My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint program to advance India’s version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections, they stage some noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

  The Union project offers Hindu nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital, you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Progress project aims at a 10 percent annual growth rate. Both projects are encrypted with genocidal potential.

  The Union project has been largely entrusted to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr. K. B. Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini’s, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler, too, was and is an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by M. S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr. Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

  Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.

  Then:

  In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation …

  All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots … The foreign races in Hindustan … may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.

  And again:

  To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here … a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.

  (How do you combat this kind of organized hatred? Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular love.)

  By the year 2000, the RSS had more than sixty thousand shakhas (branches) and an army of more than four million swayamsevaks (volunteers) preaching its doctrine across India.25 They include India’s former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the opposition L. K. Advani, and, of course, the three-time Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, the judiciary, and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva— the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery.

  But the RSS’s real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organizations at every level of society, something that no other political or cultural group in India can match. The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), women’s wing (Rashtra Sevika Samiti), student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), and economic wing (Swadeshi Jagran Manch).

  Its front organization Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organization in the nongovernmental sector. It has thirteen thousand educational institutes, including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with seventy thousand teachers and more than 1.7 million students. It has organizations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Prathishtan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organization), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushta Nivarak Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak, and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytization (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on.

  On June 11, 1989, prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the national executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. “I’m sure the resolution will translate into votes,” said L. K. Advani. In 1990, he crisscrossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984.) The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the center.

  Its first act in office was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India’s Hindu bomb. Hindutva had transcended petty party politics. In 2002, Narendra Modi’s government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly foot soldiers and not the masterminds who stand in the dock. Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing. India has a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details.

  In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to “apply through proper channels.” Procedure is everything. To begin with, of the 287 people accused, booked under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 286 are Muslim and one is Sikh.26 No bail for them, so they’re still in prison. In the case of several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged to the RSS or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder.

  Ehsan Jafri, the Congress politician and poet who had made the mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow Congress Party worker.) In the words of a man who took part in the savagery: “Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword … chopped off his hand, then his legs … then everything else … [and] after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they’d piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive.” While the mob that lynched Jafri, murdered seventy people, and gang-raped twelve women—before burning them alive—was gathering, the Ahmedabad commissioner of police, P. C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighborhood. After Modi was reelected, Pandey was promoted and made Gujarat’s director general of police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place.

  The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises but eventually put the matter into cold storage. The Congress and the Communist parties made a great deal of noise but did nothing.

  In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to but boasting about their crimes. The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but suspicion about its timing. Most people believed that the e
xposé would help Modi win the elections again. Some even believed, quite outlandishly, that he had engineered the sting. He did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists. These are the joys of democracy. (Who in Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler mask?) Preparations to re-create the “Gujarat blueprint” are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka.

  To commit genocide, says Peter Balakian, you have to marginalize a subgroup for a long time. This criterion has been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been systematically marginalized and have now joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have not just been marginalized but dehumanized by caste Hindu society and its scriptures for years, for centuries. (There was a time when they were dehumanized in order to be put to work doing things that caste Hindus would not do. Now, with technology, even that labor is becoming redundant.) The RSS also pits Dalits against Muslims and Adivasis against Dalits as part of its larger project.

  While the “people” were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India’s Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatization and liberalization resulted in the sale of the country’s natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle class who have naturally became militant evangelists for the new dispensation.

  The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the Supreme Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide—a prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to criticize the court is a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment.)

  Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programs, morality plays, transport systems, malls, and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it’s all joy-joy, you’re wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution), its own class struggles. An organization called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of reservations (affirmative action), because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India’s pulverized Lower Castes. This India has its own People’s Movements and candlelight vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People’s Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream) buy international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered to their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they’re longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in their pockets) chanting “India! India!”

  But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum. Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The Sky Citizens look toward the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime land, which really ought to be a chemical hub.27 They see thousands of acres of farmland, and think: These really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries. They see the rich fields of Singur and know this really ought to be a car factory for the Tata Nano, the People’s Car. They think: that’s our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are these people doing on our land? What’s our water doing in their rivers? What’s our timber doing in their trees?

  If you look at a map of India’s forests, its mineral wealth, and the homelands of the Adivasi people, you’ll see that they’re stacked up over each other. So in reality, those whom we call poor are the truly wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a phrase for them—überzähligen Essern, superfluous eaters.

  The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said, after closely observing the struggle between the indigenous people and their European colonizers in North America, is “an annihilating struggle.”28 Annihilation doesn’t necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing, or shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become “terrorists.”) Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together, and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. “The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into ‘reserves,’” Sven Lindqvist writes, “just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandebele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off.”29

  The historian Mike Davis writes that 12.2 to 29.3 million people starved to death in India in the famines between 1876 and 1902, while Britain continued to export food and raw material from India.30 In a democracy, as Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have famine. So in place of China’s Great Famine, we have India’s Great Malnutrition. (India hosts more than a third of the world’s undernourished children.)31

  With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than thirty million people.32 The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, government-controlled militias, or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even the Communist Party of India [Maoist] has its own armed militia.) The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps, and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.

  In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its wealth of iron ore, there’s a different technique. In the name of fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and almost forty thousand people moved into police camps. The government is arming some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, the supposedly anti-Maoist “people’s” militia, created and funded by the state government.33 While the poor fight the poor, in conditions that approach civil war, the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. (Can we establish a connection? We wouldn’t dream of it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a day after the memorandum of understanding between the Tata Group and the government was signed.)34

  It’s not surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into the version of the New India currently on the market. That’s because what is on sale is another form of denial—the creation of what Robert J. Lifton calls a “counterfeit universe.”35 In this universe, systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable to flawed individuals, and a more “balanced,” happier world is presented in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and Progress are set off against each other, a liberal secular critique of the Union project being used to legitimize the depredations of the Progress project. Those at the top of the fo
od chain, those who have no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to be the manufacturers of the “counterfeit universe.” Their job is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegitimize anger, and negotiate a ceasefire.

  Consider the response of Shah Rukh Khan (Bollywood superstar, heartthrob of millions) to a question about Narendra Modi. “I don’t know him personally, I have no opinion,” he says. “Personally they have never been unkind to me.”36 Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, advises us in his new book, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, that the Gujarat government is not really fascist, that the genocide was just an aberration, and that the government corrected itself after elections.37

  Editors and commentators in the “secular” national press, having got over their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi’s administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. The editor of the Hindustan Times said, “Modi may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murderer,” and went on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a “good” chief minister.38

  In this “counterfeit” version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of microcredit loans, development schemes, and charity meted out by NGOs.)