Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

by Arundhati Roy

  We flew together to Stockholm to meet up with Dan, who was attending the ceremony of the Right Livelihood Awards—some call it the Alternative Nobel—because Ed was one of the laureates.3 We would fly to Moscow together from there.

  The Stockholm streets were so clean you could eat off the ground.

  On our first night, there was a dinner at a nautical museum with the complete salvaged wreckage of a huge 17th-century wooden warship as the centerpiece of the modernist structure. The Vasa, considered the Titanic of Swedish disasters, was built on the orders of yet another power-hungry king who wanted control of seas and the future. It was so overloaded with weapons and top-heavy, it capsized and sank before it even left the harbor.

  It was a classic human rights evening, to be sure: gourmet food and good intentions, a choir singing beautiful noels. I enjoyed watching the almost pathologically anti-gala Roy trying to mask her blind panic. Not her venue, as they say. Dan was busy and in great demand, meeting people, doing interviews. We caught occasional glimpses of him—and managed to say a quick hello.

  The awards ceremony took place in the Swedish Parliament. Roy and I were graciously invited. We were late. It occurred to us that if neither of us would be comfortable sitting in the parliament halls of our own countries, what the fuck would we be doing sitting in the Swedish Parliament? So we skulked around the corridors like petty criminals until we found a cramped balcony from which we could watch the ceremony. Our empty seats reflected back at us. The speeches were long. We slipped away and walked through the great chambers and found an empty banquet hall with a laid out feast. There was a metaphor there somewhere. I switched on my recorder again.

  JC: What is the meaning of charity as a political tool?

  AR: It’s an old joke, right? If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.

  (Laughter)

  JC: Sugar daddy politics . . .

  AR: Embrace the resistance, seize it, fund it.

  JC: Domesticate it . . .

  AR: Make it depend on you. Turn it into an art project or a product of some kind. The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalized, funded operation, you’re in some trouble. And it’s cleverly done. It’s not all bad . . . some are doing genuinely good work.

  JC: Like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) . . .

  AR: They have money from the Ford Foundation, right? But they do excellent work. You can’t fault people for the work they’re doing, taken individually.

  JC: People want to do something good, something useful . . .

  AR: Yes. And it is these good intentions that are dragooned and put to work. It’s a complicated thing. Think of a bead necklace. The beads on their own may be lovely, but when they’re threaded together, they’re not really free to skitter around as they please. When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates, Rockefeller, or Ford Foundation’s handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse—and then, very subtly, without appearing to—they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you’re sacked if you disobey . . . sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there’s always the game of pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded,” in which the funder takes center stage. So, I mean, I’m not against people being funded—because we’re running out of options—but we have to understand—are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Or who’s the dog and who is you?

  JC: I’m definitely the dog . . . and I’ve definitely been walked.

  AR: Everywhere—not just in America . . . repress, beat up, shoot, jail those you can, and throw money at those whom you can’t—and gradually sandpaper the edge off them. They’re in the business of creating what we in India call Paaltu Sher, which means Tamed Tigers. Like a pretend resistance . . . so you can let off steam without damaging anything.

  JC: The first time you spoke at the World Social Forum . . . when was that?

  AR: In 2003, in Porto Alegre . . . just before the US invasion of Iraq.4

  JC: And then you went the next year in Mumbai and it was . . .

  AR: . . . totally NGO-ized.5 So many major activists had turned into travel agents, just having to organize tickets and money, flying people up and down. The forum suddenly declared, “Only nonviolence, no armed struggles . . .” They had turned Gandhian.

  JC: So anyone involved in armed resistance . . .

  AR: All out, all out. Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let’s say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days’ walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it—what brand of nonviolence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend? Nonviolence is radical political theater.

  JC: Effective only when there’s an audience . . .

  AR: Exactly. And who can pull in an audience? You need some capital, some stars, right? Gandhi was a superstar. The indigenous people in the forest don’t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience. Nonviolence should be a tactic—not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence . . . With me, it’s been an evolution of seeing through these things.

  “Gandhi was a superstar. The indigenous people in the forest don’t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience. Nonviolence should be a tactic—not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.”

  JC: You begin to smell the digestive enzymes . . .

  AR: (Laughing) But you know, the revolution cannot be funded. It’s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that’s going to bring real change.

  JC: But what’s the bigger game that we can name?

