My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  12.“Protestors March to UN Office in Kashmir Capital Srinagar,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 18, 2008.

  NINE IS NOT ELEVEN (AND NOVEMBER ISN’T SEPTEMBER)

  1.Rezaul H. Laskar, “India May Carry Out Surgical Strikes on Pak[istan], Warns McCain,” Press Trust of India, December 7, 2008.

  2.Yossi Melman, “Mumbai Terrorists Badly Tortured Chabad House Victims,” Ha’aretz, December 26, 2008.

  3.Quoted in Patrick French, “They Hate Us—and India Is Us,” New York Times, December 8, 2008, A29.

  4.Quoted in Mohammad Shah, “‘Killing Hindus’ Better than Dialogue with India: Lashkar-e-Taiba Chief,” Agence France-Presse, April 3, 2003.

  5.Bajrangi, “‘After Killing Them, I Felt Like Maharana Pratap.’”

  6.Golwalkar, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined, 35, 37, and 62, and quoted in William Dalrymple, “India: The War Over History,” New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005.

  7.Angana Chatterji, “Hindutva’s Violent History,” Tehelka, September 13, 2008. See also Hari Kumar and Heather Timmons, “Violence in India Is Fueled by Religious and Economic Divide,” New York Times, September 4, 2008, A6.

  8.“Situation in Kandhamal Out of Control: Archbishop,” Hindu, September 29, 2008.

  9.Wax and Lakshmi, “Indian Official Points to Pakistan.”

  10.Damien McElroy, “At Least Two More Terrorists Are on the Run, Police Admit,” Sunday Telegraph (London), December 7, 2008, 30.

  11.V. K. Shashikumar, “Recruited by RAW, Trained by Army: LTTE,” CNNIBN, July 2, 2006, http://ibnlive.in.com/news/recruitedby-raw-trained-by-army-ltte/14462-3-1.html.

  12.Emily Wax, “Calls Shed Light on Gunmen’s Motives,” Washington Post, December 16, 2008, A14.

  13.Suketu Mehta, “What They Hate about Mumbai,” New York Times, November 28, 2008, A23.

  14.See “Batla House Residents Speak Out,” Hindustan Times, September 27, 2008, and Hamari Jamatia, “Jamia Teachers’ Group Points Finger at Batla House Encounter,” IndianExpress.com, February 21, 2009. See also Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Group, “‘Encounter’ at Batla House: Unanswered Questions,” February 24, 2009, http://www.sacw.net/article691.html.

  15.L. K. Advani, Inauguration of National Seminar on Terrorism, New Delhi, October 4, 2008. See also “Advani Cautions against President’s Rule,” Hindu, October 6, 2008, and “Braveheart Delhi Cop Sharma Laid to Rest,” Times of India, September 20, 2008.

  16.Parul Abrol, “CBI Wants Action Against Delhi Police Special Officer,” Indo-Asian News Service, November 18, 2008.

  17.United News of India, “Malegaon Bomb Blast,” November 14, 2008.

  18.F. Ahmed, “ATS Is Lying, Hindus Can’t Be Terrorists: V. K. Malhotra,” Indo-Asian News Service, November 17, 2008.

  19.Press Trust of India, “Togadia Denies Links with Malegaon Blast Case: CBI Too Distances Itself,” Financial Express, November 25, 2008.

  20.See Shoma Chaudhury, “Is Kali a Wimp?” Tehelka, December 13, 2008.

  21.See Asian Centre for Human Rights, “Torture in India 2008: A State of Denial,” New Delhi, India, June 2008; “Is Torture Ever Justified?” Economist, September 22, 2007. The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment was opened for discussion on February 4, 1985.

  DEMOCRACY’S FAILING LIGHT

  1.See P. Chidambaram’s interview with Shoma Chaudhury and Shantanu Guha Ray, Tehelka 5, no. 21 (May 31, 2008).

  2.P. Sainath, “Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History,” CounterPunch, February 12, 2009.

  3.See United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), The State of Asia-Pacific’s Children2oo8(May 2008), https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOAPC_2008_080408.pdf.

  4.For a detailed account of the Mumbai riots of 1993, see the Report of the Justice B. N. Srikrishna Commission of Enquiry, http://www.sabrang.com/srikrish/sri%20main.htm.

  5.Sachar Committee Report, November 2006.

  6.Arundhati Roy, “The End of Imagination,” 1–23, above.

  7.See the Rejoinder Affidavit of the Citizens for Justice and Peace through its president vs The Dist. Collector, Ahmedabad & Ors … Respondents in Writ Petition Civil 3770/2003. Rejoinder filed October 3, 2006.

