An Interview with Arundhati Roy by
Shoma Chaudhuri (excerpt)
There is an atmosphere of growing
violence across the country. How do you read the signs? Do you think it will
grow more in the days to come? What are its causes? In what context should all
this be read?
You don’t have to be a genius to
read the signs. We have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of
radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing western
countries which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave
labour to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether
parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and
marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by
grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing
is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in Independent India.
The secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.
It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to
merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve
managed to commandeer the resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the
water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs,
more mines – super toys for the new super citizens of the new superpower. So
it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons. The
government and the corporations reach for Structural Adjustment, the World
Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy makers, help from
the ‘friendly’ corporate media and a police force that will ram all this down
peoples’ throats. Those who want to resist this process have, until now,
reached for dharnas, hunger-strikes, satyagraha, the courts, and what they
thought was friendly media. But now, more and more are reaching for guns. Will
the violence grow? If the ‘growth rate’ and the sensex are going to be the only
barometres the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of
people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read
sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters is this: The shit has hit
the fan, folks.
You once remarked that though you
may not resort to violence yourself, you think it has become immoral to condemn
it, given the circumstances in the country. Can you elaborate on this view?
I’d be a liability as a guerilla!
I doubt I used the word ‘immoral’-morality is an elusive business, as
changeable as the weather. What I feel is this:
Non-violent movements have, for decades knocked on the door of every
democratic institution in this country and have been spurned and humiliated.
Look at the Bhopal Gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The NBA for
example, had a lot going for it, high profile leadership, media coverage, more
resources than any other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound to
want to re-think strategy.
When Sonia Gandhi begins to
promote Satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in Davos it’s time for us to sit
up and think. For example, is mass civil disobedience possible within the
structure of a democratic nation-state? Is it possible in the age of
disinformation and corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger-strikes
umblically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody care if the people of
Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a hunger-strike? Sharmila Irom has been
on a hunger strike for six years. That should be a salutary lesson to many of
us. I’ve always felt that it’s ironic that hunger-strikes are used as a
political weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway. We are in a
different time and place now. Up against a different, more complex adversary.
We’ve entered the era of NGOs – or
should I say the era of palthu shers – in which mass action can be a
treacherous business. We have demonstrations which are funded, we have
sponsored dharnas and social forums which posture militantly but never follow
up on what they preach. We have all kinds of ‘virtual’ resistance. Meetings
against SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for
environmental activism and community action given by corporations responsible
for devastating whole ecosystems. Vedanta, a company mining bauxite in the
forests of Orissa wants to start a university. The Tatas have two charitable
trusts that directly and indirectly, fund activists and mass movements across
the country. Could that be why Singur has drawn so much less flak than
Nandigram, and why they have not targeted, boycotted, gheraoed? Of course, the
Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too – maybe he was our first NGO. But now we
have NGOs who make a lot of noise, write a lot of reports, but who the sarkar
is more than comfortable with. How do we make sense of all this? The place is
crawling with professional diffusers of real political action. ‘Virtual
resistance’ has become something of a liability.
There was a time when mass
movements looked to the courts for justice. The courts have rained down a
series of judgments that are so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the
language they use, they take your breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgment
allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have the
requisite clearances said in so many words, that the question of Corporations
indulging in malpractice does not arise! In the era of corporate globalization,
corporate land-grab, in the era of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel,
that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes the ideological heart of the most
powerful institution in this country. The judiciary along with the corporate
press, is now seen as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.
In a climate like this when people
feel that they are being worn down, exhausted by these interminable
‘democratic’ processes, only to be humiliated eventually, what are they supposed
to do?