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Is India on a Totalitarian Path?
Part I

Interview with ARUNDHATI ROY

 

 

 




As voting continues in India in the largest elections the world has ever seen, novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy talks about ‘Corporatism, Nationalism and World’s Largest Vote’.

Nearly 815 million Indians are eligible to vote, and results will be issued in May.

One of India’s most famous authors -- and one of its fiercest critics -- Roy is out with a new book, "Capitalism: A Ghost Story," which dives into India’s transforming political landscape and makes the case that globalized capitalism has intensified the wealth divide, racism, and environmental degradation.

"This new election is going to be [about] who the corporates choose," Roy says, "[about] who is not going to blink about deploying the Indian army against the poorest people in this country, and pushing them out to give over those lands, those rivers, those mountains, to the major mining corporations."

Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, "The God of Small Things." Her other books include "An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire" and "Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers."

The following is a transcript of her interview.


INTRODUCTION BY AMY GOODMAN ("GOODMAN“):  The number of voters in India is more than two-and-a-half times the entire population of the United States. The election will take place in nine phases at over 900,000 polling stations across India.

Pre-election polls indicate Narendra Modi will likely become India’s next prime minister.

Modi is the leader of the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party. He serves -- he served as the chief minister of Gujarat, where one of India’s worst anti-Muslim massacres occurred in 2002 that left at least a thousand people dead. After the bloodshed, the U.S. State Department revoked Modi’s visa, saying it could not grant a visa to any foreign government official who, quote, "was responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom."

Modi has never apologized for or explained his actions at the time of the mass-murders.

Modi’s main challenger to become prime minister is Rahul Gandhi of the ruling Congress party. He is heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that’s governed India for much of its post-independence history.


Several smaller regional parties and the new anti-corruption Common Man Party are also in the running. If no single party wins a clear majority, the smaller parties could play a crucial role in forming a coalition government.

Nermeen Shaikh and I recently sat down with Arundhati Roy when she was in New York. We began by asking about her new book and the changes that have taken place in India since it opened its economy in the early ’90s.

A
RUNDHATI ROY (“ROY“):   What we’re always told is that, you know, there’s going to be a trickle-down revolution. You know, that kind of opening up of the economy that happened in the early '90s was going to lead to an inflow of foreign capital, and eventually the poor would benefit.

So, you know, being a novelist, I started out by standing outside this 27-story building that belonged to Mukesh Ambani, with its ballrooms and its six floors of parking and 900 servants and helipads and so on. And it had this 27-story-high vertical lawn, and bits of the grass had sort of fallen off in squares.

And so, I said, "Well, trickle down hasn't worked, but gush up has," because after the opening up of the economy, we are in a situation where, you know, 100 of India’s wealthiest people own -- their combined wealth is 25 percent of the GDP, whereas more than 80 percent of its population lives on less than half a dollar a day.

And the levels of malnutrition, the levels of hunger, the amount of food intake, all these -- all these, you know, while India is shown as a quickly growing economy, though, of course, that has slowed down now dramatically, but at its peak, what happened was that this new -- these new economic policies created a big middle class, which, given the population of India, gave the impression of -- it was a universe of its own, with, you know, the ability to consume cars and air conditioners and mobile phones and all of that.

And that huge middle class came at a cost of a much larger underclass, which was just away from the arc lights, you know, which wasn’t -- which wasn’t even being looked at, millions of people being displaced, pushed off their lands either by big development project or just by land which had ceased to be productive.

You had -- I mean, we have had 250,000 farmers committing suicide, which, if you even try to talk about, let’s say, on the Indian television channels, you actually get insulted, you know, because it --

NERMEEN SHAIKH (“SHAIKH“):  I mean, that’s an extraordinary figure. It’s a quarter of a million farmers who have killed themselves.

ROY:  Yeah, and let me say that that figure doesn’t include the fact that, you know, if it’s a woman who kills herself, she’s not considered a farmer, or now they’ll start saying, "Oh, it wasn’t suicide. Oh, it was depression. It was this. It was that." You know?

GOODMAN:  But why are they killing themselves?

ROY:  Because they are caught in a debt trap, you know, because what happens is that the entire -- the entire face of agriculture has changed. So people start growing cash crops, you know, crops which are market-friendly, which need a lot of input. You know, they need pesticides. They need borewells. They need all kinds of chemicals. And then the crop fails, or the cost of the -- that they get for their product doesn’t match the amount of money they have to put into it. And also you have situations like in the Punjab, where -- which was called the "rice bowl of India." Punjab never used to grow rice earlier, but now --

GOODMAN:  In the north of India.

ROY:  Yes, in the north. And it’s supposed to be India’s richest agricultural state. But there you have so many farmer suicides now, land going saline. The, you know, people, ironically, the way they commit suicide is by drinking the pesticide, you know, which they need to -- and apart from the fact that the debt, the illness that is being caused by all of this, in Punjab, you have a train called the Cancer Express, you know, where people just coming in droves to be treated for illness and -- you know, and --

GOODMAN:  And the train is called the Cancer Express?

ROY:  Yes, it’s called the Cancer Express. And --

GOODMAN:  Because of the pesticide that they’re exposed to?

ROY:  Yeah, and they are. And this is the richest state in India, you know -- I mean agriculturally the richest. And there’s a crisis there -- never mind in places like, you know, towards the west, Maharashtra and Vidarbha, where, you know, farmers are killing themselves almost every day.

GOODMAN:  I was wondering if you could read from “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”

ROY: So, "In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF 'reforms' middle class -- the market -- live side by side with the spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than half a dollar, which is 20 Indian rupees, a day.

“Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalization of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels in almost every regional language.

“RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India.

“Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground.

“The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and they run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, and own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodized salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme -- which I think they’ve sold now. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.

