My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  He does, however, support Raj Thackeray’s Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the “development model” of Gujarat’s chief minister, who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)3

  Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the backstory about Anna’s old relationship with the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.4 We have heard from Mukul Sharma, who has studied Anna’s village community in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no gram panchayat or cooperative society elections in the last twenty-five years. We know about Anna’s attitude to “harijans”: “It was Mahatma Gandhi’s vision that every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this way, a village will be self-dependent. This is what we are practicing in Ralegan Siddhi.”5 Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the antireservation (pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years.6 Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and Special Economic Zones, run real estate businesses, and are closely connected to politicians who oversee financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees (hundreds of millions of dollars). Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic?

  Remember, the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the Bharatiya Janata Party seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced, and it seemed as if some major captains of Corporate India could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people’s anticorruption agitation. Or was it?

  At a time when the state is withdrawing from its traditional duties and corporations and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply, electricity, transport, telecommunications, mining, health, education); at a time when the corporate-owned media with its terrifying power and reach is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions—the corporations, the media, and the NGOs—would be included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them out completely.

  Now, by shouting louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonizing only the government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for the further withdrawal of the state from the public sphere and for a second round of reforms—more privatization, more access to public infrastructure and India’s natural resources. It may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.

  Will the 830 million people living on twenty rupees (forty cents) a day really benefit from the strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and driving this country to civil war?

  This awful crisis has been forged out of the utter failure of India’s representative democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We’re watching India being carved up in a war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at stake.

  First published in the Hindu, August 21, 2011, and Outlook, August 22, 2011.

  SPEECH TO THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY

  Yesterday morning the police cleared Zuccotti Park, but today the people are back. The police should know that this protest is not a battle for territory. We’re not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there. We are fighting for justice. Justice, not just for the people of the United States, but for everybody. What you have achieved since September 17, when the Occupy movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language, into the heart of empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerized into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfillment. As a writer, let me tell you, this is an immense achievement. I cannot thank you enough.

  We were talking about justice. Today, as we speak, the army of the United States is waging a war of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. US drones are killing civilians in Pakistan and beyond. Tens of thousands of US troops and death squads are moving into Africa. If spending trillions of dollars of your money to administer occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not enough, a war against Iran is being talked up. Ever since the Great Depression, the manufacture of weapons and the export of war have been key ways in which the United States has stimulated its economy. Just recently, under President Obama, the United States made a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.1 It hopes to sell thousands of bunker busters to the United Arab Emirates. It has sold $5 billion worth of military aircraft to my country, India—my country, which has more poor people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together.2 All these wars, from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, have claimed millions of lives—all of them fought to secure “the American way of life.”

  Today we know that “the American way of life”—the model that the rest of the world is meant to aspire toward—has resulted in four hundred people owning the wealth of half of the population of the United States. It has meant thousands of people being turned out of their homes and jobs while the US government bailed out banks and corporations—American International Group (AIG) alone was given $182 billion.

  The Indian government worships US economic policy. As a result of twenty years of the free market economy, today one hundred of India’s richest people own assets worth one-fourth of the country’s GDP while more than 80 percent of the people live on less than fifty cents a day.3 Two hundred fifty thousand farmers driven into a spiral of death have committed suicide.4 We call this progress and now think of ourselves as a superpower. Like you, we are well qualified, we have nuclear bombs and obscene inequality.

  The good news is that people have had enough and are not going to take it anymore. The Occupy movement has joined thousands of other resistance movements all over the world in which the poorest of people are standing up and stopping the richest corporations in their tracks. Few of us dreamed that we would see you, the people of the United States, on our side, trying to do this in the heart of empire. I don’t know how to communicate the enormity of what this means.

  They (the 1 percent) say that we don’t have demands … they don’t know, perhaps, that our anger alone would be enough to destroy them. But here are some things—a few “pre-revolutionary” thoughts I had—for us to think about together.

  We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality.

  We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations.

  As cap-ists and lid-ites, we demand:

  One: An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example: weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations, mining corporations cannot run newspapers, business houses cannot fund universities, drug companies cannot control public health funds.

