To read my review of Arundhati Roy’s new book of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, please visit http://www.literateur.com/2009/11/listening-to-grasshoppers-by-arundhati-roy/

Professor Jyotirmaya Sharma of the University of Hyderabad in Mail Today:

“The label of India being the largest democracy is not enough. It is not sufficient for us to go through the motions of conducting elections; sending representatives to Parliament and legislatures is not enough. Along with democracy, we need to build liberal institutions in the country.

“A narrow, official conception of nationalism often comes in the way of suppressing dissent, ignoring minority views, and demanding compliance in the name of an abstract idea of the nation. In turn, these illiberal trends fuel the demand for unity, which often is authoritarian tendencies masquerading in the name of keeping the country united and strong.”

Illustration: courtesy R. Prasad/ Mail Today

Also read: ARUNDHATI ROY: India is not a democracy

ARUNDHATI ROY: Election is not democracy

My grandmother taught me the secret of sleeping. When I was about seven, I got sick at her house and was put on the living room couch to sleep. I was extremely restless, and from her chair, she told me to close my eyes and lie still and I would fall asleep. And it worked. It still works. Now, whenever I can’t fall asleep, I just lie completely still and soon sleep finds me. This simple trick has helped me to fall asleep in the strangest places—on school buses, on the floor of a university’s business school, sitting completely upright in a kayak. But the most important lesson my grandmother taught me that day was not how to sleep. Rather, she taught me that being still is important. If you are still, whatever you are waiting for will come.

Even at the age of seven, I was restless. I couldn’t stop moving. Now, as I type this, my foot is jiggling. It’s nigh on impossible for me to sit completely still. Funnily enough, the more I sleep, the less I move. In class, I can always gauge how tired I am by how many time I switch position in five minutes. It annoys me just as much as it annoys the people sitting next to me. I wish I could find more stillness in my life, but as with many things, there never seems to be enough time.

Of course, there’s always the adage, “Don’t just sit back and watch your life go by.” But what are you missing if you are always chasing after life? What is the important things follow after you, but you’re too busy rushing onwards for them to catch up? Shouldn’t we use some of our life to see what happens, like Forrest Gump on his bend, and just wait, live, experience? What do we have to lose by stopping to smell the roses or living the moments now? Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow a vision, today is the only thing holding the two together. Being still allows life to take its time. True, there are only 24 hours in a day, but spending them in a rush creates a constant feeling of having only 23 or 22. Stillness, to some extent, allows for the full enjoyment and expression of all 24 hours.

But why stillness? Why is it so important? D.H. Lawrence wrote, “One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be mere rushing on.” Stillness brings inspiration; it allows one to be able to think more clearly and be more conscious of one’s ideas and actions. As a person with a cluttered mind, it would be nice to be able to sort through my thoughts in order to make sense of them, like Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan. Because I foresee that it will be difficult to achieve, I want it even more. We always want what we do not have, and I wish to gain stillness all the more because of its absence in my life.

I’ve been a student of yoga for about a year and a half now, goaded into it by my mother but continuing because of myself. When meditating, the practice is to not simply ignore the thoughts that come, but rather to acknowledge them and then return attention to the breath. I’ve tried this and depending on the day of the week, it works. Not always, but sometimes. It’s important to recognize that there are distractions in life, but to take time to be away from them and just be. However, my main trouble is always coming back to the breath. Throughout the day, my mind is always running, but in fits and starts. I think one task at a time, but one task leads to another and by the end of the day I have fifteen different things written on my hand. It’s kind of like that commercial with Ellen DeGeneres. When I try to clear my mind, suddenly all the things I have to do are laid out in front of me and I can see from one task to the next, rather than a jumble of things that will later be smeared across my palm. This is the exact opposite of the stillness I am trying to achieve, and simply leaves me feeling frustrated. Why can’t I quiet my mind? Why isn’t stillness of the mind as simple as the stillness of sleep?

The only thing I can think of is that it’s going to take time. Just as I have to wait for sleep to come after I’ve decided to be still, I’m going to have to practice quieting my mind in order for true stillness and peace to come. For now, I’m going to be thankful for the peace of mind I do have, and appreciate all the little things that make my life so full, loving the chaotic soul that I am. With time, the mind-quiet will come. As with anything, it’s just going to take some time.

Zen-fully yours,

S.

P.S. Great song.

“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” –Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy wrote a beautiful and heart-wrenching story, The God of Small Things, which won her the Booker Prize in 1997. Though the book is fiction, what she writes about a Kathakali play, as the main characters Estha and Rahel watch it in the History House, is universal.

“The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t.”

I finished reading Arundhati Roy’s book the other night, and the story sat with me for a long time. I knew the fate of the characters as the story unfolded, but I read anyway. The end grabbed my heart and pulled me down for a while. It was painful. But, for me, closing the book and wandering through the rest of my day with the characters at the forefront of my mind is clear evidence of a great story (even if it hasn’t won an award).

A different author wrote a blog post on a different subject, but it resonated with me as much as the quote from Arundhati Roy’s novel. Michelle Davidson Argyle, aka. Lady Glamis from The Literary Lab, reflects about knowing when we’re writing honestly:

“Magic. That’s what seems to happen when I manage to get honesty into my writing. It’s like a memorable, catchy song where everything comes together and it makes me feel a mixture of emotions that reach more deeply than I thought was possible. I look into the mirror and I see me, but I don’t see me. It has become a creation that took on a life of its own. My honesty gave it that life.”

I’ve settled into the magic of a great story many times. And,I’ve ridden the magical roller coaster of honest writing a few times, when the details of a story pour out in smooth succession: thrills, chills, and elation.

Those are the reasons why I love literature, and why I keep coming back to writing.

***

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1998 (p. 218). Print.
Argyle, Michelle Davidson. “That Song was Dinner.” The Literary Lab, November 19, 2009. Online.

The problem at the heart of post-colonialism in both it’s socio-political and literary expressions is rather simple. Oppressed nations such as India and Algeria who were under the direct control of imperialist countries have through struggle routed the invaders and taken control of their own countries. However the post-colonies did not turn out to be the equal societies that the masses of those countries were fighting for or led to believe would come into place. In place of a colony we have a society that is still at it’s heart unequal, societies that although have gotten rid of the foreign exploiter (at least in part or temporarily) they have not gotten rid of the local, national one. The ruling classes of these countries are usually made up of a combination of compromisers from the old regime and the nationalist leaders of the revolt. Together they use of the symbols and language of independence and the struggle for freedom to mask their attacks upon the working class and often peasant masses of their countries. Those that once were willing to lay down their lives for democracy and freedom seem willing to negotiate often with the imperialist and those that aided them. The politics of nationalism have come full circle.

Post-colonial literature attempts to examine this problem and discuss the effects of decolonisation. One of the major themes of post-colonist literature is nationalism and it’s failures, however I would argue that post-colonialism still largely accepts capitalist notions of nationalism and so the crisis of nationalism seems to many of them to be their own crisis and in a way it is. The dissenting so called post-nationalist still clings to the nationalist politics of the anti-imperialist struggle and because they cling to nationalism and in some way to it’s producer, capitalism, they often cannot full imagine an alternative.

