[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy on Brave New India

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

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 evacuatedand 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.