[Reader-list] Listening To Grasshoppers [Arundhati Roy]

[Nitesh Bhatnagar]

Listening To Grasshoppers
Genocide, Denial And Celebration

It's an old human habit, genocide is. It's a search for lebensraum,
project of Union and Progress.

by ARUNDHATI ROY
Magazine| Feb 04, 2008
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080204&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1


I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to
come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did,
how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year
ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked
with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this
city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant
Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half
million plus one".*

[*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were
systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in
Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian
minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in
Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]

I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked
beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of
Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the
story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in
1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her
village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now
Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they
knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were
right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was
ready for harvesting.

"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says.
"They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your
ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he
went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his
clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he
came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his
arms...so he die in jail.

And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and
they shooted, killed every one of them."

Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them
perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.

This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that
is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.

I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to
fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the
forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is
what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours,
and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their
beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me
young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a
rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their
solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he
killed Hrant.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my
battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds
of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles
are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though.
While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I
really don't know which is worse.

In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim
community in 2002.I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping
with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the
burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to
death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000
Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers,
organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government
and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and
burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and
mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were
driven from their homes.

Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage
heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no
healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and
economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have
been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now
considered 'normal'. To seal the 'normality', in 2004, both Ratan Tata
and Mukesh Ambani, India's leading industrialists, publicly pronounced
Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital.

The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat,
the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati
pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used
twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have
cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy.
The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the
BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.

As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people
killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into
millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India.
(In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of
Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress
Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate
and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the
grasshoppers have landed in mainland India.

It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in
the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is
thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third
Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coinedby Raphael
Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after
the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:

    "Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within
the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group."



Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political
dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest
mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank
Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of
Genocide, is more apt.Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass
killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a
group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the
perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide would include, for example,
the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million)
Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60
million), Mao in China (70 million).

All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude
evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more
honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its
victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must
first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as
sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to
society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot
Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:

    Those that escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed
to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly
dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed
about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying
in the fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible
was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete
sacrifice....



And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of
the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the
sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

    We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on
fire...hacked, burned, set on fire...we believe in setting them on
fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid
of it.... I have just one last wish...let me be sentenced to death...I
don't care if I'm hanged...just give me two days before my hanging and
I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs
of these people stay...I will finish them off...let a few more of them
die...at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.



I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra
Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He
continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime
he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial.

Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old,
frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as
an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th
century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy
and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people
in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments
began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed.
"Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton,
author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the
murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct
consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Delhi, 1984: Congress contribution to India's genocide history

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market,
official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a
multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to
with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not
enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining,
that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United
Nations.The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for
natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain
old economic and military might.

In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons
as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in
racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering
or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium),
permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a
country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments
adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed
whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it
will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that
reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the
Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million
Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide
(which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for
Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US
ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill
Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?

Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in
the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number
One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day
Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the
beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians,
about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man
whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus
to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious
liberal arts college named after him).

In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were
kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during
transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of
the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge
that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted,
was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the
bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which
killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts
of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn't intend
to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the
concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US
government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in
100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its
invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions
of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of
its population).

None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal
acts."The question is," says Robert MacNamara—whose career graph took
him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to
being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World
Bank—now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in
his comfortable country, "the question is, how much evil do you have
to do in order to do good?"

Could there be a more perfect illustration of Robert Jay Lifton's
point that the denial of genocide invites more genocide?

And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?)
What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one
of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in
the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation
of water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates Palestinian people
from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their
children's schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a
fishbowl, genocide in slow motion—meant especially to illustrate that
section of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says that
genocide is any act that is designed to "deliberately inflict on the
group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or part".

The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an
anomaly, a glitch in the human system. It's a habit as old, as
persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and
agriculture.

Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been
an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously
called Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the
German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he
thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand
its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This
impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant
species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give
way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.

The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but
Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier,
when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took
Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans
exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest
Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial
expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th
century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of
Tasmania, and of most of Australia.

Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was
Hitler's quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved
up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through
Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and
western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions.
Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they
had to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis'
racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of
insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic
determinism well marinated in age-old racism, very much in keeping
with European tradition of the time.

It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the
Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for
Union & Progress.'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and
'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates
of genocide.

Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about
whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is
also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being
celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy,
possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere
suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use
of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the
future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own
publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their
chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and
kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.


Advani's chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched

In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the
killing and the dying has already begun.

It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the
Government of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned
Movement and signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often
referring to itself as the 'natural ally' of Israel and the United
States. (They have at least this one thing in common—all three are
engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir,
Israel in Palestine, the US in Iraq.)

Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the
BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's
version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are
Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during
elections, they stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to
gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist
Party of India (Marxist).