Reading back over this I think this comes of a little harsh. First of all we must recognize the amazing courage and willpower of the masses that saw the expulsion of various brutal, military regimes run by racist, imperialist murders. They fought against cruel invaders backed up by the military might and monetary support of the British Empire, France, Spain, the Netherlands, German, Australia and the United States. It is obvious to see why the anti-imperialist struggles even when confined to nationalist politics, seemed to the oppressed as the expression of their hopes, dreams and passions.

However in most of these countries it is now many decades since decolonisation.

In India the nationalist ruling parties and their cohorts enforce the barbaric caste system, run a country akind to a police state and savagely attack those rebels who fight them in the countryside while adopted neoliberal policies that wreak havoc upon the working masses.

In South Africa the ANC tries to privatised water, attacks militant demonstrations and operates to help the old and new capitalists continue to make wealth at the expense of the people.

In Palestine national liberation has not yet been achieved but already the Palestinian Liberation Organisation has shown itself, unwilling and unable to lead the struggle against Israel preferring to pretend as if they have already won as they suck up to their imperialist masters for the bitter compromise of a the lesser half of an apartheid state.

Nationalism has been put to the test and in it’s success in throwing out empire has been found wanting in building an alternative to it.

Often post-colonial texts such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Childern and The Ground Beneath Her Feet take up the stories of not only the struggle against imperialism but also the contradictions in the victorious independence nationalist movements. Arundhati Roy in particular takes the post-indepenance Indian government to task for it’s failure to meet the needs and wants of the people and it’s beholdeness to the masters of profit.

The  depiction of the colonist horrors and nationalist failure can however lead to a certain pessimism. Few of the authors can offer a real alternative to nationalism, the traditions of mass struggle still cast a shadow but it is a longer and longer one as most of the old parties turn to parliamentary style reformism or just open capitalist liberalism. this can lead one to think that a revolutionary change in society, especially in the third world can only end up with the same old system still in place. This is an idea i’ve heard tossed around a lot however it completely undermines the victories of the national liberation movements and just leads to a sense that you shouldn’t try to change the world, that you will just end up with the same old mess. Others try and make out that the nationalist leaders sold out, changed their tune so to speak. This tries to redeem nationalism but fails, it can’t take into account all the twists and turns of the nationalist parties. Even at the height of the movements they were often far more conservative that the mass of people.

However reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things gives you hope. She brilliantly undermines the national, caste, religious boundaries that still scar the land (thanks for the most part to the british empire) and often spurs the politics of nationalism while also giving the idea that you can struggle for more. That you should struggle for more than just the same old mess.

However her alternative is a blurry one at best, she has sympathies for the Maoist rebels and there supports along the rural population and tradition tribes but while showing important solidarity with this struggle offers no real plan for them to succeed. Nationalism has been found wanting and so Roy gropes out for ideas such as the anti-gobalisation movement and such which while critical of many of the policies of capitalism, ultimately full short of changeling it with an idea of what social force in society can change the world.

Now don’t get me wrong I am loving The God of Small Things, it’s like fiction-poetry and it’s left wing, anti-nationalist politics are pretty amazing. She writes a book that makes you angry about the world, that makes you want to get out there and smash-up the system that has hurt the characters in the novel (and the people of the real world) so much.

But obviously a strong alternative to nationalism in literature and politics is needed. So much of literature is tied up in national identities and ideals, the constantly pushed concept that there is some gulf between American and Indian literature, German and Australian etc. Although of course literature under capitalism is shaped by the existence of national boundaries and the social basis of the writers, this does not mean however that we just have to accept nationalism uncritically in pieces of fiction.

We need more books like Arundhati Roys, books that challenged nationalist ideas and present the opening for an alternative. However we also need that alternative , it needs to be argued that we need to tear down the system of capitalism that needs these national borders, that sows national divisions, that feeds racial violence and that allows money and capital to move across the earth freely but denies this right to humans.  In the age of so-called ‘the war on terror’, invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq, the occupation of Palestine and the racism that is built up to support this neo-imperialism, the more writers writing about the horrors of imperialism the better. However the alternative to this fucked up world is not just a different kind of fucked world nor a slightly less fucked up one but a world in which the vast majority have control. The reason that the post-colonies still experiences inequality was because they were still apart of the capitalist system, that still there existed a class divide and that once the old empire had been pushed out this class division was pushed more into the foreground. This is the answer to the problem at the heart of post-colonialism, that the revolutionary movements did not go far enough, that they didn’t get rid of capitalism all together, that they substituted the peasants or the students or the middle class intellectuals for the working class, that they fell into trailing behind the nationalists. However new struggles are breaking out, many have like Arundhati Roy seen through the facade of the nationalist governments but are still fighting for a better tomorrow.

“Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe.” – Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, World Social Forum, 2003

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.” Arundhati Roy

Roy’s foray into social science, after her previous career in acting and writing film scripts, is an extremely important phenomenon. It’s akin to Ritu Beri singing the Internationale. It’s like Naomi Campbell reciting the Communist Manifesto. The market is supposed to shatter caste-based privileges. And here is a fitting example of how powerful market forces, with Roy at their helm, have smashed the brahminical exclusivism of the Left’s intellectual citadels. It’s show biz time at the National Archives!

No wonder academics and other serious folks are wringing their hands in confusion. Their exclusive space has been usurped by sheer glamour. Academic discourses have been dumbed down for mass consumption by a globalised Joan of Arc.

-Sagarika Ghose in the Outlook Magazine

There are gifted writers. There are opinionated, but gifted writers. There are ridiculously smug, opinionated, but gifted writers.

Then there is Arundhati Roy.

The woman who is lauded by that anarchist, Noam Chomsky, first shot to fame by winning the 1997 Man Booker Prize for the brilliant novel, The God of Small Things. However, by making shocking statements on almost every current issue, she went on to become, as one New York Times article labelled her, ‘the Indian author of one good novel and many peevish essays’.

She wrote a lengthy newspaper article calling for Kashmir’s freedom in which she argued: “India needs azadi [freedom] from Kashmir just as much as – if not more than – Kashmir needs azadi from India.” drawing a parallel between Russia-Chechnya and India-Kashmir. No wonder Congress Party Spokesperson Manish Tiwari was prompted to say, “It is a testimony to the Indian peoples’ tolerance that a woman who calls for the Balkanisation of the country is not locked up with the key then thrown away…”

Proclaiming herself to be an ‘Independent Mobile Republic’, she says that she is not bound by the way the Indian State thinks. While living in a country, one has to live with both rights and responsibilties. By claiming to be an Independent Mobile Republic, Roy proclaims her rights, but shirks the necessary responsibilities and obligations towards the country.

