My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Bechtel has been awarded reconstruction contracts in Iraq worth over a billion dollars, which include contracts to rebuild power generation plants, electrical grids, water supply, sewage systems, and airport facilities. Never mind revolving doors, this— if it weren’t so drenched in blood—would be a bedroom farce.

  And Bechtel has footprints around the world. It first attracted international attention when it signed a contract with Hugo Banzer, the Bolivian dictator, to privatize the city of Cochabamba’s water supply. Bechtel immediately raised the water price, bringing hundreds of thousands of those who couldn’t pay Bechtel’s bills into the streets, paralyzing the city. Martial law was declared. Bechtel was forced to flee its offices, but it is now negotiating a multimillion dollar exit payment from the Bolivian government for the loss of profits.

  In India, Bechtel along with General Electric are the new owners of the notorious and currently defunct Enron power project. The Enron contract, which legally binds the government of the State of Maharashtra to pay Enron a sum of $30 billion, was the largest contract ever signed in India. Enron was not shy to boast about the millions of dollars it had spent to “educate” Indian politicians and bureaucrats. The Enron contract in Maharashtra, which was India’s first “fast-track” private power project, has come to be known as the most massive fraud in the country’s history. (Enron was another of the Republican Party’s major campaign contributors.) Enron’s electricity was so expensive that the government decided it was cheaper not to buy electricity and to pay Enron damages under the contract. The government of one of the world’s poorest countries was paying Enron $220 million a year not to produce electricity.

  With Enron’s demise, Bechtel and GE are suing the Indian government for $5.6 billion for lost profits. Enron actually invested a tiny fraction of this sum in the project. The arbitration between Bechtel, GE, and the government of India is taking place right now in London.

  Think about it: The notional profits of a single corporate project would be enough to provide one hundred days of employment a year at minimum wages (calculated at a weighted average across different states) for twenty-five million people. That’s five million more than the population of Australia. That is the scale of the horror of neoliberalism.

  Invaded and occupied Iraq has been made to pay out $200 million in “reparations” for lost profits to corporations like Halliburton, Shell, Mobil, Nestle, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Toys R Us. That’s apart from its $125 billion sovereign debt forcing it to turn to the IMF.

  In New Iraq, privatization has broken new ground. The US Army is increasingly recruiting private mercenaries to help in the occupation. The advantage with mercenaries is that when they’re killed they’re not included in the US soldiers’ body count. It helps to manage public opinion. Prisons have been privatized and torture has been privatized.

  Other attractions in New Iraq include newspapers being shut down. Television stations bombed. Reporters killed. US soldiers have opened fire on crowds of unarmed protestors, killing scores of people. The only kind of resistance that has managed to survive is as crazed and brutal as the occupation itself. Is there space for a secular, democratic, feminist, nonviolent resistance in Iraq? There isn’t really.

  That is why it falls to those of us living outside Iraq to create that mass-based, secular, and nonviolent resistance to the US occupation. If we fail to do that, then we run the risk of allowing the idea of resistance to be hijacked and conflated with terrorism, and that will be a pity because they are not the same thing.

  We know very well who benefits from war in the age of empire. But we must also ask ourselves honestly: who benefits from peace in the age of empire? War mongering is criminal. But talking of peace without talking of justice could easily become advocacy for a kind of capitulation. And talking of justice without unmasking the institutions and the systems that perpetrate injustice is beyond hypocritical.

  It’s easy to blame the poor for being poor. It’s easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That’s what allows the American president to say “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” But we know that that is a spurious choice.

  It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other. The real tragedy is that most people in the world are trapped between the horror of a putative peace and the terror of war. Those are the two sheer cliffs we’re hemmed in by.

  The question is: How do we climb out of this crevasse?

  For those who are materially well-off but morally uncomfortable, the first question you must ask yourself is, do you really want to climb out of it? How far are you prepared to go? Has the crevasse become too comfortable?

  If you really want to climb out, there’s good news and bad news.

  The good news is that the advance party began the climb some time ago. They’re already halfway up. Thousands of activists across the world have been hard at work preparing footholds and securing the ropes to make it easier for the rest of us. There isn’t only one path up. There are hundreds of ways of doing it. There are hundreds of battles being fought around the world that need your skills, your minds, your resources.

  The bad news is that colorful demonstrations, weekend marches, and annual trips to the World Social Forum are not enough. There have to be targeted acts of real civil disobedience with real consequences. Maybe we can’t flip a switch and conjure up a revolution. But there are several things we could do. For example, you could make a list of those corporations who have profited from the invasion of Iraq and have offices here in Australia. You could name them, boycott them, occupy their offices, and force them out of business. If it can happen in Bolivia, it can happen in India. It can happen in Australia. Why not?

