There’s a scene in “DAM/AGE” in which World Bank president James Wolfensohn is visiting New Delhi, and he comes out to meet some demonstrators. He utters a stream of platitudes about how he cares for the poor, how his focus is on alleviating their suffering and poverty.

I was there when they blockaded the road. It was evening by the time Wolfensohn was forced to come out. He arrived in his pinstripe suit like a cartoon white man coming to address the peasants of India. I couldn’t bear to hear or see this played out again, at the end of the 20th century, to see the white man back again, addressing the peasants of India and saying how concerned he was about them.

Only a few weeks later, I was in London, at the release of the World Commission on Dams report, and Wolfenson was there. He talked about how he had met with the people of the valley. Missing from his account were the police and those steel separators, and the fact that he had been dragged out of the office and forced to meet them. He made it sound like a genuine grassroots meeting.

What do you think about elections as a mechanism for democracy?

I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn’t mean you’re a democratic country. There are other things that ought to function as checks and balances.

You can only campaign in a particular constitutional framework. If the courts, the press, the Parliament are not functioning as checks and balances, then this is not a democracy. And today in India, they are not functioning as checks and balances. If they were, Narendra Modi would be in jail today. He would not be allowed to campaign for office. Several candidates would be in jail today. Not to mention several senior people in the Congress Party who ought to have been in jail from 1984 onward for their roles in the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Do you see any opening for resolving the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir? Tens of thousands of Kashmiris have died. It’s a militarized state. There’s martial law. There’s a suspension of the constitution.

Kashmir is the rabbit that the governments of both India and Pakistan pull out of their hats whenever they’re in trouble. They don’t want to resolve the conflict. For them, Kashmir is not a problem; it’s a solution. Let’s never make the mistake of thinking that India and Pakistan are searching for a solution and haven’t managed to find one.

After the nuclear tests that India and Pakistan conducted, the issue of Kashmir has been internationalized to some extent. That could be a good thing, though not if the US acts as a unilateral superpower and takes it upon itself to impose a “solution.” Now with the elections, the dislodging of Farooq Abdullah, and Mufti Muhammad Sayeed coming in, I sense a slight break in the refusal to admit what is really happeing in Kashmir. I hear people asking questions about the status of Kashmir. I hear more people saying that maybe Kashmiris should be consulted, instead of this being made to seem like an issue between India and Pakistan.

The first step toward a solution would be for India and Pakistan to open up the borders, to allow people to come and go. If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters—the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

What do you think about the print media.

If you know anything about a particular issue, if you know the facts and the figures, you see how shockingly wrong newspapers always are. It’s quite sad, the lack of discipline in terms of just getting it right, the lack of rigor. The encouraging thing is that there is a tradition of little magazines, community newspapers, pamphlets—an anarchic network of maverick publications, which makes the media hard to control. The big English national dailies don’t reach the mass of the people of India. They don’t matter as much as they imagine they do. But let’s say there’s a war against Pakistan or somebody, everybody just becomes jingoistic and nationalistic, just like what happens in the US.

INDIA TODAY had a cover story recently entitled “India is Now the Electronic Housekeeper of the World.” GE, American Express, Citibank, AT&T, AOL, and other US corporations are shifting back-office operations [customer service] to India. It’s called the fastest growing industry in India, and the workers are mostly young women.

The call center industry is based on lies and racism. The people who call in are being misled into believing that they are talking to some white American sitting in America. The customers will complain if they find out that their service is being provided by an Indian. So Indians must take on false identities, pretend to be Americans, learn a “correct” accent. One way of looking at this is to say, “These people at least have jobs.” You could say that about prostitution or child labor or anything—“At least they’re being paid for it.” Their premise is that either these workers don’t have jobs or they have jobs in which they have to humiliate themselves. But is that the only choice? That’s the question.

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn’t as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It’s not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or Turkey are connected. It’s more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.

When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you’re part of that, you have to do it. You don’t have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the US decides that it wants to close down the call centers, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It’s important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. It’s important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other, or around each other’s throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.

There’s a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it’s become almost an obsession for the media in the US. But it’s a very narrow definition of terrorism.

Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of food, water, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war—people who believe that it isn’t only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well.
If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorists, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it’s in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same.

Bin Laden and bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush, with the pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected bin Laden. Bush was elected (in a manner of speaking), so US citizens are more responsible for his actions than Iraqis are for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban. And yet, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed, either by economic sanctions or cruise missiles, and we’re told that these deaths are the result of “just wars.” If there is such a thing as a just war, who is to decide what is just and what is not? Whose God is to decide that?

The US has only 3 or 4 percent of the world’s population, yet it’s consuming about a third of the world’s natural resources, and to maintain that kind of disparity and imbalance requires force, the use of violence.

The US solution to the spiraling inequalities in the world is not to search for a more equal world, or a way of making things more egalitarian, but to espouse the doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance.” The US government is now speaking about putting down unrest from space. It’s a terrorist state, and it is laying out a legitimate blueprint for state-sponsored terrorism.

Are the clichés about India being only a country of sitar players and people who meditate still active?