  8.See Celia W. Dugger, “India Orders Inquiry into Missionary’s Killing,” New York Times, January 29, 1999, A9.

  9.See Chatterji, “Hindutva’s Violent History.” See also Angana P. Chatterji, Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2009).

  10.See Somini Sengupta, “Attack on Women at an Indian Bar Intensifies a Clash of Cultures,” New York Times, February 8, 2009, A5.

  11.“Lok Sabha Polls to Cost More Than US Presidential Poll,” Times of India, March 1, 2009.

  12.See Shantanu Guha Ray, “Offer Valid Till Votes Last,” Tehelka, May 27, 2009.

  13.See online results from the Election Commission of India at http://www.eci.nic.in.

  14.Of India’s population of one billion, the registered voter base is 672 million. In 2009, only 356 million Indians voted, a turnout of 53 percent. Of this the United Progressive Alliance vote share was approximately 33 percent, that is, less than 120 million voted for the alliance, http://eciresults.nic.in/frmPercentVotesParty-WiseChart.aspx.

  15.See “BJP, Congress Should Join Hands, Says Govindacharya,” Press Trust of India, Indore, May 15, 2009.

  16.See “India, Pak Unite to Block Anti-Lanka Move at UN,” Indian Express, May 28, 2009.

  17.See “Journalism on Wheels,” photo by Rajeev Bhatt of BBC’s India Election Special Train, Hindu, April 26, 2009.

  18.See “Vote for Reforms, Says India Inc,” Sunday Hindustan Times, May 17, 2009.

  19.See “Corporate Captains Feel Easy Without Left,” Sunday Hindustan Times, May 17, 2009.

  20.The theme song from the hit film Slumdog Millionaire was bought by the Congress Party for its election campaign for a sum of Rs 1 crore ($200,000).

  21.See Uday Khandeparkar, “Behind the Nano Hype,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2009.

  22.D. K. Singh, ‘“In logon ko pakad pakad ke nasbandi karana padega”’ (These people must be caught and sterilized), Indian Express, March 22, 2009.

  23.See Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “A Country in 40 Acres,” Indian Express, August 6, 2008. See also Vir Sanghvi, “Think the Unthinkable,” Hindustan Times, August 16, 2008, and Swaminathan Iyer, “Pushing Kashmir Towards Pakistan,” Economic Times, August 13, 2008.

  24.For an appraisal of the recently concluded elections in Jammu and Kashmir, see Gautam Navlakha, “Jammu and Kashmir Elections: A Shift in Equations,” and Rekha Chowdhary, “Separatist Sentiments and Deepening of Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly, January 17–23, 2009.

  25.For a detailed report, see Rajeev Upadhyay, “The Melting of the Siachen Glacier,” Current Science (March 10, 2009): 646–48.

  THE PRESIDENT TOOK THE SALUTE

  1.Express News Service, “Migrants Blamed for Surging Crimes in Cities,” Indian Express, April 2, 2013.

  TRICKLEDOWN REVOLUTION

  1.P. Chidambaram, “Poor Rich Countries,” Outlook, October 22, 2007.

  2.Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury, “PESA, Left-Wing Extremism and Governance: Concerns and Challenges in India’s Tribal Districts,” 2010, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265000754_PESA_Left-Wing_Extremism_and_Governance_Concerns_and_Challenges_in_India’s_Tribal_Districts.

  3.B. G. Verghese, “Daylight at the Thousand Star Hotel,” Outlook, May 3, 2010.

  4.Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: Four Decades of a Simmering Revolution (Kolkata, West Bengal: Sahitya Samsad, 2009).

  5.Dandekar and Choudhury, “PESA, Left-Wing Extremism and Governance.”

  6.Kaustav Banerjee and Partha Saha, “The NREGA, the Maoists and the Developmental Woes of the Indian State,” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 28 (July 10, 2010): 42–47; retrieved from http://www.indiaenvironmentpor
tal.org.in/files/The%20NREGA.pdf.

  KASHMIR’S FRUITS OF DISCORD

  1.Joe Klein, “The Full Obama Interview,” Time, October 23, 2008.

  2.Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Yardley, “Countering China, Obama Backs India for U.N. Council,” New York Times, November 8, 2010.

  3.Yusuf Jameel and Lydia Polgreen, “Indian Agency Insists 2 Kashmiri Women Drowned,” New York Times, December 14, 2009. Human Rights Watch Asia authored a report on the high incidence of rape by Indian security personnel. See “Rape in Kashmir: A Crime of War,” AsiaWatch (division of Human Rights Watch) and Physicians for Human Rights, vol. 5, no. 9 (2009), http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/INDIA935.PDF.

