My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  There are other steps that are being taken, such as court judgments that in effect curtail free speech, the right of government workers to go on strike, the right to life and livelihood. Courts have begun to micromanage our lives in India. And criticizing the courts is a criminal offense.

  But coming back to the counterterrorism initiatives, over the last decade the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces runs into the tens of thousands. In the state of Andhra Pradesh (the pin-up girl of corporate globalization in India), an average of about two hundred “extremists” are killed in what are called “encounters” every year. The Bombay police boast of how many “gangsters” they have killed in “shootouts.” In Kashmir, in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated eighty thousand people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply “disappeared.” In the northeastern provinces, the situation is similar.

  In recent years, the Indian police have opened fire on unarmed people at peaceful demonstrations, mostly Dalit and Adivasi. The preferred method is to kill them and then call them terrorists. India is not alone, though. We have seen similar things happen in countries such as Bolivia and Chile. In the era of neoliberalism, poverty is a crime, and protesting against it is more and more being defined as terrorism.

  In India, the Prevention of Terrorism Act is often called the Production of Terrorism Act. It’s a versatile, hold-all law that could apply to anyone from an Al-Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus conductor. As with all antiterrorism laws, the genius of POTA is that it can be whatever the government wants. For example, in Tamil Nadu it has been used to imprison and silence critics of the state government. In Jharkhand 3,200 people, mostly poor Adivasis accused of being Maoists, have been named in criminal complaints under POTA. In Gujarat and Mumbai, the act is used almost exclusively against Muslims. After the 2002 state-assisted pogrom in Gujarat, in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were savagely killed by Hindu mobs and 150,000 driven from their homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these, 286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh.

  POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as judicial evidence. In effect, torture tends to replace investigation. The South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center reports that India has the highest number of torture and custodial deaths in the world. Government records show that there were 1,307 deaths in judicial custody in 2002 alone.

  A few months ago, I was a member of a people’s tribunal on POTA. Over a period of two days, we listened to harrowing testimonies of what is happening in our wonderful democracy. It’s everything—from people being forced to drink urine, being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses, to people being beaten and kicked to death.

  The new government has promised to repeal POTA. I’d be surprised if that happens before similar legislation under a different name is put in place.

  When every avenue of nonviolent dissent is closed down, and everyone who protests against the violation of their human rights is called a terrorist, should we really be surprised if vast parts of the country are overrun by those who believe in armed struggle and are more or less beyond the control of the state: in Kashmir, the northeastern provinces, large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh? Ordinary people in these regions are trapped between the violence of the militants and the state.

  In Kashmir, the Indian Army estimates that three to four thousand militants are operating at any given time. To control them, the Indian government deploys about five hundred thousand soldiers. Clearly it isn’t just the militants the army seeks to control, but a whole population of humiliated, unhappy people who see the Indian Army as an occupation force. The primary purpose of laws like POTA is not to target real terrorists or militants, who are usually simply shot. Antiterrorism laws are used to intimidate civil society. Inevitably, such repression has the effect of fueling discontent and anger.

  The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers but even junior commissioned officers and noncommissioned officers of the army to use force and even kill any person on suspicion of disturbing public order. It was first imposed on a few districts in the state of Manipur in 1958. Today it applies to virtually all of the Northeast and Kashmir. The documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape, and summary execution by security forces is enough to turn your stomach.

  In Andhra Pradesh, in India’s heartland, the militant Marxist-Leninist People’s War Group (PWG)—which for years has been engaged in a violent armed struggle and has been the principal target of many of the Andhra police’s fake “encounters”—held its first public meeting in years on July 28, 2004, in the town of Warangal.

  The former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, liked to call himself the CEO of the state. In return for his enthusiasm in implementing Structural Adjustment, Andhra Pradesh received millions of dollars of aid from the World Bank and development agencies such as Britain’s Department for International Development. As a result of Structural Adjustment, Andhra Pradesh is now best known for two things: the hundreds of suicides by farmers who were steeped in debt and the spreading influence and growing militancy of the People’s War Group. During Naidu’s term in office, the PWG were not arrested or captured, they were summarily shot.

  In response, the PWG campaigned actively, and, let it be said, violently, against Naidu. In May the Congress won the state elections. The Naidu government didn’t just lose, it was humiliated in the polls.

