[Reader-list] Reading Roy by Nadeem Paracha(in Dawn)

[rashneek kher]

http://blog.dawn.com:91/dblog/2009/08/27/reading-roy/



Quite like Dr. Noam Chomsky, award-wining writer and activist, Arundhati
Roy, can be one of the most easily predictable intellectuals this side of
the post-Cold-War left.

And also, quite like Dr. Chomsky (and Naomi Klein), Roy too is fast becoming
the provider of the intellectual fodder that wily and loud post-9/11
advocates of 21st Century right-wing claptrap sumptuously feed upon.

In fact, it is due to this feeding frenzy by so-called anti-West
reactionaries (of assorted shapes and sizes) - who cleverly use leftist
critiques of the West to give some ‘intellectual weight’ to their otherwise
contemptuous spiels of racial, religious and political hatred - that is
gradually rendering people like Chomsky, Kalian and Roy somewhat ineffectual
in fully elaborating the otherwise progressive intent of their anti-West/US
narratives.

Now hijacked and drowned by the noises emitting from right-wing playmakers
within the post-9/11 anti-US populism, Roy and Co. have tended to sound
hyperbolic to keep the dwindling left in the race featuring assorted
celebrity-backed pomposity and demagoguism that is so spectacularly
unveiling itself on TV screens and in seminars.

It is interesting to note how the once sober, back-stage leftist
intellectuals whose critiques of capitalism and ‘American imperialism’ came
attached with well thought-out thesis, rationales and ideas for a new way,
have reduced themselves to continue dishing out reactive and irresponsible
sloganeering revolving around narratives that are largely unoriginal, and
worse of all, smacking of the kind of cynical vanity one usually expects
from reactionary TV personalities such as Shahid Masood, Zaid Hamid and
Harun Yahyah.

If such celebrity reactionaries can rightly be accused of exhibiting
intellectual dishonesty by unabashedly plagiarizing leftist critiques of the
West, and anti-secular narratives devised by early 20th Century Christian
Fundamentalists, then their leftist counterparts like Roy and Chomsky can be
equally blamed for failing to openly condemn those who are using their work
to forward a clearly reactionary agenda.

These are tricky times we live in; a time when the media can neither be
called liberal/leftist nor entirely conservative. Take the case of the
Pakistani electronic media’s darling, Imran Khan. Within a single sentence
he manages to sound like a dedicated Socialist, a Taliban sympathizer, and a
conscientious democrat without even batting an eyelid. In other words, just
like the media today, the great Khan is merely playing to a gallery of
jumbled up ideas that have been constructed by the media itself.

However, no matter how populist and passionate the animation behind such
left-meets-right jumbling, its bottom-line remains reactionary in essence.
The effect of this colourful ideological circus has absolutely nothing to do
with reformism or democracy as such, but rather, the effect is either pure
entertainment or worse, the insinuation of an unsound modern political
narrative within the psyche of the more impressionable and impulsive
viewers.

Coming back to Roy, it wasn’t really her terrific novel, ‘God of Small
Things,’ that turned her into a celebrity in Pakistan; rather, it is her
(albeit bold) stands on matters such as Kashmir and (albeit hackneyed)
understanding of ‘American colonial designs’ in the region that has made her
a darling of urban Pakistani drawing rooms.
Nevertheless, it is also true that Roy is also perhaps the most tolerated
non-Muslim Indian amongst the usual India/Hindu-baiting Islamists. No prizes
in guessing why.

Conscious of the intellectual and ideological dichotomy generated by the
acceptance that she receives from Pakistani leftist/liberal drawing-rooms
and in right-wing circles, Roy soon started to add an anti-Islamist
(particularly anti-Taliban), angle to her on-going narrative concerning
India, Pakistan and the United States.

But this angle soon falls flat (and in fact negates itself) at the wake of
her verbose ramblings about ‘American Imperialism,’ ‘Globalization’ et al.
Thus, the question arises: How exactly is all this beneficial to the
egalitarian and conscientious audience that Roy has in her mind? To them
this is not news.

 But to those liberals/leftists who are more concerned about the impact
religious extremism, bigotry and counter-democratic moves are having on
their respective societies, these ramblings become an irritant when they are
liberally quoted by their rightist nemeses.

If during the Cold War there were leftists who got stuck in the hey days of
the New Left in the 1960s - and consequently failed to counter the
resurgence of the right-wing from late-‘70s onwards - Roy increasingly
belongs to a generation of leftists who got embroiled in the post-Cold-War
anti-Globalization movements of the late 1990s. Her politics are still being
informed by the dictates and sentiments of these movements that culminated
with the anti-Globalization riots in Seattle in 1999 and then by the
publishing of Naomi Klein’s classic book of the era, ‘No Logo.’

Roy is still firmly entrenched in the 1990s (albeit with the spirit of the
archetypal 1960s’ radical), and like Chomsky, she too failed to note the
many elusive symptoms that are now clearly marking the fall of the
post-Cold-War ‘New-Right.’

