Arundhati Roy
Speaks
By Arundhati
Roy & S. Anand
24 August, 2005
Outlook
India
I was about
to buy batteries for my recorder for this interview and was avoiding,
as usual, a certain unrepentant brand associated with the Bhopal gas
tragedy. Sometimes, such independent choices are not even possible in
this world which some say is becoming flat. What are your thoughts?
We live in an Age
of Spurious Choice. Eveready or Nippo? Coke or Pepsi? Nike or Reebok?thats
the more superficial, consumer end of the problem. Then we have the
spurious choice between the so-called "corrupt" public sector
and the "efficient" private sector. The real question is,
does democracy offer real choice? Not really, not anymore. In the recent
US elections, was the choice between Bush and Kerry a real choice? Was
the choice between Blair and his counterpart in the Conservative Party
a real choice? For the Indian poor, has the choice between the Congress
and the BJP been a real choice? They are all apparent choices accompanied
by a kind of noisy theatre which conceals the fact that all these apparently
warring parties share an almost complete consensus. They just exchange
slogans depending on whether theyre in the opposition or in the
government.
So theres
a lack of choice despite political democracy?
The last Lok Sabha
election was fundamentally about two issues: the economy and right-wing
Hindu nationalism. I would say that in most rural areas, issues of economy
were at the forefront of the voters mind. During the countdown,
the campaign rhetoric of the Congress was about marginalising disinvestment,
taking a new look at privatisation, taking a new look at corporate
globalisation? But as soon as it won, even before they took office,
senior Congress leaders had begun reassuring the market that it would
not make any radical change. Look at whats happening now. Privatisation
and corporatisation are proceeding APACE. Meanwhile, by arbitrarily
adjusting the poverty line, by redefining what constitutes poverty,
the Planning Commission drastically reduces the official number of poor
people to 27 per cent of the population. Half of Indias rural
population has a food energy intake below the average of sub-Saharan
Africa. Yet one of the first things finance minister P. Chidambaram
does is to slash the rural development budget to the lowest it has ever
been! The one ray of hope was the Rural Employment Guarantee Act. But
Im not at all sure it will go through. Is it just smoke and mirrors,
a game of Good Cop/Bad Cop that trades on the almost saintly status
of Sonia Gandhi and the credibility of some extraordinary people in
the National Advisory Council in order to garner the Congress some brownie
points?
PM Manmohan Singh,
who lost a Lok Sabha poll from the posh South Delhi constituency in
1999, is called a decent, incorruptible statesman. Is he able to carry
off a neo-liberal agenda because of this non-politician halo?
I dont know
why technocrats like President Kalam and this new breed of bureaucrat/politician
seem to have the middle class and the mass media in their thrall. Maybe
because they have power without being frayed at the edges by real political
engagement.Maybe because they are the architects of the process separating
the Economy from Politicsand thereby keeping power where they
think it really belongs, with the elite.Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh
Ahluwalia and P.Chidambaram have fused into the Holy Trinity of neo-liberalism.Their
vision of the New India has been fashioned at the altar of the worlds
cathedrals: Oxford, Harvard Business School, the World Bank and the
imf.They are the regional head office of the Washington Consensus.They
are part of a powerful network of politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats,
consultants, bankers, businessmen and retired judges who trade jobs,
contracts, consultancies and vitallycontacts.Right now, for example,
theres a lot in the news about the scandalous Enron contract being
"re-negotiated" for the third timethe contract that
resulted in MSEB having to pay Enron millions of dollars not to produce
electricity. The renegotiation is all very secret (like the initial
Enron negotiation). The nodal ministry involved in the re-re-negotiation
is the finance ministry headed by P. Chidambaram who, until the day
he became finance minister, was Enrons lawyer. The other members
on the committee are Montek Ahluwalia and Sharad Pawarthe two
who were instrumental in signing the disastrous contract in the first
place. Its like asking an accused in a criminal case to investigate
the crimes hes been accused of.
Do people in
rural India view these technocrats and bureaucrat-politicians differently?
A few years ago
(when Manmohan Singh was between jobs), I was in Raipur at a meeting
of iron ore workers from the neighbouring districts. Ill never
forget a young Hindi poet who read a poem, called Manmohan Singh kya
kar raha hai aaj-kal? (Whats Manmohan Singh doing these days?).