"According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have."

So, I’m talking about how, when you have this kind of control over all business, over the media, over its essential infrastructure, electricity generation, information, everything, then you just field your, you know, pet politicians.

And right now, for example, what’s happening in India is that one of the reasons that is being attributed to the slowdown of the economy is the fact that there is a tremendous resistance to all of this from the people on the ground, from the people who are being displaced, from the -- and in the forests, it’s the Maoist guerrillas; in the villages, it’s all kinds of people’s movements -- all of whom are of course being called Maoist.

And now, there is a -- you see, these economic policies -- these new economic policies cannot be implemented unless -- except with state -- with coercive state violence. So you have a situation where the forests are full of paramilitary just burning villages, you know, pushing people out of their homes, trying to clear the land for mining companies to whom the government has signed, you know, hundreds of memorandums of understanding.

Outside the forests, too, this is happening. So there is a kind of war which, of course, always existed in India. There hasn’t been a year when the Indian army hasn’t been deployed against its own people. I mean, I’ll talk about that later --

GOODMAN:  Since when?

ROY: Since independence, since 1947, you know?

But now the plan is to deploy them. Now it’s the paramilitary. But this new election is going to be who is the person that the corporates choose, who is not going to blink about putting the Indian -- about deploying the Indian army against the poorest people in this country, you know, and pushing them out to give over those lands, those rivers, those mountains, to the major mining corporations.

So this is what we are being prepared for now -- the air force, the army, going in into the heart of India now.

SHAIKH:  Before we go to the elections, could you -- one of the operations, the military operations, you talk about is Operation Green Hunt.

ROY:  Yeah.

SHAIKH:  Could you explain what that is, when it started, and who it targets?

ROY:  Well, Operation Green Hunt, basically -- you know, in 2004, the current government signed a series of memorandums of understanding with a number of mining corporations and infrastructure development companies to build dams, to do mining, to build roads, to move India into the space where, as the home minister at the time said, he wanted 75 percent of India’s population to live in cities, which is, you know, moving -- social engineering, really, moving 500 million people or so out of their homes.

And so, then they came up against this very, very militant resistance from the ground. As I said, in the forests, there were armed Maoist guerrillas; outside the forest, there are militant, you know, some call themselves Gandhians, all kinds.

There’s a whole diversity of resistance but, although strategically they had different ways of dealing with it, were all fighting the same thing. So then, in the state of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, which are where there are huge indigenous populations --

SHAIKH:  In central India.

ROY:  In central India -- the first thing the government did was to -- very similar to what happened in places like Peru and Colombia, you know, they started to arm a section of the indigenous population and create a vigilante army.

It was called the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh. The Salwa Judum, along with local paramilitary, went in and started decimating villages, like they basically chased some 300,000 people out of the forests, and some 600 villages were emptied.

And then the people began to fight back. And really, this whole Salwa Judum experiment failed, at which point they announced Operation Green Hunt, where there was this official declaration of war.

And there was so much propaganda in the media. As I explain to you now, the media is owned by the corporations who have vested interests. So there was this -- you know, the prime minister came out and said, "They are the greatest internal security threat." And, you know, there was this kind of conflation between the Maoists with their ski caps and, you know, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and all these people who are threatening the idea of India.

What the government wasn’t prepared for was the fightback, not just from the people in the forest, but even from a range of activists, a range of people who were outraged by this. And, you know, they passed these laws which meant that anybody could be called a Maoist and, you know, a threat to security.

And thousands -- even today, there are thousands of people in jail under sedition, under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and so on. And -- but that was Operation Green Hunt. But that, too, ran aground, because it’s very difficult terrain and -- you know, so now the idea is to deploy the army. And now the corporations feel that this past government hadn’t -- didn’t have the nerve to send out the army, that it blinked. And so --    

GOODMAN:  This is the Congress party.

ROY:  The Congress party and its allies. So now all the big corporations are backing the chief -- the three-times chief minister of the state of Gujarat, the western state of Gujarat, who has proved his mettle, you know, by being an extremely hard and cold-blooded chief minister, who is now -- I mean, he is, of course, best known for having presided over a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat.

GOODMAN:  So talk about who Modi is -- I mean, this moves us into this current election; it’s the largest election in the world -- who the contenders are, who this man is who could well become the head of India, who the United States has not granted a visa to in years because of what you’re describing.

ROY:  Well, who is Narendra Modi? I think he’s, you know, changing his -- changing his idea of who he himself is, you know, because he started out as a kind of activist in this self-proclaimed fascist organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, which was founded in 1925, who the heroes of the RSS were Mussolini and Hitler. Even today, you know, their -- the bible of the RSS was written by a man called Golwalkar, you know, who says the Muslims of India are like the Jews of Germany. And so, they have a very clear idea of India as a Hindu nation, very much like the Hindu version of Pakistan.

GOODMAN:  Where, you’re saying, the Muslims should be eradicated.

ROY:  Where they should be either made to live as, I think, second-class citizens and --

SHAIKH:  Or they should move to Pakistan.

ROY:  Yeah, or they should move to Pakistan. Or if they don’t behave themselves, they should just be killed, you know? So, this is a very old -- you know, Modi didn’t invent it. But he was -- he and even the former BJP prime minister, Vajpayee, the former home minister, Advani -- all of these are members of the RSS.

The RSS is an organization which has 40,000 or 50,000 units across India, extremely -- I mean, they were at one point banned because a former member of the RSS killed Mohandas Gandhi. But now -- you know, now they are of course not a banned organization, and they work --

GOODMAN:  Killed Mahatma Gandhi.

ROY:  Yeah, assassinated him.


To Be Continued Tomorrow …

[Courtesy: Democracy Now. Edited for sikhchic.com]
April 12, 2014

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Part I"









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