  AR: The bigger game is keeping the world safe for the Free Market. Structural Adjustment, Privatization, Free Market fundamentalism—all masquerading as Democracy and the Rule of Law. Many corporate foundation–funded NGOs—not all, but many—become the missionaries of the “new economy.” They tinker with your imagination, with language. The idea of “human rights,” for example—sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum—all we are supposed to expect—but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

  JC: The term human rights is, or can be, a kind of pacifier—filling the space in the political imagination that justice deserves?

  AR: Look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. If you look at a map from 1947 to now, you’ll see that Israel has gobbled up almost all of Palestinian land with its illegal settlements. To talk about justice in that battle, you have to talk about those settlements. But, if you just talk about human rights, then you can say, “Oh, Hamas violates human rights,” “Israel violates human rights.” Ergo, both are bad.

  JC: You can turn it into an equivalence . . .

  AR: . . . though it isn’t one. But this discourse of human rights, it’s a very good format for TV—the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry (laughs). Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimize violence—so who gets criminalized and delegitimized? Only—or well that’s excessive—usually, the resistance.

  JC: So the term human rights can take the oxygen out of justice?

  AR: Human rights takes history out of justice.

  JC: Justice always has context . . .

  AR: I sound as though I’m trashing human rights . . . I’m not. All I’m saying is that the idea of justice—even just dreaming of justice—is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust—and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course, the catch-2
2 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

  JC: . . . As there’s no other way of implementing those policies except violently.

  AR: No way at all—but talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalizing their resources, protecting their markets. . . . So then, real democracies were being toppled. They were toppled in Iran, they were toppled all across Latin America, Chile . . .

  JC: The list is too long . . .

  AR: Now we’re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First it was topple them, now it’s install them, right? And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility—it’s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In that sense, it’s all part of the same machine.

  JC: Tentacles of the same squid.

  AR: They moved in to the spaces that were left when “structural adjustment” forced states to pull back on public spending—on health, education, infrastructure, water supply—turning what ought to be people’s rights, to education, to health care, and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It’s a way of managing public anger. We’re all being managed, and we don’t even know it. . . . The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against “corruption” and for “transparency.” They want the Rule of Law—as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardize a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely—unimpeded—around the world today is money . . . capital.

  JC: It’s all for efficiency, right? Stable markets, stable world . . . there’s a great violence in the idea of a uniform “investment climate.”

  AR: In India, that’s a phrase we use interchangeably with “massacre.” Stable markets, unstable world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It’s enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption. (Laughing) But seriously, if you look at the history of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where almost a million people, mainly Communists, were killed by General Suharto, who was backed by the CIA, in South Africa, in the US civil rights movement—or even now, it’s very disturbing.6 They have always worked closely with the US State Department.

  JC: And yet now Ford funds The Act of Killing—the film about those same massacres.7 They profile the butchers . . . but not their masters. They won’t follow the money.

  AR: They have so much money, they can fund everything, very bad things as well as very good things—documentary films, nuclear weapons planners, gender rights, feminist conferences, literature and film festivals, university chairs . . . anything, as long as it doesn’t upset the “market” and the economic status quo. One of Ford’s “good works” was to fund the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations, which worked closely with the CIA.8 The first eleven World Bank presidents were from the CFR.9 Ford funded RAND, the research and development corporation which works closely with the US defense forces.

  JC: That was where Dan worked. That’s where he laid his hands on the Pentagon Papers.

  AR: The Pentagon Papers . . . I couldn’t believe what I was reading . . . that stuff about bombing dams, planning famines. . . . I wrote an introduction to an edition of Noam Chomsky’s For Reasons of State in which he analyzes the Pentagon Papers.10 There was a chapter in the book called “The Backroom Boys”—maybe that wasn’t the Pentagon Papers part, I don’t remember . . . but there was a letter or a note of some kind, maybe from soldiers in the field, about how great it was that white phosphorus had been mixed in with napalm . . . “The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. [T]hen . . . they started adding Willie Peter [WP—white phosphorus] so’s to make it burn better.”11 Nice people no?

  JC: You remember that by rote?

  AR: I can’t forget it. It burned me to the bone . . . I grew up in Kerala, remember. Communist country . . .

  JC: You were talking about how the Ford Foundation funded RAND and the CFR.

  AR: (Laughs) Yes . . . it’s a bedroom comedy . . . actually a bedroom tragedy . . . is that a genre? Ford funded CFR and RAND. Robert McNamara moved from heading Ford Motors to the Pentagon. So, as you can see, we’re encircled.

