The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile

-- People from poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America. I certainly do. Every time I write something, that anger does come out, and then I pull it back, because I tell myself, “They don’t know. These are people who don’t know what’s being done in their name."--Arundhati Roy

DB: Can you update me on the criminal case filed against you in a district magistrate’s court in Kerala for your book, The God of Small Things. The charge was “corrupting morality.” What has been the outcome of that particular case?

Arundhati Roy: Well, it hasn’t had an outcome. It’s still pending in court, but every six months or so the lawyer says, “There’s going to be a hearing; can you please come?”This is one of the ways in which the state controls people. Having to pay a lawyer, or having a criminal case in court, never knowing what’s going to happen. It’s not about whether you get sentenced eventually or not. It’s the harassment.

More recently you’ve been charged and found guilty of contempt of court by India’s Supreme Court, apparently in response to your criticism of its decision to allow contruction to proceed on the Narmada valley dam project. You could have been given six months in jail but they gave you only a symbolic one-day sentence and a small fine.

It’s McCarthyism—a warning to people that criticizing the supreme court could jeopardize your career. You’d have to hire lawyers, make court appearances—and eventually you may or may not be sentenced. Who can afford the risk?

Talk about Aradhana Seth’s film, called “DAM/AGE.”

Usually when people ask me to make films with them, I refuse. The request to do “DAM/AGE” came just after my supreme court hearing, when it became pretty obvious to me that I was going to be sentenced. I didn’t know for how long. I was pretty rattled, and thought that if I was going to be in jail for any length of time, at least my point of view ought to be out in the world.

In India, the press is terrified of the court. So there wasn’t any real discussion of the issues. It was discussed in a “Cheeky Bitch Taken to Court” sort of cheap, sensationalist way, but not seriously. After all, what is contempt of court? What does this law mean to ordinary citizens? None of these things had been discussed at all. So I agreed to do the film simply because I was nervous, and wanted people to know what this debate was about.

In a very moving segment of the film, you discuss a man named Bhaiji Bhai.

Bhaiji Bhai is a farmer in Gujarat, from a little village called Undava. When I first met him, I remember thinking, “I know this man from somewhere.” I had never met him before. Then I remembered that a friend of mine who had made a film on the Narmada years before had done an interview with Bhaiji Bhai. He had lost something like seventeen of his nineteen acres to the irrigation canal in Gujarat. And because he had lost it to the canal, as opposed to submergence in the reservoir area, he didn’t count as a project-affected person, and wasn’t compensated. So he was pauperized, and had spent I don’t know how many years telling strangers his story. I was just another stranger that he told his story to, hoping that some day someone would intervene and right this great wrong that had been done to him.

Women seem central to the struggle in the Narmada valley. Why do you think women are so actively engaged there?

Women are actively involved in many struggles in India. And especially in the Narmada valley. In the Maheshwar Dam submergence villages, the women of the valley are particularly effective. Women are more adversely affected by uprootment than men. Among the Adivasi people, it is not the case that men own the land and women don’t. But when Adivasis are displaced from their ancestral lands, the meager cash compensation is given by the government to the men. The women are completely disempowered. Many are reduced to offering themselves as daily laborers on construction sites, and they are exploited terribly. Women often realize that if they’re displaced, they are more vulnerable, and therefore they understand the issues in a more visceral and deeper sense than the men do.

You write in “Come September” that the theme of much of what you talk about is the relationship between power and powerlessness. And you write about “the physics of power.”

Unfettered power results in excesses such as the ones we’re talking about now. And eventually, that has to lead to structural damage. I am interested in the physics of history. Historically, we know that every empire overreaches itself and eventually implodes. Then another one rises to take its place.

I think unfettered power does have its own behavioral patterns. When you listen to george bush speak, it’s as though he has no perspective because he’s driven by the crazed impulse of a maddened king. He can’t hear the murmuring in the servants’ quarters. He can’t hear the words of the world’s subjects. He’s driving himself into a situation and he cannot turn back.

Yet, just as inevitable is the journey undertaken by those who are engaged in the business of resisting power. Just as power has a physics, those of us who are opposed to power also do. Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

You’ve just spent a couple of weeks in the United States. You spoke in New York and Santa Fe. What do you think about the incredible standard of living that Americans enjoy, and the price that is exacted from the developing world to maintain that standard of living?

