|
'It’s outright war and both sides are choosing their weapons'
Arundhati Roy
in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury (courtesy
Tehelka.Com), March 2007 [also in
PDF]
  "..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...
to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous
injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is
absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every
attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms,
there is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and
outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous
situations it creates...does this mean that people
whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because
they can’t find saints to lead them into battle?. "
Chhattisgarh.
Jharkhand.
Bihar.
Andhra Pradesh. Signposts of
fractures gone too far with too little remedy. Arundhati Roy in
conversation with Shoma Chaudhury on the violence rending our
heartland Shoma Chaudhury: There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How
do you read the signs? In what context should it be read?
Arundhati Roy: You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing
middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive
greed. Unlike industrialising Western countries, which had colonies
from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed
this process, we have to colonise 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 — supertoys for the new
supercitizens 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 people’s 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 barometers 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.
Shoma Chaudhury: 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?
Arundhati Roy: I’d be a liability as a guerrilla! 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 knocked at the door
of every democratic institution in this country for decades, and
have been spurned and humiliated.
Look at the Bhopal gas victims,
the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The nba 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
rethink 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 umbilically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody care
if the people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a hunger
strike? Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for six years.
That should be a 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 paltu shers —
in which mass action can be a treacherous business. We have
demonstrations which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and
social forums which make militant postures 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? 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 whom 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 judgements that are
so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the language they use, they
take your breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgement, allowing
the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have
the requisite clearances, said in so many words that the questions
of corporations indulging in malpractice does not arise!
In the ERA of corporate globalisation, 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 eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course
it isn’t as though the only options are binary — violence versus
non-violence. There are political parties that believe in armed
struggle but only as one part of their overall political strategy.
Political workers in these struggles have been dealt with brutally,
killed, beaten, imprisoned under false charges.
People are fully
aware that to take to arms is to call down upon yourself the myriad
forms of the violence of the Indian State. The minute armed struggle
becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colours fade to
black and white. But when people decide to take that step because
every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them?
Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a
dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed
down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support
the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being
effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn
people who are prepared to pay that price.
Shoma Chaudhury: You have been travelling a lot on the ground — can you give us a
sense of the trouble spots you have been to? Can you outline a few
of the combat lines in these places?
Arundhati Roy: Huge question — what can I say? The military occupation of Kashmir,
neo fascism in Gujarat, civil war in Chhattisgarh, mncs raping
Orissa, the submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada
Valley, people living on the edge of absolute starvation, the
devastation of forest land, the Bhopal victims living to see the
West Bengal government re-wooing Union Carbide — now calling itself
Dow Chemicals — in Nandigram.
I haven’t been recently to Andhra
Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, but we know about the almost
hundred thousand farmers who have killed themselves. We know about
the fake encounters and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh.
Each of these places has its own particular history, economy,
ecology. None is amenable to easy analysis.
And yet there is
connecting tissue, there are huge international cultural and
economic pressures being brought to bear on them. How can I not
mention the Hindutva project, spreading its poison sub-cutaneously,
waiting to erupt once again?
I’d say the biggest indictment of all
is that we are still a country, a culture, a society which continues
to nurture and practice the notion of untouchability. While our
economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million
people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos
of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t
carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some f***ing
superpower this.
Shoma Chaudhury: How does one view the recent State and police violence in Bengal?
Arundhati Roy: No different from police and State violence anywhere else —
including the issue of hypocrisy and doublespeak so perfected by all
political parties including the mainstream Left. Are Communist
bullets different from capitalist ones? Odd things are happening. It
snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in broad daylight. The Chinese
government tabled a bill sanctioning the right to private property.
I don’t know if all of this has to do with climate change. The
Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest capitalists of
the 21st century.
Why should we expect our own parliamentary Left to
be any different? Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes
you wonder — is the last stop of every revolution advanced
capitalism? Think about it — the French Revolution, the Russian
Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam War, the
anti-apartheid struggle, the supposedly Gandhian freedom struggle in
India… what’s the last station they all pull in at? Is this the end
of imagination?
Shoma Chaudhury: The Maoist attack in Bijapur — the death of 55 policemen. Are the
rebels only the flip side of the State?
Arundhati Roy: How can the rebels be the flip side of the State? Would anybody say
that those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their
methods — were the flip side of the State? What about those who
fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or
those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US
occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This facile
new report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this meaningless
condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians
of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything. However
pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the
tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices. There is
a
civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh
government, which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re
not with us, you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this war,
apart from the formal security forces, is the
Salva Judum — a government-backed militia of ordinary people forced to become spos
(special police officers). The Indian State has tried this in
Kashmir, in
Manipur,
in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed
- and thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any
banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies into the heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been forcibly moved off their
mineral-rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been
forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore, are being eyed by
corporations like the Tatas and Essar. mous have been signed, but no
one knows what they say. Land acquisition has begun. This kind of
thing happened in countries like Colombia — one of the most
devastated countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes are fixed
on the spiralling violence between government-backed militias and
guerrilla squads, multinational corporations quietly make off with
the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theatre being
scripted for us in Chhattisgarh. Of course it’s horrible that
55 policemen were killed. But they’re
as much the victims of government policy as anybody else. For the
government and the corporations they’re just cannon fodder — there’s
plenty more where they came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim
TV anchors will hector us for a while and then more supplies of
fodder will be arranged. For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and spos they killed were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the
main, hands-on perpetrators of repression, torture, custodial
killings, false encounters. They’re not innocent civilians — if such
a thing exists — by any stretch of imagination. I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and
coercion too. I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable
atrocities. I have no doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed
support from local people — but who can? Still, no guerrilla army
can survive without local support. That’s a logistical
impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not
diminishing. That says something. People have no choice but to align
themselves on the side of whoever they think is less worse. But to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous
injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is
absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every
attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms, there
is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and
outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous
situations it creates.