The anger in the poem was so acute, so shocking even to me. All the
more so because it was aimed at such a gentle, soft-spoken man. The
first two lines were: Manmohan Singh kya kar raha hai aaj-kal/Vish kya
karta hai khoon mein utarne ke baad. (What does poison do once it has
entered the bloodstream?) At the time, I came away disturbed and shaken....
But today? The thing is, rural India is in real distressand many
do link their distress to Manmohan Singhs reforms when he was
finance minister in the early 90s.
What did you
make of the PMs Oxford address?
Timing is everything,
it was an unambiguous political statement. Right now, Western powers
and several right-wing academics, like the historian Niall Ferguson,
have embarked on a project of valorising Imperialism. This is the argument
they use to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
and all the ones still to come. At this point in history, for the Indian
PM to publicly and officially declare himself an apologist for the British
Empire is pretty devastating. After a few cautious caveats in his speech,
Manmohan Singh thanked British Imperialism for everything India is today.
Ironically, at the top of his list was all the machinery of repression
put in place by a colonial regimethe bureaucracy, the judiciary,
the police, Rule of Law. He then went on to express gratitude for the
gift of the English languagethe language that separates Indias
elite from its fellow countrymen and binds its imagination to the western
world. Macaulay couldnt have asked for a more dedicated disciple.
The only people
who might have a valid reason to view the British Empire with less anger
than the rest of us are Dalits. Since to the white man all of us were
just natives, Dalits were not especially singled out for the bestial
treatment meted out to them by caste Hindus.But somehow, I cant
imagine Manmohan Singh bringing a Dalit perspective to colonialism while
receiving an honorary PhD in Oxford.
You once said
that on several issuesBabri, N-bombs, big dams, privatisationthe
Congress sowed and the BJP swept in to reap a hideous harvest.With the
Congress at the helm, what has fundamentally changed?
Ill be honest.When
the BJP lost the elections, in spite of my intellectual analysis of
the situation that nothing was going to change economically, I certainly
feel less hunted.This is a totally selfish point.I think this incredible
communal churning has ceased. The BJP has a far more vicious way of
implementing the same policies. I dont think we can deny that.
What is the future
of the BJP?
Its different
in the Centre and the states (like Rajasthan, Gujarat and MP).If you
look at the number of seats it won and its voteshare, it does not indicate
that it should have fallen apart like it has. It seems to have been
held together by the glue of power. And when that went, it fell apart.
I am not mourning this. They seem to have exhausted this Ramjanmabhoomi
agenda totally. But we also need to have a strong Opposition in this
country....
The BJP doesnt
seem to have the time for that. But the Left thinks it is playing opposition.
I think the Communist parties run the risk of making themselves ridiculous
by contesting everything initially and then caving in eventually. They
are playing the role of a virtual opposition. This Left-Congress
combine could well become the secular version of the parivar. All the
arguments are reduced to being family squabbles.
What does it mean
to be independent today? Has Independence Day become a mere annual ritual?
As corporatisation and privatisation proceed APACE and more and more
people are rendered jobless, homeless, and have no access to natural
resources, anger and unrest will build. The central function of the
State will increasingly be to oversee the repression of an unemployed,
dispossessed population on behalf of the corporates. The State will
have to evolve into an elaborate tyranny which retains all the rhetoric
of democracy. Look at whats happening in Orissathe new crucible
of corporate globalisation. Multinational mining companiesSterlite,
Vedanta, Alcanare devastating Orissas hills and forests
for bauxite. They say Kashmir is like Palestine. True. But Orissa is
getting there too. Orissa is a police state now. For some years now,
there has been a resilient, feisty, anti-mining movement in Kashipur.
You ask what independence means to most Indiansvisit Kuchaipadar,
the extraordinary little Adivasi village at the heart of the Kashipur
struggle, and you will have your answer. Kuchaipadar is surrounded by
police. People cannot move from one village to the next. Cannot hold
meetings, rallies or protests. Over the last two years, they have been
shot, beaten, lathicharged, jailed and several have been killed. Last
year, on Independence Day, Kuchaipadars villagers hoisted a black
flag. Thats what independence means to them. Oh, and whos
on the board of directors of Vedanta, one of the biggest mining companies
prospecting in Orissa? P. Chidambaram, who resigned on the day he was
appointed FM; David Gore-Booth, former UK high commissioner in India;
Naresh Chandra, former cabinet secretary and ex-Indian ambassador to
the US, and former chairman of the Foreign Investment Promotion Bureau.