The Union project offers Hindu Nationalism (which seeks to unite the
Hindu vote, vital you will admit, for a great democracy like India).
The Progress project aims at a 10 per cent annual growth rate. Both
these projects are encrypted with genocidal potential.

The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the
ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias,
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in
1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito
Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian
fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are
some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S.
Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

    Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan,
right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly
fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been
awakening.



Then:

    In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu
Nation.... All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause,
or, to take a charitable view, idiots....

    The foreign races in Hindustan...may stay in the country, wholly
subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen's
rights.



And again:

    To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the
world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews.Race
pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us
in Hindustan to learn and profit by.



(How do you combat this kind of organised hatred? Certainly not with
goofy preachings of secular love.)

By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of
seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They
include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the
former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K.
Advani, and, of course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister,
Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the
police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the
administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva—the RSS
ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are
permanent members of government machinery.

But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades
of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level
of society, something that no other organisation can claim.

The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya
Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student
wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing
(Swadeshi Jagaran Manch).

Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational
organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational
institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000
teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working
with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya
Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research
Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya),
language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva
Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National
Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran
Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and
other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit
Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar
Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration
(Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda
Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The
list goes on and on...

On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a
gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri
Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord
Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a
resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm
sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In
1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of
Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and
bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament.
(It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked
in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998,
the BJP was in power at the Centre. Its first act in office was to
conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and
corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu Bomb.
Hindutva had transcended petty party politics.

In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat
genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the
genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He
ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the
killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of
course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in
the dock.

Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.India has
a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill
volumes with the details.

In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply
through proper channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of
several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed
as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused.
Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile
to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found
that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would
record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of
the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of
their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could
not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder.

Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who had made the
mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was
publicly butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow Congressman.) In the
words of a man who took part in the savagery:

    Five people held him, then someone struck him with a
sword...chopped off his hand, then his legs...then everything
else...after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd
piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive.



The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to
visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70
people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi
was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's
Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in
place.

The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises, but
eventually put the matter into cold storage. The Congress and the
Communist parties made a great deal of noise, but did nothing.

In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel
at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted
how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior
politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of
this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the
news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes.
The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but
suspicion about its timing. Most people believed that the expose would
help Modi win the elections again. Some even believed, quite
outlandishly, that he had engineered the sting. He did win the
elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. A
committee all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring
supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The
fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little
fascists. These are the joys of democracy. Who in Nazi Germany would
have dared to put on a Hitler mask?


The Dehumanised: Dalit massacre, Jehanabad, 1997

Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in
different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.

To commit genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar of the Armenian
genocide, you have to marginalise a sub-group for a long time. This
criterion has been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been
systematically marginalised and have now joined the Adivasis and
Dalits, who have not just been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste
Hindu society and its scriptures, for years, for centuries. (There was
a time when they were dehumanised in order to be put to work doing
things that caste Hindus would not do.Now, with technology, even that
labour is becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's work involves setting
Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis against Dalits.

While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its
doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The
new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of
the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private
corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and
growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists
for the new dispensation.

The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge,
no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At
the heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the
Supreme Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power,
issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the
interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of
forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide—a
prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to criticise the court is a criminal
offence, punishable by imprisonment).

Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful
secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle
and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the
stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This
Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically
sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films,
television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and
intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all
joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own
environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own
class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for
example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels
Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower
Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils
(Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its
own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group
recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV
advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face
Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an
imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new
offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to
be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready
to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium
roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting 'India!
India!'

But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs
its lebensraum. Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The
Sky Citizens look towards the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on
the bauxite mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and
Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits)
sitting on prime land, which really ought to be a chemical hub. They
see thousands of acres of farm land, and think, these really ought to
be Special Economic Zones for our industries; they see the rich fields
of Singur and know this really ought to be a car factory for the
People's Car. They think: that's our bauxite, our iron ore, our
uranium. What are those people doing on our land? What's our water
doing in their rivers? What's our timber doing in their trees?

If you look at a map of India's forests, its mineral wealth and the
homelands of the Adivasi people, you'll see that they're stacked up
over each other.So, in reality, those who we call poor are the truly
wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they
see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a
phrase for them—überzahligen Essern, superfluous eaters.

The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely
observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European
colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation
doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by
bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or
shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up
a fight. Because then they become Terrorists.) Historically, the most
efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their
homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water.
Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in
far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats
and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the
Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other
children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their
own when food supply to the reserves was cut off."

The historian Mike Davis says that between 12 million and 29 million
people starved to death in India in the great famine between 1876 and
1892, while Britain continued to export food and raw material from
India. In a democracy, Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have
Famine. So in place of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great
Malnutrition. (India hosts 57 million—more than a third—of the world's
undernourished children.)


