My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Most important of all, India has a surviving Adivasi population of almost one hundred million. They are the ones who still know the secrets of sustainable living. If they disappear, they will take those secrets with them. Wars like Operation Green Hunt will make them disappear. So victory for the prosecutors of these wars will contain within itself the seeds of destruction, not just for Adivasis, but eventually, for the human race. That’s why the war in Central India is so important. That’s why we need a real and urgent conversation between all those political formations that are resisting this war.

  The day capitalism is forced to tolerate noncapitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low, down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains, and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains, and the rivers protect them.

  The first step toward reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination that has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?

  If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.

  First published in Outlook, September 20, 2010.

  KASHMIR’S FRUITS OF DISCORD

  A week before he was elected in 2008, President Obama said that solving the dispute over Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination—which has led to three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947—would be among his “critical tasks.”1 His remarks were greeted with consternation in India, and he has said almost nothing about Kashmir since then.

  But on Monday, November 8, 2010, during his visit here, he pleased his hosts immensely by saying the United States would not intervene in Kashmir and announcing his support for India’s seat on the UN Security Council.2 While he spoke eloquently about threats of terrorism, he kept quiet about human rights abuses in Kashmir.

  Whether Obama decides to change his position on Kashmir again depends on several factors: how the war in Afghanistan is going, how much help the United States needs from Pakistan, and whether the government of India goes aircraft shopping this winter. (An order for ten Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, worth $5.8 billion, among other huge business deals in the pipeline, may ensure the president’s silence.) But neither Obama’s silence nor his intervention is likely to make the people in Kashmir drop the stones in their hands.

  I was in Kashmir ten days ago, in that beautiful valley on the Pakistani border, home to three great civilizations—Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist. It’s a valley of myth and history. Some believe that Jesus died there, others that Moses went there to find the Lost Tribe. Millions worship at the Hazratbal shrine, where a few days a year a hair of the prophet Muhammad is displayed to believers.

  Now Kashmir, caught between the influence of militant Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, America’s interests in the region, and Indian nationalism (which is becoming increasingly aggressive and “Hinduized”), is considered a nuclear flash point. It is patrolled by more than five hundred thousand soldiers and has become the most highly militarized zone in the world.

  The atmosphere on the highway between Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, and my destination, the little apple town of Shopian in the South, was tense. Groups of soldiers were deployed along the highway, in the orchards, in the fields, on the rooftops, and outside shops in the little market squares. Despite months of curfew, the “stone pelters” calling for azadi (freedom), inspired by the Palestinian intifada, were out again. Some stretches of the highway were covered with so many of these stones that you needed an SUV to drive over them.

  Fortunately, the friends I was with knew alternative routes down the back lanes and village roads. The “long cut” gave me the time to listen to their stories of this year’s uprising. The youngest, still a boy, told us that when three of his friends were arrested for throwing stones, the police pulled out their fingernails—every nail, on both hands.

  For three years in a row now, Kashmiris have been in the streets protesting what they see as India’s violent occupation. But the militant uprising against the Indian government that began with the support of Pakistan twenty years ago is in retreat. The Indian Army estimates that there are fewer than five hundred militants operating in the Kashmir Valley today. The war has left seventy thousand dead and tens of thousands debilitated by torture. Many, many thousands have “disappeared.” More than two hundred thousand Kashmiri Hindus have fled the valley. Though the number of militants has come down, the number of Indian soldiers deployed remains undiminished.

  But India’s military domination ought not to be confused with a political victory. Ordinary people armed with nothing but their fury have risen up against the Indian security forces. A whole generation of young people who have grown up in a grid of checkpoints, bunkers, army camps, and interrogation centers, whose childhood was spent witnessing “catch and kill” operations, whose imaginations are imbued with spies, informers, “unidentified gunmen,” intelligence operatives, and rigged elections, has lost its patience as well as its fear. With an almost mad courage, Kashmir’s young have faced down armed soldiers and taken back their streets.

  Since April, when the army killed three civilians and then passed them off as “terrorists,” masked stone throwers, most of them students, have brought life in Kashmir to a grinding halt. The Indian government has retaliated with bullets, curfew, and censorship. Just in the last few months, 111 people have been killed, most of them teenagers; more than 3,000 have been wounded and one thousand arrested.

  But still they come out, the young, and throw stones. They don’t seem to have leaders or belong to a political party. They represent themselves. And suddenly the second-largest standing army in the world doesn’t quite know what to do. The Indian government doesn’t know with whom to negotiate. And many Indians are slowly realizing that they have been lied to for decades. The once solid consensus on Kashmir suddenly seems a little fragile.

  I was in a bit of trouble the morning we drove to Shopian. A few days earlier, at a public meeting in Delhi, I said that Kashmir was disputed territory, and, contrary to the Indian government’s claims, it couldn’t be called an “integral” part of India. Outraged politicians and news anchors demanded that I be arrested for sedition. The government, terrified of being seen as “soft,” issued threatening statements, and the situation escalated. Day after day, on prime-time news, I was being called a traitor, a white-collar terrorist, and several other names reserved for insubordinate women. But sitting in that car on the road to Shopian, listening to my friends, I could not bring myself to regret what I had said in Delhi.

  We were on our way to visit a man called Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar. The previous day he had come all the way to Srinagar, where I had been staying, to press me, with an urgency that was hard to ignore, to visit Shopian.

  I first met Shakeel in June 2009, only a few weeks after the bodies of Nilofar, his twenty-two-year-old wife, and Asiya, his seventeen-year-old sister, were found lying a thousand yards apart in a shallow stream in a high-security zone—a floodlit area between army and state police camps. The first postmortem report confirmed rape and murder. But then the system kicked in. New autopsy reports overturned the initial findings, and after the ugly business of exhuming the bodies, rape was ruled out. It was dec
lared that in both cases the cause of death was drowning.3 Protests shut Shopian down for forty-seven days, and the valley was convulsed with anger for months. Eventually, it looked as though the Indian government had managed to defuse the crisis. But the anger over the killings has magnified the intensity of this year’s uprising.