What Roy seems not to realize (or clearly own up to), is the fact that the
New Right (‘neo-cons,’ etc.) and, for instance, it’s reaction, ‘Islamist
terrorism,’ are actually two sides of the same coin.

It is true that the whole paranoid spiel about the so-called ‘war on terror’
was a creation of American neo-conservatives to help them to continue
occupying the decision-making corridors of United States. The neo-cons had
looked to restoring the American pride that was lost in its unsuccessful war
against the Soviet-backed North Vietnam (1975).

They did this by using the Regan presidency (1980-88), and the media to
create a Soviet ‘bogey’ radically heightening the Soviet threat by more than
doubling the projected size of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and its
plans for world domination. This was done to force Reagan to take a more
militaristic stance against the Soviets.

The Soviet Union’s incompetence during the Afghan war and its eventual
collapse clearly stated the weakness of its economic and political systems,
and proved that the neo-cons’ exaggerated estimation of Soviet power had a
malicious intent. In fact, even had the US not intervened in the war, the
Soviets would still have been unable to hold on to Afghanistan. But the
neo-cons’ agenda insisted that the Reagan regime fatten autocratic regimes
like that of General Ziaul Haq in Pakistan and assorted Arab monarchies to
use them to heavily arm the so-called Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets.

After the collapse of the inflated Soviet bogey, the neo-cons lost power in
Washington, giving way to the moderate Bill Clinton years (1992-99).
However, by 2000 the neo-cons were back. They returned much stronger with
the arrival on the scene of George W. Bush, especially after the 9/11
attacks in 2001.

Though to a certain extent, the justification behind the war on terror was a
bogey called Islamic terrorism, ironically this war was also aided by
nihilistic Islamic fundamentalists like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Led by the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda is
basically a group of failed Islamic revolutionaries; a bunch of frustrated
Islamists who were deluded into believing that it was they who defeated the
Soviets and could now impose Islamic regimes wherever.

The truth is, it was the Soviet Union’s weak economy and worn-out political
structure and, of course, the billions of dollars worth of arms that the
mujahideen received from the US that did the trick.

I am in total agreement with the line of thought that insists that the
neo-cons and the Islamists are two sides of the same coin. And that’s why
the more terrorism the Islamists practiced, the stronger the neo-cons got.
After all, the neo-cons lost all purpose and requirement once the USSR
collapsed.

Interestingly, the bait of the post-Soviet Islamic bogey dangled by the
neo-cons was not only taken by groups of renegade Islamic revolutionaries;
the media took it too.

In the West the media continues to portray skewed perceptions of ‘Islamism’
fed to it by the neo-cons; while in the Islamic world, the media is playing
out to the other side of the coin by indulging in crass speculative gossip,
conspiracy theories and images of the West sketched by frustrated Islamists
dreaming of a global Islamic revolution and the reinstatement of the
Caliphate.

Thanks to the media, this pseudo (but deadly) conflict has now trickled down
to realms of society as well. For example, today an average westerner is
more likely to feel uneasy if confronted by a person with a Muslim name. He
perceives this person with the aid of what he hears and sees in the western
media. He will see the Muslim as potentially violent, oppressive, and most
probably a wife beater!

On the other side, a Muslim is just as likely to interpret western society
as being satanic, Jewish-dominated and obscene. This person’s source in this
respect is the media in the Islamic countries. It triggers a flippant effect
in which the person is then bound to do two things: either fall in the
luring trap of the violent Islamist minority, or react by suddenly donning a
long beard or a headscarf.

What really keeps the neo-cons and the Islamists afloat is the larger social
fall-out of this conflict. The conflict then becomes a battle of reactive
images in which a westerner influenced by neo-con rhetoric in the media
becomes Islamophobic, and a Muslim driven by his country’s conspiratorial
media suddenly grows a long beard or starts doing the hijab. Paradoxically,
he or she then becomes more receptive to what so-called leftists like
Chomsky and Roy have to say about the West.

To quote from an article about Roy in The Hindu (November 26, 2000):
‘Arundhati Roy might very well equal (activist writers) Orwell and Karanth
in her bravery. But she lacks their intellectual probity and judgment. Those
men wrote with a proper sense of gravitas, in a prose that was lucid but
understated, each word weighed before it was uttered. Perhaps they were
lucky to work in a pre-television and pre-colour supplement era, when the
principle would take precedence over the personality.’

I think the above paragraph says it all. Writer-activists such as Roy, Naomi
Klein and even the more aged Chomsky have allowed themselves to be bitten by
the post-modern celebrity bug that usually feeds on their more reactionary
and right-wing counterparts.

They have become too self-conscious of their ‘intellectual importance,’ with
their overall make-up now bordering on plain vanity. This is something their
bygone contemporaries like Edward Said and Iqbal Ahmed would have balked
at.

*And, for example, while the later two’s writings and thoughts actually
helped improve the world’s understanding of the plight of, say, the
Palestinians and the Third World in general, Roy and Chomsky’s writings in
the last five years have contributed more to fatten reactionary arguments,
even if the original intent of the writings were/are as noble as those of
Said’s and Ahmed’s.*
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best


-- 
Rashneek Kher
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com