ARUNDHATI ROY
Terrorism: No Easy Answers
Interviewed by David Barsamian
New Delhi, India 1 January 2009
Arundhati Roy is the celebrated
author of "The God of Small Things" and winner of the prestigious
Booker Prize. "The New York Times" calls her, "India's most impassioned
critic of globalization and American influence." Howard Zinn praises
her "powerful commitment to social justice." She is the winner of the
Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom. Her latest books are "The Checkbook
& the Cruise Missile," a collection of interviews with David
Barsamian, and "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire."
You've been spending at lot of
time in Kashmir and you were just there again. There has been a series
of elections over the last couple of months, and these elections have
been heralded, at least by the mainstream press here in India, as a
great referendum for freedom and democracy and a rebuke for the
separatists. What is your understanding of what exactly happened in
terms of the elections?
Really, the difficulty about it, the thing I worry most about, is
losing the language with which to describe what's happening there.
Because it's almost as though you need a deep knowledge of what's going
on there to be able to understand what happened. In August, even then I
was there, and all over the world it has been reported, there was an
incredible spontaneous uprising, and there were hundreds of thousands
of people on the streets. This time I was there in the silence, and
still I could hear that noise in my head, "Azadi, azadi, azadi." The
fruit sellers were weighing their fruit chanting "Azadi, azadi." The
people on the buses, the children on the streets. It was as if the sky
was chanting that.
Azadi means freedom.
Azadi means freedom. Azadi means a lot of things: freedom in a very
nuanced way, because that in itself is a very contested term in
Kashmir. And then that nonviolent uprising-and that uprising was
actually presented to the leaders, the, quote, unquote, leaders of the
separatist movement by the people. It wasn't that the leaders led the
movement, but the people really came and dusted off the mothballs and
pulled the leaders out onto the street and presented them with a kind
of revolution.
The Indian government's response to that was the harshest curfew that
has ever been imposed in Kashmir. Days and days and days together,
razor wire, steel walls that were put in, people were prevented from
moving between the districts, between villages. A lot of Kashmiris were
killed in the firings. I don't know if I need to keep on saying this
because everyone knows it now, but still, for the record-more than half
a million soldiers in the valley of Kashmir, which somebody in America
wrote saying it was the equivalent of the entire U.S. Army and the
entire Marine Corps deployed in Minnesota, sort of like that; 165,000
American soldiers in Iraq. Between 500,000 and 700,000 Indian security
personnel in the valley of Kashmir. So the way the army is deployed
there, I think it would take them less than half an hour to just be
everywhere in Kashmir, because they are spread out and they are
patrolling all the time. So to put down this uprising wasn't hard for
them in a military sense. So that was August.
Then there was a big debate about whether or not to call elections,
because everybody feared that there would be a complete boycott of the
elections, which have been more or less boycotted in past. The
separatists called for a boycott. And to everybody's shock and
surprise, there was a huge turnout in the elections. I think nobody
could understand exactly what had happened. Where had that sentiment
gone? Where was that outburst of a desire for freedom that was being
expressed from the street? How did it suddenly disappear? And it was
quite interesting that I started getting calls from people.
The other thing is that it was very interesting in the way in which the
election was called. A couple of districts in Jammu are
Hindu-dominated, the BJP has not ever been in power there, but still
there was a sort of political divide between these districts in Jammu
and the Kashmir valley. Then there is Ladakh, there is Doda and
Kishtwari.
The BJP being the Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing Hindu nationalist party.
And there are some parts of the Kashmir valley which are under the boot
of the army. If you travel in Kashmir, you see that there the army
controls the inhalation and the exhalation. It controls everything. So
it was pretty brilliant, if you look at it from the Indian government's
point of view, the way the elections were called. These places where
traditionally the Army's fiat rules went to the polls first and so on.
Without wanting to get into too much detail to an audience that's not
familiar with this, the point is that there was a big turnout. Except
in the cities. In almost all the cities and towns the turnout was low,
but in the villages the turnout was very high.
So I went back to Kashmir just now just to understand for myself what
it was all about. Of course, the first thing that happened was that the
last stage of the polling in Srinagar was due to happen, and so the
police put me under house arrest, which revealed more than it hid,
because if you can imagine, they're so frightened of anybody who has a
point of view different from that of the Indian state seeing anything.
Before the polls happened, they did a massive round of arrests. They
arrested not just the leaders of the Hurriyat, which is the separatist
groups, but all the workers, all the activists, all the young people
who were seen to have led these protests. Hundreds of people were put
into jail.
A lot of even liberal Indians say that the polls were free and fair.
First of all, the first question you have to ask yourself is, when you
have that kind of a densely deployed army, can you have free and fair
elections? Is it at all possible? Election observers and liberal
Indians went there and they didn't see people being pushed to the
polling booths on the end of a bayonet, so they said there was no
coercion. But the thing is, now the people of Kashmir have
internalized, what it means to live in an occupation and how to deal
with it. And they do have a long-term view, because they do have to
survive. So one of the things that happened was that the main party,
the National Conference, that is now coming into power campaigned very
openly saying that these elections have nothing to do with azadi;
they're just about bread and butter issues. That was one thing that
happened.
