Arundhati Roy's Blog

A perfect day for democracy

Arundhati Roy



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. 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.” 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 BJP and the CPM 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. Even though the man was dead and gone, like cowards that hunt in packs, they seemed to need each other to keep their courage up. Perhaps because deep inside themselves they know that they all colluded to do something terribly wrong.
What are the facts?
On the 13th of December 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 he made in police custody, Afzal Guru 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.
On the 14th of December 2001 the Delhi Police Special Cell claimed it had cracked the case. On the 15th of December it arrested the ‘master mind’ Professor S.A.R Geelani in Delhi and Showkat Guru and Afzal Guru in a fruit market in Srinagar. Subsequently they arrested Afsan Guru, Showkat’s wife. The media enthusiastically disseminated the Special Cell’s version. These were some of the headlines: ‘DU Lecturer was Terror Plan Hub’, ‘Varsity Don Guided Fidayeen’, ‘Don Lectured on Terror in Free Time.’ Zee TV broadcast a ‘docudrama’ called December 13th , a recreation that claimed to be the ‘Truth Based on the Police Charge Sheet.’ (If the police version is the truth, then why have courts?) Then Prime Minister Vajpayee and L.K. Advani publicly appreciated the film. The Supreme Court refused to stay the screening saying that the media would not influence judges. The film was broadcast only a few days before the fast track court sentenced Afzal, Showkat and Geelani to death. Subsequently the High Court acquitted the ‘mastermind’, Professor S.A.R Geelani, and Afsan Guru. The Supreme Court upheld the acquittal. But in its 5th August 2005 judgment it gave Mohammed Afzal three life sentences and a double death sentence.
Contrary to the lies that have been put about by some senior journalists who would have known better, Afzal Guru was not one of “the terrorists who stormed Parliament House on December 13th 2001” nor was he among those who “opened fire on security personnel, apparently killing three of the six who died.” (That was the BJP Rajya Sabha MP, Chandan Mitra, in The Pioneer, October 7th 2006). Even the police charge sheet does not accuse him of that. The Supreme Court judgment says the evidence is circumstantial: “As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and could be no evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy.” But then it goes on to say: “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”
Who crafted our collective conscience on the Parliament Attack case? Could it have been the facts we gleaned in the papers? The films we saw on TV?
There are those who will argue that the very fact that the courts acquitted S.A.R Geelani and convicted Afzal proves that the trial was free and fair. Was it?
The trial in the fast-track court began in May 2002. The world was still convulsed by post 9/11 frenzy. The US government was gloating prematurely over its ‘victory’ in Afghanistan. The Gujarat pogrom was ongoing. And in the Parliament Attack case, the Law was indeed taking its own course. At the most crucial stage of a criminal case, when evidence is presented, when witnesses are cross-examined, when the foundations of the argument are laid—in the High Court and Supreme Court you can only argue points of law, you cannot introduce new evidence— Afzal Guru, locked in a high security solitary cell, had no lawyer. The court-appointed junior lawyer did not visit his client even once in jail, he did not summon any witnesses in Afzal’s defense and did not cross examine the prosecution witnesses. The judge expressed his inability to do anything about the situation.
Even still, from the word go, the case fell apart. A few examples out of many:How did the police get to Afzal? They said that S.A.R Geelani led them to him. But the court records show that the message to arrest Afzal went out before they picked up Geelani. The High Court called this a ‘material contradiction’ but left it at that.
The two most incriminating pieces of evidence against Afzal were a cellphone and a laptop confiscated at the time of arrest. The Arrest Memos were signed by Bismillah, Geelani’s brother, in Delhi. The Seizure Memos were signed by two men of the J&K Police, one of them an old tormentor from Afzal’s past as a surrendered ‘militant’. The computer and cellphone were not sealed, as evidence is required to be. During the trial it emerged that the hard disc of the laptop had been accessed after the arrest. It only contained the fake home ministry passes and the fake identity cards that the terrorists used to access Parliament. And a Zee TV video clip of Parliament House. So according to the police, Afzal had deleted all the information except the most incriminating bits, and he was speeding off to hand it over to Ghazi Baba, who the charge sheet described as the Chief of Operations.
A witness for the prosecution, Kamal Kishore, identified Afzal and told the court he had sold him the crucial SIM card that connected all the accused in the case to each other on the 4th of December 2001. But the prosecution’s own call records showed that the SIM was actually operational from November 6th 2001.
It goes on and on, this pile up of lies and fabricated evidence. The courts note them, but for their pains the police get no more than a gentle rap on their knuckles. Nothing more.Then there’s the back story. Like most surrendered militants Afzal was easy meat in Kashmir—a victim of torture, blackmail, extortion. Anybody who was really interested in solving the mystery of the Parliament Attack would have followed the dense trail of evidence that leads into the shadowy grid in Kashmir that connects militants to surrendered militants, renegades to Special Police Officers, the Special Operations Group to the Special Task Force, and upwards and onwards. And upwards and onwards.
But now that Afzal Guru has been hanged, I hope our collective conscience has been satisfied. Or is our cup of blood still only half full?

Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India

Well-known writer and social issues with his own opinion Arundhati Roy spoke on the issue of rape in the BBC studios. Read what she says.I do not believe that Delhi is the rape capital.If the rape has been going on for years. It is embedded in the psyche. Muslims in Gujarat was raped when security forces in Kashmir, Manipur also happens but then picks up no sound.Dalit women are raped in Kherlanjhi and his daughter was burned them. Then a voice was raised.Only a feudal mindset which raises voice of the people of the great nation, dominated happens with people in Delhi.Sound should arise. Which is supposed to happen in Delhi, but for him to Halla Halla should not just middle class people to save.

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Chhattisgarh tribal woman with Sony Tyre happened if you will recall. His Jnnango were cast in stone., But the police did not have even a raised voice. If the police officer received an award for courage.Poor security forces in Kashmir when Kashmiri forces against rape does not demand a hanging.Rape of a higher-caste Dalit man does not, then no such demand.This time there were hundreds of people gathered in Delhi when the girl was thrown out of the bus, people were standing naked.Someone gave him his cloak. Everyone stood.Rich in Delhi - was the first to distinguish between poor. But now they are still the target. Rape is not the issue. When the country was partitioned, we can not even imagine how many were raped.Inside we have a feudal mindset.Rape is a terrible crime, but what people do. The girl is raped does not accept him. How do we live in society. In many cases, the rape of the same family are out of the house.There is too much violence in society.But should not be protesting against choose. Every woman should resist rape. These dual mindset that you will sound but Manipur to Delhi rape of women, and for women of Kashmir Kherlanjhi not raise voice for the downtrodden.Do not resist rape on the ground that he is in Delhi or any other place in Manipur. All I can say.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/india/2012/12/121222_arundhati_rape_skj.shtml*google translation from hindi to english

We Call This Progress

By Arundhati Roy
December 17, 2012
From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.[image error]
Image of a coal mine in Dhanbad, India from Wikimedia CommonsI don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.Today, as we speak, the U.S., and perhaps China and India, are involved in a battle for control of the resources of Africa. Thousands of U.S. troops, as well as death squads, are being sent into Africa. The “Yes We Can” president has expanded the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. There are drone attacks killing children on a regular basis there.In the 1990s, when the markets of India opened, when all of the laws that protected labor were dismantled, when natural resources were privatized, when that whole process was set into motion, the Indian government opened two locks: one was the lock of the markets; the other was the lock of an old fourteenth-century mosque, which was a disputed site between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindus believed that it was the birthplace of Ram, and the Muslims, of course, use it as a mosque. By opening that lock, India set into motion a kind of conflict between the majority community and the minority community, a way of constantly dividing people. Finding ways to divide people is the main practice of anybody that is in power.

