My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Let’s look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the US Army’s capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century partnership in which the ripping and strangling was a joint enterprise. It’s an in-house quarrel. They’re business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack’s the CEO.

  So if we are against imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the US occupation and that we believe that the United States must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?

  How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let’s start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba’athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?) We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.

  Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the US government’s plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.

  I suggest we choose by some means two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It’s a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It’s a question of the desire to win.

  “The Project for the New American Century” seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it’s apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.

  For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.

  This speech was delivered at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, on January 14, 2004.

  HOW DEEP SHALL WE DIG?

  Recently a young Kashmiri friend was talking to me about life in Kashmir. Of the morass of political venality and opportunism, the callous brutality of the security forces, of the osmotic, inchoate edges of a society saturated in violence, where militants, police, intelligence officers, government servants, businessmen, and even journalists encounter each other and gradually, over time, become each other. He spoke of having to live with the endless killing, the mounting “disappearances,” the whispering, the fear, the unresolved rumors, the insane disconnection between what is actually happening, what Kashmiris know is happening, and what the rest of us are told is happening in Kashmir. He said, “Kashmir used to be a business. Now it’s a mental asylum.”

  The more I think about that remark, the more apposite a description it seems for all of India. Admittedly, Kashmir and the Northeast are separate wings that house the more perilous wards in the asylum. But in the heartland, too, the schism between knowledge and information, between what we know and what we’re told, between what is unknown and what is asserted, between what is concealed and what is revealed, between fact and conjecture, between the “real” world and the virtual world, has become a place of endless speculation and potential insanity. It’s a poisonous brew which is stirred and simmered and put to the most ugly, destructive, political purpose.

  Each time there is a so-called terrorist strike, the government rushes in, eager to assign culpability with little or no investigation. The burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, the December 13, 2001, attack on the Parliament building, and the massacre of Sikhs by so-called terrorists in Chittisinghpura in March 2000 are only a few high-profile examples. (The so-called terrorists who were later killed by security forces turned out to be innocent villagers. The state government subsequently admitted that fake blood samples were submitted for DNA testing.)1 In each of these cases, the evidence that eventually surfaced raised very disturbing questions and so was immediately put into cold storage. Take the case of Godhra: as soon as it happened the home minister announced it was an Inter-Services Intelligence plot. The VHP says it was the work of a Muslim mob throwing petrol bombs.2 Serious questions remain unanswered. There is endless conjecture. Everybody believes what they want to believe, but the incident is used to cynically and systematically whip up communal frenzy.

  The US government used the lies and disinformation generated around the September 11 attacks to invade not just one country but two—and heaven knows what else is in store.

  The Indian government uses the same strategy, not with other countries but against its own people.

  Over the last decade, the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces runs into the thousands. Recently several Bombay policemen spoke openly to the press about how many “gangsters” they had eliminated on “orders” from their senior officers.3 Andhra Pradesh chalks up an average of about two hundred “extremists” in “encounter” deaths a year.4 In Kashmir, in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated eighty thousand people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply “disappeared.”5 According to the records of the Association of Parents of Disappeared People (APDP), more than 3,000 people were killed in 2003, of whom 463 were soldiers.6 Since the Mufti Mohammed Sayeed government came to power in October 2002 on the promise of bringing a “healing touch,” the APDP says, there have been fifty-four custodial deaths.7 In this age of hypernationalism, as long as the people who are killed are labeled gangsters, terrorists, insurgents, or extremists, their killers can strut around as crusaders in the national interest and are answerable to no one. Even if it were true (which it most certainly isn’t) that every person who has been killed was in fact a gangster, terrorist, insurgent, or extremist, it only tells us there is something terribly wrong with a society that drives so many people to take such desperate measures.

  The Indian state’s proclivity to harass and terrorize people has been institutionalized, consecrated, by the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which has been promulgated in ten states. A cursory reading of POTA will tell you that it is draconian and ubiquitous. It’s a versatile, hold-all law that could apply to anyone—from an Al-Qaeda operative caught with a cache of explosives to an Adivasi playing his flute under a neem tree, to you or me. The genius of POTA is that it can be anything the government wants it to be. We live on the sufferance of those who govern us. In Tamil Nadu it has been used to stifle criticism of the state government.8 In Jharkhand thirty-two hundred people, mostly poor Adivasis accused of being Maoists, have been indicted under POTA.9 In eastern Uttar Pradesh the act is used to clamp down on those who dare to protest about the alienation of their land and livelihood rights.10 In Gujarat and Mumbai, it is used almost exclusively against Muslims.11 In Gujarat after the 2002 state-assisted pogrom in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed and 150,000 driven from their homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these, 286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh!12 POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as judicial evidence. In effect, under the POTA regime, police torture tends to replace police investigation. It’s quicker, cheaper, and ensures results. Talk of cutting back on public spending.