  When the PWG called a public meeting, it was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA, all of them are considered terrorists.

  Are they all going to be detained in some Indian equivalent of Guantánamo Bay?

  The whole of the Northeast and the Kashmir valley is in ferment. What will the government do with these millions of people?

  One does not endorse the violence of these militant groups. Neither morally nor strategically. But to condemn it without first denouncing the much greater violence perpetrated by the state would be to deny the people of these regions not just their basic human rights but even the right to a fair hearing. People who have lived in situations of conflict are in no doubt that militancy and armed struggle provoke a massive escalation of violence from the state. But living as they do, in situations of unbearable injustice, can they remain silent forever?

  There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar.

  After all, when the US invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has done, with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be expected to be a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it were conventional, it would still be called terrorist.) In a strange sense, the US government’s arsenal of weapons and unrivaled air and fire power makes terrorism an all-but-inescapable response. What people lack in wealth and power, they will make up for with stealth and strategy.

  In the twenty-first century, the connection between corporate globalization, religious fundamentalism, nuclear nationalism, and the pauperization of whole populations is becoming impossible to ignore. The unrest has myriad manifestations: terrorism, armed struggle, nonviolent mass resistance, and common crime.

  In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to violence. No government’s condemnation of terrorism is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by nonviolent dissent. But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any kind of mass political mobilization or organization is being bought off, broken, or simply ignored.

  Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let’s not forget the film industry, lavish their time, attention, funds, technology, research, and admiration on war and terrorism. Viol
ence has been deified.

  The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: if you seek to air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.

  As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to appropriate and control the world’s resources to feed the great capitalist machine becomes more urgent, the unrest will only escalate.

  For those of us who are on the wrong side of empire, the humiliation is becoming unbearable.

  Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated.

  The US soldiers fighting in Iraq—mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods—are victims, just as much as the Iraqis, of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.

  The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals, look down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly. “There’s no alternative,” they say, and let slip the dogs of war.

  Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, comes the chilling reply: “There’s no alternative but terrorism.” Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.

  Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

  Human society is journeying to a terrible place.

  Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice.

  It’s time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons, or full-spectrum dominance, or daisy cutters, or spurious governing councils and loya jirgas, can buy peace at the cost of justice.

  The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others.

  Exactly what form that battle takes, whether it’s beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends on us.

  This text is based on a public address delivered to an overflow crowd at the American Sociological Association’s Ninety-Ninth Annual Meeting in San Francisco on August 16, 2004. The theme of the conference was “Public Sociologies.” The talk quickly aired on C-SPAN Book TV, Democracy Now!, and Alternative Radio, reaching audiences throughout North America and beyond, and was circulated via email around the world.

  PEACE AND THE NEW CORPORATE LIBERATION THEOLOGY

  It’s official now. The Sydney Peace Foundation is neck deep in the business of gambling and calculated risk. Last year, very courageously, it chose Dr. Hanan Ashrawi of Palestine for the Sydney Peace Prize. And, as if that were not enough, this year—of all the people in the world—it goes and chooses me!

  When the prize was announced, I was subjected to some pretty arch remarks from those who know me well: Why did they give it to the biggest troublemaker we know? Didn’t anybody tell them that you don’t have a peaceful bone in your body? And, memorably, Arundhati, didi (sister), what’s the Sydney Peace Prize? Was there a war in Sydney that you helped to stop?

  Speaking for myself, I am utterly delighted. But I must accept it as a literary prize that honors a writer for her writing, because contrary to the many virtues that are falsely attributed to me, I’m not an activist, nor the leader of a mass movement, and I’m certainly not the “voice of the voiceless.”

  Today, not merely justice, but the idea of justice is under attack. The assault on fragile sections of society is at once so complete, so cruel and so clever—all-encompassing and yet specifically targeted, brutal and yet insidious—that its audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights and expectations.

  In an alarming shift, the reduced, fragile discourse of “human rights” is replacing the magnificent concept of justice. The difference is that notions of equality have been pried loose and eased out of the equation. It’s a process of attrition. Almost unconsciously, we begin to think of justice for the rich and powerful and human rights for the poor. Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its victims. Justice for the Indian upper castes, human rights for Dalits and Adivasis (if that). Justice for white Australians, human rights for Aboriginals and immigrants.