All clichés are structured around a grain of truth. I think that the BJP’s few years in power have given an ugly edge to India’s image internationally.

In India, we are fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it’s gone. Every person that’s walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put it in its place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists. It’s threatened, but we’re fighting to retain it. There is that space that hasn’t been completely mapped and taken over and tagged and trademarked. I think that’s important. And it’s important that in India, we understand that it’s there and we value it.

Just from hearing you speak it’s obvious that you care a lot for this country. You have a deep affection for it.

I’m not a patriot. I’m not somebody who says, “I love India,” and waves a flag around in my head. It’s my place. I’m used to it. When people talk about reclaiming the commons, I keep saying, “No, reclaim the wilderness.” Not reclaim it, but hold on to it. It’s for that reason that I cannot see myself living away from India. As a writer, it’s where I mess around. Every day, I’m taken by surprise by something.

There is just a space for the unpredictable here, which is life as it should be. It’s not always that the unpredictable is wonderful—most of the time it isn’t. Even when it comes to my work and myself, I’m ripped apart here. I’m called names. I’m insulted. But it’s the stuff of life. The subjects I write about raise these huge passions. It’s why I keep saying, “What’s dissent without a few good insults?” If they call you names, you have to just smile and know that you’ve touched a nerve.

The point is that we have to rescue democracy by being troublesome, by asking questions, by making a noise. That’s what you have to do to retain your freedoms. Even if you lose. Even if the NBA loses the battle against the Sardar Sarovar, it has demonstrated the absolute horrors of what it means to displace people, what it means to build a big dam. It’s asked these questions. It hasn’t gone quietly. That’s the important thing.

I was at Delhi University a few days ago, and a student asked me, “What would you do with a public sector that is inefficient and has an overbloated bureaucracy and is losing money?” What’s wrong with privatizing that?

People in India, and the Third World generally, are being made to believe that this is the only choice. You have a choice between a corrupt public sector and an efficient private sector. If those are the only two options, anyone would say, “I’ll have the efficient private sector.” In fact, many of the public sector units that are being privatized were actually profit-making. For instance, Bharat Heavy Electricals, which manufactures turbines and heavy electrical machinery, was one of the foremost manufacturers in the world. As soon as the government decided to privatize it about ten years ago, they deliberately allowed everything to go to seed, and then they said, “Look, isn’t it terrible?” It’s propaganda, this opposition of the sleek, efficient private sector and the corrupt, terrible government. Of course, the public power sector has been incredibly corrupt and inefficient. The transmission and distribution losses have been tremendous. But what does the government do? It signs up with Enron. What is happening with Enron today? The government is paying Enron not to produce electricity, because it’s so expensive.

So Enron, even though it’s bankrupt in the US and disgraced, is still sucking money out of the Indian economy?

There’s a big litigation process on, but, yes, that’s the situation.

Bill Gates of Microsoft, one of the sahibs of the new world economic order, was shopping in Delhi last week. He met with top government officials and CEOs.

I was watching some music channel—not MTV, but another one—this morning. On the screen it said, “What does Bill Gates really want?” Then they had interviews with maybe twenty young students. Every single one of them said he’s here to blow open the market for windows and he’s just trying to get publicity by giving money for AIDS. Nobody was under any illusions about what his visit was about.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” that true peace “is not merely the absense of tension, but the presence of justice.”

Or at least the journey toward justice, toward some vision of egalitarianism. Which is what I think is fundamentally the problem with the whole ethic of neoliberal neo-capitalism. You make it all right to grab. You say that it’s all right to accumulate capital and profits at someone else’s expense. It destroys the fabric of concern and fellow-feeling. There is a finite amount of capital in the world, and if you accumulate, you’re grabbing from someone. That’s not right.

Another of the sahibs who recently has been in Delhi is Paul O’Neill, the US treasury secretary. He was talking on November 22 to an audience of corporate leaders, and he was very critical of India, where he said “corruption and bribery are widespread, frightening away honest businessmen and investors. It’s interesting that he should be lecturing Indians about corruption and bribery, because the US has just gone through what Business Week calls the most unprecedented “corporate crime wave” in its history.

When have america’s own shortcomings prevented it from lecturing to other people? That’s par for the course.

You are very critical of US policy in support of Israel and its repression of the Palestinians.

I was talking about the eleventh of September, and I thought I should remind people that the eleventh of September 1922 was when imperial Britain marked out a mandate on Palestine, after the Balfour Declaration. Eighty years on, the Palestinians are still under siege. How can one come to the US and not mention Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory? The US government is funding it and supporting it politically and morally. It’s a crime.

You have used the word “bully” to describe the united states and its policies. Some Americans might have difficulty identifying their state as a bully because of a lack of information about what’s going on outside.

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." Yet, I keep wondering if that’s because it suits them not to know. I have to remind myself of the extent of the brainwashing that goes on there. But I think that if most people knew what was being done in their names, they would be mortified. The question is, how do we let them know.

Where are the spaces for dissidents in the Indian context? What about TV?

