My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

The NGO-ization of the women’s movement has also made Western liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles, as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and burkas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double whammy, Botox and the burka.) When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem.

  In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject,” a separate, professionalized, special interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos, each with its own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.

  Poverty, too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As though the poor had not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to exist and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal (administered by NGOs on an individual, person-to-person basis), and whose long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance. Under the regime of Global Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying.

  Indian poverty, after a brief period in the wilderness while India “shone,” has made a comeback as an exotic identity in the arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog Millionaire. These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have no villains—except the small ones who provide narrative tension and local color. The authors of these works are the contemporary world’s equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honored for working “on the ground,” for their brave journeys into the unknown. You rarely see the rich being examined in these ways.

  Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media, and liberal opinion, the neoliberal establishment faced one more challenge: how to deal with growing unrest, the threat of “people’s power.” How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys?

  Here too, foundations and their allied organizations have a long and illustrious history. A revealing example is their role in defusing and deradicalizing the Black civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and the successful transformation of Black Power into Black Capitalism.55

  The Rockefeller Foundation, in keeping with J. D. Rockefeller’s ideals, had worked closely with Martin Luther King Sr. (father of Martin Luther King Jr.). But his influence waned with the rise of the more militant organizations—the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations moved in. In 1970 they donated $15 million to “moderate” Black organizations, giving people, grants, fellowships, scholarships, job-training programs for dropouts, and seed money for Black-owned businesses.56 Repression, infighting, and the honey trap of funding led to the gradual atrophying of the radical Black organizations.

  Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between capitalism, imperialism, racism, and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by (among others) the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel, and Monsanto. The center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others.”57 It cosponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series called “The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Nonviolent Social Change.”58

  Amen.

  A similar coup was carried out in the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. In 1978 the Rockefeller Foundation organized a Study Commission on US Policy toward Southern Africa. The report warned of the growing influence of the Soviet Union on the African National Congress (ANC) and said that US strategic and corporate interests (that is, access to South Africa’s minerals) would be best served if there were genuine sharing of political power by all races.

  The foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the more radical organizations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated it. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black president, he was canonized as a living saint, not just because he is a freedom fighter who spent twenty-seven years in prison but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great “peaceful transition,” so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalization of South Africa’s mines. Instead there was privatization and structural adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good Hope—to his old friend and supporter General Suharto, the killer of communists in Indonesia. Today in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedes-driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country. But that is more than enough to perpetuate the myth of Black liberation.

  The rise of Black Power in the United States was an inspirational moment for the rise of a radical, progressive Dalit movement in India, with organizations like the Dalit Panthers mirroring the militant politics of the Black Panthers. But Dalit Power, too, in not exactly the same but similar ways, has been fractured and defused and, with plenty of help from right-wing Hindu organizations and the Ford Foundation, is well on its way to transforming into Dalit capitalism.

  “Dalit Inc ready to show business can beat caste,” the Indian Express reported in December last year. It went on to quote a mentor of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry: “Getting the prime minister for a Dalit gathering is not difficult in our society. But for Dalit entrepreneurs, taking a photograph with Tata and Godrej over lunch and tea is an aspiration—and proof that they have arrived,” he said.59 Given the situation in modern India, it would be casteist and reactionary to say that Dalit entrepreneurs oughtn’t to have a place at the high table. But if this were to be the aspiration, the ideological framework of Dalit politics, it would be a great pity. And unlikely to help the one million Dalits who still earn a living off manual scavenging—carrying human shit on their heads.

  Young Dalit scholars who accept grants from the Ford Foundation cannot be too harshly judged. Who else is offering them an opportunity to climb out of the cesspit of the Indian caste system? The shame as well as a large part of the blame for this turn of events also goes to India’s communist movement, whose leaders continue to be predominantly upper caste. For years it has tried to force-fit the idea of caste into Marxist class analysis. It has failed miserably, in theory as well as practice. The rift between the Dalit community and the left began with a falling out between the visionary Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar and S. A. Dange, trade unionist and founding member of the Communist Party of India. Dr. Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the Communist Party began with the textile workers’ strike in Mumbai in 1928, when he realized that despite all the rhetoric about working-class solidarity, the party did no
t find it objectionable that the “untouchables” were kept out of the weaving department (and qualified only for the lower-paid spinning department) because the work involved the use of saliva on the threads, which other castes considered “polluting.”

