My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  We have less money, less food, and smaller bombs. However, we have, or had, all kinds of other wealth. Delightful, unquantifiable. What we’ve done with it is the opposite of what we think we’ve done. We’ve pawned it all. We’ve traded it in. For what? In order to enter into a contract with the very people we claim to despise. In the larger scheme of things, we’ve agreed to play their game and play it their way. We’ve accepted their terms and conditions unquestioningly. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ain’t nothin’ compared to this.

  All in all, I think it is fair to say that we’re the hypocrites. We’re the ones who’ve abandoned what was arguably a moral position, i.e.: we have the technology, we can make bombs if we want to, but we won’t. We don’t believe in them.

  We’re the ones who have now set up this craven clamoring to be admitted into the club of superpowers. (If we are, we will no doubt gladly slam the door after us, and say to hell with principles about fighting Discriminatory World Orders.) For India to demand the status of a superpower is as ridiculous as demanding to play in the World Cup finals simply because we have a ball. Never mind that we haven’t qualified, or that we don’t play much soccer and haven’t got a team.

  Since we’ve chosen to enter the arena, it might be an idea to begin by learning the rules of the game. Rule number one is Acknowledge the Masters. Who are the best players? The ones with more money, more food, more bombs.

  Rule number two is Locate Yourself in Relation to Them, i.e.: make an honest assessment of your position and abilities. The honest assessment of ourselves (in quantifiable terms) reads as follows:

  We are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development terms we rank No. 138 out of the 175 countries listed in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index. More than four hundred million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over six hundred million lack even basic sanitation, and over two hundred million have no safe drinking water.

  So the three Official Reasons, taken individually, don’t hold much water. However, if you link them, a kind of twisted logic reveals itself. It has more to do with us than them.

  The key words in our prime minister’s letter to the president of the United States were “suffered” and “victim.” That’s the substance of it. That’s our meat and drink. We need to feel like victims. We need to feel beleaguered. We need enemies. We have so little sense of ourselves as a nation and therefore constantly cast about for targets to define ourselves against. Prevalent political wisdom suggests that to prevent the state from crumbling, we need a national cause, and other than our currency (and, of course, poverty, illiteracy, and elections), we have none. This is the heart of the matter. This is the road that has led us to the bomb. This search for selfhood. If we are looking for a way out, we need some honest answers to some uncomfortable questions. Once again, it isn’t as though these questions haven’t been asked before. It’s just that we prefer to mumble the answers and hope that no one’s heard.

  Is there such a thing as an Indian identity?

  Do we really need one?

  Who is an authentic Indian and who isn’t?

  Is India Indian?

  Does it matter?

  Whether or not there has ever been a single civilization that could call itself “Indian Civilization,” whether or not India was, is, or ever will become a cohesive cultural entity, depends on whether you dwell on the differences or the similarities in the cultures of the people who have inhabited the subcontinent for centuries. India, as a modern nation-state, was marked out with precise geographical boundaries, in their precise geographical way, by a British Act of Parliament in 1899. Our country, as we know it, was forged on the anvil of the British Empire for the entirely unsentimental reasons of commerce and administration. But even as she was born, she began her struggle against her creators. So is India Indian? It’s a tough question. Let’s just say that we’re an ancient people learning to live in a recent nation.

  What is true is that India is an artificial state—a state that was created by a government, not a people. A state created from the top down, not the bottom up. The majority of India’s citizens will not (to this day) be able to identify her boundaries on a map, or say which language is spoken where or which god is worshiped in what region. Most are too poor and too uneducated to have even an elementary idea of the extent and complexity of their own country. The impoverished, illiterate agrarian majority have no stake in the state. And indeed, why should they, how can they, when they don’t even know what the state is? To them, India is, at best, a noisy slogan that comes around during the elections. Or a montage of people on government TV programs wearing regional costumes and saying “Mera Bharat Mahaan” (My India Is Great).

  The people who have a vital stake (or, more to the point, a business interest) in India’s having a single, lucid, cohesive national identity are the politicians who constitute our national political parties. The reason isn’t far to seek, it’s simply because their struggle, their career goal, is—and must necessarily be—to become that identity. To be identified with that identity. If there isn’t one, they have to manufacture one and persuade people to vote for it. It isn’t their fault. It comes with the territory. It is inherent in the nature of our system of centralized government. A congenital defect in our particular brand of democracy. The greater the numbers of illiterate people, the poorer the country and the more morally bankrupt the politicians, the cruder the ideas of what that identity should be. In a situation like this, illiteracy is not just sad, it’s downright dangerous. However, to be fair, cobbling together a viable predigested “National identity” for India would be a formidable challenge even for the wise and the visionary. Every single Indian citizen could, if he or she wants to, claim to belong to some minority or the other. The fissures, if you look for them, run vertically, horizontally, and are layered, whorled, circular, spiral, inside out, and outside in. Fires when they’re lit race along any one of these schisms, and in the process, release tremendous bursts of political energy. Not unlike what happens when you split an atom.

