[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy in Karachi

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

The Delhi based writer Arundhati Roy has recently been in Karachi,  
Pakistan at the invitation of civil society organizations and womens  
rights groups. Here are two reports from Dawn, a Karachi based daily,  
about meetings she attended (with an organization titled 'Womens  
Action Forum') and interactions she had. I hope that they will be of  
interest to people on the list.

regards,

Shuddha
------------------------------
1.

Arundhati Roy and the WAF
By Zubeida Mustafa
Wednesday, 13 May, 2009
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/ 
pakistan/11-arundhati-roy-and-the-waf--02

‘WOMEN to reclaim public spaces: a programme of defiance and  
resistance.’ That is how the Women’s Action Forum defined the meeting  
it held last Friday to mobilise public opinion against extremism.

Although WAF’s concern to protect the space women have created in the  
public mainstream has been on its agenda for some time, this goal has  
acquired urgency in the wake of the events in Swat. The Nizam-i-Adl  
Regulation in Malakand Division has brought people face to face with  
the ugly reality of the Talibanisation phenomenon in the rural  
backwaters as well as in modern urban centres.

The Karachi meeting was well-attended by WAF’s standards. It is not  
easy to mobilise women for any cause in this city of multiple  
identities. The metropolis has a diversity of populations, cultures,  
languages and economic interests posing a challenge to bring women  
together on a single platform. Learning from its experience of the  
lawyers’ movement that had succeeded in uniting the extreme right and  
centrist political parties and the professionals on a single-point  
agenda for two years, WAF also decided to make Talibanisation and  
women the focal issue.

That strategy paid off. Women had already been galvanised by the  
video showing the flogging of a teenaged girl in Swat that activist  
Samar Minallah courageously brought to the world media’s attention,  
invoking in the process the wrath of the Taliban whose fatwa declared  
her as wajibul qatl. The oppression of women is an issue that cuts  
across classes to touch every female raw nerve. Whether it is the  
smartly turned-out high-society woman or the working woman who slaves  
all day long to feed an army of children and a drug-addict husband or  
even the heavily veiled orthodox woman, each type, with few  
exceptions, has expressed her horror at the flogging incident.

Hence on this occasion WAF managed to bring a diverse crowd together  
— the activists reaching out to the grassroots such as Amar Sindhu  
from Sindh University Hyderabad, Parveen Rahman from the Orangi Pilot  
Project and Sadiqa Salahuddin whose Indus Resource Centre runs  
schools in the interior of Sindh, as well as the elites sitting side  
by side with the three van-loads of women from Neelum Colony who  
clean the homes of the rich and will be starting their adult literacy  
classes from next week, courtesy Shabina’s Garage School.

The variety of speakers focusing on the theme of women’s oppression  
by the Taliban found a responsive audience. But the question that  
made many ponder was: what next? Can this interest be sustained? If  
they had not already started probing for answers, the thought- 
provoking speech by Arundhati Roy, the renowned Indian writer and  
activist, did the trick. Coming from New Delhi on a solidarity  
mission to WAF’s meeting. Roy raised four issues:

• What do we mean by the Taliban and what gave birth to them?

• Define your own space and do not surrender it.

• Don’t allow yourself to be forced into making choices of the ‘with  
us or against us’ type.

• Don’t be selective in your injustices.

These should provide food for thought for those struggling against  
oppression. Without being specific, Roy exhorted her audience to look  
into the structures and systems that lead to a situation of such  
extreme oppression, some of which is rooted in the class conflict.  
She believes one has to take a ‘total view’ of the matter, which she  
admitted she had come to Pakistan to understand.

The fact is that we live in a largely grey area where the lines are  
not sharply drawn. There is a lot of overlapping between issues  
touching gender, class, ethnicity, culture, political power and  
economic gains. It is this reality one has to recognise and see how  
the contradictions can be addressed. The demand to take sides  
unambiguously, expressed so vividly in the days following 9/11 by  
George Bush as ‘You are with us or against us,’ can create a dilemma  
for people when negotiating these grey areas.

Roy’s advice to avoid being ‘with us or against us’ has implications  
she didn’t elucidate. In times when action is needed and a position  
has to be taken — even if verbally — inaction or neutrality  
unwittingly props up the status quo. If the status quo has been  
created by inimical forces ostensibly now fighting their self-created  
Frankenstein, where does one go?

The practical approach would be to prioritise strategies that can be  
adapted to changing circumstances. And what should these be? Here Roy  
has a point when she says that one cannot be selective in the  
justices one espouses and the injustices one denounces. In this  
context Pakistanis find themselves trapped between the devil and the  
deep sea. Attempting to rectify a problem here and another there  
really doesn’t help because our entire state structure is colonial,  
as a booklet titled Making Pakistan a Tenable State points out.

Produced by 17 intellectuals, with Dr Mubashir Hasan as the driving  
force, the book describes the state structure as being ‘based on the  
concentration of political and administrative power in the steel  
frame of the civil services under the protection of the armed forces.  
The structure could be defined as feudal-military-bureaucratic.’

The problem is systemic. In a state ruled by ‘a government of the  
elites, by the elites, for the elites’ it is inevitable that it is  
authoritarian and exploitative. Change can come when there is  
mobilisation of the people for change. When WAF mobilises women to  
fight against injustices it prepares them to also fight for change.  
The need is to empower them and instill confidence in them.

Two women I have written about who are fighting for change come from  
the poorest of the poor and theirs is not a feminist agenda. They are  
fighting to have a roof above their heads. One is the wife of Walidad  
from Muhammad Essa Khaskheli who came all the way to Karachi in the  
heat of summer to save her goth from being snapped up by a feudal in  
the neighbourhood.

The other is Parveen whose one-room ‘mansion’ in a katchi abadi of  
Clifton is now under threat of demolition. She is resisting the  
exploitative system that cannot provide shelter to the poor.  
Initially she hesitated — was it ‘proper’ for a woman to protest she  
had asked me. When encouraged she decided it was. These are women on  
the way to empowerment and that is WAF’s agenda.

  2.

‘I’m here to understand what you mean by Taliban’
by Salman Siddiqui
Friday, 08 May, 2009
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/ 
pakistan/arundhati-roy-sal-02

Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region?

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

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

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

Swat and the Taliban boy

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

Water is the main issue

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

Fight over Siachen glacier

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

Money and the Indian elections

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

RSS and the Indian establishment

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

Indian media and sensationalizing of news coming out from Pakistan

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

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

Is the Indian army a sacred cow?

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

Women and their fight for justice

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



Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net