Sarak, pani and-what was the slogan?
Sarak, pani, bijli. It means roads, water, and electricity. So I think
that quite explains the fact that in urban areas, where people are more
secure, they didn't feel the need to come out and vote, whereas in
rural areas people-it's not actually sarak, pani, and bijli so much as
a thin layer of protection from this occupation. For example, when the
SOG, which is the dreaded Special Operations Group, goes and picks up
somebody, you have to have somebody to appeal to. And that somebody is
the politician. So, for example, to give you an example, some people
were telling me of how there is one particular member of the
legislative assembly who keeps getting voted back to power. His modus
operandi is, just before the elections he organizes for the army to
pick up five or six people, young men, from that area. Then the people
go and petition him. Then he goes and gets them released and earns
their eternal gratitude. These are all sort of invisible things that
happen.
There are many other reasons. For example, just now the stories are
emerging that in this election, more than in any other election, there
were hundreds, hundreds of candidates who were fielded. Each of them,
in a slightly feudal area, has a certain number of relatives and
friends who come and vote for them. Because the main thing in these
elections was the government was very keen to have a turnout,
regardless of what happened, to show that this is a democracy. In fact,
the day I left Kashmir all these defeated independent candidates were
having a press conference in this restaurant called Ahdoo's talking
about how they had all been paid by the Intelligence Bureau sums of
money to stand for election, and then some of them weren't given that
money, so now they are disgruntled.
Then there are other issues. For example, there is this group of
renegades known as Ikhwanis, former militants who turned into very
dreaded killers working for the government. Some Ikhwanis and sometimes
Ikhwanis' sons were standing for election. And people went out to vote
against them so that they would not be represented by them.
So there are a number of factors. But it's true that even without these
factors, people did come out and vote. For me, the way I see it is that
people realize that they're lying on a bed of nails, and these
elections are like a little, thin layer of sponge over the bed of
nails, a way of getting by, a way of continuing to live. They are not
in any way going to permanently solve the problem of Kashmir. What the
Indian government has done over and over again over the decades is to
do this kind of crisis management, sweep things under the carpet, and
then hope that it will go away. Then it resurfaces in a different way,
in a different form. So I was there when the sort of free and fair
press of the mighty government of India arrived there to gloat over
these elections, people who knew nothing about Kashmir, who were coming
there to give the commentary, saying the most absurd things about how
this was the end of the freedom movement.
To me, the saddest thing was that I felt all the Kashmiris, I spoke to,
without exception said, "We've done this to ourselves." And I felt that
this sort of psychological war on them, this lowering of their
self-esteem, this forcing them to participate in tactics of survival
which eventually make them despise themselves was really the deepest
form of colonialism. Someone said, "We feel like Shi'as at Muharram (a
religious holiday marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein). We whip
ourselves and then we draw our own blood and then the Indian propaganda
machine comes and puts salt in our wounds." That's how a lot of people
said they felt.
It's very difficult to understand the full extent of this, except that
what people really want is being thwarted again and again and again.
Everybody is speaking on behalf of people. As a citizen of India, I
feel uncomfortable with that. I feel that we can't gloat about doing
this to somebody. Of course you can manage it. Of course India will
always be able to manage it, because it's a small valley. But, then
again, I don't think that it will always be possible to manage it,
because eventually I do think that the price of holding down the
Kashmir valley, which was being paid mostly by Indian soldiers, who are
mostly poor people from India who don't count, was suddenly being paid
by the Indian elite in five-star hotels in Bombay. That puts a totally
different spin on things.
You write that the Indian military occupation of Kashmir "makes monsters of us all." What do you mean by that?
It makes us complicit in the holding down by military force of a
people, it makes us complicit in the propaganda, it makes us complicit
in the lies. And eventually it makes us people who are unable to look
things in the eye.
You say that it allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimize Muslims in other parts of the country.
One of the things that happened in the early 1990s in Kashmir was that
when the elections were rigged in 1987, which led to the movement in
Kashmir which existed beforehand, suddenly it had become a militant
movement, and there were young men rising up with arms, young men
crossing the border to Pakistan to train and come back. One of the
fallouts of that was the exodus of the small community of Kashmiri
Pandits, or Kashmiri Hindus, from the valley. Because the king who
signed the accession document was a Hindu ruler over Muslim subjects,
and therefore this small minority of Hindu Kashmiris was a powerful
minority. But because they feared for their safety, rightly so, and
because the governor, Jagmohan, quite unforgivably said that the
government couldn't protect them, they sort of facilitated the exit of
these Hindu Pandits from the valley. The poor among them ended up
living in refugee camps in Jammu. They still live in refugee campus in
Jammu.