Its a bedroom farce with blood on the tracks.
Theres
been an outsourcing boom. The Indian IT and IT-enabled services industry
business touched $17.2 billion in 2004-05. Fifty per cent of Fortune
500 companies are clients of Indian IT firms. Surely, some people are
benefiting?
Of course, some
people benefit.Otherwise there wouldnt be the kind of vocal support
that it does have among sections of the people and the national media.The
outsourcing industry has created thousands of jobs, mostly in urban
areas, and in India that small percentage amounts to a huge number of
people.But in return, there is a larger section that gets disempowered,
dispossessed.The point, as always, is: who pays, who profits? This section
that benefits is full of the joy of having cars, mobile phones, lifestyles
that they could not even have dreamt of a few years ago.They control
the media, television, they make the movies, they fund them, act in
them, distribute them.They form a little universe of their own, sending
each other signals of light. For the rest, the darkness deepens. However,
be assured: if at any point outsourcing begins to cost America, if it
begins to affect their population seriously, outsourcing operations
will be shut down in a flash.We live on sufferance. And thats
not a safe place to build a home.
While the UPA government
initially promised to ensure some kind of affirmative action in the
private sector, 21 leading industrialists led by Ratan Tata have pronounced
the entire generation of Dalit/ tribal people with degrees from Indian
institutions "unemployable". They have decided to create a
new generation of Dalits/Adivasis through "skill upgradation".
When it appears that Dalits and other backward classes are getting represented
suddenly in our democracy, people in power will find ways of undermining
this process. Thats what privatisation and corporatisation is
about. Dalits, Adivasis and other dispossessed people should realise
that they cant bank on the politics of compassion. Because there
is none left, and they have no leverage on Ratan Tata.
Dalit spokespersons
such as Chandrabhan Prasad have been arguing that if US corporates can
employ blacks under the policy of diversity, cant Ford and GE
do similar social engineering here?
It was not an act
of compassion on the part of Ford and GE. At the time in the US, the
black civil rights movement was an international force to be reckoned
with. So some negotiation had to happen. Power concedes nothing unless
it is forced to. No one knew that better than Ambedkar. It was at the
centre of his brilliant demolition of Gandhis argument in Annihilation
of Caste. Right now, the Dalits have no leverage. Today, the Dalit
movement is fractured and scattered. We need a strong Dalit movement.
Unfortunately, it is not a movement that anyone has to negotiate with,
least of all India Inc.
The UN this April
appointed two special rapporteurs to investigate and find solutions
for caste-based discrimination in India. Can something come out of this
internationalisation of the Dalit issue?
The UN is such a shaky organisation. It has not been able to bring any
kind of authority to international issues of late, as we have seen from
what happened in Iraq. The UN was used to disarm Iraq before the attack,
and then was just kicked aside. Maybe their (the UN rapporteurs)
coming is a good thing. But Ill believe it when I see something
really happening. Because today India is a market. All the major corporations
are looking at India with greedy, greedy little eyes. Whether it is
the genocide that took place in Gujarat, or whether it is everyday discrimination
against Dalits, I dont see any of this being allowed to come in
the way of Thomas Friedmans dreamland project. The treatment of
Dalits in India is by no means any less grotesque than the treatment
of women by the Taliban. But is any of the violence against Dalits in
the Indian or international mainstream press? But if you are a willing
and open market, will they bomb the caste system out of India, like
they wanted to bomb feminism into Afghanistan? I am not a believer in
these UN-driven institutional therapies.You have to wage your struggles,
you have to put your foot in the door.
That brings us
to Friedmans dreamland, New Gurgaon, an outsourcing hub.The Congress
harped on the aam aadmi before the election.But the aam
aadmi got pulped in Gurgaon.What lessons do we learn?
Unfortunately, underpaid
as they are, and humiliated as they have been, the Honda workers are
not aam aadmi. Theyre supposed to be the real beneficiaries of
globalisation.At least they have work. Far from the glare of TV cameras,
the aam aadmi has been facing not just the lathi, but also goliin
Orissa, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh,
Kerala.The atrocity on the Honda workers happened at the heart of corporate
paradise. In Thomas Friedman land. Trouble broke out in the bubble.Gurgaon
is one of three New Economic Zones where existing labour laws have never
really applied.In the race to the bottomcheaper labour, longer
hours, more efficiencythe companys labour contractors,
like all labour contractors, hired trainees and paid them
stipends, not salaries. When their training was through,
they fired them in order to hire more trainees.