  It is this energy that Gandhi sought to harness when he rubbed the magic lamp and invited Ram and Rahim to partake of human politics and India’s war of independence against the British. It was a sophisticated, magnificent, imaginative struggle, but its objective was simple and lucid, the target highly visible, easy to identify and succulent with political sin. In the circumstances, the energy found an easy focus. The trouble is that the circumstances are entirely changed now, but the genie is out of its lamp, and won’t go back in. (It could be sent back, but nobody wants it to go, it’s proved itself too useful.) Yes, it won us freedom. But it also won us the carnage of Partition. And now, in the hands of lesser statesmen, it has won us the Hindu Nuclear Bomb.

  To be fair to Gandhi and to other leaders of the National Movement, they did not have the benefit of hindsight, and could not possibly have known what the eventual, long-term consequences of their strategy would be. They could not have predicted how quickly the situation would careen out of control. They could not have foreseen what would happen when they passed their flaming torches into the hands of their successors, or how venal those hands could be.

  It was Indira Gandhi who started the real slide. It is she who made the genie a permanent State Guest. She injected the venom into our political veins. She invented our particularly vile local brand of political expediency. She showed us how to conjure enemies out of thin air, to fire at phantoms that she had carefully fashioned for that very purpose. It was she who discovered the benefits of never burying the dead, but preserving their putrid carcasses and trundling them out to worry old wounds when it suited her. Between herself and her sons she managed to bring the country to its knees. Our new government has just kicked us over and arranged our heads on the chopping block.

  The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is, in some senses, a specter that Indira Gandhi and the Congress created. Or, if you want to be less harsh, a specter that fed
and reared itself in the political spaces and communal suspicion that the Congress nourished and cultivated. It has put a new complexion on the politics of governance. While Mrs. Gandhi played hidden games with politicians and their parties, she reserved a shrill convent-school rhetoric, replete with tired platitudes, to address the general public. The BJP, on the other hand, has chosen to light its fires directly on the streets and in the homes and hearts of people. It is prepared to do by day what the Congress would do only by night. To legitimize what was previously considered unacceptable (but done anyway). There is perhaps a fragile case to be made here in favor of hypocrisy. Could the hypocrisy of the Congress Party, the fact that it conducts its wretched affairs surreptitiously instead of openly, could that possibly mean there is a tiny glimmer of guilt somewhere? Some small fragment of remembered decency?

  Actually, no.

  No.

  What am I doing? Why am I foraging for scraps of hope?

  The way it has worked—in the case of the demolition of the Babri Masjid as well as in the making of the nuclear bomb—is that the Congress sowed the seeds, tended the crop, then the BJP stepped in and reaped the hideous harvest. They waltz together, locked in each other’s arms. They’re inseparable, despite their professed differences. Between them they have brought us here, to this dreadful, dreadful place.

  The jeering, hooting young men who battered down the Babri Masjid are the same ones whose pictures appeared in the papers in the days that followed the nuclear tests. They were on the streets, celebrating India’s nuclear bomb and simultaneously “condemning Western Culture” by emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains. I’m a little baffled by their logic: Coke is Western Culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition?

  Yes, I’ve heard—the bomb is in the Vedas. It might be, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find Coke in the Vedas, too. That’s the great thing about all religious texts. You can find anything you want in them—as long as you know what you’re looking for.

  But returning to the subject of the non-Vedic 1990s: We storm the heart of whiteness, we embrace the most diabolical creation of Western science and call it our own. But we protest against their music, their food, their clothes, their cinema, and their literature. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s humor.

  It’s funny enough to make a skull smile.

  We’re back on the old ship. The SS Authenticity & Indianness.

  If there is going to be a pro-authenticity/antinational drive, perhaps the government ought to get its history straight and its facts right. If they’re going to do it, they may as well do it properly.

  First of all, the original inhabitants of this land were not Hindu. Ancient though it is, there were human beings on earth before there was Hinduism. India’s Adivasis have a greater claim to being indigenous to this land than anybody else, and how are they treated by the state and its minions? Oppressed, cheated, robbed of their lands, shunted around like surplus goods. Perhaps the place to start would be to restore to them the dignity that was once theirs. Perhaps the government could make a public undertaking that more dams like the Sardar Sarovar on the Narmada will not be built, that more people will not be displaced.

  But, of course, that would be inconceivable, wouldn’t it? Why? Because it’s impractical. Because Adivasis don’t really matter. Their histories, their customs, their deities are dispensable. They must learn to sacrifice these things for the greater good of the nation (that has snatched from them everything they ever had).

