WE CALL THIS PROGRESS!
DEMOCRACY – A BAIT OR A WEAPON?
“America
the workshop and
hollowed it out.”
Excerpts from: “We Call This Progress”
By: Arundhati
Roy
(From a speech at the
‘Earth At Risk’ conference, Roy
on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.)
(Courtesy: Guernica
magazine)
I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay
the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990's, not long
after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of
Afghanistan .
The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the
nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to
call itself the natural ally of the U.S.
and Israel .
It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been
speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to
separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for
example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the
military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great
Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries
in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons.
What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are
absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the
military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.
Today, as we speak, the U.S. ,
and perhaps China and India , are involved in a battle for control of
the resources of Africa . Thousands of U.S. troops, as well as death squads, are being
sent into Africa . The “Yes We Can” president
has expanded the war from Afghanistan
into Pakistan .
There are drone attacks killing children on a regular basis there.
In the last twenty
years, after we embraced the free
market, two
hundred and fifty thousand farmers
have committed
suicide (in India
been driven into
debt. This has never happened in
human history
before. Yet, obviously when the
establishment has
a choice between suicide farmers
and suicide
bombers, you know which ones they are
going to
encourage. They don’t mind that statistic,
because it helps them;
they feel sorry, they make a
few noises, but
they keep doing what they are doing.
In the 1990's, when the
markets of India opened, when all of the laws that protected labor were
dismantled, when natural resources were privatized, when that whole process was
set into motion, the Indian government opened two locks: one was the lock of
the markets; the other was the lock of an old fourteenth-century mosque, which
was a disputed site between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindus believed that it was
the birthplace of Ram, and the Muslims, of course, use it as a mosque. By
opening that lock, India
The prime minister of the world’s largest democracy,
Manmohan Singh, who was more or less installed by
the IMF, has never won an election in his life. He
stood
for one election and lost, but after that he was just
placed there. He’s the person who, when he was
finance minister, actually dismantled all the laws
and allowed global capital into India.
Since 1947, ever since India became a sovereign republic,
it has deployed its army against what it calls its own people. Now, gradually,
those states where the troops were deployed are states of people who are
fighting for self-determination. They are states that the decolonized Indian
state immediately colonized. Now, those troops are actually defending the government’s
rights to build big dams, to build power projects, to carry out the processes
of privatization. In the last fifty years, more than thirty million people have
been displaced by big dams alone in India . Of course, most of those are
Indigenous people or people who live off the land.
The result of twenty years of this kind of free market, and
this bogey of terrorism, is in the hollowing out of democracy. I notice a lot
of people using the word democracy as a good word, but actually, if you think of
it, democracy today is not what democracy used to be. There was a time when the
American government was toppling democracies in Latin
America and all over the place. Today, it’s waging wars to install
democracy. It has taken democracy into the workshop and hollowed it out.
Democracy today is not what democracy used to be.
There was a time when the American government
was toppling democracies in Latin
America
over the place. Today, it’s waging wars to install
democracy. It has taken democracy into the
workshop and hollowed it out.
In India ,
every institution, whether it’s the courts, or the parliament, or the press—has
been hollowed out and harnessed to the free market. There are empty rituals to
mask what actually happens, which is that India continues to militarize, it
continues to become a police state. In the last twenty years, after we embraced
the free market, two hundred and fifty thousand farmers have committed suicide,
because they have been driven into debt. This has never happened in human
history before. Yet, obviously when the establishment has a choice between
suicide farmers and suicide bombers, you know which ones they are going to
encourage. They don’t mind that statistic, because it helps them; they feel
sorry, they make a few noises, but they keep doing what they are doing.
Today, India
has more people than all the poorest countries of Africa
put together. It has 80 percent of its population living on less than twenty
rupees a day, which is less than fifty cents a day. That is the atmosphere in
which the resistance movements are operating.
We should not be
saying ‘tax the rich’,
we should be
saying ‘take their money
and redistribute
it; take their property
and redistribute
it’.
Of course, it (India India
One time I was at a meeting
of iron ore workers, and Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of that time, had
been the leader of the opposition in Parliament. A Hindi poet read out a poem
called “What is Manmohan Singh doing these days?” The first lines were: “What
is Manmohan Singh doing these days? What does poison do after it enters the
bloodstream?” They knew that whatever he had to do was done, and now it’s just
a question of it taking its course.
In 2005, which was the first term of the present government,
the Indian government signed hundreds of Memorandums of Understanding, or MOUs,
with mining companies, infrastructure companies, and so on, to develop a huge
swath of forestland in Central India . India
has up to an estimated one hundred million Indigenous people, and if you look
at a map of India, the minerals, the forests, and the Indigenous people are all
stacked up, one on top of the other. Many of these Memorandums of Understanding
were signed with these mining companies in 2005. At the time, in the state of
Chhattisgarh, which is where this great civil war is unfolding now, the
government raised a tribal militia, which was funded by these corporations, to
basically go through the forest to try and clear it of people so that the MOUs
could be actualized. The media started to call this whole swath of forest the
“Maoist Corridor.” Some of us used to call it the “MOUist Corridor.” Around
that time, they announced a war called “Operation Green Hunt.” Two hundred
thousand paramilitary began to move into the forests, along with the tribal
militia, to clear it of what the government called Maoists.
In the
Northeastern states we have laws like the Armed
Forces Special
Powers Act, which allows soldiers to kill
on suspicion. In
all of India
Prevention Act,
which basically makes even thinking an
Anti-government
thought a criminal offense, for which
you can be jailed
for up to seven years.