America has taken democracy into the workshop and hollowed it out.

The opening of these two locks unleashed two kinds of totalitarianism in India: one was economic totalitarianism, and the other was Hindu fundamentalism. These processes manufactured what the government calls “terrorism.” You had Islamist terrorists and you had what today the government calls “Maoists,” which means anybody who is resisting the project of civilization, of progress, of development; anybody who is resisting the takeover of their lands or the destruction of rivers and forests, is today a Maoist. Maoists are the most militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements, with Gandhists at the other end of the spectrum. The kind of strategy people adopt to resist the onslaught of global capital is quite often not an ideological choice, but a tactical choice dependent on the landscape in which those battles are being fought.Since 1947, ever since India became a sovereign republic, it has deployed its army against what it calls its own people. Now, gradually, those states where the troops were deployed are states of people who are fighting for self-determination. They are states that the decolonized Indian state immediately colonized. Now, those troops are actually defending the government’s rights to build big dams, to build power projects, to carry out the processes of privatization. In the last fifty years, more than thirty million people have been displaced by big dams alone in India. Of course, most of those are Indigenous people or people who live off the land.The result of twenty years of this kind of free market, and this bogey of terrorism, is in the hollowing out of democracy. I notice a lot of people using the word democracy as a good word, but actually, if you think of it, democracy today is not what democracy used to be. There was a time when the American government was toppling democracies in Latin America and all over the place. Today, it’s waging wars to install democracy. It has taken democracy into the workshop and hollowed it out.In India, every institution, whether it’s the courts, or the parliament, or the press—has been hollowed out and harnessed to the free market. There are empty rituals to mask what actually happens, which is that India continues to militarize, it continues to become a police state. In the last twenty years, after we embraced the free market, two hundred and fifty thousand farmers have committed suicide, because they have been driven into debt. This has never happened in human history before. Yet, obviously when the establishment has a choice between suicide farmers and suicide bombers, you know which ones they are going to encourage. They don’t mind that statistic, because it helps them; they feel sorry, they make a few noises, but they keep doing what they are doing.Today, India has more people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together. It has 80 percent of its population living on less than twenty rupees a day, which is less than fifty cents a day. That is the atmosphere in which the resistance movements are operating.Of course, it has a media—I don’t know any other country with so many news channels, all of them sponsored or directly owned by corporations, including mining corporations and infrastructure corporations. The vast majority of all news is funded by corporate advertising, so you can imagine what’s going on with that. The prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, Manmohan Singh, who was more or less installed by the IMF, has never won an election in his life. He stood for one election and lost, but after that he was just placed there. He’s the person who, when he was finance minister, actually dismantled all the laws and allowed global capital into India.

We should not be saying tax the rich, we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it.

One time I was at a meeting of iron ore workers, and Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of that time, had been the leader of the opposition in Parliament. A Hindi poet read out a poem called “What is Manmohan Singh doing these days?” The first lines were: “What is Manmohan Singh doing these days? What does poison do after it enters the bloodstream?” They knew that whatever he had to do was done, and now it’s just a question of it taking its course.In 2005, which was the first term of the present government, the Indian government signed hundreds of Memorandums of Understanding, or MOUs, with mining companies, infrastructure companies, and so on, to develop a huge swath of forestland in Central India. India has up to an estimated one hundred million Indigenous people, and if you look at a map of India, the minerals, the forests, and the Indigenous people are all stacked up, one on top of the other. Many of these Memorandums of Understanding were signed with these mining companies in 2005. At the time, in the state of Chhattisgarh, which is where this great civil war is unfolding now, the government raised a tribal militia, which was funded by these corporations, to basically go through the forest to try and clear it of people so that the MOUs could be actualized. The media started to call this whole swath of forest the “Maoist Corridor.” Some of us used to call it the “MOUist Corridor.” Around that time, they announced a war called “Operation Green Hunt.” Two hundred thousand paramilitary began to move into the forests, along with the tribal militia, to clear it of what the government called Maoists.The Maoist movement, in various avatars, has existed in India since 1967, which was the first time there was an uprising. It took place in a village in West Bengal called Naxalbari, so the Maoists are sometimes called Naxalites. Of course it’s an underground, banned party. It now has a People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army. Thousands of people have been killed in this conflict. Today, there are thousands of people in prison, and all of them are called Maoists, though not all of them are really Maoists, because as I said, anybody who resists today is called a terrorist. Poverty and terrorism have been conflated. In the Northeastern states we have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows soldiers to kill on suspicion. In all of India we have the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which basically makes even thinking an anti government thought a criminal offense, for which you can be jailed for up to than seven years.