It’s not that I haven’t been America or to a western country before. But I haven’t lived here, and I can’t seem to get used to it. I haven’t got used to doors that open on their own when you stand in front of them, or looking at these supermarkets stuffed with goods. But when I’m here, I have to say that I don’t feel, “Oh, look how much they have and how little we have.” Because I think Americans pay such a terrible price. In terms of emotional emptiness.

Watching Michael Moore’s film, “Bowling for Columbine,” you suddenly get the feeling that here is a country with an economy that thrives on insecurity, fear, on threats, on protecting what you have—your washing machines, your dishwashers—from the invasion of killer tomatoes or evil owmen in saris or whatever other kind of alien. It’s a culture under siege. Every person who gets ahead gets ahead by stepping on his brother, or sister, or mother, or friend. It’s such a sad, lonely, terrible price to pay for creature comforts. I think people here could be much happier if they could say “I don’t really need this. I don’t really have to get ahead. I don’t have to come in first class. I don’t really have to be the highest earner in my little town.” There are so many happinesses that come from just loving and companionship and even losing.

You write in “Come Septermber” that the bush administration is “cynically manipulating grief” after September 11 “to fuel yet another war—this time against Iraq.” There’s not a lot of sympathy in the US for the Palestinians, or for the Iraqis, for that matter.

The thing is, if you’re a writer, you’re not polling votes. I’m not here to tell stories that people want to hear. I’m not entering some popularity contest. I just say what I have to say, and the consequences are sometimes wonderful and sometimes not.

What about the mass media in the US. You write that “thanks to America’s ‘free press,’ sadly, most Americans know very little” about the US government’s foreign policy.

Yes, it’s a strangely insular place, America. When you live outside it, and you come here, it’s almost shocking how insular it is. And how puzzled people are—and how curious, now I realize, about what other people think, because it’s just been blocked out. Before I came here, I remember thinking that when I write about dams or nuclar bombs in India, I’m quite aware that the elite in India don’t want to know about dams. They don’t want to know about how many people have been displaced, what cruelties have been perpetrated for their own air conditioners and electricity. Because then the ultimate privilege of the elite is not just their deluxe lifestyles, but deluxe lifestyles with a clear conscience. And I felt that that was the case here too, that maybe people here don’t want to know about Iraq, or Latin America, or Palestine, or East Timor, or Vietnam, or anything, so that they can live this happy little suburban life. But then I thought about it. Supposing you’re a plumber in Milwaukee or an electrician. You just go to work, come home, and then you watch CNN or Fox News and you go to bed. You don’t know what the American government is up to. And ordinary people are maybe too tired to make the effort, to go out and really find out. So they live in this bubble of lots of advertisements and no information.

Third World Resurgence, an excellent magazine out of Penang, Malaysia, had a recent article on the Bhopal disaster of 1984. More than half a million people were seriously injured and some three thousand people died on December 3, 1984, when a cloud of lethal gas was released into the air from Union Carbide’s Bhopal facility in central India. And more than twenty thousand deaths since have been linked to this accident.

Even the absurd compensation that the Indian courts agreed upon for the victims of Bhopal has not been disbursed over the last eighteen years. And now the governments are trying to use that money to pay into constituencies where there were no victims of the Bhopal disaster. The victims were primarily Muslim, but now they’re trying to pay that money to Hindu-dominant constituencies, to look after their vote banks.

You were speaking to some students in New Mexico and you advised them to travel outside the united states, to put their ears against a wall and listen to the whispering. What did you mean by that?

That when you live in the US, with the roar of the free market, the roar of the military, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don’t think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world—other voices, other people.

I was wondering, in light of the announcement last week [on September 17] of the bush doctrine about preemptive war, if that may not be used as legitimacy for, say, India to settle scores with Pakistan. Let’s say the Bharatya Janata Party [BJP] government in New Dehli says, “Well, we have evidence that Pakistan may attack us, and we will launch a preemptive strike.”