The Maoist movement, in various avatars, has existed in India
since 1967, which was the first time there was an uprising. It took place in a
village in West Bengal called Naxalbari, so
the Maoists are sometimes called Naxalites. Of course it’s an underground,
banned party. It now has a People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army. Thousands of
people have been killed in this conflict. Today, there are thousands of people
in prison, and all of them are called Maoists, though not all of them are
really Maoists, because as I said, anybody who resists today is called a
terrorist. Poverty and terrorism have been conflated. In the Northeastern
states we have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows
soldiers to kill on suspicion. In all of India we have the Unlawful
Activities Prevention Act, which basically makes even thinking an anti
government thought a criminal offense, for which you can be jailed for up to
seven years.
This is the atmosphere that
was being created, and the media was in this orgy of these “Maoist-terrorists.”
They were conflating them with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, so you’d see them on TV
with ski masks and AK-47s, and the middle class was literally baying for their
blood. At this time, I had written a couple of articles about the whole thing,
television anchors would look around at me like I was crazy when I mentioned
mining. What was the connection between pure evil guerrillas and good mining
corporations? In my book, Field Notes on Democracy, there’s a part about how
the Supreme Court of India actually gave a judgment saying you cannot possibly
accuse a corporation of malpractice. In so many words, it just says so.
If you look at the history of the struggle for land in India , what is really sad is that after India became
independent, land reform was one of the biggest things on the agenda of the new
government. This was of course subverted by the politicians, who were
upper-class people, landowners. They put so many caveats in the legal system
that absolutely no redistribution happened. Then, in the 1970s, shortly after
the Naxalite movement started, when the first people rose up, it was about the
redistribution of land. The movement was saying land to the tiller. It was
crushed; the army was called out. The Indian government, which calls itself
democratic, never hesitates to call out the army. Today, people have completely
forgotten the idea of redistribution. Now, they are fighting just to hold on to
what little they have. We call that “progress.” The home minister allegedly
says he wants 70 percent of India
to live in cities, meaning he wants five to six hundred million people to move.
How do you make that happen, unless you become a military state? How do you do
that, unless you build big dams and big thermal projects and have nuclear
power?
In so many ways, we have regressed. Even the most radical
politics are practiced by people that are privileged enough to have land. There
are millions and millions of people who don’t have land, who now just live as
pools of underpaid wage labor on the edges of these huge megalopolises that
make up India
now. The politics of land in one way is radical, but in another way it has left
out the poorest people, because they are out of the equation. We don’t talk
about justice anymore. None of us do; we just talk about human rights or
survival. We don’t talk about redistribution. In America , four hundred people own
more wealth than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax
the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it,
take their property and redistribute it.
Today, one of the biggest
battles being fought in India
Now, the Indian government—the largest democracy in the
world—is planning to call out the army in Central India ,
to fight the poorest people in the world.
A lot of the Indian government’s violence and repression is
outsourced to the mob; it’s not always acting as a state. Often, academics or
journalists or these moronic anchors in TV studios will initiate a debate based
on the question, is violence moral or immoral?
Of course, people don’t necessarily function like that. You
can be a Maoist in the forest and a Gandhian on the street. You can change
identities based on what suits you tactically; it’s not like you have to swear
to be this thing or that thing or the other thing. Some people do, some don’t.
I think what happens in India
is that there is something false about this debate, because it’s infused with a
kind of false morality. After all, if people from the middle class were to
support that fight—which is an oxymoron; they won’t—then I can understand
saying we should all get together and go on a hunger strike. But, if you’re
going to distance yourself from that village that has been surrounded by a
hundred policemen and is being burned, then it’s immoral to try and lecture to
those people how they should protect themselves.
Quite often, when you see what is being done to people, it
creates rage in you and humiliation if you keep quiet. People ask me why I
write, and I say it’s in order to not be humiliated. I don’t write for anything
else except to not be humiliated. Every time I write, I keep telling myself
that I won’t do it again, but it’s like I can’t contain it inside my body; I
write, and it’s a relief.
As a writer, if you know
something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying. Between the various choices
of fear, I still choose to write rather than not write.
When I landed in New
York , one of the first things I did was to go to the
Wall Street occupation, because I wanted to see who they were, what it was
about, and how it connected to the things that we’ve been fighting and writing
about. Regardless of what all of the various trends are, and the fact that the
movement doesn’t have demands, and that it doesn’t have identifiable leaders,
there is clearly still a connection between what is going on in the Occupy
movement and what is going on in India . That connection is that of
exclusion. These are people who are excluded. They are clearly not the four
hundred families who own more wealth than half of Americans. They are not the
hundred people in India who
own 25 percent of India ’s
GDP.
While many of us believe in revolution, and believe that the
system must be brought down, right now, the least we can ask for to begin with
is a cap on all of this. I’m a cappist and a liddite. We do need to say a few
things: one is that no individual can have an unlimited amount of wealth. No
corporation can have an unlimited amount of wealth. This sort of
cross-ownership of businesses really has to stop.
In India ,
the Tatas are the biggest company. They own iron ore mines, steel manufacturing
plants, iodized salt, and television providers. They manufacture trucks, they
fund activists, they do everything. There’s an iron ore and steel company
called Jindal. They have iron ore mines, steel-making plants. The CEO is a
member of Parliament. He also started the National Flag Foundation, because he
won the right to fly the national flag on his house. They run a global law
school just outside Delhi ,
which is like a Stanford campus in the midst of the most unbelievable squalor
you can imagine. They have faculty flown in from all over the world paid huge
salaries. They fund and promote cutting-edge artists who work in stainless
steel. They recently had a protest workshop where they flew in activists to
this unbelievably posh campus and then had protest poetry and protest slogans.
They own everything; they own the resistance, the mines, the Parliament, the
flag, the newspapers. They don’t let anything go. These are some simple things
that have to stop. Berlusconi indirectly controls 90 percent of the media in Italy ;
so what if he’s not the prime minister?
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