You must remember that it was exactly at the time that a lot of things
were happening geographically in this area. It was the Taliban coming
to power in Afghanistan, the BJP with L. K. Advani leading this rath
yatra towards the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the rise of Hindu
chauvinism. So these Kashmiri Pandits were wielded like a club by Hindu
chauvinists in India and used to whip up this anti-Muslim sentiment. Of
course, that orgy of hatred, that whole manifesto of hatred of the BJP,
eventually led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the coming to
power of the BJP, the genocide against Muslims in Gujarat, the bombings
in Bombay in retaliation for Babri Masjid, and the genocide in Bombay
against Muslims by the Shiv Sena
(a Maharashtra-based Marathi nationalist group), and the whole rise of this kind of ugly, divisive politics.
So if you were to question the average Indian, the only thing they know
is that there are terrorists in Kashmir. They wouldn't be able to tell
you that 60,000 or 70,000 people have died in this war. They wouldn't
be able to tell you about the dubious morality of India holding on to
this place. They say Kashmir is an atut ang, which means an inseparable
limb of India.
And there are also close to 10,000 people are missing.
That have disappeared. The point is that it doesn't seem to occur to
anyone that Kashmir was never a part of India. It was an independent
kingdom. So even today, when they gloat about elections, if you say,
"Why don't you have a referendum?" as was promised by the U.N., they
say, "Oh, that's an old cliché. How can you ask that? Things
have moved on from then."
Tell me, the people that you spoke to there, what do they think of Pakistan?
When I was there in August-I've written about it in this piece that you
referred to-along with "Hum Kya Chatey? Azadi," which means, "What do
we want? We want freedom," there was an equal amount of "Jeeve, Jeeve,
Pakistan!" meaning "Long live Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan."
Yet I think that if you question people, there were many reasons for
that. One was that what they think of Pakistan is, to put it in some
crude way, if there was some referendum where people were given the
option of India, Pakistan, or azadi, I imagine that an overwhelming
majority would say azadi. If they were given only an option between
India and Pakistan, I think-I'm no one to say this, but I'm just saying
my gut feeling is that Pakistan would win hands down. But what India
says is Pakistan is fueling terrorism in Kashmir. I think people see
Pakistan as somewhat self-serving yet very important support for the
freedom movement in Kashmir. People understand that it's self-serving,
but people still see it as support for what they see as a freedom
movement.
And there is awareness also that the state there is not only exploding but imploding.
I think that there is awareness of that. Yet, the real question is that
what people have experienced is the brutality of the Indian state, so
at this point that is foregrounded for people in Kashmir. It's a bit
theoretical to say, but maybe it will be worse for them. They say,
"Then that's our problem. Why are you worried about our problems?" The
Kashmiris, even when they are not being political, if you go around
Kashmir, they ask you, "Have you come from India?" They don't consider
themselves Indians.
It's been a very difficult time for Muslims in India. So to imagine
that Muslims would be longing to be a part of India when they don't
have to be is a hallucination. Indian Muslims have a completely
different problem from Kashmiris. Indian Muslims have a different issue
here, because they have to live here and they have to find peace in
this almost fascist atmosphere. But Kashmiris see themselves as people
who have a choice. They don't have to put their heads down and kiss
ass. You have to find a different way of saying that.
You conclude that article that "India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much if not more than Kashmir needs azadi from India".
I think there was something almost prescient there. I wrote this-I
don't remember when it was published-in August or September. And I did
sense that there wasn't any possibility of the Indian state-and it's
wrong for me to just say the Indian state, because Indian society in
places like Gujarat and Maharashtra or even in Bombay-to continue to
marginalize such a vast majority-only in India can 150 million people
be a minority, 150 million Muslims in India-and to continue to bulldoze
this population in Kashmir. Eventually all that can come out of it is
destruction. All that come out of it is people wanting to take you down
with them. If you push them to a stage where there is no possibility of
any access to justice, even if 99% of them decide to put their heads
down and suffer, 1% is enough to destroy life as you knew it.
It's interesting, though, that
at the same time when the vast majority of the Muslim minority is
impoverished and suffering from discrimination, you have big Bollywood
film stars such as Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan, and Shah Rukh Khan who
are Muslim.
They are like the turkeys that the American president pardons during
Thanksgiving and sends them to Frying Pan Park in Virginia while the
others are slaughtered for Thanksgiving. There's that sense that, like
I always say, if you look at the person who is the president of India,
the figurehead, you will be able to tell which are the communities that
are having a really hard time. It's a Muslim or it's a woman or it's a
Dalit. So it's the new age.
But I think there is more to it than that when it comes to the film
stars. There is a strange undercurrent which nobody knows how to
handle. After the Mumbai attacks, the most bigoted television
channels-I've been watching some of them-actually have programs about
which of the big film stars is going to play Kasab, who is the gunman
who survived and who is in jail now. Whether it's Bollywood or whether
it's your video games or whether it's your war games, everybody is
trained to hero worship, this kind of thing, and then you're supposed
to come out and publicly condemn it. But, in fact, wasn't it Die Hard,
what was going on in those hotels and so on? So there is a very strange
fascination for violence and then a kind of morality that kicks in
which is quite at odds with what young people are being sold as heroic.
