and shut them down. And it's very important to do that; otherwise people keep saying something but nothing actually happens.

There are no consequences.

Then the only people who are actually engaging the forces of empire are the resistance movement in Iraq or the people in Palestine. And because they are not pristine and secular and feminist and democratic and perfect, all of us curl up in moral distaste. We have to find a way of becoming the resistance or we have to find a way of supporting whatever resistance there is.

I want to return to your idea of creating consequences...the idea of making those corporations pay. Bechtel and Halliburton keep themselves at arm's length from consumers. They like dealing directly with governments. How would you see a boycott against them playing out?

There's a very interesting division between the first world consumer society and third world countries regarding companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. In terms of actually boycotting consumer products, that's not so much an issue for poor countries because most people can't afford those products anyway.

In Latin America, Asia, Africa, India, these companies are involved in the privatization of essential infrastructure, which affects the lives of millions of people. Bechtel was the company that was chased out of Cochabamba by the movement against the privatization of water in Bolivia. Bechtel is a partner with Enron, which signed the most bizarre contract in history with the Indian government. It might break down differently in the industrialized world than in the third world. How those actions are coordinated requires a lot of talk among activists and organizations.

So, in other words, we connect some of those dots, we connect ourselves, and that leads to action.

What do you believe Americans of conscience can do? How do we make a difference in a democracy in which the media and the people themselves seem to conspire to lower the intelligence of the public? In which people feel good electing charming leaders who do not serve their interests?

Even though I know it isn't the majority position in America right now, coming from the outside, I do have a lot of respect for the quality of the dissent that I have seen in America. To see that march against the Republican Convention was absolutely spectacular.

On the run-up to the march, the papers were full of these stupid stories about aging anarchists who had penetrated the system and were going to be violent, and about how New Yorkers had all left town. This whole cloud of fear was constructed. The march itself happened, and day after day after day spontaneous protests took place across the city, and there wasn't any violence. The newspapers said this was only because of the extraordinary restraint of the police. It's almost as if you're goading people into being violent.

Yes.

...I think the more absurd the corporate media gets, the more distorted Fox News gets, we have to find ways of making independent media a forum that is heard and listened to. There is good independent media here, though I suppose it's quite marginal because we're dealing with a very indoctrinated population.

Given the amount of propaganda people are subjected to, that a half a million people will turn out on the street tells me that something is happening. That's thanks to this kind of under-the-surface drumbeat of the independent media of newspapers and radio stations...

...and the internet.

Exactly. I'm completely flummoxed sometimes. Since I don't come to America often, I can't believe that people even know who I am. I'm not published in any mainstream American paper, but obviously there are listeners and readers and there's an audience that's getting bigger, and that is wonderful.

One of the tragedies for me is that all the hopes and efforts of those who've opposed the war, whether in protests or in support of Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich, finally depend for their expression on the idiosyncratic decisions of one man and his ten advisors.

But it cannot be idiosyncratic. That's what I find very frightening. Given that the Democratic party must have some kind of thermometer by which they judge the popular temperature, how is it that they are not being forced to take a position against the war? They seem so terrified of appearing weak or being mocked for not being strong enough on America's security.

It's the same thing in India. Even if it wanted to – and I don't know if it wants to – the Congress party seems terrified of taking a proper position on Kashmir, because it will always be outdone by the right. So everything just keeps drifting towards the right. That's the frightening thing about this so-called game of democracy.

Let me ask a big question, and here I call on you as a storyteller. If you could look back from the year 2020 or 2025, do you sense that humanity is capable of turning things around? And again looking back – if that happened, how did we do it? What were the turning points?

I don't know. I would hate to pretend that I have a cogent answer to that. To me, I think there are three things that would make a big difference.

One is if we can somehow break the hegemony of the mass media, and right now we're very far from that place. It won't happen through any direct confrontation, but it will break itself by being so ridiculous and so propagandistic that it will cease to be relevant in some ways. We will end up using its energies against itself. So that when we read the mainstream press, we will not understand from it what they want us to understand. We will read the New York Times or the Economist, but the message we get will not be the message they want us to get. That is happening now, but it has to happen on a much larger scale.

The second major issue is the process of corporate globalization. I think people haven't yet understood the extent of deprivation and the extent of desperation that is being created by feeding this capitalist machine.

That's where you end up saying that "peace is war" – that for millions in this world even a state of peace is a state of war for survival.

Exactly, and no amount of full spectrum dominance and no amount of nuclear weapons and no amount of accumulation of capital is really going to match the fury and the despair of the dispossessed.

Obviously there are two paths that humanity can choose to take. One is to increase inequality and then bank on weapons to maintain that, which is the project of the New American Century, and the project of any person who bids to be president of this country.

I was at the Republican convention, and I was appalled by how blatantly this is put forward – that the US must be stronger and richer and better than anyone else and than ever before.

Unfortunately the last issue – and maybe the most important – is that empires have always risen and fallen because of the physics of power, but they never had nuclear weapons. That danger looms over all of us, and has for so long that we are inured to it.

So you feel that, if we are to turn things around, those are the three challenges we must confront?

Yes, but finally you have to understand that more important than anything else is justice. The way we can turn the world around is if we are at least moving on a path toward justice. Maybe it can never be achieved in any pristine form. Right now, the powerful, and I don't just mean the powerful in America, but the coalition of the powerful elites across the world are making it very clear that they are not even interested in justice.

One of the great abuses of language that has happened in this country is that justice out of the mouth of a politician almost always means revenge. Always justice against an enemy, never justice for all.

Yes. What means anything anymore? Everything means something else. Language has been taken away and slaughtered.

Thank you Arundhati Roy. Keep up the good work.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create 'a world that just might work.'

Arundhati Roy Blog: Arundhati's Book, Article, Speech, Video

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Enough Rope, with Andrew Denton: Arundhati Roy (10/18/2004)

Enough Rope, with Andrew Denton Episodes - 18 October 2004

The algebra of infinite justice (By Arundhati Roy)

THE GREATER COMMON GOOD (By ARUNDHATI ROY)

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Brutality smeared in peanut butter : Why America must stop the war now. By Arundhati Roy

Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy

Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet Posted on September 21, 2004, Printed on November 17, 2007 http://www.alternet.org/story/19936/

Enough Rope, with Andrew Denton
Episodes - 18 October 2004

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on September 21, 2004, Printed on November 17, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/19936/