  Okay, so that’s out.

  For the rest, I could compile a practical list of things to ban and buildings to break. It’ll need some research, but off the top of my head, here are a few suggestions.

  They could begin by banning a number of ingredients from our cuisine: chilies (Mexico), tomatoes (Peru), potatoes (Bolivia), coffee (Morocco), tea, white sugar, cinnamon (China) … they could then move into recipes. Tea with milk and sugar, for instance (Britain).

  Smoking will be out of the question. Tobacco came from North America.

  Cricket, English, and Democracy should be forbidden. Either kabaddi or kho-kho could replace cricket. I don’t want to start a riot, so I hesitate to suggest a replacement for English (Italian …? It has found its way to us via a kinder route: marriage, not imperialism). We have already discussed (earlier in this essay) the emerging, apparently acceptable alternative to democracy.

  All hospitals in which Western medicine is practiced or prescribed should be shut down. All national newspapers discontinued. The railways dismantled. Airports closed. And what about our newest toy—the mobile phone? Can we live without it, or shall I suggest that they make an exception there? They could put it down in the column marked “universal.” (Only essential commodities will be included here. No music, art, or literature.)

  Needless to say, sending your children to college in the US and rushing there yourself to have your prostate operated upon will be a cognizable offense.

  The building demolition drive could begin with the Rashtrapati Bhavan and gradually spread from cities to the countryside, culminating in the destruction of all monuments (mosques, churches, temples) that were built on what was once Adivasi or forest land.

  It will be a long, long list. It would take years of work. I couldn’t use a computer because that wouldn’t be very authentic of me, would it?

  I don’t mean to be facetious, merely to point out that this is surely the shortcut to hell. There’s no such thing as an Authentic India or a Real Indian. There is no Divine Committee that has the right to sanction one single, authorized version of what India is or should be. There is no one religion or language or caste or region or person or story or book that can claim to be its sole representative. There are, and can only be, visions of India, various ways of seeing it—honest, dishonest, wonderful, absurd, modern, traditional, male, female. They can be argued over, criticized, praised, scorned, but not banned or broken. Not hunted down.

  Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It’s over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don’t. There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented, and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether or not we use them. They will destroy us either way.

  India’s nuclear bomb is the final act of betrayal by a ruling class that has failed its people.

  However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it’s far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.

  According to opinion polls, we’re expected to believe that there’s a national consensus on the issue. It’s official now. Everybody loves the bomb. (Therefore the bomb is good.)

  Is it possible for a man who cannot write his own name to understand even the basic, elementary facts about the nature of nuclear weapons? Has anybody told him that nuclear war has nothing at all to do with his received notions of war? Nothing to do with honor, nothing to do with pride? Has anybody bothered to explain to him about thermal blasts, radioactive fallout, and the nuclear winter? Are there even words in his language to describe the concepts of enriched uranium, fissile material, and critical mass? Or has his language itself become obsolete? Is he trapped in a time capsule, watching the world pass him by, unable to understand or communicate with it because his language never took into account the horrors that the human race would dream up? Does he not matter at all, this man? Shall we just treat him like some kind of a cretin? If he asks any questions, ply him with iodine pills and parables about how Lord Krishna lifted a hill or how the destruction of Lanka by Hanuman was unavoidable in order to preserve Sita’s virtue and Ram’s reputation? Use his own beautiful stories as weapons against him? Shall we release him from his capsule only durin
g elections, and once he’s voted, shake him by the hand, flatter him with some bullshit about the Wisdom of the Common Man, and send him right back in?

  I’m not talking about one man, of course, I’m talking about millions and millions of people who live in this country. This is their land, too, you know. They have the right to make an informed decision about its fate, and, as far as I can tell, nobody has informed them about anything. The tragedy is that nobody could, even if they wanted to. Truly, literally, there’s no language to do it in. This is the real horror of India. The orbits of the powerful and the powerless spinning further and further apart from each other, never intersecting, sharing nothing. Not a language. Not even a country.

  Who the hell conducted those opinion polls? Who the hell is the prime minister to decide whose finger will be on the nuclear button that could turn everything we love—our earth, our skies, our mountains, our plains, our rivers, our cities and villages—to ash in an instant? Who the hell is he to reassure us that there will be no accidents? How does he know? Why should we trust him? What has he ever done to make us trust him? What have any of them ever done to make us trust them?

  The nuclear bomb is the most antidemocratic, antinational, antihuman, outright evil thing that man has ever made.

  If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man’s challenge to God.

  It’s worded quite simply: we have the power to destroy everything that You have created.

  If you’re not (religious), then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand six hundred million years old.