The Indian government—the largest democracy in the world—is planning to call out the army in Central India, to fight the poorest people in the world.

This is the atmosphere that was being created, and the media was in this orgy of these “Maoist-terrorists.” They were conflating them with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, so you’d see them on TV with ski masks and AK-47s, and the middle class was literally baying for their blood. At this time, I had written a couple of articles about the whole thing, television anchors would look around at me like I was crazy when I mentioned mining. What was the connection between pure evil guerrillas and good mining corporations? In my book, Field Notes on Democracy, there’s a part about how the Supreme Court of India actually gave a judgment saying you cannot possibly accuse a corporation of malpractice. In so many words, it just says so.                 *                      *                     *If you look at the history of the struggle for land in India, what is really sad is that after India became independent, land reform was one of the biggest things on the agenda of the new government. This was of course subverted by the politicians, who were upper-class people, landowners. They put so many caveats in the legal system that absolutely no redistribution happened. Then, in the 1970s, shortly after the Naxalite movement started, when the first people rose up, it was about the redistribution of land. The movement was saying land to the tiller. It was crushed; the army was called out. The Indian government, which calls itself democratic, never hesitates to call out the army. Today, people have completely forgotten the idea of redistribution. Now, they are fighting just to hold on to what little they have. We call that “progress.” The home minister allegedly says he wants 70 percent of India to live in cities, meaning he wants five to six hundred million people to move. How do you make that happen, unless you become a military state? How do you do that, unless you build big dams and big thermal projects and have nuclear power?In so many ways, we have regressed. Even the most radical politics are practiced by people that are privileged enough to have land. There are millions and millions of people who don’t have land, who now just live as pools of underpaid wage labor on the edges of these huge megalopolises that make up India now. The politics of land in one way is radical, but in another way it has left out the poorest people, because they are out of the equation. We don’t talk about justice anymore. None of us do; we just talk about human rights or survival. We don’t talk about redistribution. In America, four hundred people own more wealth than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it.                 *                      *                     *Today, one of the biggest battles being fought in India is over the extraction of bauxite, the ore that makes aluminum, which is at the center of the military-industrial complex. There’s something like four trillion dollars’ worth of bauxite in the mountains of Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Bauxite mountains are beautiful; they are flat-top mountains. Bauxite is a porous rock, and when it rains the mountains absorb the water; they are like water tanks. They let the water out through their toes, and they irrigate the plains. Mining companies, who have bought the bauxite for a small royalty to the Indian government, have already traded it on the future’s market. For local people, the bauxite in the mountain is the source of their life and their future, their religion and everything. For the aluminum company, the mountain is just a cheap storage facility. They’ve already sold it, so the bauxite has to come out, either peacefully or violently.

As a writer, if you know something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying.