Let's talk about the Mumbai and
the events of 26 November. It struck me-I was in Islamabad, Pakistan,
by the way, watching this on television-that it was like a three-day
serial. You would go to bed at night and wake up in the morning, turn
on the television, and it was continuing. The out-of-breath commentary
and reporting were quite stunning. You've talked about the media
coverage of the Mumbai attack, but initially you were very reluctant to
even write about it. I know you're working on a novel and you want to
focus on that but people just came up to you and said, "Are you going
to write something?"
It was a difficult decision for me to write about this, because I
recognize that there was a lot of ugliness in the air and that people
who were prepared to tolerate the people like myself were already
straining at the bit because of my views on Kashmir, which are just not
acceptable in India. And then to write about Mumbai. And yet it became
much harder not to write about it than to write about it, because the
elite had cornered the TV channels, and there was this spiraling
ugliness and this baying for war. And also the way in which suddenly it
appeared as if this was the first time that such a thing had happened
in India, because it was the first time that the golden heart of India,
the absolute elite, had been targeted, which raised a lot of very
interesting things to write about. Predictably, people who had been
annoyed with what I've said have twisted it around to say, "Oh, she
justifies it" or "She thinks it's okay for rich people to be killed,"
which is absolutely not what I'm saying. But what does it mean in this
country where it really doesn't matter what happens to poor people, it
doesn't matter that well more than 100,000 farmers have killed
themselves, it doesn't matter as long as only poor, impoverished
soldiers are paying the price to hold down Kashmir? But when your best
and most beautiful citizens are paying the price, then what?
And also, living in this country, watching the news, reading the news,
it was like this dead silence about the elephants in the room. One of
the gunmen, one of the terrorists, actually spoke about Kashmir and
about Gujarat and about Babri Masjid. But it was as if he hadn't. It
was as if those were not the issues at all. This was just some mad
pathology. So that effort to push everything away and say this was a
text without a context was something that became very, very dangerous.
Yes, it's true that I tried not to write about it, but I was literally
pushed into it. People on the street would come to me and say, "What
are you thinking? What are you saying?" They were waiting to know. I
think that's because I'm not just writing as me. I don't want to claim
some unique voice. Actually, outside the mainstream media, if you read
what was being written on the Internet and what was being said on the
streets, there was an incredible maturity in the response. I wasn't in
the U.S. when 9/11 happened, so I don't really have the word on the
street what people were thinking. But here was certainly the media were
in its own stratosphere along with a section of the elite. But the
people that I spoke to and heard and encountered had an incredible
maturity.
I have to say this reluctantly, that even the Indian government was far
more mature than the media were. And I am unable to say right now
whether they were playing good cop, bad cop, whether the media were
being asked-were not being-some of it was so irresponsible that it was
worrying, that there were channels that were literally declaring war.
And given how much they are controlled, in a way, by governments and
corporates, the fact that they were allowed to carry on being that
irresponsible makes me think that perhaps it was a sort of duel-like
while the government sounded sober and responsible, the media was
whipping up hysteria. I don't know whether they were on their own or
whether they were sort of being given a nudge and a wink.
There was also, attendant with
what was going on in Mumbai, almost a clamor to link it to 9/11. This
was India's 9/11. And there has been now significant legislation passed
as a result of Mumbai. A new agency has been created called the
National Intelligence Agency. So what has been the political upshot of
this in terms of civil liberties and human rights?
This is a very important question, which I have no doubt that you
understand in a very nuanced way, being an American, but there is a
difference, which is that in India there is a completely different set
of reasons for why the government and the elites are pushing for these
so-called terrorist laws. It doesn't have to do with the fear of
terrorism only, because I think people are very well aware of the fact
that we have had these laws in the past. We've had the Terrorism and
Disruptive Activities Act and we've had the Prevention of Terrorism
Act. In all these cases, the conviction rate has been 2%. It doesn't
take a great deal of intelligence to know that when a person has
decided to die fighting, they are hardly likely to be concerned with
bailable and nonbailable offenses. And it's not just a knee-jerk
reaction to, oh, we must do something.
Really what is happening in India right now has to do with the other
battle, the battle that's not on television. The battle that's being
fought in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand-the battle of the poor against
displacement, the battle of the Maoists, the battle against mining and
all that-which is actually a far bigger battle. And there is where
these laws come into use. There is where a person like Binayak Sen, a
medical doctor and human rights activist, who is in Chhattisgarh and
been in prison now for almost two years as a dangerous terrorist, with
no evidence whatsoever, but no bail either. Those laws are really for
people governments don't like and do not have anything to do with
terrorism, nor do they really have centrally to do with the fear or
desire to prevent terrorism. But they have to do with giving government
power to criminalize democratic space. Basically, that's what it's
about, to criminalize the democratic space, to prevent people speaking,
people working, people organizing into a kind of mass movement, which
is what is going on outside the floodlights in the rest of India.