  That’s only a small suggestion. But remember that if the struggle were to resort to violence, it will lose vision, beauty, and imagination. Most dangerous of all, it will marginalize and eventually victimize women. And a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

  The point is that the battle must be joined. As the wonderful American historian Howard Zinn put it, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

  Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, November 4, 2004.

  BREAKING THE NEWS

  This reader goes to press almost five years to the day since December 13, 2001, when five men (some say six) drove through the gates of the Indian Parliament in a white Ambassador car and attempted what looked like an astonishingly incompetent terrorist strike.

  Consummate competence appeared to be the hallmark of everything that followed: the gathering of evidence, the speed of the investigation by the Special Cell of the Delhi police, the arrest and charge sheeting of the accused, and the forty-month-long judicial process that began with the fast-track trial court.

  The operative phrase in all of this is “appeared to be.” If you follow the story carefully, you’ll encounter two sets of masks. First the mask of consummate competence (accused arrested, “case cracked” in two days flat), and then, when things began to come undone, the benign mask of shambling incompetence (shoddy evidence, procedural flaws, material contradictions). But underneath all of this, as each of the essays in this collection shows, is something more sinister, more worrying. Over the last few years the worries have grown into a mountain of misgivings, impossible to ignore.

  The doubts set in early on, when on December 14, 2001, the day after the Parliament attack, the police arrested S. A. R. Geelani, a young lecturer in Delhi University. He was one of four people who were arrested. His outraged colleagues and friends, certain he had been framed, contacted the well-known lawyer Nandita Haksar and asked her to take on his case. This marked the beginning of a campaign for the fair trial of Geelani. It flew in the face of mass hysteria and corrosive p
ropaganda enthusiastically disseminated by the mass media. The campaign was successful, and Geelani was eventually acquitted, along with Afsan Guru, co-accused in the same case.

  Geelani’s acquittal blew a gaping hole in the prosecution’s version of the Parliament attack. But in some odd way, in the public mind, the acquittal of two of the accused only confirmed the guilt of the other two. When the government announced that Mohammad Afzal Guru, Accused Number One in the case, would be hanged on October 20, 2006, it seemed as though most people welcomed the news not just with approval, but morbid excitement. But then, once again, the questions resurfaced.

  To see through the prosecution’s case against Geelani was relatively easy. He was plucked out of thin air and transplanted into the center of the “conspiracy” as its kingpin. Afzal was different. He had been extruded through the sewage system of the hell that Kashmir has become. He surfaced through a manhole, covered in shit (and when he emerged, policemen in the Special Cell pissed on him).1 The first thing they made him do was a “media confession” in which he implicated himself completely in the attack.2 The speed with which this happened made many of us believe that he was indeed guilty as charged. It was only much later that the circumstances under which this “confession” was made were revealed, and even the Supreme Court set it aside, saying that the police had violated legal safeguards.3

  From the very beginning there was nothing pristine or simple about Afzal’s case. Even today Afzal does not claim complete innocence. It is the nature of his involvement that is being contested. For instance, was he coerced, tortured, and blackmailed into playing even the peripheral part he played? He didn’t have a lawyer to put out his version of the story or help anyone to sift through the tangle of lies and fabrications. Various individuals worked it out for themselves. These essays by a group of lawyers, academics, journalists, and writers represent that body of work. It has fractured what—only recently—appeared to be a national consensus interwoven with mass hysteria. We’re late at the barricades, but we’re here.

  Most people, or let’s say many people, when they encounter real facts and a logical argument, do begin to ask the right questions. This is exactly what has begun to happen on the Parliament attack case. The questions have created public pressure. The pressure has created fissures, and through these fissures those who have come under the scanner—shadowy individuals, counterintelligence and security agencies, political parties—are beginning to surface. They wave flags, hurl abuse, issue hot denials, and cover their tracks with more and more untruths. Thus they reveal themselves.

  Public unease continues to grow. A group of citizens has come together as a committee (chaired by Nirmala Deshpande) to publicly demand a parliamentary inquiry into the episode.4 There is an online petition demanding the same thing. Thousands of people have signed on. Every day new articles appear in the papers and on the Internet. At least half a dozen websites are following the developments closely. They raise questions about how Mohammad Afzal, who never had proper legal representation, can be sentenced to death, without having had an opportunity to be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated evidence, procedural flaws, and the outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers. They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

  And then, there are even more disturbing questions that have been raised, which range beyond the fate of Mohammad Afzal. Here are thirteen questions about December 13:

  Question 1: For months before the attack on Parliament, both the government and the police had been saying that Parliament could be attacked. On December 12, 2001, at an informal meeting, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee warned of an imminent attack on Parliament.5 On December 13, Parliament was attacked. Given that there was an “improved security drill,” how did a car bomb packed with explosives enter the parliament complex?

  Question 2: Within days of the attack, the Special Cell of Delhi police said it was a meticulously planned joint operation of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. They said the attack was led by a man called “Mohammad” who was also involved in the hijacking of IC-814 in 1998. (This was later refuted by the Central Bureau of Investigation.)6 None of this was ever proved in court. What evidence did the Special Cell have for its claim?