  Shakeel wanted us to visit him in Shopian because he was being threatened by the police for speaking out, and he hoped our visit would demonstrate that people even outside of Kashmir were looking out for him, that he was not alone.

  It was apple season in Kashmir, and as we approached Shopian we could see families in their orchards, busily packing apples into wooden crates in the slanting afternoon light. I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake. The news of our visit had preceded us, and a small knot of people were waiting on the road.

  Shakeel’s house is on the edge of the graveyard where his wife and sister are buried. It was dark by the time we arrived, and there was a power failure. We sat in a semicircle around a lantern and listened to him tell the story we all knew so well. Other people entered the room. Other terrible stories poured out, ones that are not in human rights reports, stories about what happens to women who live in remote villages where there are more soldiers than civilians. Shakeel’s young son tumbled around in the darkness, moving from lap to lap. “Soon he’ll be old enough to understand what happened to his mother,” Shakeel said more than once.

  Just when we rose to leave, a messenger arrived to say that Shakeel’s father-in-law—Nilofar’s father—was expecting us at his home. We sent our regrets; it was late and if we stayed longer it would be unsafe for us to drive back.

  Minutes after we said goodbye and crammed ourselves into the car, a friend’s phone rang. It was a journalist colleague of his with news for me: “The police are typing up the warrant. She’s going to be arrested tonight.” We drove in silence for a while, past truck after truck being loaded with apples. “It’s unlikely,” my friend said finally. “It’s just psy-ops.”

  But then, as we picked up speed on the highway, we were overtaken by a car full of men waving us down. Two men on a motorcycle asked our driver to pull over. I steeled myself for what was coming. A man appeared at the car window. He had slanting emerald eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard that went halfway down his chest. He introduced himself as Abdul Hai, father of the murdered Nilofar.

  “How could I let you go without your apples?” he said. The bikers started loading two crates of apples into the back of our car. Then Abdul Hai reached into a pocket of his worn brown cloak and brought out an egg. He placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it. And then he placed another in my other hand. The eggs were still warm. “God bless and keep you,” he said, and walked away into the dark. What greater reward could a writer want?

  I wasn’t arrested that night. Instead, in what is becoming a common political strategy, officials outsourced their displeasure to the mob. A few days after I returned home, the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu nationalist opposition) staged a demonstration outside my house, calling for my arrest. Television vans arrived in advance to broadcast the event live. The murderous Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group that in 2002 spearheaded attacks against Muslims in Gujarat in which two thousand people were killed, have announced that they are going to “teach me a lesson” with all the means at their disposal, including by filing criminal charges against me in different courts across the country.4

  Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm boiled eggs.

  First published in the New York Times, November 8, 2010.

  I’D RATHER NOT BE ANNA

  While his means may be Gandhian, his demands are certainly not.

  If what we’re watching on TV is indeed a revolution, then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan Lokpal Bill (People’s Anti-Corruption Bill), here are the answers you’re likely to get—tick the box: (a) “ Vande Mataram” (I bow to thee, Mother); (b) “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (Victory for Mother India); (c) “India is Anna, Anna is India”; (d) “Jai Hind” (Hail India).

  For completely different reasons, and in completely different ways, you could say that the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common—they both seek the overthrow of the Indian state. One working from the bottom up, by means of an armed struggle, waged by a largely Adivasi army, made up of the poorest of the poor. The other from the top down, by means of a bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint and an army of largely urban and certainly better-off people. (In this one, the government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to overthrow itself.)

  In April 2011, a few days into Anna Hazare’s first “fast unto death,” searching for some way of distracting attention from the massive corruption scams that had battered its credibility, the government invited Team Anna, the brand name chosen by this “civil society” group, to be part of a joint drafting committee for a new anticorruption law.1 A few months down the line it abandoned that effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a bill so flawed that it was impossible to take seriously.

  Then, on August 16, the morning of his second “fast unto death,” before he had begun his fast or committed any legal offense, Anna Hazare was arrested and jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill now coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the struggle for democracy itself. Within hours of this “Second Freedom Struggle,” Anna was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison but remained in the Tihar jail as an honored guest, where he began a fast, demanding the right to fast in a public place. For three days, while crowds and television vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna whizzed in and out of the high-security prison, carrying out his video messages to be broadcast on national TV on all channels. (Which other person would be granted this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the Municipal Commission of Delhi, fifteen trucks, and six earth movers worked around the clock to ready the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand weekend spectacle. Now, waited upon hand and foot, watched over by chanting crowds and crane-mounted cameras, attended to by India’s most expensive doctors, the third phase of Anna’s fast to the death has begun. “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is One,” the TV anchors tell us.2

  While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare’s demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji’s ideas about the decentralization of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian anticorruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the prime minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won’t have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

  Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In the future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative, too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality or in creating yet another power structure
that people will have to defer to?

  Meanwhile, the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag-waving of Anna’s Revolution are all borrowed from the antireservation protests, the World Cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not “true Indians.” The twenty-four-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.

  “The Fast” of course doesn’t mean Irom Sharmila’s fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she’s being force-fed now) against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. “The People” does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila’s fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in the New Okhla Industrial Development Area, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.

  “The People” means only the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a seventy-four-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. “The People” are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, as Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we’re told. “India is Anna.”

  Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough, we’ve heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmers’ suicides in his neighborhood or about Operation Green Hunt farther away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmers’ agitations or the blight of Special Economic Zones. He doesn’t seem to have a view about the government’s plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of Central India.