Being the most virulent anti-US of A voice in the intelligentsia, Roy often goes on the offensive, taking Iraq’s side. At other times, it’s Israel v/s Palestine. No prizes for guessing whom the Great Loose Canon supports. She goes so far as to call Bush ‘a nightmare incarnate’. As an Indian, Ms. Roy, we can not afford to forget that George W. Bush Jr. has probably been the best American Prez. for India, so far. The man put his job on the line to get India to sign a Nuke deal, on OUR TERMS, benefiting only us. Countless homes will get power from this energy, but even when progress is staring us in the face, Ms. Roy chooses to live by her ‘anti-globalisation’ stand.

But, one of the most troubling aspects of  Arundhati Roy is her stands on various religion-based happenings in the country and around the world. Suffering from a desperate need for contest, Roy went on to blame the 26/11 attacks’ responsibility on not just the terrorists, but the Kashmir issue, the Gujarat riots and the poor economic condition of Muslims in India. She later on went on to clarify that terrorism can not be justified, and that it is heartless. At a time when the entire nation was reeling under the shock of the said attacks, Roy’s comments came across as exceedingly insensitive, bordering on gaga babbling. However, the article carrying the above observations reeked of a dire need for sensationalism…these were certainly not the comments of a deep-thinking intellectual.

Roy also exhibits double standards in such issues. While often coming across as anti-Hindu, Roy is a staunch supporter of MF Husain, and strongly lambasts Taslima Nasreen.

”I don’t believe that a writer like Taslima Nasreen can undermine the dignity of 10 million people. Who is she? She is not a scholar of Islam. She does not even claim that Islam is her subject. She might have said extremely stupid things about Islam. I have no problem with the quotations that I have heard from her book. Dwikhandito has not been translated into English, but let’s just assume that what she said was stupid and insulting to Islam. But you have to be prepared to be insulted by something that insignificant.”

Here again, we see that while Roy jumps at the opportunity to blacken Hindu nationalists’ names, she is not prepared to back a woman like Taslima Nasreen, whose life was spent in sheer hell due to various religious reasons. Supporting a nudist painter who plays with fire, over a woman who has suffered in every way possible in daily life is quite clearly the sign of a Bohemian intellectual, isn’t it?

The worst of all of Roy’s commentary is the one on the current Naxalite problem. She supports their viewpoint that they should they will carry their guns to the negotiation table. The less said about Roy’s views on these mass-murderers, the better. Instead, we bring you excerpts of an interview:

“Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.”

“What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one.They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere.”

On being asked about the Maoist attack in Bijapur, in which 55 policemen were killed, Roy said:

“How can the rebels be the flip side of the State? Would anybody say that those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their methods — were the flip side of the State? What about those who fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This facile new report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything.”

Of course it’s horrible that 55 policemen were killed. But they’re as much the victims of government policy as anybody else.

Basically, Ms. Roy wants us to believe that every single martyr in the war against Red Terror has died because of the Government. Roy equates Maoists with the anti-Nazi fighters, the anti-French in Algeria, and the anti-USA in Iraq. This gives us fascinating insight into how Arundhati Roy’s mind works. You see, The Indian State is evil. The Naxalites are noble. The State is very rich. The Naxalites are extremely poor. The State has all the resources. The Naxalites have none. Therefore, it is a very unequal battle. The brilliant telly critic, Poonam Saxena could not have been more succint:

“But what about Naxalite violence?” Rajdeep Sardesai asked, and Arundhati Roy almost had a violent fit: how could he compare that with the power of the (Bad) Indian State, which is a Nuclear Power to boot and has an Army and Air Force. (She forgot the Navy and the paramilitary forces and several other Symbols of Oppression).

Further, Ms Roy declared that there was no point in the Poor, Good Naxals joining the mainstream because the Indian State is so Bad and so Corrupt, what would the Poor, Good Naxals do, being part of it?

Once upon a time, I seem to remember, Arundhati Roy had grandly proclaimed herself to be a mobile independent republic. If only she would demonstrate this mobility and — for starters at least — exit TV news channels, never to return.”

The problem with Arundhati Roy, like every other Neo-Marxist, is that she would rather sit down and pick faults in the Government rather than suggest ANY concrete measures to combat those problems. She, like every other pseudo-intellectual, has only the questions. Here’s a question from me: WHO DO YOU EXPECT WOULD HAVE THE ANSWERS??

Check. Not the Indian Government, you’ve made that only too obvious.

Check. Not you. Obviously.

Check. Not the Maoists. Since you yourself say that whenever, and if ever they come to power, they too will be autocratic, unjust and brutal.

Check. Not the Human Rights Activists. They are, as you say, ‘meaningless condemners’.

Check. Not the Indian Public. Too unconcerned, right?

Check. Not the politicians. Too corrupt.

Did I miss anyone out?

So you see, Ms. Roy is just one of those people, who revel in sensationalism, and making wild, grand statements, without an inch of depth. God save us from such…errr…’intellectuals(?)’

Nah.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones needs to be remade. The story needs to be told to a larger audience and since it’d generally be acceptable to the more open society now, it’d probably be a hit at the box office. While there may not be much problem hunting for people to play other roles, the role of Radha would be hard to find an actor for. Ms. Roy has done such a wonderful job of being Radha that whoever plays the role now, runs the risk of paling in comparison.

The credits include Manoj Bajpai and Harsh Chhaya. We wonder if they are the same ones we know of now. Raghuveer Yadav doesn’t have much of a role; he comes in only to have some paint sprayed upon him. The less we talk of Shahrukh Khan, the better for his fans.

“Parece, y sólo es el principio, que la urgencia de una tasa de crecimiento del 10% y la democracia son mutuamente incompatibles… porque este crecimiento está basado en el desplazamiento de millones de personas de sus tierras. Está basado en la extracción de minerales y en utilizar los ríos de una manera que resulta absolutamente destructiva desde el punto de vista ecológico. Y todo esto se ha hecho manteniendo los rituales de la democracia, pero vaciándolos de contenido. Así, tenemos los tribunales, la prensa y la policía fingiendo que hacen su trabajo, fingiendo que actúan como contrapesos y frenos, como se supone que deben las instituciones democráticas, pero, de hecho, todos ellos tienen intereses en ese proceso. Actúan como tapadera para los ricos, que desmantelan la democracia desde el fondo.”

Este episodio del programa de Riz Khan fue emitido en vivo por Al Jazeera el 2 de noviembre del 2009. Vea, también, Karan Thapar, “La democracia india en estado de emergencia”, entrevista con Arundhati Roy, CNN-IBN.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/roy051109.html

It has become fashionable to simply accept, to acquiese to power, to be obsequieous, to kiss-ass, to bend over to be taken from behind, to be grateful that your mortage can still be paid, to look for hand outs, to simply repeat the rhetoric and language of the powerful…to simply exlain the status quo and consider it insight.

Arundhati Roy continues, quietly and incisely, to remind us that dissent, all dissent, is the fundamental platform of democracy and of liberty.

One of my favorite commentators, Mark Slouka, recently penned a piece called Democracy & Deference where he ask, first the Americans, but then the world in general:

Turn on the TV to almost any program with an office in it, and you’ll find a depressingly accurate representation of the “boss culture,” a culture based on an a priori notion of—a devout belief in—inequality. The boss will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.