The TV coverage
cuts both waysit can either frighten people or enrage them. I
think the police was given instructions to be so brutal and repressive
in order to make an example of workers so that others would not dare
to do this again anywhere. But the uproar that has ensued and the fact
that Honda has been forced to reinstate those who it sacked could mean
that workers realise that when they act together they do become a force
to reckon with.
Doesnt
the Indian elite and the middle class conveniently vent its anger on
the political class and yet align with the state on most issues?
This is again about
the hollowing out of democracy. Even as we sell our credentials on the
international stage as a democracy, even if theres democracy at
the level of panchayati raj or Laloo and Mayawati, theres a certain
amount of fear in the Indian elite that the underclasses are being elected.
How do you undermine that? You undermine it by corporatisation, by creating
a situation in which the politicians may hold the theatre and the audience,
but the real economic power has shifted from their hands. The elite
in Pakistan has seen so little democracy. So, strangely enough, they
know the difference between themselves and the state. Najam Sethi can
be rounded up, beaten up and put in jail. People tell me: if you had
been in Pakistan, you would have been shot by now. But whoever comes
to power (in India), the chances of that happening to N. Ram or Vinod
Mehta are still quite remote. The Indian elite is fused with the state
in many ways. We think like the state. Were all wannabe policymakers.
No ones just a citizen.
What do you think
of Indias new role as a US ally?
The Indian government
should seriously study the history and fate of former and present US
alliesthe world is littered with the carcasses of their people.
Only a few years ago, they were shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, and
a little before that they were doing it with the mujahideen. Pakistan,
Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Chile, other countries in Latin
America and Africa. Look what happened to Argentina. And the former
USSR. We are tying ourselves into an intricate economic and strategic
web. Once were in, theres no out. Were in the belly
of the beast. Once youre there, you eat predigested pap. You behave.
You do what youre told, buy what youre sold. If you disobey,
youre in trouble. Already, you can see the signs. Condoleezza
Rice says the oil pipeline deal with Iran will be a bad idea.Manmohan,
on cue, promptly declares to the Washington Post that he thinks it will
be very hard to raise money for the project. Whats that supposed
to mean?
But experts say
the nuclear deal with the US puts India in a win-win situation.
If a swordfish signs
a deal with a crocodile, can it be a win-win deal? Right now, its
strategically important for the US to allow us to believe our own publicity
about being a superpower. India is not a superpower.Its just super-poor.
Its not enough to discuss the nuclear deal as an issue
about nuclear energy and nuclear bombsthough thats important
too.Where are the studies that show that the right kind of energy for
India is nuclear energy? Have we seriously explored alternative forms
of energy? Why has the debate been posited as one solely between nuclear
energy and fossil fuels? What are the pros and cons of nuclear energy
versus energy from fossil fuels? Why has there been no public debate
about these things? But the real issue is not about whether India has
escaped nuclear isolation.Its not about whether the government
has capped its nuclear programme. Its about whether it has capped
its imagination. Its about whether it has restricted its room
to manoeuvre politically, economically and morally. Has it imbricated
itself intimately into an embrace it can never escape?
But both Gen
Musharraf and Manmohan Singh want to be Bushies.
We have two begums
competing for the attention of Sheikh Bush. Both of them are fighting
for attention and are jealous of each other.
Edward Said would
have perhaps approved of this interesting Orientalist metaphor. But
seriously, what should be the terms of the nuclear debate?
Actually, it is
Orientalist and sexist. I shouldnt have said it...anyway. For
all these experts appearing to debate and disagree on the nuclear issue,
these are matters of state and foreign policy which are not to be debated
in terms of morality and principles, because thats not how foreign
policy works. Its about strategy. I know that. But
I dont want to think like the state. As a human being, I ask:
is it alright for our prime minister, on behalf of all of us, to dine
at the high table and wave from the balcony arm-in-arm with a liar and
a butcher called President George Bush? A man who has lied about WMDs
in Iraq, whose lies have been exposed, whose military cowardly killed
1,00,000 Iraqis after getting the UN to disarm Iraq, and killed 25,000
more subsequently? Its worth keeping in mind that collaboration
in wars against sovereign nations is a war crime. And also, if Bush
is so acceptable to them (the Congress), why lose sleep over Modi, our
own overseer of mass murder? We are told its a strategic alliance
with the US, and morality doesnt apply. But why is it that every
time a government goes to war, the only reasons offered are moral reasons?