  Question 3: The entire attack was recorded live on closed-circuit television (CCTV). Congress Party MP Kapil Sibal demanded in Parliament that the CCTV recording be shown to the members. He was supported by the deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Najma Heptullah, who said that there was confusion about the details of the event. The chief whip of the Congress Party, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, said, “I counted six men getting out of the car. But only five were killed. The closed-circuit TV camera recording clearly showed the six men.”7 If Dasmunshi was right, why did the police say that there were only five people in the car? Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recording not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why was it not released for public viewing?

  Question 4: Why was Parliament adjourned after some of these questions were raised?

  Question 5: A few days after December 13, the government declared that it had “incontrovertible proof” of Pakistan’s involvement in the attack and announced a massive mobilization of almost half a million soldiers to the Indo-Pakistan border. The subcontinent was pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Apart from Afzal’s “confession,” extracted under torture (and later set aside by the Supreme Court), what was the “incontrovertible proof”?

  Question 6: Is it true that the military mobilization to the Pakistan border had begun long before the December 13 attack?

  Question 7: How much did this military standoff, which lasted for nearly a year, cost? How many soldiers died in the process? How many soldiers and civilians died because of mishandled land mines, and how many peasants lost their homes and land because trucks and tanks were rolling through their villages, and land mines were being planted in their fields?

  Question 8: In a criminal investigation it is vital for the police to show how the evidence gathered at the scene of the attack led them to the accused. How did the police reach Mohammad Afzal? The Special Cell says S. A. R. Geelani led them to Afzal.8 But the message to look out for Afzal was actually flashed to the Srinagar police before Geelani was arrested. So how did the Special Cell connect Afzal to the December 13 attack?

  Question 9: The courts acknowledge that Afzal was a surrendered militant who was in regular contact with the security forces, particularly the Special Task Force (STF) of Jammu and Kashmir police. How do the security forces explain the fact that a person under their surveillance was able to conspire in a major militant operation?

  Question 10: Is it plausible that organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed would rely on a person who had been in and out of STF torture chambers, and was under constant police surveillance, as the principal link for a major operation?

  Question 11: In his statement before the court, Afzal says that he was introduced to “Mohammad” and instructed to take him to Delhi by a man called Tariq, who was working with the STF. Tariq was named in the police charge sheet. Who is Tariq and where is he now?

  Question 12: On December 19, 2001, six days after the Parliament attack, Police Commissioner S. M. Shangari, Thane (Maharashtra), identified one of the attackers killed in the Parliament attack as Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammad (alias Abu Hamza) of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who had been arrested in Mumbai in November 2000 and immediately handed over to the Jammu and Kashmir police. He gave detailed descriptions to support his statement. If Police Commissioner Shangari was right, how did Mohammad Yasin, a man in the custody of the Jammu and Kashmir police, end up participating in the Parliament attack? If he was wrong, where is Mohammad Yasin now?

  Question 13: Why is it that we still don’t know who the five dead “terrorists” killed in the Parliament attack are?

  These questions, examined cumulatively, point to something
far more serious than incompetence. The words that come to mind are complicity, collusion, and involvement. There’s no need for us to feign shock or shrink from thinking these thoughts and saying them out loud. Governments and their intelligence agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies like this to further their own ends. (Look up the burning of the Reichstag and the rise of Nazi power in Germany, 1933; or Operation Gladio, in which European intelligence agencies “created” acts of terrorism, especially in Italy, in order to discredit militant groups like the Red Brigade.)9

  The official response to all of these questions has been dead silence. As things stand, the execution of Afzal has been postponed while the president considers his clemency petition. Meanwhile the Bharatiya Janata Party announced that it would turn “Hang Afzal” into a national campaign.10 The campaign was fueled by the usual stale cocktail of religious chauvinism, nationalism, and strategic falsehoods. But it doesn’t seem to have taken off. Now other avenues are being explored. M. S. Bitta of the All India Anti-Terrorist Front is parading around the families of some of the security personnel who were killed during the attack. They have threatened to return the government’s posthumous bravery medals if Afzal is not hanged by December 13. (On balance, it might not be a bad idea for them to turn in those medals until they really know who the attackers were working for.)

  The main strategy seems to be to create confusion and polarize the debate on communal lines. The editor of the Pioneer newspaper writes in his columns that Mohammad Afzal was actually one of the men who attacked Parliament, that he was the first to open fire and kill at least three security guards.11 The columnist Swapan Dasgupta, in an article titled “You Can’t Be Good to Evil,” suggests that if Afzal is not hanged there would be no point in celebrating the victory of good over evil at Dussehra or Durga Puja.12 It’s hard to believe that falsehoods like this stem only from a poor grasp of facts.