The magazine India Today has
named "The Terrorist." as its "2008 Newsmaker." The accompanying
article has photos of accused terrorists, all of whom are in Pakistan.
How does one address the issue of terrorism? Okay, you give the context
and background. Yet you have people who seem to have total disdain not
only for the lives of others but for their own lives. How can you reach
them? It's as if they're in another zone entirely.
That is the problem. Those particular individuals have obviously
departed to another station and communication links have been cut. So
if you try and look at whatever policies you make as some way of
stopping terrorism forever, you're bound to fail. The only thing you
can do is to look at the conditions in which more and more anger, more
and more despair, more and more resentment are being created, and how
do you change the chemistry there. It's interesting to see this. This
is an India Today picture of all the various Muslims whom they see as
terrorists. All of them are under trial. But also under trial are a
whole lot of Hindus who have been accused of bombing and killing people
as well. Their pictures are not here. Including a senior serving
officer of the Indian army.
He was implicated in the Malegaon blast.
Malegaon and Samjhauta Express blasts. I think it's very important to
say that the attack on Mumbai was the most recent in a series of
attacks in Bombay, Delhi, Jaipur, Bangalore, and Ahmedabad. All the
people that have been held by the police as suspects in these attacks
are Indian nationals, Hindu and Muslim. Initially they were all
Muslims, at which point-there were several very big loopholes in the
investigations, which some of us pointed out. And L. K. Advani, who
sees himself as the next candidate for prime minister, went around
campaigning against those of us, mentioning us by name, saying that we
were anti-nationals and it was suicidal to question the police and so
on. And then the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad arrested this Hindu
Sadvi God woman and a few Hindu priests, self-styled, and the senior
serving officer in the Indian army. And then Advani himself began to
campaign against the police.
Saying they were unreliable.
Saying that they were unreliable and that Hindus could not be
terrorists. And that senior policeman who did that investigation had
death threats. Then, in a peculiar twist of fate, he was one of the
first people to get shot in Mumbai.
The fact is that we in India today have a very murky, murky history of
these attacks, who is implicated, who has actually done it. We have
this whole sort of squadron of what are known as encounter specialists,
who are lauded for, actually, summary justice, for just going and
shooting down people and claiming that they were terrorists, and time
and time again having proved to be wrong. Several of them are involved
in all kinds of shady property deals. Several of them are in jail,
these encounter specialists. And yet movies are made about them and
they are the big stars of the middle class.
Fundamentally, today I'd say, as a person who has been following these
things very closely, reading documents, studying court judgments,
talking to people, whenever there is a terrorist strike, I have no idea
which side has done it. I'm amazed that after all the work that was
done on the fact that the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament was
obviously-there was something very, very wrong there, because all the
evidence was fabricated, most of it. The four people that the Indian
government arrested, one of them being called a mastermind and so on,
after four people arrested, the mastermind and two others were released
and three of them were acquitted of the charges that had been made
against them, and one of them was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court
said, we have no evidence that he belongs to a terrorist group but in
order to satisfy the collective conscience of society, we're sentencing
him to death.
In the work that many people, including myself, have done on these
things, we have exposed how the police fabricate evidence, how the
media fabricate evidence, who are the journalists in the media who are
sort of fed by this special cell of the Delhi police, how the courts
working in ways which make any kind of due process ridiculous and
redundant. And yet the propaganda is so huge. When I'm talking about
the parliament attack, I'm not talking about a conspiracy theory,
because I don't have one. I don't have a theory. All I have is
absolute, downright, straightforward facts that tell you that we were
lied to. And we want to know why.
L. K. Advani, the BJP leader,
has mentioned you in public talks, referring to a book that you had
contributed to on the 13 December 2001 attack on the parliament.
Turning to the media, Arnab Goswami also had something to say about
you. He's one of the leading voices on Times Now TV.
That was also something that I wonder about, whether they've been sort
of given the green flag to take that Fox News sort of slot here.
Because we have a TV anchor whose reporting, hardly pausing to take a
breath, is so excited about this unfolding drama in Mumbai, and then
suddenly turns to the camera and says, "Arundhati Roy and Prashant
Bhushan," who is a leading lawyer, who has also been one of those
people who has in the past questioned the actions of the police in
these encounter killings and so on, he says, "Arundhati Roy and
Prashant Bhushan, we think you're disgusting."
Using the collective "we."
"We," yes, like he's the Queen of England. Why did he think we were
disgusting? "We" meaning he's just one of many who hold the view, who
was carrying Advani's flag of under no circumstances can you question
the brave police and the brave army-at a time when we are a country
that has the highest number of custodial deaths in the world, a country
that has not ratified the international covenants on torture, an army
that has occupied Kashmir and killed tens of thousands of people.