This is the paradigm—the relational model that shapes so much of our public life. Its primary components are intimidation and fear. It is essentially authoritarian. If not principally about the abuse of power, it rests, nonetheless, on a generally accepted notion of power’s privileges. Of its inherent rights. The Rights of Man? Please. The average man has the right to get rich so that he too can sit behind a desk wearing an absurd haircut, yelling, “You’re fired!” or refuse to take any more questions; so that he too—when the great day comes—can pour boiling oil on the plebes at the base of the castle wall, each and every one of whom accepts his right to do so, and aspires to the honor.

And then leads us to the crucial question on which our democracy may hinge:

What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses.

Indeed, what kind of culture is that? We would do well to consider answers.

[DemocracyNow Interview w/ Amy Goodman pt. 1]

[pt. 2]

[pt. 3]

[pt. 4]

Click HERE to buy this book.

Peace!
C

By: PKKH

Jim Yardley

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.  Indigenous women walked to a market in Chattisgarh State, where villagers are caught between the Indian government and Maoist rebels

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh. Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.  If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system. Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality.

Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated. “The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,” said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.” India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline. If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India. Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station. Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing

Earlier,” said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.” The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained. “It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said. Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders and private contractors, numerous government reports have found. “The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,” said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.” The Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by local Communists over a land dispute in a West Bengal village known as Naxalbari, hence the name Naxalites.

Some Communists would enter the political system; today, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an influential political force that holds power in West Bengal. But others went underground, and by the 1980s, many found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the region across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, the Maoists recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out. For years, the central government regarded them as mostly a nuisance. But in 2004, the movement radicalized, authorities say, when its two dominant wings merged with the more violent Communist Party of India (Maoist).

I’d promised Slimy Snake that I’d give him a hug each day for the rest of my life if he got me the two movies. He’s kept his part of the deal and it’s time for me to honour mine. Being the yellow chicken (I can’t call myself a chick now, can I?) that I am, I don’t think I’m going to engage in a hug everyday. But there’s hope for me yet. I bet he wouldn’t like the idea of being hugged everyday either. So, if he scraps the deal, I can always claim to have been willing for the same.

One of the movies has been watched and liked. The old flame has rekindled and I’m in love again. With her. Imagine her in a sari, with a hat and sunglasses!

Lesson to self: Make a promise you can’t keep only if you are sure of the other party’s reluctance to let you go ahead with it.

 

Rajdhani Express

The concerns raised by various reports earlier seemed to have not made any impact on the authorities in India who still talk about going soft on the Maoist terrorists (Naxalites) in India. The “Red-Corridor” as it is (in)famously known, stretches over multiple states in India. These terrorists who call themselves the voice of the poor and oppressed have been on an overdrive in the past few months killing hundreds of civilians and security personnel. In the latest incident they hijacked a passenger train thereby holding the whole nation to ransom. The train in question is arguably the most coveted train in India, the Rajdhani Express.

Booker Awardee-Arundhati Roy has been vocal about the Naxal "cause"

While people are regularly killed and looted by these criminals, the most shocking element of the whole episode is the clout and sympathy they find in political and so-called “intellectual” groups. While the spate of violence and crime goes unabated after a lot of dilly-dally the central government recently gave a go ahead to carry out operations against the Naxalites. Though the level of commitment from the various political parties still seems varied and casts doubts on the intentions.

In the recent Rajdhani express incident the police FIR lodged tells a story in itself.

While the political parties exchange allegations over support to naxalities, security of the hapless passengers remains at stake. Everyday millions of Indians commute on the rail network.

Though later on Thursday evening the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), in what seemed to be a “damage-control” exercise filed a FIR naming naxals as the perperators.

Naxalite Training

In an earlier revelation many national newspapers carried the news of the amount of fund and source of funds that these Naxalities have in their kitty. The sources peg the value of the “business” at INR 1,500- crores which is raised mainly through mafia style extortions especially from the corporates operating mines and related industries in the naxal belt.

"Red-Corridor"

The report also exposed the way these militants are raising funds from the hapless industrialist in these areas. This has in many cases also led industries to shut down operations after some of the employees were abducted or killed. The area is widely under developed and poor people get lured to join the “movement” with hope of getting “social justice” and as reports indicate “wages” for being part of the gang.

Such militants are also encouraging production of narcotics to fund their groups. While they lead a lavish life from the funds they are forcing common people to death traps.

The naxalities have also been targeting banks to fund their luxuries.

In a report published by the BBC the level of sophistication and organization of these terrorists is clearly visible. The details were revealed when BBC landed up with a copy of the “preliminary interrogation report” of Narla Ravi Sharma, a senior Naxalite leader who was arrested a fortnight ago by the security forces.

Other related NowPublic Stories

• http://my.nowpublic.com/world/naxal-terror-rips-bihar-again-16-murdered
• http://my.nowpublic.com/world/its-all-out-against-naxals-india
• http://my.nowpublic.com/world/indian-naxals-turning-taliban
• http://my.nowpublic.com/world/naxalities-attack-police-party-behead-informer

NowPublic

This is not for those who adore Ms. Arundhati Roy.

As they say, if there’s an issue, Arundhati Roy has an incorrect theory about it. This time it is the Maoists and Naxals. I don’t even have to detail what her opinion on the matter is.

Regardless, watch this episode of Devil’s Advocate with Arundhati Roy (or read the transcript here). I cannot help but immensely respect Karan Thapar after watching it.

Did you see the man’s unfaltering concentration in the face of Ms. Roy’s repeatedly falling pallu ?

On a serious note, there are the usual metaphors (followed by a smug and self-satisfied ah-ha expression .. that only Ms. Roy feels), the usual tirade against free markets, the usual lack of solutions that make sense, the usual stuff.

**

For those interested, read this superb piece by Vir Sanghvi (via Sauvik) on the same issue. This is the part where he takes on the likes of Ms. Roy :

Seven, it does not follow however that just because we understand where we’ve gone wrong, we are obliged to support a Marxist or Maoist view of the world where all free enterprise is terrible, where all elections are a joke and where political power only comes out of the barrel of a gun.

It is entirely possible to sympathise with the victims but to disagree profoundly with the people who claim to represent them.

Do read the entire piece.

In her latest series of essays, Arundhati Roy sounds deeply dismissive of the Indian democracy and perhaps supportive of the Maoist struggle. Why does she take these positions? That’s the key issue explore today with Arundhati Roy.

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Kiran Thapar: Hello and welcome to Devil’s Advocate. In her latest series of essays, Arundhati Roy sounds deeply dismissive of the Indian democracy and perhaps supportive of the Maoist struggle. Why does she take these positions? That’s the key issue I shall explore today with Arundhati Roy.

Let’s start with your cynical view of Indian democracy. In your essays, you say the ‘Beacon is fading,’ you say it’s being hollowed out and emptied of meaning, you say that Indian democracy no longer can be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we dreamt it would. Why have you come to this conclusion?