Nandigram 2007: Even the CPI(M) has its own armed militia

With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest
population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone
have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being
enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by
government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even
the CPI(M) had its own armed militia.) The displaced are being herded
into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a
means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.

In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its
wealth of iron ore, there's a different technique. In the name of
fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly
evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved into police camps. The
government is arming some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a
'people's militia'. While the poorest fight the poorest, in conditions
that approach civil war, the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly
negotiating for the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can we
establish a connection? We wouldn't dream of it. Even though the Salwa
Judum was announced a day after the Memorandum of Understanding
between the Tata Group and the government was signed.

It's not surprising that very little of this account of events makes
it into the version of the New India currently on the market. That's
because what is on sale is another form of denial—the creation of what
Robert Jay Lifton calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe,
systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable to
flawed individuals, and a more 'balanced' happier world is presented
in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and
Progress are set off against each other, a liberal-secular critique of
the Union project being used to legitimise the depredations of the
Progress project. Those at the top of the food chain, those who have
no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to be the
manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".Their job is to patrol the
border, diffuse rage, delegitimise anger, and broker a ceasefire.

Consider the response of Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra
Modi. "I don't know him personally...I have no opinion...," he says.
"Personally they have never been unkind to me." Ramachandra Guha,
liberal historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, a
corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book—as well as in a series
of highly publicised interviews—that the Gujarat government is not
really fascist, and the genocide was just an aberration that has
corrected itself after elections.

Editors and commentators in the 'secular' national press, having got
over their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's
administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by.
The editor of The Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass murderer,
but he's our mass murderer", and went on to air his dilemmas about how
to deal with a mass murderer who is also a "good" chief minister.

In this 'counterfeit' version of India, in the realm of culture, in
the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the
poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in
advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries
of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by
NGOs.)

Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool room in which four
beautiful young girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were
lounging, introducing their puppies to one another. One of them turned
to me and said, "I was on holiday with my family and I found an old
essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he
knew about what a bad time these Dalits and Adivasis were having,
being displaced and all.... I mean just being kicked out of their
homes 'n stuff like that? And you know, my brother's such a jerk, he
said they're the ones who are holding India back. They should be
exterminated. Can you imagine?"

The trouble is, I could. I can.

The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine
exterminating each other. They're probably not progressive enough.

That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, appearing in a
commercial for The Times of India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV
anchor introducing the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to
leave behind the "constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism
over pessimism.

"There are two Indias in this country," Amitabh Bachchan said, in his
famous baritone.

    One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and
live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently
showering upon us. The Other India is the leash.

    One India says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself."

    The Other India says, "Prove yourself first, and maybe then,
you'll have a chance."

    One India lives in the optimism of our hearts; the Other India
lurks in the scepticism of our minds.

    One India wants, the Other India hopes... One India leads, the
Other India follows.

    These conversions are on the rise.

    With each passing day, more and more people from the Other India
are coming over to this side. ...

    And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic,
new India is emerging.



And finally:

    Now in our 60th year as a free nation, the ride has brought us to
the edge of time's great precipice....

    And one India, a tiny little voice in the back of the head is
looking down at the ravine and hesitating. The Other India is looking
up at the sky and saying it's time to fly.



Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare.It tells us that the rich
don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They
can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because they are
choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want
over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's their
fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum
think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'.
They're already ghosts.

"Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert Jay Lifton says,
"genocide becomes easy, almost natural."

The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to
succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the
world's not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another
ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they
look back at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful
slogan: 'There Is No Alternative.'

They have watched the great Gandhian people's movements being reduced
and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger
strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million
Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have
given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the
Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of
Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go
on hunger strike when they're already starving. How they can boycott
foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can
refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.


Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India

People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what
the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing
that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land
criminalise the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful
activists are ogws—overground workers.) They know that appeals to
conscience, liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not
help them now. They know no international marches, no globalised
dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.

Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of
India's democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the
government's control. (At last count, it was supposed to be 25 per
cent). The battle stinks of death, it's by no means pretty. How can it
be when the helmsman of the army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost
of Chairman Mao himself? (The ray of hope is that many of the
footsoldiers don't know who he is. Or what he did. More Genocide
Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists fighting for a Better World?
Well... anything is better than annihilation.

The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the
"single largest internal security threat". There have even been
appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless
condemnation.

Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp
out the Naxals, it is called.

    This government is at last showing some sense in tackling
Naxalism. Less than a month ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked
state governments to "choke" Naxal infrastructure and "cripple" their
activities through a dedicated force to eliminate the "virus". It
signalled a realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out through
enforcement of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.



"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out".

Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that
faced with extermination, they have the right to fight back.By any
means necessary.

Perhaps they've been listening to the grasshoppers.



This is an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in
Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of
the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper,
Agos.