  It is becoming clearer that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure on the world. Without wholesale violation of human rights, the neoliberal project would remain in the dreamy realm of policy. But human rights violations increasingly are being portrayed as the unfortunate, almost accidental, fallout of an otherwise acceptable political and economic system. This is why in areas of heightened conflict—in Kashmir and in Iraq, for example—human rights professionals are regarded with suspicion.

  It has been only a few weeks since Australians voted to reelect prime minister John Howard who, among other things, led Australia to participate in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it, and are now in the process of selling it.

  Iraq is a sign of things to come, showing us the corporate-military cabal of “empire” at work. As the battle to control the world’s resources intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.

  In 1991, US president George Bush senior mounted Operation Desert Storm. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed in the war. Iraq’s fields were bombed with more than three hundred tons of depleted uranium, causing a fourfold increase in cancer among children. For more than thirteen years, twenty-four million Iraqi people lived in a war zone and were denied food, medicine, and clean water. In the frenzy around the US elections, let’s remember that the levels of cruelty did not fluctuate whether the Democrats or the Republicans were in the White House. Half a million Iraqi children died because of economic sanctions in the run up to Operation Shock and Awe. Until recently, while there was a careful record of how many US soldiers had lost their lives, we had no idea of how many Iraqis had been killed. A new, detailed study, fast-tracked by the Lancet medical journal and extensively peer reviewed, estimates that one hundred thousand Iraqis have died since the invasion. And let’s not forget Iraq’s children. Technically, the bloodbath is called precision bombing. In ordinary language, it’s called butchery.

  So the civilized modern world—built painstakingly on a legacy of genocide, slavery, and colonialism—now controls most of the world’s oil. And most of the world’s weapons, most of the world’s money, and most of the world’s media. The embedded, corporate media in which the doctrine of Free Speech has been substituted by the doctrine of Free If You Agree Speech.

  UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said he found no evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq. Every scrap of evidence produced by the US and British governments was found to be false. And yet, in the prelude to the war, day after day the most “respectable” newspapers and TV channels in the US headlined the “evidence” of Iraq’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. It now turns out that the source of the manufactured “evidence” of Iraq’s arsenal of nuclear weapons was Ahmed Chalabi who— like General Suharto of Indonesia, General Pinochet of Chile, the Shah of Iran, the Taliban, and of course, Saddam Hussein himself—was bankrolled with millions of dollars from the good old CIA.

  And so, a country was bombed into oblivion.

  Visitors to Australia like myself are expected t
o answer the following question when they fill in the visa form: Have you ever committed or been involved in the commission of war crimes or crimes against humanity or human rights? Would George Bush and Tony Blair get visas to Australia? Under the tenets of international law they must surely qualify as war criminals.

  Although no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq—stunning new evidence has revealed that Saddam Hussein was planning a weapons program. (Like I was planning to win Olympic Gold in synchronized swimming.) No doubt all will be revealed in the free and fair trial of Saddam Hussein that’s coming up soon in the New Iraq.

  But we won’t learn how the US and Britain plied him with money and material assistance at the time he was carrying out murderous attacks on Iraqi Kurds and Shias, or that the twelve-thousand-page report submitted by Saddam Hussein’s government to the UN was censored by the United States because it lists twenty-four US corporations that participated in Iraq’s pre-Gulf War nuclear and conventional weapons program. (They include Bechtel, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Hewlett Packard, International Computer Systems, and Unisys.)

  So Iraq has been “liberated,” its people subjugated, and its markets “freed” in outright violation of international law. Once Iraq has been handed over to the multinationals, a mild dose of genuine democracy won’t do any harm. In fact, it might be good PR for the corporate version of Liberation Theology, otherwise known as New Democracy.

  Corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, the company that US vice president Dick Cheney once headed, have won huge contracts for “reconstruction” work. A brief CV of any one of these corporations would give us a layperson’s grasp of how it all works—not just in Iraq, but all over the world. Say we pick Bechtel—an old business acquaintance of Saddam Hussein. Many of its dealings were negotiated by none other than Donald Rumsfeld. In 1988, after Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds, Bechtel signed contracts with the Iraqi government to build a dual-use chemical plant in Baghdad.