  In March 2004 I was a member of a people’s tribunal on POTA. Over a period of two days we listened to harrowing testimonies of what goes on in our wonderful democracy. Let me assure you that in our police stations it’s everything: from people being forced to drink urine to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses to being beaten and kicked to death.

  Across the country hundreds of people, including some very young children charged under POTA, have been imprisoned and are being held without bail, awaiti
ng trial in special POTA courts that are not open to public scrutiny. A majority of those booked under POTA are guilty of one of two crimes. Either they’re poor—for the most part Dalit and Adivasi—or they’re Muslim. POTA inverts the accepted dictum of criminal law: that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Under POTA you cannot get bail unless you can prove you are innocent—of a crime that you have not been formally charged with. Essentially, you have to prove you’re innocent even if you’re unaware of the crime you are supposed to have committed. And that applies to all of us. Technically, we are a nation waiting to be accused.

  It would be naive to imagine that POTA is being “misused.” On the contrary. It is being used for precisely the reasons it was enacted. Of course, if the recommendations of the Malimath Committee are implemented, POTA will soon become redundant. The Malimath Committee recommends that in certain respects normal criminal law should be brought in line with the provisions of POTA.13 There’ll be no more criminals then. Only terrorists. It’s kind of neat.

  Today in Jammu and Kashmir and many northeastern states of India, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers but even junior commissioned officers and noncommissioned officers of the army to use force against (and even kill) any person on suspicion of disturbing public order or carrying a weapon.14 On suspicion of! Nobody who lives in India can harbor any illusions about what that leads to. The documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape, and gang-rape (by security forces) is enough to make your blood run cold. The fact that, despite all this, India retains its reputation as a legitimate democracy in the international community and among its own middle class is a triumph.

  The Armed Forces Special Powers Act is a harsher version of the ordinance that Lord Linlithgow passed on August 15, 1942, to handle the Quit India Movement. In 1958 it was clamped on parts of Manipur, which were declared “disturbed areas.” In 1965 the whole of Mizoram, then still part of Assam was declared “disturbed.” In 1972 the act was extended to Tripura. By 1980, the whole of Manipur had been declared “disturbed.”15 What more evidence does anybody need to realize that repressive measures are counterproductive and only exacerbate the problem?

  Juxtaposed against this unseemly eagerness to repress and eliminate people is the Indian state’s barely hidden reluctance to investigate and bring to trial cases in which there is plenty of evidence: the massacre of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and the massacres of Muslims in Bombay in 1993 and in Gujarat in 2002 (not one conviction to date); the murder a few years ago of Chandrashekhar Prasad, former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University student union; and the murder twelve years ago of Shankar Guha Niyogi of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha are just a few examples.16 Eyewitness accounts and masses of incriminating evidence are not enough when all of the state machinery is stacked against you.

  Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform us that the GDP growth rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods. Government storehouses are overflowing with food grain. Outside this circle of light, farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide in the hundreds. Reports of starvation and malnutrition come in from across the country. Yet the government allowed 63 million tons of grain to rot in its granaries.17 Twelve million tons were exported and sold at a subsidized price the Indian government was not willing to offer the Indian poor.18 Utsa Patnaik, the well-known agricultural economist, has calculated food grain availability and food grain absorption in India for nearly a century, based on official statistics. She calculates that in the period between the early 1990s and 2001, food grain absorption has dropped to levels lower than during the World War II years, including during the Bengal Famine, in which three million people died of starvation.19 As we know from the work of professor Amartya Sen, democracies don’t take kindly to starvation deaths. They attract too much adverse publicity from the “free press.”20 So dangerous levels of malnutrition and permanent hunger are the preferred model these days. Forty-seven percent of India’s children below three suffer from malnutrition, 46 percent are stunted.21 Utsa Patnaik’s study reveals that about 40 percent of the rural population in India has the same food grain absorption level as sub-Saharan Africa.22 Today, an average rural family eats about 100 kilograms less food in a year than it did in the early 1990s.23

  But in urban India, wherever you go—shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals—you have TV monitors in which election promises have already come true. India’s Shining, Feeling Good. You only have to close your ears to the sickening crunch of the policeman’s boot on someone’s ribs, you only have to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged broken people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor and you will be in that other beautiful world. The singing-dancing world of Bollywood’s permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, permanently happy Indians waving the tricolor flag and Feeling Good. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell which one’s the real world and which one’s virtual. Laws like POTA are like buttons on a TV. You can use it to switch off the poor, the troublesome, the unwanted.