Structurally the point is, maybe you can disagree with the point of
view of somebody, but to believe that citizens should just sit quiet
while all this happens, that there is no need for a debate, that there
is no need for questions also feeds into this terrifying atmosphere of
nationalism and fascism. And I don't use that word lightly, because I
use it after what happened in Gujarat. I use it after the fact that
more than 1,000 people were slaughtered in broad daylight in the
streets of Gujarat, that the police watched, that the police
participated, that those who participated were then promoted, that
those who killed then appeared on TV and boasted about how they killed
and how they were supported. And then those who killed and supervised
the killing were voted to power twice. So it's not the number of people
that were killed but the fact that the entire democratic machinery
colluded with the courts of India.
And the people. Let's not leave out the people. The people who knew
these things happened voted saying, this is what they deserve.
You make some connections
between 26/11 and U.S. foreign policy in South Asia, and you refer to
"the detritus of two Afghan wars."
In a way, at least in the corporate media, there is a sort of coy
silence about the role of the United States in what has happened in the
subcontinent. The fact is that Pakistan was the crucible in which
America conducted its experiment in its jihad against the Soviet Union.
So Pakistan was the recruiting agency and the recruiting ground for
mujahideen fighters from all over the Middle East, from Chechnya, from
Saudi Arabia, from everywhere, to come and fight the Soviets.
It isn't that people were simply recruited and given Stinger missiles
and AK-47s and told to go and fight. People were indoctrinated. People
were indoctrinated, brainwashed into going and fighting that desperate
war in which more than a million people died. Once you've released
those Frankenstein monsters into the world, you can't whistle and hope
they will come back like trained mastiffs and say, "Yes, sir, did you
call?" So when John McCain and Condoleezza Rice and Gordon Brown and so
on come in and say Pakistan is the heart of evil and the founder of
terrorism, I feel it's like scientists blaming their crucible for an
experiment that's gone wrong.
There are no easy answers to this problem. Certainly there was no easy
answer to 9/11. The fact that the U.S. rebombed Afghanistan into the
Stone Age didn't help them. And now to assume that you can bomb
Pakistan to sort out the problem is absurd beyond belief. The point is
that we are living in a very, very dangerous era, and more than
anything, you need brains to sort it out. That seems to be a very
scarce commodity.
Span is the name of the
magazine of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, and in the November-December
2008 issue, there is a postcard showing the Indian and American flags
side by side and "Joined in sorrow we stand together against terror,"
which, if I can make an editorial comment, I find very interesting.
Might they also be joined in sorrow against poverty and farmer suicides
and patriarchy and misogyny and child marriages and trafficking and all
the other injustices that occur?
That's a placebo. Because it's like if you watch those advertisements
for Pepsi and Coca-Cola where they are busy sort of inflaming
nationalism, and then across the border they're doing the same in the
other country. So I wouldn't be surprised if in Span Pakistan we have
the American and the Pakistani flag. It's a placebo, and it would make
the Indian middle class extremely happy, because that's the real anthem
now, that America, India, and Israel are natural allies. It's just a
game.
As far as the U.S. is concerned, it's just a game, because, actually,
Indians are feeling terrible about the fact that India-by Indians I
don't mean Indians, I mean the Indian government and its
spokespeople-are feeling terrible that so many thousands of people have
died because of terrorism in India. And the Americans are not
supporting India in the bombing of Pakistan. But two people died in
Israel, and then Israel retaliated by killing hundreds in Gaza and
moving in for a land invasion, and the Americans are supporting that.
They keep saying, oh, they have double standards. So this is a placebo.
This is just to ruffle our hair and say "Calm down."
You also commented about the
U.S., the superpower, never has friends, it only has agents. So here
you have at least the Indian government and elites lining up with the
Americans, but ultimately you suggest that it will just backfire into
their faces.
It will, because does anybody care to study the history of former
allies of the United States and what happens to them when they're
kicked over like an empty pail? The world is full of these examples,
whether it's Iraq or whether it's Pakistan or whether it's Chile. The
list goes on and on and on. So I don't think anybody should be
goo-goo-eyed about how much America loves India.
It's interesting now how Israel, as you suggested, has formed part of
this equation-Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Washington. Anand Patwardhan, a
well-known filmmaker, couldn't get an article that he wrote placed in
the Indian media, so it's online. He recalls the time when Indian
passports were stamped with invalid for two countries in the world: one
was apartheid South Africa and the other was Israel. The situation
today is completely different.
I think about the fact every morning we wake up and have this national
pride rammed down our throats when actually there is no pride. There
was a time when India stood for something, when it was part of the
nonaligned movement, when there was a sort of moral dignity. So the
more we are told that we should feel national pride, in fact, the more
you actually ought to be ashamed, because you know that this country
stands for nothing except the self-interest of its elites now.
And this despite the fact that, on the other hand, when you look at it
from the other side, there are people involved in environmental
movements, in displaced people's protests and agitation who look at
India with awe, because that side of India is alive and thriving and
full of fire and full of dignity. So I do feel a great amount of pride
in that, that it is a country where people are not taking things lying
down and people are fighting with huge amounts of imagination. But in
this official world, the world of diplomats and the world of power and
armies and weapons and governments, we have humiliated ourselves while
trying to force people to feel national pride.