If they can borrow the rhetoric, they can borrow the logic. If the Bush administration can stamp its foot and insist on being allowed to play out his insane fantasies, then why shouldn’t prime minister A.B. Vajpayee or Pakistan’s general Musharraf? In any case, India doesn’t behave like the united states of the Indian subcontinent.

Since 9-11, particularly in the US, the pundits who appear with boring regularity on all the talk shows invoke the words of Winston Churchhill. He’s greatly admired for his courage. In “Come September” you have a very interesting quote of his that does not get heard anywhere. Can you paraphrase it?

He was talking about the Palestinian struggle, and he basically said, “I do not believe that the dog in the manger has the right to the manger, simply because he has lain there for so long. I do not believe that the Red Indian has been wronged in America, or the Black man has been wronged in Australia, simply because they have been displaced by a higher, stronger race.”

In “DAM/AGE” there’s an incredibly moving scene where the supreme court in New Dehli is surrounded by people who have come from the Narmada valley and elsewhere and are chanting your name. There was so much love and affection, and tears come to your eyes.

I was very scared that day. Now that it’s over it’s okay to say what I’m saying. But while it was happening, while I was surrounded by police, and while I was in prison for one day it was enough to know how helpless one can be. They can do anything to you when you’re in prison.

I knew that people from the Narmada valley had come. They had come because they knew that I was somebody who had said, with no caveats, “I’m on your side.” I wasn’t hedging my bets like most sophisticated intellectuals, and saying, “On the one hand, this, but on the other hand, that.” I was saying, “I’m on your side.” So they came to say, “We are on your side when you need us.” I was very touched by this. People don’t always come out spontaneously onto the streets. And one of the things about resistance movements is that it takes a great deal of mobilization to keep a movement together and to keep them going and to do things for one another.

In the united states there’s the Patriot Act, and you have something similar in India, the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Do you see any similarities?

Terrorism has become the excuse for states to do just what they please in the name of protecting citizens against terrorism. Hundreds of people are being held in prisons under the antiterrorism law in India. Many of them are poor people, Dalits and Adivasis, who are protesting against “development projects” that deprive them of their lands and livelihoods. Poverty and protest are being conflated with terrorism. There was a fake “encounter” in New Dehli’s Ansal Plaza just a couple weeks ago, on November 3. The police claimed that they had foiled a terrorist attack, and that the people they killed were Pakistani terrorists. But from eyewitness reports, it’s pretty clear that the police story was concocted.
In March, 2000, just before Clinton came here, there was a massacre of Sikhs in Chittisinghpura in the valley of Kashmir. The police claim they killed terrorists who were responsible for the massacre. It now turns out that the people they killed were not terrorists, but just ordinary, innocent villargers. The chief minister of Kashmir actually admitted that the DNA samples that were sent to a lab for testing were fake. But nothing happens. You’ve killed these people, you’ve admitted to fudging DNA samples, but nothing happens.

A few years ago there was a major massacre of Sikhs right here in the capital of India. Thousands of Sikhs were killed. And in Bombay after the Babri Masjid was destroyed in Ayodhya, several thousand Muslims were massacred.

Yes, and nothing happened. And in Gujarat now, Narendra Modi is spearheading an election campaign, and the Congress Party and the BJP are both openly talking about playing the Hindu card, or using the caste card vs. the Hindu card. So we have to ask ourselves, what is the systemic flaw in this kind of democracy that makes politicians function by creating these vote banks divided along caste lines, or regional lines.

You’re a critic of corporate globalization. What changes would you like to see?

I am a critic of corporate globalization because it has increased the distance between the people who take decisions and the people who have to suffer those decisions. Earlier, for a person in a village in Kerala, his or her life was being decided maybe in Trivandrum or, eventually, in Delhi, Now it could be in the Hague or in Washington, by people who know little or nothing of the consequences their decisions could have. And that distance between the decision-taker and the person who has to endure or suffer that decision is a very perilous road, full of the most unanticipated pitfalls.

It’s not that everything is designed to be malevolent, of course. Most of it is, but the distance between what happens on paper and what happens on the ground is increasing enormously. That distance has to be eliminated. Decentralization and the devolving of power to local groups is very important. The current process is fundamentally undemocratic.

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