Now, the Indian government—the largest democracy in the world—is planning to call out the army in Central India, to fight the poorest people in the world.A lot of the Indian government’s violence and repression is outsourced to the mob; it’s not always acting as a state. Often, academics or journalists or these moronic anchors in TV studios will initiate a debate based on the question, is violence moral or immoral? (SMS your answer to the studio now.)Of course, people don’t necessarily function like that. You can be a Maoist in the forest and a Gandhian on the street. You can change identities based on what suits you tactically; it’s not like you have to swear to be this thing or that thing or the other thing. Some people do, some don’t. I think what happens in India is that there is something false about this debate, because it’s infused with a kind of false morality. After all, if people from the middle class were to support that fight—which is an oxymoron; they won’t—then I can understand saying we should all get together and go on a hunger strike. But, if you’re going to distance yourself from that village that has been surrounded by a hundred policemen and is being burned, then it’s immoral to try and lecture to those people how they should protect themselves.Quite often, when you see what is being done to people, it creates rage in you and humiliation if you keep quiet. People ask me why I write, and I say it’s in order to not be humiliated. I don’t write for anything else except to not be humiliated. Every time I write, I keep telling myself that I won’t do it again, but it’s like I can’t contain it inside my body; I write, and it’s a relief.As a writer, if you know something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying. Between the various choices of fear, I still choose to write rather than not write.                 *                      *                     *For many years, I have been writing and following resistance movements and the new economic policy. I’ve always found that the chances of coming upon despair are much greater in middle-class households, than on the ground where people are actually fighting. Middle-class people have the choice between hope and despair, just like they have the choice between shampoo for dry hair and oily hair; they have the choice between doing politics and interior design. People who are fighting don’t have a choice; they are fighting and they are focused and they know what they are doing. They are arguing with each other a lot, of course, but that’s all right.When I landed in New York, one of the first things I did was to go to the Wall Street occupation, because I wanted to see who they were, what it was about, and how it connected to the things that we’ve been fighting and writing about. Regardless of what all of the various trends are, and the fact that the movement doesn’t have demands, and that it doesn’t have identifiable leaders, there is clearly still a connection between what is going on in the Occupy movement and what is going on in India. That connection is that of exclusion. These are people who are excluded. They are clearly not the four hundred families who own more wealth than half of Americans. They are not the hundred people in India who own 25 percent of India’s GDP.While many of us believe in revolution, and believe that the system must be brought down, right now, the least we can ask for to begin with is a cap on all of this. I’m a cappist and a liddite. We do need to say a few things: one is that no individual can have an unlimited amount of wealth. No corporation can have an unlimited amount of wealth. This sort of cross-ownership of businesses really has to stop.In India, the Tatas are the biggest company. They own iron ore mines, steel manufacturing plants, iodized salt, and television providers. They manufacture trucks, they fund activists, they do everything. There’s an iron ore and steel company called Jindal. They have iron ore mines, steel-making plants. The CEO is a member of Parliament. He also started the National Flag Foundation, because he won the right to fly the national flag on his house. They run a global law school just outside Delhi, which is like a Stanford campus in the midst of the most unbelievable squalor you can imagine. They have faculty flown in from all over the world paid huge salaries. They fund and promote cutting-edge artists who work in stainless steel. They recently had a protest workshop where they flew in activists to this unbelievably posh campus and then had protest poetry and protest slogans. They own everything; they own the resistance, the mines, the Parliament, the flag, the newspapers. They don’t let anything go. These are some simple things that have to stop. Berlusconi indirectly controls 90 percent of the media in Italy; so what if he’s not the prime minister?It’s a kind of insanity that could have some simple solutions, too. For example, perhaps children shouldn’t inherit the wealth their parents amass. We can all find some simple solutions like this that would point us in the right directions.

