Empire
And The Corporate Media
By Arundhati
Roy and Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
01 June, 2003
Interview with
Arundhati Roy on Democracy Now! co-hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez
AMY GOODMAN: Well it's a
great pleasure to be able to see you face to face and to talk to you
in person. We've spoken to you on the phone many times and I very much
look forward to your address tomorrow night. Well your book has come
out now in a new edition, War Talk and in it, it includes one of the
speeches that we have run a lot here and that is your speech "Come
September" that you gave in Santa Fe. Juan mentioned the issue
of media centralization in this country. In India you see the United
States through the lens of--what is it you've said? Fox is what you
watch?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Fox and CNN
I think, are the two channels you get there.
AMY GOODMAN: So what do you
think? What do you think of America through that lens?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well you know
it's it's true that last year before I came, I was coerced to come to
America because I did think that there was no need for me to come here
and you know be insulted and called names and so on. Because you think
of it as a homogenous place in some way, and I was so delighted to find
the opposite. I was so delighted to find that we who are protesting
against these things on the outside have some of our staunchest allies
in America. And I must say that, it put me in the extraordinary position
of defending American citizens against an assault which is absolutely
racist sometimes, outside, because of these media channels and because
of the policies of the US government, people in America are just seen
as a homogenous bunch of rabid, nationalist bullies and that's such
a sad thing because I think if we are going to fight to reclaim democracy
that fight has to begin here. And all of us have to acknowledge that
it is the people of America who have access to the imperial palace.
And so, it was wonderful to come. At the same time, this consolidation
of the American media. I mean I think, one of the good things that happened
after September 11th, was that this myth of free speech and the free
market crumbled along with the twin towers you know. Outside America,
the American free press has become the butt of some pretty dark humor
and nobody now it's contextualized you know. When you watch CNN and
FOX news--anywaynot everybody, but a lot of people just watch it as
the boardroom bulletin of the White House you know, and know it for
what it is.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well in your
latest book War Talk, you talk about Empire in a much broader way than
perhaps we're accustomed to discussing here in the US, cause we're always
centering in on the US Empire and the US's role in world domination
but you talk about Empire and all the allies of Empire in all the different
countries around the world including your own. I'm wondering if you
could expound on that a little bit?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you
know there are two ways that Empire spreads its tentacles, one is with
the cruise missile and the daisy cutter and so on, and the other is
with the IMF checkbook. So you know the argument that is being made
across the world is that the people of Argentina and the people of Iraq
have been decimated by the same process but by different weapons--in
one case the cruise missile, in the other case, the check book. And
what happened was just like the colonial enterprise which needed the
collusion of native elites you know, it wasn't as though Britain had
huge armies stationed in India, it had the Indian elite colluding with
it. In the same way now, this project of corporate globalization has
the collusion of local elites in third world countries you know. And
so what happens is that you have a process in which the white man doesn't
even have to come to the hot countries and get malaria and diarrhea
and die an early death because it is being managed on their behalf by
governments like say the government in India or the government in South
Africa who are willingly genuflecting to that process. And a situation
in which, very interestingly say you look at a country like South Africa
you know, 1994 apartheid officially ended. By 1996, the ANC who had
fought so hard and people who had fought so hard for that freedom look
what's happened to them. Out of a population of 44 million, 10 million
have had their water and electricity cut off and you have the traditional
power, the white power in say South Africa, more secure and happier
than it's ever been cause it's apartheid with a clean conscience now
and it's called democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you decide
when to write fiction and when to write non-fiction?
ARUNDHATI ROY: That's a very,
very troubling question, you know becausewell I don't decide, it's somehow
decided somewhere else in the ether. But the fact is that for me, fiction
is my love. Fiction is what makes me happy. The other writing that I
do, each time I write I swear that I'll never do it again. It's sort
of wrenched out of me andit ends up--I end up paying a price for it
which I'm not sure that I want to pay. And that's not just in prison
sentences, or criticism or insults which I have my share of, but even
the other--you know it keeps pushing you into this very public place
where you know there are times when you don't want to be. You want to
be tentative and you want to be uncertain and you don't want to-to--to
sort of bang your fist on the table and yet I know that there are times
in the world when you can't look at it as what you want to do or where
you want to be. You have to intervene. It's like I never, ever decide
to write something in terms of my essays, you know. Like if someone
asks mesome newspaper asks me will you write this or someone asks me,
I will say no. It's just when something happens and I read about what's
happening, and then I know that there's something that hasn't been said
which I want to say and it sets up this hammering in my head and I can't
keep quiet and I have to do it and I do it and I--most of the time regret
it immediately.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break
for stations to identify themselves but we will be back with Arundhati
Roy here live in our firehouse studios just blocks from ground zero,
from where the towers of the world trade center once stood.