There’s no space on TV whatsoever. Not even to show a documentary film, like, say, Sanjay Kak’s film on the Narmada. We don’t even begin to think that it will be shown on TV.

Why not?

You can’t even have a private screening of a documentary film without a censor certificate. When Anand Patwardhan made his documentary about the nuclear issue, the censor told him, “You can’t show politicians in your film.” You can’t show politicians in your film!? What does that mean? You can’t have politicians making political speeches in your film!

In a country like the US where books like Chomsky’s "9-11" are starting to reach wider audiences, aren’t people going to feel a bit pissed off that they had no idea about what was going on, and what was being done in their name? If the corporate media continues to be as outrageous in it suppression of facts as it is, it might just lift off like a scab. It might become something that’s totally irrelevant, that people just don’t believe. Because people are interested in their own safety.
The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It’s true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can’t control the rage that’s building in the world. You just can’t . And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. How can you condemn violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence?

With few exceptions, the 9-11 attacks are presented as actions by people who simply hate America. It’s separated from any political background.

It was a successful strategy, this isolation of the events of 9-11 from history, insisting that terrorism is an evil impulse with no context. The minute you try and put it into context, you are accused of excusing it or justifying it. If you’re trying to understand something, it doesn’t mean yo’re justifying it. The fact is, if you can justify all the wars that you have fought, all the people that you’ve murdered, all the countries that you’ve bombed, the ecologies you’ve destroyed, if you can justify that, then Osama bin Laden can certainly use the same logic to justify 9-11. You can’t have a political context for one kind of terrorism and not for another.

I noticed in the film “DAM/AGE” it was difficult to follow some of the pronouncements from the supreme court.

“Vicious stultification and vulgar debunking cannot be allowed to pollute the stream of justice” [laughs]. What is the other one, “Contumacious violation…”

Do you see any role for specialized knowledge?

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that there should be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: What sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don’t think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.

The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewer system didn’t work? A CEO wouldn’t be able to deal with his own shit.

Himanshu Thakker is someone whom you admire. You mention him in the introduction to The Cost of Living. I met him and he told me, “You know, it’s remarkable. The women are the leaders in the country. The women are advancing the movements for social justice.” Why is that?

I don’t know why but it’s absolutely correct. In India, the legacy of the freedom struggle has been a great respect for nonviolent resistance. The pros and cons of violent and nonviolent resistance can be debated, but I don’t think there can be any doubt that violent resistance harms women physically and psychologically in deep and complex ways. Having said that, Indian society is still deeply disrespectful of women. The daily violence, injustice, and indignity heaped on women is hard to believe sometimes.

There’s a Bombay Bollywood star, from an older generation, named Nargis. She complained bitterly about Satyajit Ray, the great Indian filmmaker, saying that his films only show poverty. Then she was asked, “Well, what would you rather see in Indian cinema?” And she said “dams.”

You’re not showing Indian in a proper light.” That's the great middle-class complaint: “Why can’t you show McDonald’s or Pizza King?” Because here, you see, people have learned not to see the poverty. They have these filters, these contact lenses, that filter it out. It’s a survival technique. You have to find a way of continuing with your life. So you just filter it out.

In March 2002, a pogrom was carried out against the Muslim population of Gujarat. What happened?

In February 2002, the BJP was gearing up for elections in Uttar Pradesh. They had trundled out their favorite campaign issue, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Communal tension was at a fever pitch. People were traveling to Ayodhya by train to participate in the building of the temple. At the time, Gujarat was the only major state in India to have a BJP government. It had for some time been the laboratory in which Hindu fascism had been conducting an elaborate experiment. In late February, a train carrying belligerent VHP and Bajrang Dal activists was stopped by a mob outside the Godhra station. A whole compartment of the train was set on fire and fifty-eight people were burned alive.

Nobody really knew who was responsible for the carnage. Within hours, a meticulously planned pogrom was unleashed against the Muslim community. About two thousand Muslims were killed. One hundred and fifty thousand were driven from their homes. Women were publicly gang-raped. Parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children. The leaders of the mob had computer-generated lists marking out Muslim-owned shops, homes, and businesses, which were burned to the ground. Muslim places of worship were desecrated. The mob was equipped with trucks loaded with thousands of gas cylinders that had been horded weeks in advance. The police did not merely protect the mob, but provided covering fire. Within months, Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, announced proudly that he wanted to have early elections. He believed that the pogrom would win him Hindu hearts.

Modi was right, wasn’t he?

Modi’s reelection is something that has shaken many of us to the core of our beings. It’s one thing to have a dictator who commits genocide. It’s another thing to have an elected government with officials who have been accused of actively abetting mass murder being reelected. I don’t think that it’s all that different from the American public electing president after president who has killed and massacred and bombed people all over the world.

What happened in Gujarat has raised very serious questions. When you speak to somebody and tell them that two thousand Muslims were massacred on the streets of Gujarat, and women were raped, and pregnant women had their stomachs slit open, normal people, who are outside of that situation, recoil in horror. But people inside that situation say things like, “They deserved it.” And how do you deal with that?

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