2009 marks the 25th
anniversaries of a couple of events. One is the Bhopal Union Carbide
gas leak. I was just in Bhopal. Thousands of people have died. Many
thousands continue to suffer-I visited a clinic and talked to some
survivors. Children are being born with birth defects because the
aquifer has been contaminated because of chemical leaks. Nothing has
happened to Union Carbide, which is now owned by Dow Chemical, a huge
U.S. chemical corporation, also infamous for its Agent Orange in
Vietnam. And the other event that occurred in 1984 was right here in
New Delhi primarily, the massacre of thousands of Sikhs in the wake of
the assassination of Indira Gandhi. To date no one has been brought to
book in either of these cases.
The Indian government didn't ask for the extradition of Warren
Anderson, the head of Union Carbide, who continues to enjoy the
protection of the U.S. government. And the government here that is in
power now still shelters people who killed Sikhs and burned them alive
on the streets of this city and has denied justice to those people all
these years. This kind of poison never goes away. It is because the
Congress Party did not see that justice came to the people who
participated in those killings. That they kept quiet over the killing
of Muslims in Gujarat. And the killing of Sikhs in that way didn't
spread into the kind of contagion that it has because Sikhs are just a
small, localized community, whereas if you do that to Muslims and there
are millions of Muslims in the world who participate in that sense of
outrage.
But everything in India is like this: Everything is swept under the
carpet. You never get to the bottom of anything. The Godhra train was
burned. Who burned that train? The pilgrims died. Who did it? We still
don't know. Who attacked parliament? We still don't know. Who were the
killers in Gujarat, in Bombay? Why wasn't the Srikrishna report
implemented when the Muslims were killed in Gujarat? You never get to
the bottom of it. And the same in Kashmir. You always think that you
can just ride on to the next wave of something or the other happening,
because something or the other is always happening here. While farmers
are killing themselves, you're also winning a test match or Pongal is
being celebrated somewhere or the food grain input has grown. Something
else is always happening.
It must drive you batty.
These things don't go away, they do grow and they do become something,
and they do poison the bloodstream, and they do inform the politics of
what's going on. And eventually you can't push it away, because there
comes a stage when people simply won't take it anymore. Whatever spin
you put on it, people know what's going on eventually.
There are something like 600
districts of the country, and according to some reports, about a third
of them are in some kind of revolt or in some stage of resistance. In
the Northeast, there has been a long-standing rebellion. You mentioned
Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and other parts of the country.
That is the situation. And that's why I'm saying that this militaristic
response is more for us, the citizens in India, than it is for Pakistan
or for Lashkar-e Taiba (the group accused of the Mumbai attack) or for
terrorism. It's more to control us. It's a very interesting thing, the
difference between-right now Indian media are blaming the Pakistan
media for being jingoistic, but I have no doubt that the Pakistan media
is reacting to what happened.
But I think that, interestingly, this democracy has created a situation
in which the elites are fused with the state; they see like the state.
So you see columnists and writers in newspapers and magazines-I was
just telling someone today, it's amazing the way they are constantly
giving advice. They always seem like the state. They always want to be
ministers or policymakers. They are never citizens who are angry or
outraged or protesting. They're never at the receiving end of power;
they are at the disbursing end of power.
The shoe-throwing event by an
Iraqi journalist. I was in Kerala, your home state, in a rural area of
the state, Champakulam. I was with a family there. And they
spontaneously cheered when this was shown on television of this Iraqi
journalist, Muntadar Zaidi, throwing shoes at Bush.
I think it was one of the more delightful things that happened in a
long time. It was not just the fact that he threw them but the way the
world took it up. Immediately there was a video game, millions of
people threw those same shoes, there were millions of people in Baghdad
with a shoe protest. And I thought here was such a wonderful farewell
to this man, so much more wonderful than an assassination attempt or
anything like that. So creative. Not just the throwing of it but, as I
said, the use that was made of it by people and by the new media and so
on. I was actually delighted by the fallout, the fact the shoemaker had
orders for millions. It was like a modern version of the story of
"The Shoemaker and the Elves." One of the biggest laughs I had recently
was when I read some stodgy columnist in India writing disapprovingly
of the fact that this had been done to Bush. He said it would have been
so much better if he could have come up with a sarcastic, witty
comment. And I thought, this man is not with the project at all.
One of the things-this was not
widely reported-but Zaidi also made some comments as he was throwing
the shoes, calling Bush a dog, which is very derogatory in Islamic
culture. But he also said, "This is for the widows and orphans that you
have made in Iraq."
I would think that Bush ought to be flattered to be called a dog,
because dog-I don't think calling him a dog is at all derogatory to me,
so we leave that out. Whatever it is, I think it was a more fitting
farewell to that man than one could have come up with in a fiction
film. It was wonderful and spontaneous. Maybe it wasn't spontaneous.
But the world's reaction and the way the world took it up was
beautiful. And as a person who enjoys this kind of watching and
thinking about things politically, it opened up a kind of wonderful,
irreverent, powerful political space, and that's what I liked about it.