(music break)
AMY GOODMAN: I'm Amy Goodman,
with Juan Gonzalez Our guest is Arundhati Roy. Arundhati Roy's books:
The God of Small Things, a novel; her essays collected as The Cost of
Living, one book; Power Politics and her latest is War Talk, published
by South End Press, an independent press in this country. Arundhati
can you talk about where you grew up, where you were born, where you
grew up, and on this day after Mother's Day, your mother, Mary Roy.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I was
born in a town called Shillong, that is in the north-east of India.
You know India is like--more complicated than the whole of Europe, so
you know, My mother was--is from South India in a state called Kerala.
My father is from Bengal. I was born in Shillong which at the time was
in a state called Assam. But now it isn't. And my parents were divorced
when I was about one or something, and I came back with my mother to
Kerala, where I grew up in a village called Aymanam, which is the village
in which The God of Small Things is set. She comes from a community
of Syrian Christians who are Christians who believe they were converted
at the time when St. Thomas traveled east after the crucifixion of Christ.
But the first real evidence of that is around the 8th century. Anyway
it's a very small parochial community and my mother was sort of shunned
for being this woman who dared to marry a Hindu outside her community
and then got divorced and came back to the village with her children
and so on. So I suppose now that that is behind me I have to look at
it as fortunate, because I grew up on the edges of an extremely feudal,
suffocating society whereyou know which was not prepared to assure me,
the assurances that it would hold out to other sort of you know, children
who belonged to that community. One was outside it cause you were not
of it. And because I grew up in Kerala which has traditionally been
a communist state, it was very interesting because you had Christianity,
Hinduism, Muslims, Marxists all sort of rubbing each other down and
you lived outside the framework--I lived outside the framework of all
this. Growing up in a rural area, but at the same time having, the--
being educated in the ways that other people would not have been in
a rural area. So I keep saying that as a writer it was a lucky place
to be at the top of the bottom of the heap. Somehow, without the perspective,
this sort of tunnel vision of the completely oppressed. Without the
paranoia of the cojmpletelyof the oppressors. Somehow you grew up in
-- the cracks between this very complex society.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And why was
it that Kerala, being as you mentioned, such a feudal and rural place
could then develop to have a communist administration so early on. What
were the conditions and dynamics that gave rise to that? What kind of
impact did that have on your consciousness?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, don't
make the mistake of assuming that the communists aren't feudal. They
are more progressive than others, so what they did was to harness that
feudalism to kind of not challenge it in some way. So the irony of course
is that the communists are all upper caste people and very intellectual
and so on. But the situation isthat's what The God of Small Things is
all about, you know, where you have a Kerala is the only place in India
where they claim a hundred percent literacy and yet the kind ofthe kind
of oppression that you see there or the kind of attitudes towards women
that you see there is so suffocating you know. My mother is, I didn't
talk about her. She is a remarkable woman. Also someone who I often
think kind of escaped from the sets of a Fellini film but that's a separate
thing. And she really it was a combination of her being in this place
where she was shunned and you know ridiculed for who she was, and so
I never grew up being told that I should play by the rules, you know,
which is very lucky for me. But I find myself in this really strange
position cause so many years of my life I spent fighting to escape the
suffocation of tradition as an Indian woman, and I got there only to
be up against the bestiality of the modern world which I don't want
either, you know so you're somehow in this narrow alley between these
two monolithic, monstrous things and you know sometimes, you don't know
where to go with it. Every single decision that you make is a decision
and a political one, you know, for that reason.
AMY GOODMAN: Your mother
ran a school and also stood up for women's rights in India?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah, my mother
runs a school. I studied there. She started it when she left my father.