  Ambedkar realized that in a society where the Hindu scriptures institutionalize untouchability and inequality, the battle for “untouchables,” for social and civic rights, was too urgent to wait for the promised communist revolution. The rift between the Ambedkarites and the left has come at a great cost to both. It has meant that a great majority of the Dalit population, the backbone of the Indian working class, has pinned its hopes for deliverance and dignity on constitutionalism, capitalism, and political parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party, which practices an important, but in the long run stagnant, brand of identity politics.

  In the United States, as we have seen, corporate-endowed foundations spawned the culture of NGOs. In India, targeted corporate philanthropy began in earnest in the 1990s, the era of the New Economic Policies. Membership in the Star Chamber doesn’t come cheap. The Tata Group donated $50 million to that needy institution, the Harvard Business School, and another $50 million to Cornell University. Nandan Nilekani of Infosys and his wife Rohini donated $5 million as a startup endowment for the India Initiative at Yale. The Harvard Humanities Center is now the Mahindra Humanities Center, after it received its largest-ever donation of $10 million from Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra Group.

  At home, the Jindal Group, with a major stake in mining, metals, and power, runs the Jindal Global Law School and will soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. (The Ford Foundation runs a law school in the Congo.) The New India Foundation, funded by Nandan Nilekani, financed by profits from Infosys, gives prizes and fellowships to social scientists. The Sitaram Jindal Foundation, endowed by the chairman and managing director of Jindal Aluminum Ltd., has announced five annual cash prizes of ten million rupees ($195,000) each, to be given to those working in rural development, poverty alleviation, education and moral uplift, environment, and peace and social harmony. The Observer Research Foundation (ORF), currently endowed by Mukesh Ambani, is cast in the mold of the Rockefeller Foundation. It has retired intelligence agents, strategic analysts, politicians (who pretend to rail against each other in Parliament), journalists, and policy makers as its research “fellows” and advisers.

  ORF’s objectives seem straightforward enough: “to help develop a consensus in favor of economic reforms.” And to shape and influence public opinion, creating “viable, alternative policy options in areas as divergent as employment generation in backward districts and real-time strategies to counter Nuclear, Biological and Chemical threats.”60

  I was initially puzzled by the preoccupation with “Nuclear, Biological and Chemical threats” in ORF’s stated objectives. But less so when, in the long list of its “institutional partners,” I found the names of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, two of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers. In 2007 Raytheon announced it was turning its attention to India.61 Could it be that at least part of India’s $32 billion annual defense budget will be spent on weapons, guided missiles, aircraft, warships, and surveillance equipment made by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin?

  Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.

  In the new Cold War between the United States and China, India is being groomed to play the role Pakistan played as a US ally in the Cold War with Russia. (And look what happened to Pakistan.) Many of those columnists and “strategic analysts” who are playing up the hostilities between India and China, you’ll see, can be traced back directly or indirectly to the Indo-American think tanks and foundations. Being a “strategic partner” of the United States does not mean that the heads of state make friendly phone calls to each other every now and then. It means collaboration (interference) at every level. It means hosting US Special Forces on Indian soil. (A Pentagon commander recently confirmed this to the BBC.) It means sharing intelligence, altering agriculture and energy policies, opening up the health and education sectors to global investment. It means opening up retail. It means an unequal partnership in which India is being held close in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.

  In the list of ORF’s “institutional partners,” you will also find the RAND Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution (whose stated mission is to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system”). You will also find the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany. (Poor Rosa, who died for the cause of communism, to find her name on a list such as this one!)

