Arundhati Roy
Interviewed
By Amy Goodman
of Democracy Now!
20 May, 2004
Democracy
Now!
Full transcript
and audio online at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/19/1449239
AMY GOODMAN: Welcome
to Democracy Now!, Arundhati.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank
you, Amy
AMY GOODMAN: It's
very good to have you with us. Can you explain what is
happening right now in India? Were you surprised by the victory of the
Congress party, and then the rejection by Sonia Gandhi of the prime
ministership?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I
think many people were surprised by the victory of the
Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze
of
hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading. One wasn't sure
whether the people would be blinded by that -- and they had been just
a few
months ago in a local assembly elections in Gujarat -- or whether the
real
issues of absolute poverty and absolute [separation] from the land and
water
resources would be the big issues. A lot of us, when the results came
out
were -- leaving aside one's cynicism about mainstream politics -- thought
it
couldn't have been a better result. The Congress party sort of shackled
to
the left parties in a coalition which would make them a pretty formidable
opposition to the B.J.P. But subsequently, what has happened has been
actually fascinating because you can just see the forces at play, both
internationally and nationally, so blatantly, just so blatantly that,
you
know, just in order to understand what's going on, it's been a fascinating
few days.
AMY GOODMAN: Can
you talk about the differences between the B.J.P., which has been defeated,
and the Congress party? I understand that you have just returned from
the house of the man who we believe will replace Sonia Gandhi since
she has turned down the prime ministership.
ARUNDHATI ROY: No,
no, no not returned, but I was in the market and to come back home I
had to drive past all of the politicians' houses, and I could
see all the crowds outside and the television cameras and so on. I have
no
access to them in that sense, but, well the fundamental difference between
the Congress and the BJP is that one is an overtly fascist party, proudly
fascist. It doesn't feel bad if you call it that. The culture to which
the
BJP's big leaders subscribe to, which is the RSS, openly admires Hitler.
The Congress --
I mean, obviously, the way it has happened is that the
Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to
create
what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against
another
and so on in order to secure votes. So, somehow the BJP is the horrible
specter that has emerged from the legacy of the Congress party. You
know,
you begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you
see
what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal
politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.
Economically, again,
it's the same thing. You know, the Congress really was
the party that opened India up to the whole neo-liberal regime. But
the BJP
has come in and taken it much further, to absurd levels. Today, we have
a
situation in which 40% of rural India has food absorption levels lower
than
sub-Saharan Africa. You have the biggest rural income divide ever seen
in
history. You have millions of tons of food grain rotting in government
pogroms while starvation deaths are announced all over. You have the
W.T.O.
regime making it possible for the government to import food grain and
milk
and sugar and all of these things while Indian farmers are committing
suicide not in the hundreds now, but the figures have moved into the
thousands. And you have a middle class which is glittering, which is
happy... I just wrote a piece about how corporate globalization and
this
kind of Hindu nationalism, communal fascism are so linked. If you see
what
has happened after the elections, after the people of India made it
clear
that their mandate was against communalism, their mandate was against
economic reforms. Even in state governments where the Congress party
had
instituted these reforms, the Congress was also overthrown. It wasn't
a vote
for Sonia Gandhi or a vote for the congress, it was a vote against very
serious issues.
What has happened
is that as soon as the election results were announced,
the BJP, the hard-right wing members of the BJP and its goon squads
started
saying we'll shave our heads. We'll eat green gram and make a revolution
in
this country against this foreign woman on the one hand, and on the
other
hand, equally hard core corporate groups were acting -- they were out
on the
streets. They were yelling like fundamentalists would, and all of these
corporate television channels had split screens where on the one hand,
you
saw what is happening in Sonia Gandhi's house and on the other half,
you
just had what the stockbrokers are saying. And the whole of the one
billion
people who had voted had just been forgotten. They had been given their
photo opportunity, their journeys on elephant back and camel and whatever
it
was to the election booth. Now they were just forgotten. The only comments
you get are what the industrialists think... and what the centrists
think
about Sonia Gandhi. It is an absolutely absurd kind of blackmail by
fascists
on the one hand and corporate fascists on the other.