Shoma Chaudhury: ‘Naxals’, ‘Maoists’, ‘outsiders’: these are terms being very loosely
used these days.
Arundhati Roy: ‘Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the early stages of
repression by governments who have begun to believe their own
publicity and can’t imagine that their own people have risen up
against them. That’s the stage the CPM is at now in Bengal, though
some would say repression in Bengal is not new, it has only moved
into higher gear.
In any case, what’s an outsider? Who decides the
borders? Are they village boundaries? Tehsil? Block? District?
State? Is narrow regional and ethnic politics the new Communist
mantra?
About Naxals and Maoists — well… India is about to become a
police state in which everybody who disagrees with what’s going on
risks being called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be
Islamic — so that’s not good enough to cover most of us. They need a
bigger catchment area. So leaving the definition loose, undefined,
is effective strategy, because the time is not far off when we’ll
all be called Maoists or Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist
sympathisers, and shut down by people who don’t really know or care
who Maoists or Naxalites are.
In villages, of course, that has begun
— thousands of people are being held in jails across the country,
loosely charged with being terrorists trying to overthrow the state.
Who are the real Naxalites and Maoists? I’m not an authority on the
subject, but here’s a very rudimentary potted history. The Communist Party of India, the CPI, was formed in 1925. The CPI
(M), or what we now call the CPM — the Communist Party Marxist —
split from the CPI in 1964 and formed a separate party. Both, of
course, were parliamentary political parties. In 1967, the CPM,
along with a splinter group of the Congress, came to power in West
Bengal. At the time there was massive unrest among the peasantry
starving in the countryside. Local CPM leaders — Kanu Sanyal and
Charu Mazumdar — led a peasant uprising in the district of Naxalbari
which is where the term Naxalites comes from. In 1969, the
government fell and the Congress came back to power under Siddhartha
Shankar Ray.
The Naxalite uprising was mercilessly crushed —
Mahasweta Devi has written powerfully about this time. In 1969, the
CPI (ML) — Marxist Leninist — split from the CPM. A few years later,
around 1971, the CPI (ML) devolved into several parties: the CPM-ML
(Liberation), largely centred in Bihar; the CPM-ML (New Democracy),
functioning for the most part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar; the
CPM-ML (Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties have been
generically baptised ‘Naxalites’.
They see themselves as Marxist
Leninist, not strictly speaking Maoist. They believe in elections,
mass action and — when absolutely pushed to the wall or attacked —
armed struggle. The MCC — the Maoist Communist Centre, at the time mostly
operating in Bihar — was formed in 1968. The PW, People’s War,
operational for the most part in Andhra Pradesh, was formed in 1980.
Recently, in 2004, the MCC and the pw merged to form the CPI
(Maoist) They believe in outright armed struggle and the
overthrowing of the State. They don’t participate in elections.
This
is the party that is fighting the guerrilla war in Bihar, Andhra
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The government is responsible for
the situations it creates
Shoma Chaudhury: The Indian State and media largely view the Maoists as an “internal
security” threat. Is this the way to look at them?
Arundhati Roy: I’m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed in this way. The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given the autocratic
ideology they take their inspiration from, what alternative would
they set up? Wouldn’t their regime be an exploitative, autocratic,
violent one as well? Isn’t their action already exploitative of
ordinary people? Do they really have the support of ordinary people? I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that both Mao and
Stalin are dubious heroes with murderous pasts. Tens of millions of
people were killed under their regimes. Apart from what happened in
China and the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the Chinese
Communist Party (while the West looked discreetly away), wiped out
two million people in Cambodia and brought millions of people to the
brink of extinction from disease and starvation.
Can we pretend that
China’s cultural revolution didn’t happen? Or that millions of
people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not victims of
labour camps, torture chambers, the network of spies and informers,
the secret police. The history of these regimes is just as dark as
the history of Western imperialism, except for the fact that they
had a shorter life-span. We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq,
Palestine and Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and
Chechnya.
I would imagine that for the Maoists, the Naxalites, as
well as the mainstream Left, being honest about the past is
important to strengthen people’s faith in the future. One hopes the
past will not be repeated, but denying that it ever happened doesn’t
help inspire confidence… Nevertheless, the Maoists in Nepal have
waged a brave and successful struggle against the monarchy.
Right
now, in India, the Maoists and the various Marxist-Leninist groups
are leading the fight against immense injustice here. They are
fighting not just the State, but feudal landlords and their armed
militias. They are the only people who are making a dent. And I
admire that. It may well be that when they come to power, they will,
as you say, be brutal, unjust and autocratic, or even worse than the
present government. Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume that in
advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight them too. And most likely
someone like myself will be the first person they’ll string up from
the nearest tree — but right now, it is important to acknowledge
that they are bearing the brunt of being at the forefront of
resistance.
Many of us are in a position where we are beginning to
align ourselves on the side of those who we know have no place for
us in their religious or ideological imagination. It’s true that
everybody changes radically when they come to power — look at
Mandela’s anc. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the imf, driving the
poor out of their homes — honouring Suharto, the killer of hundreds
of thousands of Indonesian Communists, with South Africa’s highest
civilian award.
Who would have thought it could happen? But does
this mean South Africans should have backed away from the struggle
against apartheid? Or that they should regret it now? Does it mean
Algeria should have remained a French colony, that Kashmiris, Iraqis
and Palestinians should accept military occupation? That people
whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because
they can’t find saints to lead them into battle?
Shoma Chaudhury: Is there a communication breakdown in our society?
Arundhati Roy:Yes.
|