  4.Special correspondent, “Bajrang Dal’s Warning to Arundhati Roy,” Hindu, October 28, 2010.

  I’D RATHER NOT BE ANNA

  1.“Anna Hazare Himself Involved in Corruption, Says Congress,” Economic Times, August 14, 2011. See also “Had Held Hazare Guilty of Corruption: PB Sawant,” IBNLive, August 14, 2011.

  2.Shortly after Hazare’s release from prison, the Telegraph reported that Hazare was sustained with glucose and electrolyte powder during his second “fast unto death.” Of the possible fraud, the physician who examined him, Abhijit Vaidya, offered an analysis: “I fear Hazare is being used as a tool to destabilise the government…. Corruption obviously needs to be fought but Hazare has never addressed other social issues such as economic inequality, extreme poverty and farmers’ suicides that are equally hurting the country.” “Secret of Fast? Hear It from a Pune Doctor,” Telegraph, August 16, 2011. See also “The Anna Hazare Scam,” Analytical Monthly Review, April 15, 2011, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/amr150411.html.

  3.Manas Dasgupta, “Hazare Clarifies Remarks on Modi, but Activists Unrelenting,” Hindustan, April 13, 2011.

  4.“Hazare Failed to Recognise Workers’ Contribution: RSS,” Hindu, February 5. 2012.

  5.Mukul Sharma, “The Making of Moral Authority: Anna Hazare and Watershed Management Programme in Ralegan Siddhi,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 20 (May 2006): 1981–88.

  6.Lola Nayar, “Flowing the Way of Their Money,” Outlook, September 19, 2011.

  SPEECH TO THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY

  1.Andrea Shalai-Esa, “Saudi Deals Boosted US Arms Sales to Record 66.3 Billion in 2011,” Reuters UK, August 27, 2012.

  2.Sunil Dasgupta and Stephen P. Cohen, “Arms Sales for India,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2011.

  3.“Mukesh Ambani Tops for the Third Year as India’s Richest,” Forbes Asia, news release, September 30, 2010. The article notes, “The combined net worth of India’s 100 richest people is $300 billion, up from $276 billion last year. This year, there are 69 billionaires on the India Rich List, 17 more than last year.” India’s 2009 GDP was $1.2 trillion.

  4.P. Sainath, “Farm Suicides Rise in Maharashtra, State Still Leads the List,” Hindu, July 3, 2012.

  CAPITALISM: A GHOST STORY

  1.“Mukesh Ambani Tops for the Third Year as India’s Richest,” Forbes Asia, news release, September 30, 2010.

  2.Vikas Bajaj, “For Wealthy Indian Family, Palatial House Is No Home,” New York Times, October 18, 2011.

  3.Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (Torfaen, UK: Merlin, 1998), 17.

  4.P. Sainath, “Farm Suicides Rise in Maharashtra, State Still Leads the List.”

  5.National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector, Government of India, August 2007, https://ruralindiaonline.org/resources/report-on-conditions-of-work-and-promotion-of-livelihoods-in-the-unorganised-sector/. The state-supported study notes that though a “buoyancy in the economy did lead to a sense of euphoria by the turn of the last century … a majority of the people … were not touched by this euphoria. At the end of 2004–5, about 836 million or 77 per cent of the population were living below Rs. 20 a day and constituted most of India’s informal economy” (1).

  6.As of March 2013, Mukesh Ambani was worth $21.5 billion, according to a Forbes profile: http://www.forbes.com/profile/mukesh-ambani/.

  7.“RIL Buys 95% Stake in Infotel Broadband,” Times of India, June 11, 2010.

  8.Depali Gupta, “Mukesh Ambani–Owned Infotel Broadband to Set Up over 1,000,000 Towers for 4G Operations,” Economic Times, August 23, 2012.

  9.Brinda Karat, “Of Mines, Minerals, and Tribal Rights,” Hindu, May 15, 2012.

  10.See Michael Levien, “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39, nos. 3–4 (2012): 933–69.

  11.S. Sakthivel and Pinaki Joddar, “Unorganised Sector Workforce in India: Trends, Patterns, and Social Security Coverage,” Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006, 2107–14.

  12.“India Approves Increase in Royalties on Mineral Mining,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2009.