  JC: . . . and not just by the past.

  AR: No—by the future, too. The future is Google, isn’t it? In Julian Assange’s book—brilliant book—When Google Met WikiLeaks, he suggests that there isn’t much daylight between Google and the NSA.12 The three people who went along with Eric Schmidt—CEO of Google—to interview Julian were Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas—ex-State Department and senior something or other on the CFR, adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. The two others were Lisa Shields and Scott Malcolmson, also former State Department and CFR. It’s serious shit. But when we talk about NGOs, there’s something we must be careful about . . .

  JC: What’s that?

  AR: When the attack on NGOs comes from the opposite end, from the far Right, then those of us who’ve been criticizing NGOs from a completely different perspective will look terrible . . . to liberals, we’ll be the bad guys . . .

  JC: Once again pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded.”

  AR: For example, in India the new government—the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a “Hindu Nation”—they’re bigots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns—orchestrated to polarize communities and bring in the vote. It was so in Gujarat in 2002, and this year, in the run-up to the general elections, in a place called Muzaffarnagar, after which tens of thousands of Muslims had to flee from their villages and live in camps.13 Some of those who are accused of all that murdering are now cabinet ministers. Their support for straightforward, chest-thumping butchery makes you long for even the hypocrisy of the human rights discourse. But now if the “human rights” NGOs make a noise, or even whisper too loudly . . . this government will shut them down. And it can, very easily. All it has to do is to go after the funders . . . and the funders, whoever they are, especially those who are interested in India’s huge “market,” will either cave in or scuttle over to the other side. Those NGOs will blow over because they’re a chimera, they don’t have deep roots in society among the people, really, so they’ll just disappear. Even the pretend resistance that has sucked the marrow out of genuine resistance will be gone.

  JC: Is Modi going to succeed long term?

  AR: It’s hard to say. There’s no real opposition, you know? He has an absolute majority and a government that he completely controls, and he himself—and I think this is true of most people with murky pasts—doesn’t trust any of his own people, so he’s become this person who has to interface directly with people. The government is secondary. Public institutions are being peopled by his acolytes, school and university syllabi are being revamped, history is being rewritten in absurd ways. It’s very dangerous, all of it. And a large section of young people, students, the IT crowd, the educated middle class and, of course, Big Business, are with him—the Hindu right wing is with him. He’s lowering the bar of public discourse—saying things like, “Oh, Hindus discovered plastic surgery in the Vedas because how else would we have had an elephant-headed god.”14

  JC: (Laughing) He said that?

  AR: Yes! It’s dangerous. On the other hand, it’s so corny that I don’t know how long it can last. But for now people are wearing Modi masks and waving back at him . . . He was democratically elected. There’s no ge
tting away from that. That’s why when people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

  JC: As they say, “Kitsch is the mask of Death” . . . 15

  AR: Sounds about right . . . But then, while there’s no real opposition to him in Parliament, India’s a very interesting place . . . there’s no formal opposition, but there’s genuine on-the-ground opposition. If you travel around—there are all kinds of people, brilliant people . . . journalists, activists, filmmakers, whether you go to Kashmir, the Indian part, or to an Adivasi village about to be submerged by a dam reservoir—the level of understanding of everything we’ve talked about—surveillance, globalization, NGO-ization—is so high, you know? The wisdom of the resistance movements, which are ragged and tattered and pushed to the wall, is incredible. So . . . I look to them and keep the faith. (Laughs)

  JC: So this isn’t new to you . . . the debate about mass surveillance?

  AR: Of course, the details are new to me, the technical stuff and the scale of it all—but for many of us in India who don’t consider ourselves “innocent,” surveillance is something we have all always been aware of. Most of those who have been summarily executed by the army or the police—we call them “encounters”—have been tracked down using their cellphones. In Kashmir, for years they have monitored every phone call, every e-mail, every Facebook account—that plus beating doors down, shooting into crowds, mass arrests, torture that puts Abu Ghraib in the shade. It’s the same in central India.

  JC: In the forest where you went “walking with the comrades”?

  AR: Yes. Where the poorest people in the world have stopped some of the richest mining corporations in their tracks. The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don’t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media. There’s a virtual civil war going on there and few know about it. Anyway, before I went into the forest, I was told by the superintendent of police, “Out there, ma’am . . . my boys shoot to kill.”16 The police call the area across the river “Pakistan.”17 Anyway, then the cop says to me, “‘See, ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”18 His point was that watching TV would teach them greed.