  There is a new kind of secessionist movement taking place in India. Shall we call it New Secessionism? It’s an inversion of Old Secessionism. It’s when people who are actually part of a whole different economy, a whole different country, a whole different planet, pretend they’re part of this one. It is the kind of secession in which a relatively small section of people become immensely wealthy by appropriating everything—land, rivers, water, freedom, security, dignity, fundamental rights, including the right to protest—from a large group of people. It’s a vertical secession, not a horizontal, territorial one. It’s the real Structural Adjustment—the kind that separates India Shining from India. India Pvt. Ltd. from India the Public Enterprise.

  It’s the kind of secession in which public infrastructure, productive public assets—water, electricity, transport, telecommunications, health services, education, natural resources—assets that the Indian state is supposed to hold in trust for the people it represents, assets that have been built and maintained with public money over decades, are sold by the state to private corporations. In India 70 percent of the population—70 million people—live in rural areas.24 Their livelihoods depend on access to natural resources. To snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is beginning to result in dispossession and impoverishment on a barbaric scale.

  India Pvt. Ltd. is on its way to being owned by a few corporations and major multinationals. The CEOs of these companies will control this country, its infrastructure and its resources, its media and its journalists, but will owe nothing to its people. They are completely unaccountable—legally, socially, morally, politically. Those who say that in India a few of these CEOs are more powerful than the prime minister know exactly what they’re talking about.

  Quite apart from the economic implications of all this, even if it were all that it is cracked up to be (which it isn’t)—miraculous, efficient, amazing—is the politics of it acceptable to us? If the Indian state chooses to mortgage its responsibilities to a handful of corporations, does it mean that the theater of electoral democracy is entirely meaningless? Or does it still have a role to play?

  The free market (which is actually far from free) needs the state, and needs it badly. As the disparity between the rich and poor grows in poor countries, states have their work cut out for them. Corporations on the prowl for “sweetheart deals” that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and administer those projects in developing countries without the active connivance of state machinery. Today corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries, to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It’s called “Creating a Good Investment Climate.”

  When we vote, we choose which political party we would like to invest the coercive, repressive powers of the s
tate in.

  Right now in India we have to negotiate the dangerous crosscurrents of neoliberal capitalism and communal neofascism. While the word capitalism hasn’t completely lost its sheen yet, using the word fascism often causes offense. So we must ask ourselves, are we using the word loosely? Are we exaggerating our situation, does what we are experiencing on a daily basis qualify as fascism?

  When a government more or less openly supports a pogrom against members of a minority community in which up to 2,000 people are brutally killed, is it fascism? When women of that community are publicly raped and burned alive, is it fascism? When authorities collude to see to it that nobody is punished for these crimes, is it fascism? When 150,000 people are driven from their homes, ghettoized, and economically and socially boycotted, is it fascism? When the cultural guild that runs hate camps across the country commands the respect and admiration of the prime minister, the home minister, the law minister, the disinvestment minister, is it fascism? When painters, writers, scholars, and filmmakers who protest are abused, threatened, and have their work burned, banned, and destroyed, is it fascism? When a government issues an edict requiring the arbitrary alteration of school history textbooks, is it fascism? When mobs attack and burn archives of ancient historical documents, when every minor politician masquerades as a professional medieval historian and archaeologist, when painstaking scholarship is rubbished using baseless populist assertion, is it fascism? When murder, rape, arson, and mob justice are condoned by the party in power and its stable of stock intellectuals as an appropriate response to a real or perceived historical wrong committed centuries ago, is it fascism? When the middle class and the well-heeled pause a moment, tut-tut, and then go on with their lives, is it fascism? When the prime minister who presides over all of this is hailed as a statesman and visionary, are we not laying the foundations for full-blown fascism?