AMY GOODMAN: We're
talking to Arundhati Roy, speaking to us from Delhi. She recently wrote
a piece in The Guardian of Britain, ³Let Us Hope that the
Darkness has Passed and the Veil of the Virtual Worlds has Collided
in a
Humiliation of Power.² On the issue of Sonia Gandhi and why she
is stepping
down, what this means, do you think it is significant at all?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I
think there was a real dilemma there. All of us are so used to being
cynical and reading meaning into meanings. But she was faced with a
party and with a climate and people at the helm of the BJP, who we know
now are capable of going to any extreme -- as we saw what happened in
Gujarat two years ago when they openly supported a pogrom in which 2,000
Muslims were massacred on the streets, and not a single person has been
brought to book or punished. I think she was aware of the fact that
this kind of
vilification and this kind of chauvinism is in the air. It could have
resulted in a situation where a new government comes in and all it's
doing
is firefighting on a non-issue, on whether Sonia Gandhi is a foreigner
or
whether she should be there or not there. Whereas, in fact, there are
so
many really pressing issues that need to be looked at. So, I think that
there was a real dilemma there, and perhaps strategically it has taken
the
wind out of the BJP's sails and has exposed them for being absolutely
uncaring for a massive mandate. If you look at all of the secular and
left
parties together, it's 320 seats, which is a huge majority.
AMY GOODMAN: As
we return to Arundhati Roy in India, as she reports on
what's happening there with the elections that have routed out the B.J.P.
party. Arundhati, as you listen to this report of the Israeli helicopter
gun
ships firing into the crowd of thousands [in Rafah in Gaza], a number
of
people are dead, and it's certainly an issue you have followed as well
as
what you're hearing about what's happening in Iraq, could you share
your
response?
ARUNDHATI ROY: It's
just that you have to sometimes you have come to a
stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding
some
tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize
that
the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the
horrors. Next time around, only if it is ratcheted up, will it get our
attention? I have always maintained that it's very, very important to
understand that war is the result of a flawed peace, and we must understand
the systems that are at work here. You know, we must understand that
the
resistance movement in Iraq is a resistance movement that all of us
have to
support, because it's our war, too. And it will not do for them to call
people terrorists and thugs and all of that. That time is over now.
The fact
is that America¹s weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody
to
confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning,
and
your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting. You see that
system. You see Iraq as the culmination of a system, and you see how
hard
that system is pushing even here. You can see the clear links between
what's
happening in the Indian elections and this whole global economy and
how it's
suffocating the breath out of the body of poor people.
AMY GOODMAN: We're
talking with Arundhati Roy in India. We have also gotten these reports
of some Indian workers who were working for a western
contractor in Iraq, who alleged that they were kept there against their
will, hardly being paid. It was a report that was first reported in
the
Hindu and then followed up in this country, a group of 20 Indians who
ran
away from a U.S. Military camp in Iraq where they worked in the kitchen
claiming they had been abused for nine months. Is this a story that
you have
been following? They have returned, I believe, now, to India.
ARUNDHATI ROY: They
are all people from Kerala which is where I come from, you know, and
apparently, these kind of job contractors took them to Kuwait, pretending
that they had got them work there. A lot of people from Kerala work
in the Middle East. And then they were put on a bus basically and they
realized they were in Baghdad before they knew it. So, I think, you
know, this is the bottom end of the privatization of war. Torture has
been
privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about
the
abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay
a
price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too? Eventually,
you
have a situation also in which -- as it becomes more and more obvious
to the
American government that when American soldiers die on the battlefield,
pressure goes up at home. so they're going to try to hire other soldiers
to
do their work for them. You know, they're going to try to hire poor
people
from poor countries who would be willing to do it. I'm sure they're
going to
try that. They're trying that already, trying to get, of course, the
Indian
army and so on in -- we know Hamid Karzai's securities are all privatized.
I
think it's a nightmare and ultimately, terrorism, in way, is a privatization
of war. It's the belief that it's not only states that can wage war,
why not
private people? Why not have your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All
of
these policies that America upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization,
all of
these things are going to mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous
things.
AMY GOODMAN: I want
to thank you for joining us from New Delhi, India.
Arundhati Roy, the
author and activist. Her book is coming out this summer"The Ordinary
Person's Guy to Empire." This is Democracy Now!.