She started it with seven children, two of whom were her own. It used
to be what I called the sliding, folding school cause it used to be
in the premises of the Rotary club. In the evenings the men used to
meet and drink and smoke cigarettes and throw the butts and their dirty
glasses on the floor. In the morning we would come and clean it all
up and you know, open up the furniture and it used to be the school
and then in the evening they would come and dirty it up again. Now of
course it's a beautiful school on the outskirts of this little town
called Kotayem and yeah, she still runs it. It's a fabulous place. She
became very well known my mother because you know, she filed a case,
a public litigation case in the Supreme Court of India, challenging
a law which said that Syrian Christian women could inherit one fourth
of their father's property or five thousand rupees which is aboutwhich
is less than a hundred dollars, whichever is less. So she challenged
that and said it was unconstitutional and the law was changed with retrospective
effect giving women equal rights. So that was a very, very big thing
then. Not that it has made such a huge difference cause whatthat was
a law in case a man didn't leave a will, in case a father didn't leave
a will. So now of course they are taking will-making classes on how
to disinherit their daughters.
AMY GOODMAN: And now, like
it or not, Arundhati Roy, you've ended up in court yourself on several
occasions. One had to do with your own book as people -- men in Kerala
called The God of Small Things obscene, or at least in some sections
of it. And then in your own activism around the issue of dams in India.
Can you talk about both?
ARUNDHATI ROY: In The God
of Small Things, I was accused of corrupting public morality which the
case is still in court actually and I keep saying there is a technical
legal issue here because at least it should have been "further
corrupting public morality" since I can't believe public morality
was pure until I came along. But--In India the legal system is like
this lumbering thing. It's partlike 75% of it is about harassment. It's
not about conviction. It's not about what will happen at the end. It's
about court appearances and paying lawyers and disrupting your life
and so on. You know it's used for that reason. For me to go from Delhi
to Kerala to appear it's almost like going from Delhi to London it's
so far away. And I'll go there and the judge will arrive and he says
"everybody is ready to argue the case," and he says "everytime
this case comes before me I get chest pains and I don't want to decide
it." You know cause he knows that everybody is waiting for him
to say something and he doesn't want to so, then it's dismissed and
it's been going on for years. The other one is much more serious, was
much more serious and is much more serious. Because, you know there
are two ways of looking at it. One is just personally the court harassing
a writer, a famous writer or whatever. But that's not as important as
if I can explain an issue of democracy. Because you see people now have
begun to think of democracy as elections, you know, that's it. That's
the only genuflection you have to make in the direction of democracy.
But in actual fact, it is a lateral system of checks and balances with
various institutions checking each other and balancing each other.
Now in India, the Supreme
Court is perhaps the most powerful institution in our so-called "democracy".
And now it takes decisions which areit's a micro-management of Indian
society. It decides whether slums should be cleared, whether dams should
be built, whether industry should be privatized, whether diesel should
be the public fuel or it should be compressed natural gas, whether industry
should be moved out of a city or not, whether history text books should
contain such and such a chapter or not, whether this mosque should be
built or not. Every single decision is taken today by the Supreme Court
of India. Now there is a law called contempt of court which says that
you cannot criticize the Supreme Court. You can criticize a judgment,
but you can't say, put a series of judgments together and say "look
there's a very distinct politics emerging here." A wide -- you
can't question it except in their terms let's say. So that makes it
an institution which is completely undemocratic. And I was you know
hauled up on contempt of court. And I was saying: "You can't have
this law. You can't have this law and call yourself a democracy. It's
a judicial dictatorship." And that's what it is. People are terrified,
terrified of the Supreme Court.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And why do
you think that that has evolved in that way, this judicial dictatorship?
What in the political development of Indian society has allowed the
court to exercise such power?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well I think
the philosophical answer to that is we are still a feudal society who
looks to authority somehow, you know. But really what has happened is
that, you know, power looks for ways in which to subvert democracy at
all times. And so you have a situation where you have a very corrupt
political elite. You have a media that is increasingly becoming a corporate
media. And so you have this court. It's like you have a system. You
have this contempt of court now, which is a law, which means that the
court works like a manhole, like a floor trap. It attracts all the power
because it's not accountable and it's able to exercise unaccountable
power. Today, if I had documentary evidence of a corrupt judge - say
I had evidence of a judge having taken a bribe for making a particular
judgment I can't put that evidence before the court because it's
contempt of court. Truth is not a defense in contempt of court. So you
can imagine the extent of power that is being exercised. It's completely
unaccountable. And now having put me in jail on this, what has happened
is that the message has gone out to the Indian media that "Don't
mess with us if we can do this to her, you think of what we can
do to a journalist in a little town who has no money, who can't hire
a lawyer, who doesn't have the protection of, you know, being a public
figure." They can just be thrown in jail. They lose their jobs.