Arundhati Roy: It is pretty obvious that in the last 60 years of our democracy what we have is a situation in which the poor are getting poorer and poorer, the rich are getting richer. I am not suggesting by this that we should go back to some older form of discredited despotic or colonial regime. I am trying to analyse what is the problem with democracy now. Why are the institutions of our democracy – the courts, media and Parliament – letting the people down? In a democracy, they are meant to act as checks and balances but actually they are serving as a cover to be as undemocratic as possible.

Karan Thapar: So you are suggesting two important things. Firstly, you are saying that the institutions of democracy have actually failed to act as checks and secondly, you are saying that the poor, who I presume are the vast majority of India, are not benefiting from Indian democracy sufficiently.

Arundhati Roy: Of course they have protection but the fact is that we are now in a situation of emergency. The human developmental index shows that more than 80 per cent of the people of India are living in conditions of extreme poverty. We have the world’s most malnutritioned children. The Dalits and the Adivasis are living in conditions of famine by any world indicators when more than 50 per cent of them are malnutritioned.

Karan Thapar: So the state of India’s dispossessed and poor is proof that Indian democracy has failed?

Arundhati Roy: It’s proving that there is a structural violence. Mahasweta Devi (Magsaysay Award-winner Bengali novelist) said a few years ago in Frankfurt about the Indian democracy as a tapestry with parts of it as silken and parts of it tattered but it all holds together. Now, what has happened is that the silken parts have sequined and the tattered parts are torn and the poor are falling in. And the Indian state is following them with guns, with helicopter gunships. We are in crisis. We have an ecological crisis.

Karan Thapar: Let’s pick up the issue of the poor that they are actually falling through the holes in the tapestry. How do you view the NREGA which was specifically designed to give relief and succour to the very poorest of the poor. Don’t you believe that it has been effective?

Arundhati Roy: It’s important, it’s effectiveness is debatable. It is also working as a honeypot around which corrupt people have flocked and have tried their best to prevent it.

Karan Thapar: Are the failings so great that they undermine the essential core of NREGA?

Arundhati Roy: No, I am not critical of the Employment Guarantee Act but what I am saying is that it was passed in order to mitigate a structural dispossession that was going on. So we shouldn’t confuse that mitigation with the structural problem.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying that structurally Indian democracy works to the disadvantage of the poor?

Arundhati Roy: What I have said is that democracy has become fused with free-market capitalism. And it is this that has made a serious erosion and hollowed up these institutions. So if you look at the Supreme Court or if you look at the corporate media or ministers, Parliamentarians and MPs have interests in shares and what is going on, if you look at the massive levels of corruption, what we are looking at is a very structural problem.

Karan Thapar: Would you be happier if instead of fusing with a free market economic system Indian democracy had fused with socialist system? In other words, what I am questioning is that is it the ideology that you bring to this issue that actually determines your conclusion about democracy?

Arundhati Roy: Socialism has had its problems too. I am not a supporter of Stalinism nor am I a person who is totally uncritical of what happened in China or the Soviet Union, so I am not talking about merely ideologically, but certainly socialism has a language of justice that capitalism does not have.

Karan Thapar: Doesn’t capitalism actually produce higher living standards overall for people, doesn’t it guarantee to them the liberties of individuality which gets suppressed, are you not ignoring all of that?

Arundhati Roy: It guarantees a higher living standards for a few at the cost of the many. And that’s the situation we find ourselves in a country where we have more and more billionaires and a large vast portion of people who are dispossessed, who are homeless, who are being cutoff from their resources.

Karan Thapar: Can I ask you a blunt question? Sixty years after Indian democracy came into being, do you believe that India’s poor and dispossessed have benefited?

Arundhati Roy: No, I don’t. I believe that they have some security and some more than others. We in Delhi have democracy where as in the jungles of Dantewada, they don’t have democracy.

Karan Thapar: You are saying that a vast majority of the poor have not benefited?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t think that it is that simple. For example, the Dalit issue. There is a form of representation that is going on yet the people that have fallen through the hole, people I am talking about who do not have representation, the people who are malnutritioned, who are living in conditions of famine and now the Army is being called out against them.

Karan Thapar: I am not sure whether you can say that the Army is being called out against them, but let me quote to you a critic of your essay, Harsh Mander, in particular a critic of your ‘dismissal’ of democracy …

Arundhati Roy: Dismissal, please is not the word.

Karan Thapar: Cynicism?

Arundhati Roy: Neither cynicism.

Karan Thapar: Sort of questioning?

Arundhati Roy: Yes.

Karan Thapar: Let me quote to you. “With all its failings and betrayals, the guarantees contained in India’s secular democratic Constitution have made a significant difference to the lives of its dispossessed people. They would have been even poorer than they are now, more insecure, more oppressed without democracy. Of this, I am convinced.” You are radically disagreeing with someone like Harsh Mander?

Arundhati Roy: I am sorry to say but this is a silly point because it suggests that what I am saying is we shouldn’t have democracy, we should have some other old discredited authoritarian system. It is not.

Karan Thapar: I am not sure if he is suggesting that. He is suggesting that your questioning is unjustified, that you are finding flaws where they don’t exist.

Arundhati Roy: Come on. Look at the human development index and what it is saying. My point is that there are problems in our system and we need to face them.

Karan Thapar: What would have produced a better human index for India?

Arundhati Roy: For example when some keep repeating the word ‘democracy’, they are refusing to see the fact that what I am saying is that the fusion of corporate globalisation and democracy has created this situation. A system in which you don’t have the free-market policies.

Karan Thapar: So what policies would you want, socialist policies?

Arundhati Roy: No, a different policy. Come on! Do you want me to give you a manifesto right here?

Karan Thapar: I suspect that it’s your ideological aversion to the free market that has conditioned your suspicion or your questioning of democracy.

Arundhati Roy: Well, you are right because I do have an ideological aversion to the free market and its fusion with democracy has corrupted what democracy was meant to me. But when you are saying what’s your solution, it is that we have to look. You know it has taken years and years of decision making of corruption, of injustice, refusing to look at the problems saying we would have been much better or we would have been much worse of it if it was somewhere else, so let’s not critique what is going on now. My thing is that everytime something happens, for example, if you just give me two minutes I would like to say it that we call ourselves a democracy but as a society we tolerate the 68,000 dead in Kashmir, we tolerate deeply undemocratic laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, we had the Sikh genocide and what happened in Gujarat, all of these things I question.

Karan Thapar: And the Prime Minister apologised for what happened to the Sikhs, Sonia Gandhi visited the Golden Temple.

Arundhati Roy: Would it be enough for you Karan, if someone killed your parents and raped your wife and the Prime Minister apologises?

Karan Thapar: The Chinese haven’t apologised for the Tiananmen Square.

Arundhati Roy: It doesn’t matter. The point is when we accept these kinds of injustices and absorb them and the Government thinks by apologising or dissimulating it’s over, but they all settle in us like toxins and we become a pretty barbaric society.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying that the weight of all that has gone wrong in 60 years is now sinking us?

Arundhati Roy: It is.

Karan Thapar: Is it beyond correction?