Copyright PM Press. Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet (PM Press, 2013)

Source:http://www.guernicamag.com/features/we-call-this-progress/

���Those Who���ve Tried To Change The System Via Elections Have Ended Up Being Changed By It'

On the anti-corruption movement that has implications for politics, media and the national discourse
Saba Naqvi interviews Arundhati Roy

In August last year, Arundhati Roy wrote a piece that raised important questions about the Anna Hazare movement. A lot has changed since then and Arvind Kejriwal and Anna have taken divergent paths. Kejriwal will launch a political party on November 26 and in the last few months he has, along with lawyer Prashant Bhushan, taken on powerful politicians and corporates. Saba Naqvi sent Arundhati five questions on e-mail to get her views on what is an evolving situation that has implications for politics, media and the national discourse. Here are Arundhati���s very detailed answers.


What do you make of these many corruption exposes and do you see this as a healthy development?It���s an interesting development. The good thing about it is that it gives us an insight into how the networks of power connect and interlock. The worrying thing is that each scam pushes the last one out of the way, and life goes on. If all we will get out of it is an extra-acrimonious election campaign, it can only raise the bar of what our rulers know we can tolerate, or be conned into tolerating. Scams smaller than a few lakh crores will not even catch our attention. In election season, for political parties to accuse each other of corruption or doing shady deals with corporations is not new���remember the BJP and the Shiv Sena���s campaign against Enron? Advani called it ���Looting through liberalisation���. They won that election in Maharashtra, scrapped the contract between Enron and the Congress government, and then signed a far worse one!
Also worrying is the fact that some of these ���exposes��� are strategic leaks from politicians and business houses who are spilling the beans on each other, hoping to get ahead of their rivals. Sometimes it���s across party lines, sometimes it���s intra-party jockeying. It���s being done brilliantly, and those who are being used as clearing houses to front these campaigns may not always be aware that this is the case. If in this process there was some attrition and corrupt people were being weeded out of the political arena, it would have been encouraging. But those who have been ���exposed������Salman Khurshid, Robert Vadra, Gadkari���have actually been embraced tighter by their parties. Politicians are aware of the fact that being accused or even convicted of corruption does not always make a dent in their popularity. Mayawati, Jayalalitha, Jaganmohan Reddy���they remain hugely popular leaders despite the charges that have been brought against them. While ordinary people are infuriated by corruption, it does seem as though when it comes to voting, their calculations are more shrewd, more complicated. They don���t necessarily vote for Nice Folks.


Why do you think stories that the media knew about but never carried or paid a price for carrying are suddenly coming out like a rash and new details are emerging in the process?Just because there is a new kid in town, we mustn���t forget that some media houses and several other groups and individuals, at cost to themselves, have played a part in exposing major scams, like the Commonwealth games, 2G and Coal-gate, which shone the light on private corporations and sections of the media as well. Ironically, the Anna Hazare movement last year concentrated solely on politicians and let the others off the hook. But you���re right, there are cases in which the facts were known, but they remained unpublished until now. And suddenly it���s raining corruption scams now���some are even being recycled. Corruption has become so blatant, so pathological that those involved don���t even try very hard to hide their tracks. Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan have all played an important part in making it hard for the media to elide the issue. But the sudden rash of exposes also has to do with the growing competition between the various coalitions of politicians, mega corporations and the media houses they own. For example, I do believe there is some substance to the speculation that the expose of Gadkari has to do with Narendra Modi���backed by big business���positioning himself to become the BJP���s prime ministerial candidate and trying to get hostile lobbies out of the way. Now since it���s the era of corruption and balancesheets���blood is passe. It���s strange how often you hear commentators saying that it���s time to move on from the Sangh parivar���s Gujarat pogrom against Muslims in 2002 and to look ahead. The Congress party-led ���84 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi has been forgotten too. Killers and fascists are OK as long as they are not financially corrupt? What the newest anti-corruption movement led by Kejriwal and Bhushan is doing is important work that ought really to be done by the media and investigation agencies, and by people pressurising the system from outside. I���m not sure a new political party that is going to fight elections is the right vehicle. Given how elections work in India, given the amount of money and the machinations that go into them, what does this decision to stand for elections mean? There is a reason why the big political parties gleefully invite everybody to stand for elections. They know they control the arena, they want to turn newcomers into clowns in their circus, and wear them down by having to perform endlessly before a carnivorous media.
Many have walked this plank before. If, for example, Kejriwal���s party wins just a few seats, or none at all, what would it imply? That the majority of Indian people are pro-corruption? What stands exposed in all of this, other than the grand nexus between politicians and business houses, is that the media is struggling with its role as the ���Fourth Estate���. A new political party, however good or honest, is not going to be able to resolve that anytime soon, because that is a structural problem. The media is hobbled by its economics. Recently in an interview, Vineet Jain of the Times Group was disarmingly frank when he said the Times Group was not in the business of news, but in the business of advertising. Apart from this, we have the problem of paid news and of outright ownership. Industrialists have always owned newspapers, but the scale of the operation has changed. Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), for example, recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels. Sometimes it���s the other way around: we have media houses own mining companies. Dainik Bhaskar, with a readership of 17 million, owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate and textiles. And then, of course, we have the newspapers and TV channels owned by politicians like Karunanidhi, Jayalalitha, Jaganmohan Reddy and others. 
As the boundary between big business, big politics and news melts away, it���s becoming harder for journalists and reporters to do what was once considered an almost sacred duty���to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That ideal has been more or less turned on its head.