"To spread democracy, freedom, feminism, to rid the world of evil-doers?"
Why is it that states expect morality of us, but we as individuals cant
debate an issue in moral terms? I dont understand.
Youve travelled
in Kashmir...
Its impossible
to pronounce knowledgeably on Kashmir after just a few short trips.
But some things are not a mystery. Hundreds of thousands have lost their
lives in this conflict. Both Pakistan and India have played a horrible,
venal role in Kashmir. But among ordinary Kashmiri people, Pakistan
still remains an unknown entityand for that reason its become
an attractive idea, an ideal even, conflated by many with the yearning
for azaadi. Its ironic that a country that is a military
dictatorship should be associated with the notion of liberation.The
ugly reality of Pakistan is not something that most Kashmiris have experienced.The
reality of India, however, to every ordinary Kashmiri, is an ugly, vicious
reality they encounter every day, every ten steps at every checkpost,
during every humiliating search.And so India stands morally isolatedit
has completely lost the confidence of ordinary people.According to the
Indian army, there are never at any time more than 3,000-4,000 militants
operating in the Valley. But there are between 5,00,000-8,00,000 Indian
soldiers there.An armed soldier for every 10-15 people. By way of comparison,
there are 1,60,000 US soldiers in Iraq.Clearly, the Indian army is not
in Kashmir to control militants, it is there only to control the Kashmiri
people. It is an army of occupation the Indian mediaand here I
include the film industryhas played a pretty unforgivable part
in. In totally misrepresenting the truth of whats really going
on. How can we even talk of solutions when we simply deny
the reality?
State repression,
religious fundamentalism and corporate globalisation seem interconnected.
But hasnt resistance to this nexus become symbolic, tokenist,
NGO-ised and even a career for some professionals, including some would
say for you?
Its true.Sometimes
NGOs wreck real political resistance more effectively than outright
repression does. And yes, it could be argued that Im yet another
commodity on the shelves of the Empires supermarket, along with
Chinese cabbages and freeze-dried prawns. Buy Roy, get two human rights
free! But between the NGOs and Al Qaedafrankly, Im with
the many millions who are looking for the Third Way.
And the prognosis
for the War on Terror?
Clearly, its
spreading. Empire is overstretched. The Iraqis have actually managed
to mire the US army in what looks like endless, bloody combat. More
and more US soldiers are refusing to fight. More and more young people
are refusing to join the army. Manpower in the armed forces is becoming
a real problem. In a recent article, the remarkable un-embedded journalist
Dahr Jamail interviews several American marines who served in Iraq.
Asked what he would do if he met Bush, one of them says: "It would
be two hitsme hitting him and him hitting the floor." Its
for this reason that the US is looking for alliespreferably low-cost
allies with low-cost lives. Because the media is completely controlled,
no real news makes it out of Iraq. But last month, I was on the jury
of the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul. We heard 54 horrifying testimonies
about what is going on there, including from Iraqis who had risked their
lives to make it to the tribunal. The world knows only a fraction of
whats going on. The anger emanating out of Iraq and Afghanistan
is spreading wider and wider.... Its a deep, uncontrollable rage
that you cannot put a PR spin on. America isnt going to win this
war.
It has been eight
years since The God of Small Things. Is there a second novel
in you or has too much politics meant the end of Arundhati Roys
imagination? You have also been talking of disengaging from political
writing?
All writing is political.
Fiction is especially subversive. But its time for me to change
gear. I am sort of up for anything right now, which is exciting. Lets
see what happens.
Any positive
thoughts to end this dark conversation?
Let me share a sweet
little thing. I saw a news report about two Adivasi girls getting married
to each other. And the whole village was saying: if thats what
they want, its fine. They had this ceremony, with all the rituals
and customs, and they let them get married. Thats a moment of
magic. It reveals their level of modernity, of their sophistication.Of
their beauty.