  Though capitalism is meant to be based on competition, those at the top of the food chain have also shown themselves to be capable of inclusiveness and solidarity. The great Western capitalists have done business with fascists, socialists, despots, and military dictators. They can adapt and constantly innovate. They are capable of quick thinking and immense tactical cunning.

  But despite having successfully powered through economic reforms, despite having waged wars and militarily occupied countries in order to put in place free market “democracies,” capitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself completely yet. Marx said, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”62

  The proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. Over the years, those making up the proletariat have been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India it has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against caste, region against region. And yet all over the world they are fighting back. In China there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.

  Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 percent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.

  Capitalism’s real “gravediggers” may end up being its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping— simply will not work.

  I stood outside Antilla for a long time watching the sun go down. I imagined that the tower was as deep as it was high. That it had a twenty-seven-story-long tap root, snaking around below the ground, hungrily sucking sustenance out of the earth, turning it into smoke and gold.

  Why did the Ambanis choose to call their building Antilla?

  Antilla is the name of a set of mythical islands whose story dates back to an eighth-century Iberian legend. When the Muslims conquered Hispania, six Christian Visigothic bishops and their parishioners boarded ships and fled. After days, or maybe weeks, at sea, they arrived at the isles of Antilla, where they decided to settle and raise a new civilization. They burned their boats to permanently sever their links to their barbarian-dominated homeland.

  By calling their tower Antilla, do the Ambanis hope to sever their links to the poverty and squalor of their homeland and raise a new civilization? Is this the final act of the most success
ful secessionist movement in India: the secession of the middle and upper classes into outer space?

  As night fell over Mumbai, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appeared outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blazed on, to scare away the ghosts perhaps. The neighbors complain that Antilla’s bright lights have stolen the night.

  Perhaps it’s time for us to take back the night.

  First published in Outlook, March 26, 2012.

  A PERFECT DAY FOR DEMOCRACY

  Wasn’t it? yesterday, I mean. Spring announced itself in Delhi. The sun was out, and the law took its course. Just before breakfast, Afzal Guru, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament attack, was secretly hanged, and his body was interred in Tihar Jail.1 Was he buried next to Maqbool Butt? (The other Kashmiri who was hanged in Tihar in 1984. Kashmiris will mark that anniversary tomorrow.) Afzal’s wife and son were not informed. “The Authorities intimated the family through Speed Post and Registered Post,” the home secretary told the press; “the Director General of J&K Police has been told to check whether they got it or not.”2 No big deal, they’re only the family of a Kashmiri terrorist.

  In a moment of rare unity the Nation, or at least its major political parties, the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the CPI(M), came together as one (barring a few squabbles about “delay” and “timing”) to celebrate the triumph of the Rule of Law. The Conscience of the Nation, which broadcasts live from TV studios these days, unleashed its collective intellect on us—the usual cocktail of papal passion and a delicate grip on facts. Like cowards that hunt in packs, they seemed to need each other to keep their courage up, even though the man was dead and gone. Perhaps because deep inside themselves they know that they all colluded to do something terribly wrong. What are the facts?

  On December 13, 2001, five armed men drove through the gates of the Parliament House in a white Ambassador fitted out with an improvised explosive device. When they were challenged they jumped out of the car and opened fire. They killed eight security personnel and a gardener. In the gun battle that followed, all five attackers were killed. In one of the many versions of confessions Afzal Guru made in police custody, he identified the men as Mohammed, Rana, Raja, Hamza, and Haider. That’s all we know about them even today. L. K. Advani, the then home minister, said they “looked like Pakistanis.” (He should know what Pakistanis look like, right? Being a Sindhi himself.) Based only on Afzal’s confession (which the Supreme Court subsequently set aside, citing “lapses” and “violations of procedural safeguards”), the government of India recalled its ambassador from Pakistan and mobilized half a million soldiers to the Pakistan border. There was talk of nuclear war. Foreign embassies issued travel advisories and evacuated their staff from Delhi. The standoff lasted for months and cost India thousands of crores of rupees (hundreds of millions of dollars).