Can anti-corruption be a valid plank for a political party?I don���t think so. Corrupt politicians have shown themselves to be hugely popular. I hope Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan���s party will have more to its plank than just anti-corruption.
I think the middle-class definition of corruption���as a sort of accounting problem���isn���t necessarily everybody else���s definition. Corruption is a symptom of a widening gap between the powerful and the powerless which, in India, is one of the worst in the world. That is what needs to be addressed. Moral policing, or even actual policing, can���t be a solution. What is that meant to achieve? Making an unjust system cleaner and more efficient? Setting up a parallel government with tens of thousands of police and bureaucrats, which is what the Jan Lokpal Bill envisages, will not solve the problem. Have our police and bureaucrats shown themselves to be guardians of the poor? Which pool will these new, honest souls be culled from? In a country where a majority of the population is illegitimate in the ways in which they live and work, the Jan Lokpal Bill could easily become a weapon in the hands of the middle classes������Remove these filthy illegal slums, clear away these illegal vendors crowding the pavements������and so on. The point is how do we define corruption? If a corporate house pays a thousand crore bribe to secure a contract for a coal-field, it���s corruption. If a voter takes a thousand rupees to vote for a particular politician, it���s corruption too. If a samosa-seller pays a cop a hundred-rupee bribe for a place on the pavement, that too is corruption. But are they all the same thing? I do not mean to suggest that there shouldn���t be a grievance redressal mechanism to monitor corruption, of course there should be. But that will not solve the big problem, because the big players only become better at covering their tracks.
For a political party to view the politics of this vast and complex country through the lens of corruption is���to put it politely���inadequate. Can we understand or address the politics of caste and class, ethnicity, gender, religious chauvinism, the whole of our political history, the current process of environmental devastation���and the other myriad things that make India���s engine work, or not work���all through the narrow, brittle lens of corruption? They can only be addressed if you know your people, if you have vision and ideology, not by just changing the props or costumes activists wear on stage when one or the other group accuses them of something or the other. Being against corruption is not in itself a political ideology. Even corrupt people will say they���re against corruption.Change will come. It has to. But I doubt it will be ushered in by a new political party hoping to change the system by winning elections. Because those who have tried to change the system that way have ended up being changed by it���look what happened to the Communist parties. I think the insurrections taking place in the countryside will move towards the cities, not under any single banner, not in some orderly or revolutionary way, necessarily. It will not be pretty. But it���s inevitable.
Sections of the ruling class see the current exposes as ���anarchy���. After the Ambani, KG basin and oil issue was raised, there were some commentaries about Kejriwal and ���his leftist��� friends. Your comments on this.By ���anarchy���, I presume they mean chaos, which is not what anarchy means. May I say that what the ruling classes are engaged in today, that is anarchy, by their definition. (By the way, I don���t know which of Arvind Kejriwal���s friends is a ���leftist���.) Or are we now supposed to collapse ���chaos���, ���anarchy��� and the ���left��� into one big ball of wax?