Let me ask you about the new
American president, Barack Obama, and the promise of hope, of someone
who will change America's image in the world, which has been damaged
under the Bush regime. What was your response and that of the people
that you hang out with when Obama was elected?
It's difficult to say, because I watched the night that he won. And I
wasn't so concerned about what he was as much as to see the happiness
on people's faces and to know that whatever will be given to them, the
fact that they wanted a change, that they wanted something else meant a
lot, because the last time they wanted the same guy back, which was
devastating, I think, for the rest of the world.
The 2004 election of George Bush.
When he was reelected, yes.
We don't say that, necessarily, in the States. Selected the first time, elected the second.
That election hardened a lot of people's hearts, including mine,
because I had been one of those people who said that there is a
difference between the government and the people and all that. And then
when it happened, you sort of felt... What will Obama do? I'm not one
of those people who wants to be right inside the heart of America,
understanding every move, because it's not something I can do, but, to
me, for example, the fact that he has been utterly quiet on this new
bombing of Gaza, the fact that he has recruited so many of the old
people, even if he says that he's sure that he can push them in
different directions, I haven't seen anything on the ground that makes
me feel that it's going to be all that different. But still, to me, the
fact that people wanted a change makes me feel better about the people.
I think Obama is going to be presiding over perhaps the debacle, the
undoing of the American Empire. And that, I don't think, needs to worry
the American people, because the Romans are still around and the Brits
are still around and the Americans will still be around and might be
slightly more relaxed. It might be easier to be an American when there
isn't an American Empire. But I think that the unraveling of the
economy is not going to be easy for people to predict what shape and
form it will take and where the explosions will come and so on.
But surely the fact is that unless somebody sees this structurally,
sees that there has been a structural problem which needs structural
solutions, we are going to be in trouble, because I'm not an economist,
but when I see that there is a crisis because people who have taken
loans can't repay those loans and your solution is to give more money
to the lenders, not to the borrowers, it seems a bit strange. All this
interconnected stuff, all those strings are going to come loose. And
what form they take is hard to predict.
I think that in India, too, the fact is that so far the people who are
being seriously affected are the rich, who can afford to be affected,
in a sense. But I think the costs of this collapse are still being
hidden by the media, because the media is invested in the markets, too,
and needs to keep up this very scientific term that they use, "the
sentiment of the markets." So there is a lot of talking up that's going
on. But, in fact, people are losing their jobs. In India only a few
months ago the finance minister, who is now the home minister,
Chidambaram, said that his dream was to have 75% of the Indian
population living in cities, which means 75% of the Indian population
being dependent on this very fragile version of a kind of corporate
global economy. That dream is over. The fact is, thank God, he didn't
manage to do that before this collapsed, because then we would have
been in a lot of trouble.
Right now I think that the real fact is that the government has to see
that we grow more food, that agricultural lands and ecosystems and
forests and mountain systems are not disturbed, because this is
indiscriminate mining, this strip mining, this destruction of the
ecology, this destruction of the rivers is eventually at the core of
all this.
I was reading somebody who said that the way China can solve its
problem is to make consumers out of its own population instead of
manufacturing to sell outside. If it can make consumers out of its own
population, it will have its own big market. But I think somewhere they
have to see the connection between global warming and this
indiscriminate consumption, because that's where it's going to
collapse. We have to start finding ways of consuming less, of wasting
less, of conserving more. You can't just look at these as separate
departments in separate universities. They have an impact on each other.
I'm glad you mentioned the
environment, because in the U.S. as well there is much focus and
attention on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and rather
marginal attention being paid to these very significant issues which
actually threaten survival of the planet.
I have to tell you that last night I spent watching the new James Bond
film. Very interesting. Only if you were a freak and interested in all
the things that the film really wasn't interested in would you see
this. But still I think it's of significance that in this film James
Bond's mission is to thwart a military coup against the government in
Bolivia. They don't say whose government it is, but we know whose
government it is. A military coup that's been plotted by a corrupt
general and a French corporate who is going to fund the coup in return
for the general signing over some big batch of land to him. So
initially everyone thinks it's because there is oil on that land. But,
no, what it is is this man has built these dams and has sort of
cornered 60% of the water resources of Bolivia and is then going to
hold the country to ransom when the coup happens. So in its own twisted
way the James Bond film was about the privatization of water and big
dams and the overthrow of Evo Morales's government. So it's interesting
that people are beginning to get it, people
in
anotheruniversearealsobeginningtogetit.
And how is the writing going in terms of your novel?
It's becoming very, very difficult to write because of all this, and I
don't know how to handle both things. But maybe that's all right. Maybe
we just muddle along.
Other AR Arundhati Roy programs -
A Writer's Place in Politics
The God of Small Things
Globalization and Terrorism
Imperial Democracy
Confronting Empire
The New Delhi Interviews
The LA Interviews
Public Power in the Age of Empire
Seize the Time!
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile
Brave New India: Uprisings
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other programs, please contact:
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Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
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