  Two: Natural resources and essential infrastructure—water supply, electricity, health, and education—cannot
be privatized.

  Three: Everybody must have the right to shelter, education, and health care.

  Four: The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents’ wealth.

  This struggle has reawakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

  As a cap-ist and a lid-ite, I salute your struggle.

  Salaam and Zindabad.

  November 16, 2011, Washington Square Park, New York City. First published in the Guardian, November 17, 2011.

  CAPITALISM: A GHOST STORY

  Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said. “Pay your respects to our new ruler.”

  Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I’d read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, twenty-seven-story-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.

  But Gush Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.1

  The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla.2 No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vastu and feng shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.”3

  In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post–International Monetary Fund (IMF) “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves and the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.4 And who survive on less than twenty Indian rupees (forty cents) a day.5

  Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion.6 He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalization of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fiber, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research, and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 percent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls twenty-seven TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language.7 Infotel owns the only nationwide license for 4G broadband, a high-speed information pipeline, which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange.8 Mr. Ambani also owns a cricket team.

  RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar, and the other Reliance, Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, overground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than one hundred companies in eighty countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private-sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, and cable TV and broadband networks, and they run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks and own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodized salt, and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be You Can’t Live Without Us.

  According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.

  The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, as with any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, and Sterlite, are those that have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth.9 It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.

  The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agribusiness corporations, and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (This entails commandeering water, too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and handed over to private corporations for “public interest”—for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs, and Formula One racing.10 (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had is actually part of employment generation. But by now we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of “growth,” 60 percent of India’s workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India’s labor force works in the unorganized sector.11

  Post-Independence, right up to the 1980s, people’s movements, ranging from the Naxalites to Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, were fighting for land reforms, for the redistribution of land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today any talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic but lunatic. Even the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have. The millions of landless people, the majority of them Dalits and Adivasis, driven from their villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and megacities, do not figure even in the radical discourse.

  As Gush Up concentrates wealth onto the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy—the courts, the Parliament—as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.

  Each new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame. In the summer of 2011 the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learned that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the minister of communications and information who grossly underpriced the licenses for 2G telecom spectrums and illegally auctioned them to his buddies. The taped telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists, and a TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes were just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.

  The privatization and illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not involve war, displacement, and ecological devastation. The privatization of India’s mountains, rivers, and forests does. Perhaps because it does not have the uncomplicated clarity of a straightforward, out-and-out accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all being done in the name of India’s “progress,” it does not have the same resonance with the middle classes.

  In 2005 the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding with a number of private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore, and other minerals for a pittance, defying even the warped logic of the free market. (Royalties to the government ranged between 0.5
percent and 7 percent.)12

  Days after the Chhattisgarh government signed a memorandum of understanding for the construction of an integrated steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated. The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up with “repression” by Maoist guerrillas in the forest. It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and subsidized by mining corporations. In the other states similar militias were created, with other names. The prime minister announced the Maoists were the “Single Largest Security Challenge in India.” It was a declaration of war.13

  On January 2, 2006, in Kalinganagar, in the neighboring state of Orissa, perhaps to signal the seriousness of the government’s intention, ten platoons of police arrived at the site of another Tata Steel plant and opened fire on villagers who had gathered there to protest what they felt was inadequate compensation for their land. Thirteen people, including one policeman, were killed and thirty-seven injured.14 Six years have gone by, and though the villages remain under siege by armed policemen, the protest has not died.

  Meanwhile in Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum burned, raped, and murdered its way through hundreds of forest villages, evacuating 600 villages and forcing 50,000 people to come out into police camps and 350,000 people to flee.15 The chief minister announced that those who did not come out of the forests would be considered “Maoist terrorists.” In this way, in parts of modern India plowing fields and sowing seed came to be defined as terrorist activity. Eventually, the Salwa Judum’s atrocities succeeded only in strengthening the resistance and swelling the ranks of the Maoist guerrilla army. In 2009 the government announced what it called Operation Green Hunt. Two hundred thousand paramilitary troops were deployed across Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, and West Bengal.16