They lose everything. So they just allow the court this wide berth.
And it keeps going. You know, sometimes it makes judgments which are
good. But most of the time, its judgments, at the moment, are retrogressive,
you know? And of course those judgments suit the middle class; it suits
the Indian elite so the court is a holy cow. So they say "Oh but
how can she, you know, like, - there should be respect for something,
you know? That hierarchical way of thinking.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking
to Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things. Her latest book
is War Talk. We'll be back with her in a minute.
music break)
AMY GOODMAN: Sheila Chandra
Roots and Wings here on Democracy Now!, the War and Peace
report. I'm Amy Goodman and, with Juan Gonzalez, our guest is the acclaimed
writer, Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, The Cost of
Living, Power Politics, and War Talk. War Talk is her latest book, collection
of essays. You were just talking about going to court. Maybe if you
could briefly tell us about the issue of the dams in India. And then
we can talk about, for those who watch us on TV in our breaks, we were
just showing Gujarat. You can talk about what's happening there.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the
issue of big dams in India is really somehow a microcosm it's
not a microcosm; it's such a big issue but it tells the story
of modern India and the model of development that that country has chosen
to follow. There is a river called the Narmada in central India, which,
you know, on which this Narmada Valley Development Project has proposed
to build 3,200 dams on a single river. Now for years, there's been a
very spectacular resistance movement against the building of these dams
by people who stand to be displaced by them. And in early 1999, in an
interim judgment, the Supreme Court decided to allow this very controversial
dam to be built. And I wrote an essay called "The Greater Common
Good" where I... you know when I traveled in the Narmada Valley
and found things that shocked me, shocked me. Among which were not the
facts that exist but the facts that don't exist. And one of them was
that there were no figures for how many people have been displaced by
big dams in India because big dams are like secular temples, you know?
And I calculated that figure to be 33 million people, which of course
at the time I wrote the essay, was marked and people said "How
can that be?" and so on. Subsequently, the World Commission on
Dams did an India country study where they placed it at almost 56 million
people, all of whom are obviously the poorest, the "untouchables,"
the indigenous peoples. And so the whole thing again is a critique of
how you centralize natural resources; how you snatch them from the poor
and redistribute them to the rich. And that process of course was carried
out pretty successfully by the corrupt Indian state, as in all third
world countries. But now it's become even worse, because that process
is being privatized. And theyou know, it's like... everybody thought,
"Oh this doesn't work for us so maybe privatization will make it
all efficient and just." And in fact it's like giving a malaria
patient medicine for jaundice. It's become so very much worse, so very
frightening. Thousands of people are now being pushed off their lands,
not just by dams but by the corporatization of agriculture, the privatization
of water, you know, the whole process of the WTO. And now you have reports
from all over of Indian farmers committing suicide by the hundreds because
they are not able to cope. And there's a drought looming. So obviously
these are issues that are complex and I can't really, you know, I can't
convey anything but the urgency on a radio program. But I have written
about it in some depth.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk,
again in the speech you did at Porto Allegre, which is reproduced in
your book War Talk about not being forced to choose between the mad
moolahs and the malevolent Mickey Mouses as a choice that was being
confronted by many people in the Third World. But interesting that I've
mentioned this on the program several times, the Pakistani Marxist Tariq
Ali in his book, Clash of Fundamentalisms, lays out the theory that
really the resurgence of fundamentalism, in the Middle East especially,
was a direct product of British and American imperialism. And their
attempts to prevent the Indian modernists, Gandhi and others, from moving
forward, to prevent the Egyptian progressives of the 1950s and 60s
they supported the rise of fundamentalism and in essence there is some
tie between the continuing process of imperialism, both British and
US, and the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East and in India and
Pakistan. I'm wondering your thoughts about that.
ARUNDHATI ROY: I completely
agree, except that he should bring India into it too. If you look at
things now, there has never been a close association between the US
government and any Indian government before. And today we have what
can only be described as a very quick march towards fascism, towards
religious fascism. And the Indian government and the Indian government
and the Israeli government are more or less aligned on this, you know?
And if you see how there's a connection, not just between - yeah, well
corporate globalization is a project of imperialism, if you like. And
you see how closely those two things are allied and you see how what
is happening in India the massacre, the state-supervised massacre
of Muslim people on the street of Gujarat is not being condemned;
is being allowed to... is almost being approved of now in the way things
are going there. And of course, there's a link between... it suits this
project really well, fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism of any
kind.