Arundhati Roy: Well, it’s not beyond correction, it would not be beyond correction if instead of patting ourselves on the back and saying we are so much better off now, we looked at what’s going wrong and we went out and insisted that we start moving on the paths to justice.

Karan Thapar: So your essays are in a sense a wake up call to the Indian people, you are saying look at the black side of our democracy, stop patting yourself and ignoring?

Arundhati Roy: Absolutely. I mean look at everything that’s going wrong.

Karan Thapar: So you are not dismissing it, you are actually asking the Indians to open their eyes and see the truth.

Arundhati Roy: Yes, absolutely.

Karan Thapar: Let’s come to how you view the Maoists’ struggle. In your essay, ‘Listening To Grasshoppers’ you write almost with approval that the poor are crossing over quietly while the world is not looking to the side of the arms struggle. Do you even support or perhaps even approve the Maoists’ struggle?

Arundhati Roy: As we have been talking earlier that there has been a massive dispossession, a structural violence against the poor of this country, we are talking about tens of millions dispossessed and malnutritioned. We are talking about 180,000 farmers who have committed suicide but most of all what worries me is this binary that has been put out – the state versus the Maoists. Sometimes even I am guilty of that. But the fact is that for the last 20 years, there have been a whole array of peaceful struggles, a whole array of voices, including mine saying, look you don’t pay attention to this nonviolence resistance by default you condone violence.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying that the Maoists have been driven to take up arms because they have been pushed to the perimeters of Indian society?

Arundhati Roy: Look, so now what’s happening is that the poor who are being faced with this violence have taken up arms. I am not sure that all of them are Maoists, I think there is a very big problem about how the State defines Maoists and who they are willing to kill and call a Maoist.

Karan Thapar: Leave the definition of Maoist aside. Are the poor and the dispossessed, who you say have been driven to the perimeters, justified in taking up arms?

Arundhati Roy: If I was a person who has been dispossessed, whose wife has been raped or have been pushed of their lands, and who is being faced with ‘police force’, I would say that I am justified in taking up arms if that’s the only way I have to defend myself.

Karan Thapar: If the Maoists and the poor are justified in taking up arms, then is the State, particularly the state where the government is popularly elected and represented, justified in taking up arms in defence?

Arundhati Roy: I think we should stop thinking about who is justified because we are in a situation now in which what is happening is that there is face-off and there are two armies apart from the fact that there are all these nonviolent resistant movements which are not being listened to, which are not being spoken or written about. You have an army of very poor people being faced down by an army of the rich that are corporate backed and I am sorry but it is like that. So you cannot extract a morality from the heinous acts of violence that each commits against the other. You have to pull back and look at what’s going on and we have to understand that this war the government of India cannot win because the poor don’t have weapons, the poor don’t have money but they are huge numbers. And what you are seeing is a conflation of terrorism and poverty. The poor today are being called terrorists.

Karan Thapar: Not necessarily except in your interpretation, I think there is a distinction that others draw but let me come to the issue of violence because that is critical. Quite understandably and rightly, you condemn what you call ’state violence’. But do you equally, emphatically, unequivocally condemn the Maoists when they butcher someone like Francis Induwar or when they assume the power to be judge, jury and prosecutor in a multitude of cases, do you condemn them?

Arundhati Roy: I think that this equivalence is a stupid thing and violence is not the issue because I do condemn anybody whether it’s the Maoists or whether it’s the state, anybody who kills a person in custody, I condemn.

Karan Thapar: So do you condemn the killing of Francis Induwar?

Arundhati Roy: Absolutely, I condemn it. I do not approve of it. I don’t think anyone in their right senses would. However, as I said what I think or don’t think and these moral positions are not the point. Of course, all of us are very uncomfortable with violence but there it is, it’s happening. The point is why? Why don’t we ask why? Who should the poor go to, which court?

Karan Thapar: The ‘why’ we know because you have explained it earlier as the conflation between democracy and free-market policies which is leading to the subjugation and the repression and the exploitation of the poor. The question is what do you do about it. You have said earlier this week that a military solution to the Maoists’ struggle is not an option. What then is the solution?

Arundhati Roy: I think the solution is to understand that the State needs to regain the faith of the poor. It needs to woo the poor again. And it cannot be done over a weekend.

Karan Thapar: How?

Arundhati Roy: I think the first thing would be to pull back the army and to stop this nonsense about air force will fire in self-defence and all that.

Karan Thapar: No military operations even if it includes just police and paramilitary?

Arundhati Roy: No military operations. I would say that that is going to provoke a situation.

Karan Thapar: What’s the second thing?

Arundhati Roy: Then I would say that you should come out with all the MoUs that you have signed for all the mineral wealth which is really the key issue. I mean just the bauxite in Orissa is worth 4 trillion that’s with 12 zeros.

Karan Thapar: Do you really believe that the dispossessed and poor in Orissa would be concerned about the MoUs signed by the Government of India, they are not aware of them.

Arundhati Roy: Are you joking? They know it better than you or me. This is what I would say – come clean, tell us what the MoUs are and the companies involved.

Karan Thapar: After coming clean, what’s the next stage?

Arundhati Roy: For example, on October 12, there was supposed to be a public hearing in Lohandigura (Madhya Pradesh) where Tata is setting up a steel factory, in the name of operation “Green Hunt”. There were barriers that prevented people from going there and expressing what they had to – their approvals or disapprovals.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying let people express themselves and voice their dissents?

Arundhati Roy: Let them voice their dissent, let them be at these public hearings, make all the MoUs public, remove your army and then let’s see what happens.

Karan Thapar: If the Government were prepared to take your advice, would you in return go to the Maoists and say it now behooves you to also abjure your violence. If the Government is reaching out with one hand, you must return with the other. Will you take that step?

Arundhati Roy: If you are talking about me as an individual, I am nobody but I am sure there are people who would take that step. It has been done before. In the interest of the future of this country, all of us are concerned.

Karan Thapar: What you are saying is that the initiative should come from the Government first.

Arundhati Roy: I think so. There should be unconditional talks.

Karan Thapar: My last question. How do you see the situation developing?

Arundhati Roy: My fear is that because of its economic interest, the Government and the establishment actually needs a war, it needs to militarise and for that it needs an enemy and so in a way what the Muslims were to the BJP, the Maoists are to the Congress and once you have created this enemy that you are going to go after, there is going to be a lot of violence. That’s how mining corporations have worked historically.

Karan Thapar: So you see a greater potential for bloodshed and violence?

Arundhati Roy: Unless we can get together and stop it, which we must. A military solution will destroy us.

Karan Thapar: Arundhati Roy a pleasure talking to you.

ran Thapar: Hello and welcome to Devil’s Advocate. In her latest series of essays, Arundhati Roy sounds deeply dismissive of the Indian democracy and perhaps supportive of the Maoist struggle. Why does she take these positions? That’s the key issue I shall explore today with Arundhati Roy.

Let’s start with your cynical view of Indian democracy. In your essays, you say the ‘Beacon is fading,’ you say it’s being hollowed out and emptied of meaning, you say that Indian democracy no longer can be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we dreamt it would. Why have you come to this conclusion?