  13.From a 2009 Ministry of Rural Development report titled “State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms,” commissioned by the Government of India: “The new approach came about with the Salwa Judum. … [Its] first financiers … were Tata and the Essar…. 640 villages as per official statistics were laid bare, burnt to the ground and emptied with the force of the gun and the blessings of the state. 350,000 tribals, half the total population of Dantewada district are displaced, their womenfolk raped, their daughters killed, and their youth maimed. Those who could not escape into the jungle were herded together into refugee camps run and managed by the Salwa Judum. Others continue to hide in the forest or have migrated to the nearby tribal tracts in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. 640 villages are empty. Villages sitting on tons of iron ore are effectively de-peopled and available for the highest bidder. The latest information that is being circulated is that both Essar Steel and Tata Steel are willing to take over the empty landscape and manage the mines” (161). The report is available at http://southasia.oneworld.net/Files/MRD%20Commitee%20Report.pdf

  14.P. Pradhan, “Police Firing at Kalinganagar,” People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) report, Orissa. April 2006.

  15.Ibid.

  16.Sudha Ramachandran, “India’s War on Maoists under Attack,” Asia Times Online, May 26, 2010.

  17.“Anti-Naxal Operations: Gov’t to Deplot 10,000 CRPF Troopers,” Zeenews. com, October 30, 2012. “Chhattisgarh HM Wants Army to Tackle Naxalism,” webindia, November 15, 2012; Soumittra S. Bose, “Naxals Gear up to Take on the Indian Army, Times of India, June 2, 2012.

  18.See Human Rights Watch, “Getting Away with Murder: 50 Years of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA),” August 2008. The report states that AFSPA’s ability to act “on suspicion” has led to thousands of disappearances in Jammu and Kashmir. Many of those who’ve disappeared are believed to be in “unmarked graves that security forces say are the burials of unidentified militants. Human rights groups have long called for an independent investigation and forensic tests to establish the identity of those in the graves, but the government has yet to respond to that demand” (12).

  19.J. Balaji, “Soni Sori Case: HRW Wants PM to Order Impartial Probe on Torture,” Hindu, March 8, 2011. Although Soni Sori has been acquitted in six of the eight cases filed against her, she remains in a Chhattisgarh jail. See Suvojit Bagchi, “Soni Sori Acquitted in a Case of Attack on Congress Leader,” Hindu, May 1, 2013.

  20.Aman Sethi, “High Court Stays Clearance for DB Power Coal Mine in Chhattisgarh,” Hindu, December 12, 2001.

  21.Sanjib Kr Baruah, “Dam Wrong,” Hindustan Times, September 2, 2010.

  22.“Kashmir Power Cut Protest Turns Deadly,” Aljazeera, January 3, 2012.

  23.“Report Raised Fears about Proximity of Kalpasar Dam and Mithivirdi N-Project,” Indian Express, May 3, 2013.

  24.Vinod K. Jose, “The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi,” Caravan Magazine, March 1, 2012.

  25.Maj. Gen. Dhruv Katoch et
al., “Perception Management of the Indian Army,” Centre for Land Warfare Studies seminar, Delhi, February 21, 2012.

  26.Lydia Polgreen, “High Ideals and Corruption Dominate Think Festival Agenda,” New York Times, November 1, 2011. While Tehelka held a “Summit of the Powerless” conference in 2006, initiating discussions of Naxalism and farmer suicides, the 2011 Think Fest, hosted by the same magazine, was a “glitzy and glamorous celebration” with guests including Thomas Friedman and India’s “mining barons and real estate tycoons” held “at a five-star resort … allegedly owned by men in jail awaiting charges involving the 2G telecommunications scam.”

  27.Raman Kirpal, “How Goa’s Illegal Ore Miners Are in League with CM Kamat,” First Post Politics, September 5, 2011.

  28.Purnima S. Tripathi, “Battle of Bastar,” Frontline 29, no. 8 (April/May 2012), http://www.frontline.in/navigation/?type=static&page=flonnet&rdurl=fl2908/stories/20120504290803200.htm.

  29.“PIL on India Role in ‘Genocide,’” Telegraph India, March 21, 2013. Peter Cobus, “Indian Kashmir to ID Bodies from Unmarked Graves,” Voice of America, September 26, 2011.

  30.Jaipur Sun, “Jaipur Lit Fest: Oprah Winfrey Charms Chaotic India,” Indian Express, January 22, 2012.

  31.Gerard Colby, Thy Will Be Done: Conquest of the Amazon; Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1996).

  32.“Introduction: The Rockefellers,” American Experience, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduction/rockefellers-introduction/. “Because of the ruthless war he waged to crush his competitors, Rockefeller was to many Americans the embodiment of an unjust and cruel economic system. Yet he lived a quiet and virtuous life. ‘I believe the power to make money is a gift of God,’ Rockefeller once said. ‘It is my duty to make money and even more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow men.’”

  33.Pablo Neruda, “Standard Oil Company,” in Canto General, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 176.