AMY GOODMAN: Gujarat. It
is between who?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Between Hindus
and Muslims and...
AMY GOODMAN: But where does
the government stand on this?
ARUNDHATI ROY: (laughs) The
Indian government today is the BJP, which hasit is called the
sang parivar which in Hindi means "the family" you know, of
basically Hindu right-wing political parties, cultural guilds, goon
squads. And between themselves, they divide the labor. But last year
at this time, in Gujarat, the BJP government headed by a person called
Narendra Modi, sponsored, supervised, oversaw the slaughter of 2000
Muslims on the streets of Gujarat. 150,000 were driven from their homes.
Women were gang-raped and burned alive. And after that, he won the elections,
you know? It's a very big crisis for our notion of democracy. While
that was happening, while the slaughter was happening on the streets
of Gujarat, I was being put into prison for contempt of court by the
Supreme Court. Not a single murderer, not a single person there was
proceeded against. But they all stood for elections. And they won. So
how do you call that democracy? What is the difference between democracy
and majoritarianism and where does it shade into fascism? And where
does nationalism fit in all this?
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about
the major forces that people on the ground are up against when you talk
about the dams, when you talk about globalization. If we can end also
on the issue of war, invasion, and now, occupation -- what about the
force of the people? I think of the women, your friends, who are willing
to drown, to stand in the areas that they are supposed to be displaced
from to say "the waters can rise; we won't leave."
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you
know, I think we need to... I'm in a state right now where I feel that
we need to reexamine our ideas of resistance. I think we need to think
about this very carefully, because we saw perhaps the most spectacular
display of public morality ever on the 15th of February when millions
of people across five continents marched against the war. It was discarded
with disdain. Those marches were important. Those marches were important
for us to rally our forces, to understand our strengths. But those marches
didn't affect the other side. So we need to now understand that the
time has come for civil disobedience to become real. It's no longer
symbolic. The marches can only be the symbol of something else that's
real that we are doing, you know? Our meetings in Porto Allegre, our
marches, and our demonstrations are for us. But they are not weapons
when using against them, you know? So we need to now change our way
of thinking to be effective. It's enough of being right; now we need
to win. And now we need to win not necessarily by confronting empire,
but by taking it apart part by part, and disabling those parts. I think
we need to make a list of every single company that has benefited from
a reconstruction contract in Iraq and we need to go after them and we
need to shut them down. That's what we need to do. We can't think that...it's
beyond the stage of resistance songs and marches; those are for us.
Those are important for us. But we need to pick these people off one
by one because we can't confront empire. We can't confront it all together.
We can't...nobody can deal with America's war machine. But we need to
reverse those sanctions, you know. We need to make people sanctions.
We need to look to our strengths and do it right. We need to... undo
the nuts and bolts of empire.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And it could
also be though that the reaching deeper into the populations of these
various countries so that those sectors of the population, whether it's
people who work in these industries or the people who provide the shipping
for the tankersin other words, at a certain point a movement will
reach those sectors of the population that have a decisive impact, if
they're organized sufficiently, to push back.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Absolutely.
You need to get to the people who say "We will not move this missile
from the warehouse to the dock."
JUAN GONZALEZ: (overlapping)
Or the soldiers. Or the soldiers themselves.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you see
that happening? Is there somewhere that is giving you hope?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think
I'm a pre-programmed optimist, you know? So I'm the wrong person to
ask. But I think the point is, that for people like us, we have to do
this anyway. We have to do what we do anyway, whether there's hope or
despair is a way of seeing. But even if there wasn't hope, I would still
be doing what I do. Because that's what I do; that's who I am; that's
how I am. So we can't be only fighting because there's hope. If there's
only despair, the reasons to fight are even greater.
AMY GOODMAN: Well I want
to thank you very much for being with us. When you speak at Riverside
Church, what will the name of your speech be? Have you decided yet?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, it's
called Instant Mix Imperial Democracy: Buy One, Get One Free.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I very
much look forward to seeing it and hearing you speak then afterwards
to Howard Zinn. And in NY, there still is overflow seating. The tickets
sold out within hours of them going out, I think about a month ago.
Thousands of people have already gotten tickets. It's up at Riverside
Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan if people want to go tomorrow
night, Tuesday night at 7:00. Arundhati Roy, I want to thank you very
much for being with us. It's been a privilege.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you,
Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy,
her latest book is War Talk. It is published by South End Press. And
that does it for the program.