Arundhati Roy: It is pretty obvious that in the last 60 years of our democracy what we have is a situation in which the poor are getting poorer and poorer, the rich are getting richer. I am not suggesting by this that we should go back to some older form of discredited despotic or colonial regime. I am trying to analyse what is the problem with democracy now. Why are the institutions of our democracy – the courts, media and Parliament – letting the people down? In a democracy, they are meant to act as checks and balances but actually they are serving as a cover to be as undemocratic as possible.

Karan Thapar: So you are suggesting two important things. Firstly, you are saying that the institutions of democracy have actually failed to act as checks and secondly, you are saying that the poor, who I presume are the vast majority of India, are not benefiting from Indian democracy sufficiently.

Arundhati Roy: Of course they have protection but the fact is that we are now in a situation of emergency. The human developmental index shows that more than 80 per cent of the people of India are living in conditions of extreme poverty. We have the world’s most malnutritioned children. The Dalits and the Adivasis are living in conditions of famine by any world indicators when more than 50 per cent of them are malnutritioned.

• Govt at war with Naxals to aid MNCs: Arundhati

Karan Thapar: So the state of India’s dispossessed and poor is proof that Indian democracy has failed?

Arundhati Roy: It’s proving that there is a structural violence. Mahasweta Devi (Magsaysay Award-winner Bengali novelist) said a few years ago in Frankfurt about the Indian democracy as a tapestry with parts of it as silken and parts of it tattered but it all holds together. Now, what has happened is that the silken parts have sequined and the tattered parts are torn and the poor are falling in. And the Indian state is following them with guns, with helicopter gunships. We are in crisis. We have an ecological crisis.

Karan Thapar: Let’s pick up the issue of the poor that they are actually falling through the holes in the tapestry. How do you view the NREGA which was specifically designed to give relief and succour to the very poorest of the poor. Don’t you believe that it has been effective?

Arundhati Roy: It’s important, it’s effectiveness is debatable. It is also working as a honeypot around which corrupt people have flocked and have tried their best to prevent it.

Karan Thapar: Are the failings so great that they undermine the essential core of NREGA?

Arundhati Roy: No, I am not critical of the Employment Guarantee Act but what I am saying is that it was passed in order to mitigate a structural dispossession that was going on. So we shouldn’t confuse that mitigation with the structural problem.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying that structurally Indian democracy works to the disadvantage of the poor?

Arundhati Roy: What I have said is that democracy has become fused with free-market capitalism. And it is this that has made a serious erosion and hollowed up these institutions. So if you look at the Supreme Court or if you look at the corporate media or ministers, Parliamentarians and MPs have interests in shares and what is going on, if you look at the massive levels of corruption, what we are looking at is a very structural problem.

Karan Thapar: Would you be happier if instead of fusing with a free market economic system Indian democracy had fused with socialist system? In other words, what I am questioning is that is it the ideology that you bring to this issue that actually determines your conclusion about democracy?

Arundhati Roy: Socialism has had its problems too. I am not a supporter of Stalinism nor am I a person who is totally uncritical of what happened in China or the Soviet Union, so I am not talking about merely ideologically, but certainly socialism has a language of justice that capitalism does not have.

Karan Thapar: Doesn’t capitalism actually produce higher living standards overall for people, doesn’t it guarantee to them the liberties of individuality which gets suppressed, are you not ignoring all of that?

Arundhati Roy: It guarantees a higher living standards for a few at the cost of the many. And that’s the situation we find ourselves in a country where we have more and more billionaires and a large vast portion of people who are dispossessed, who are homeless, who are being cutoff from their resources.

Karan Thapar: Can I ask you a blunt question? Sixty years after Indian democracy came into being, do you believe that India’s poor and dispossessed have benefited?

Arundhati Roy: No, I don’t. I believe that they have some security and some more than others. We in Delhi have democracy where as in the jungles of Dantewada, they don’t have democracy.

Karan Thapar: You are saying that a vast majority of the poor have not benefited?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t think that it is that simple. For example, the Dalit issue. There is a form of representation that is going on yet the people that have fallen through the hole, people I am talking about who do not have representation, the people who are malnutritioned, who are living in conditions of famine and now the Army is being called out against them.

Karan Thapar: I am not sure whether you can say that the Army is being called out against them, but let me quote to you a critic of your essay, Harsh Mander, in particular a critic of your ‘dismissal’ of democracy …

Arundhati Roy: Dismissal, please is not the word.

Karan Thapar: Cynicism?

Arundhati Roy: Neither cynicism.

Karan Thapar: Sort of questioning?

Arundhati Roy: Yes.

Karan Thapar: Let me quote to you. “With all its failings and betrayals, the guarantees contained in India’s secular democratic Constitution have made a significant difference to the lives of its dispossessed people. They would have been even poorer than they are now, more insecure, more oppressed without democracy. Of this, I am convinced.” You are radically disagreeing with someone like Harsh Mander?

Arundhati Roy: I am sorry to say but this is a silly point because it suggests that what I am saying is we shouldn’t have democracy, we should have some other old discredited authoritarian system. It is not.

Karan Thapar: I am not sure if he is suggesting that. He is suggesting that your questioning is unjustified, that you are finding flaws where they don’t exist.

Arundhati Roy: Come on. Look at the human development index and what it is saying. My point is that there are problems in our system and we need to face them.

Karan Thapar: What would have produced a better human index for India?

Arundhati Roy: For example when some keep repeating the word ‘democracy’, they are refusing to see the fact that what I am saying is that the fusion of corporate globalisation and democracy has created this situation. A system in which you don’t have the free-market policies.

Karan Thapar: So what policies would you want, socialist policies?

Arundhati Roy: No, a different policy. Come on! Do you want me to give you a manifesto right here?

Karan Thapar: I suspect that it’s your ideological aversion to the free market that has conditioned your suspicion or your questioning of democracy.

Arundhati Roy: Well, you are right because I do have an ideological aversion to the free market and its fusion with democracy has corrupted what democracy was meant to me. But when you are saying what’s your solution, it is that we have to look. You know it has taken years and years of decision making of corruption, of injustice, refusing to look at the problems saying we would have been much better or we would have been much worse of it if it was somewhere else, so let’s not critique what is going on now. My thing is that everytime something happens, for example, if you just give me two minutes I would like to say it that we call ourselves a democracy but as a society we tolerate the 68,000 dead in Kashmir, we tolerate deeply undemocratic laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, we had the Sikh genocide and what happened in Gujarat, all of these things I question.

Karan Thapar: And the Prime Minister apologised for what happened to the Sikhs, Sonia Gandhi visited the Golden Temple.

Arundhati Roy: Would it be enough for you Karan, if someone killed your parents and raped your wife and the Prime Minister apologises?

Karan Thapar: The Chinese haven’t apologised for the Tiananmen Square.

Arundhati Roy: It doesn’t matter. The point is when we accept these kinds of injustices and absorb them and the Government thinks by apologising or dissimulating it’s over, but they all settle in us like toxins and we become a pretty barbaric society.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying that the weight of all that has gone wrong in 60 years is now sinking us?

Arundhati Roy: It is.

Karan Thapar: Is it beyond correction?

Arundhati Roy: Well, it’s not beyond correction, it would not be beyond correction if instead of patting ourselves on the back and saying we are so much better off now, we looked at what’s going wrong and we went out and insisted that we start moving on the paths to justice.

Karan Thapar: So your essays are in a sense a wake up call to the Indian people, you are saying look at the black side of our democracy, stop patting yourself and ignoring?

Arundhati Roy: Absolutely. I mean look at everything that’s going wrong.

Karan Thapar: So you are not dismissing it, you are actually asking the Indians to open their eyes and see the truth.

Arundhati Roy: Yes, absolutely.

Karan Thapar: Let’s come to how you view the Maoists’ struggle. In your essay, ‘Listening To Grasshoppers’ you write almost with approval that the poor are crossing over quietly while the world is not looking to the side of the arms struggle. Do you even support or perhaps even approve the Maoists’ struggle?

Arundhati Roy: As we have been talking earlier that there has been a massive dispossession, a structural violence against the poor of this country, we are talking about tens of millions dispossessed and malnutritioned. We are talking about 180,000 farmers who have committed suicide but most of all what worries me is this binary that has been put out – the state versus the Maoists. Sometimes even I am guilty of that. But the fact is that for the last 20 years, there have been a whole array of peaceful struggles, a whole array of voices, including mine saying, look you don’t pay attention to this nonviolence resistance by default you condone violence.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying that the Maoists have been driven to take up arms because they have been pushed to the perimeters of Indian society?

Arundhati Roy: Look, so now what’s happening is that the poor who are being faced with this violence have taken up arms. I am not sure that all of them are Maoists, I think there is a very big problem about how the State defines Maoists and who they are willing to kill and call a Maoist.

Karan Thapar: Leave the definition of Maoist aside. Are the poor and the dispossessed, who you say have been driven to the perimeters, justified in taking up arms?

Arundhati Roy: If I was a person who has been dispossessed, whose wife has been raped or have been pushed of their lands, and who is being faced with ‘police force’, I would say that I am justified in taking up arms if that’s the only way I have to defend myself.

Karan Thapar: If the Maoists and the poor are justified in taking up arms, then is the State, particularly the state where the government is popularly elected and represented, justified in taking up arms in defence?

Arundhati Roy: I think we should stop thinking about who is justified because we are in a situation now in which what is happening is that there is face-off and there are two armies apart from the fact that there are all these nonviolent resistant movements which are not being listened to, which are not being spoken or written about. You have an army of very poor people being faced down by an army of the rich that are corporate backed and I am sorry but it is like that. So you cannot extract a morality from the heinous acts of violence that each commits against the other. You have to pull back and look at what’s going on and we have to understand that this war the government of India cannot win because the poor don’t have weapons, the poor don’t have money but they are huge numbers. And what you are seeing is a conflation of terrorism and poverty. The poor today are being called terrorists.

Karan Thapar: Not necessarily except in your interpretation, I think there is a distinction that others draw but let me come to the issue of violence because that is critical. Quite understandably and rightly, you condemn what you call ’state violence’. But do you equally, emphatically, unequivocally condemn the Maoists when they butcher someone like Francis Induwar or when they assume the power to be judge, jury and prosecutor in a multitude of cases, do you condemn them?

Arundhati Roy: I think that this equivalence is a stupid thing and violence is not the issue because I do condemn anybody whether it’s the Maoists or whether it’s the state, anybody who kills a person in custody, I condemn.

Karan Thapar: So do you condemn the killing of Francis Induwar?

Arundhati Roy: Absolutely, I condemn it. I do not approve of it. I don’t think anyone in their right senses would. However, as I said what I think or don’t think and these moral positions are not the point. Of course, all of us are very uncomfortable with violence but there it is, it’s happening. The point is why? Why don’t we ask why? Who should the poor go to, which court?

Karan Thapar: The ‘why’ we know because you have explained it earlier as the conflation between democracy and free-market policies which is leading to the subjugation and the repression and the exploitation of the poor. The question is what do you do about it. You have said earlier this week that a military solution to the Maoists’ struggle is not an option. What then is the solution?

Arundhati Roy: I think the solution is to understand that the State needs to regain the faith of the poor. It needs to woo the poor again. And it cannot be done over a weekend.

Karan Thapar: How?

Arundhati Roy: I think the first thing would be to pull back the army and to stop this nonsense about air force will fire in self-defence and all that.

Karan Thapar: No military operations even if it includes just police and paramilitary?

Arundhati Roy: No military operations. I would say that that is going to provoke a situation.

Karan Thapar: What’s the second thing?

Arundhati Roy: Then I would say that you should come out with all the MoUs that you have signed for all the mineral wealth which is really the key issue. I mean just the bauxite in Orissa is worth 4 trillion that’s with 12 zeros.

Karan Thapar: Do you really believe that the dispossessed and poor in Orissa would be concerned about the MoUs signed by the Government of India, they are not aware of them.

Arundhati Roy: Are you joking? They know it better than you or me. This is what I would say – come clean, tell us what the MoUs are and the companies involved.

Karan Thapar: After coming clean, what’s the next stage?

Arundhati Roy: For example, on October 12, there was supposed to be a public hearing in Lohandigura (Madhya Pradesh) where Tata is setting up a steel factory, in the name of operation “Green Hunt”. There were barriers that prevented people from going there and expressing what they had to – their approvals or disapprovals.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying let people express themselves and voice their dissents?

Arundhati Roy: Let them voice their dissent, let them be at these public hearings, make all the MoUs public, remove your army and then let’s see what happens.

Karan Thapar: If the Government were prepared to take your advice, would you in return go to the Maoists and say it now behooves you to also abjure your violence. If the Government is reaching out with one hand, you must return with the other. Will you take that step?

Arundhati Roy: If you are talking about me as an individual, I am nobody but I am sure there are people who would take that step. It has been done before. In the interest of the future of this country, all of us are concerned.

Karan Thapar: What you are saying is that the initiative should come from the Government first.

Arundhati Roy: I think so. There should be unconditional talks.

Karan Thapar: My last question. How do you see the situation developing?

Arundhati Roy: My fear is that because of its economic interest, the Government and the establishment actually needs a war, it needs to militarise and for that it needs an enemy and so in a way what the Muslims were to the BJP, the Maoists are to the Congress and once you have created this enemy that you are going to go after, there is going to be a lot of violence. That’s how mining corporations have worked historically.

Karan Thapar: So you see a greater potential for bloodshed and violence?

Arundhati Roy: Unless we can get together and stop it, which we must. A military solution will destroy us.

Karan Thapar: Arundhati Roy a pleasure talking to you.

In her latest series of essays, Arundhati Roy sounds deeply dismissive of the Indian democracy and perhaps supportive of the Maoist struggle. Why does she take these positions? That’s the key issue explore with Arundhati Roy.