I want to make just one very simple suggestion, and it is far from radical. Let���s say it is just a common minimum programme. We have become a country that is more or less run by private corporations. Let���s look at two of the biggest corporations who rule us today: Reliance and Tatas. Mukesh Ambani, who holds a majority controlling share in RIL, is personally worth $20 billion. RIL has a market capitalisation of $47 billion. Its business interests include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, SEZs, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. It has a controlling interest in 27 TV news and entertainment channels. It has endowed chairs in foreign universities worth millions of dollars.
The Tatas run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India���s largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, phone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, and a major brand of iodised salt. The Tatas are also hugely invested in foreign universities.
I don���t think that there are corporations like these elsewhere in the world���none with this range of business interests, that control our lives so minutely, that can hold us to ransom and can shut us down as a country if they are unhappy with the deals they are being given. This is the biggest danger facing us.What our economists like to call a level playing field is actually a machine spinning with a centrifugal force that funnels the poor out like disposable residue, and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, which is why 100 people have wealth equivalent to 25 per cent of the GDP and hundreds of millions live on less than `20 a day. It is why most of our children suffer from severe malnutrition, why two lakh farmers have killed themselves and why India is home to a majority of the world���s poor.
Whether you are Communist, Capitalist, Gandhian, Hindutva-ist, Islamist, Feminist, Ambedkarite, Environmentalist, whether you are a farmer, a businessman, journalist, writer, poet, or fool, even if you believe in privatisation and in the new economy���whatever���if you have a modicum of concern or affection, leave alone love, for this country, surely you must see that this is the clear and present danger? Even if these corporations and politicians were scrupulously honest, it is an absurd situation for a country to be in. Unless mega corporations are reined in and limited by legislation, unless the levers of such untrammelled power (which includes the power to buy politics and policymaking, justice, elections and the news) is taken away from them, unless the cross-ownership of businesses is regulated, unless the media is freed from the absolute control of big business, we are headed for a shipwreck. No amount of noise, no amount of anti-corruption campaigns, no amount of elections can stop that.


You have in the past described the system as ���hollowed out���. In that case do you see all this as a pantomime?

Pantomime is a harsh word. I see what is happening now as part of the unrest, anger and frustration that is building up in the country. Sometimes the noisiness of it makes it hard to see clearly. But unless we look things in the eye���instead of heading off in strange quixotic directions���we can look forward to the civil war, which has already begun, reaching our doorsteps very soon.




Source:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?283000

‘Those Who’ve Tried To Change The System Via Elections Have Ended Up Being Changed By It'

On the anti-corruption movement that has implications for politics, media and the national discourse
Saba Naqvi interviews Arundhati Roy

In August last year, Arundhati Roy wrote a piece that raised important questions about the Anna Hazare movement. A lot has changed since then and Arvind Kejriwal and Anna have taken divergent paths. Kejriwal will launch a political party on November 26 and in the last few months he has, along with lawyer Prashant Bhushan, taken on powerful politicians and corporates. Saba Naqvi sent Arundhati five questions on e-mail to get her views on what is an evolving situation that has implications for politics, media and the national discourse. Here are Arundhati’s very detailed answers.


What do you make of these many corruption exposes and do you see this as a healthy development?It’s an interesting development. The good thing about it is that it gives us an insight into how the networks of power connect and interlock. The worrying thing is that each scam pushes the last one out of the way, and life goes on. If all we will get out of it is an extra-acrimonious election campaign, it can only raise the bar of what our rulers know we can tolerate, or be conned into tolerating. Scams smaller than a few lakh crores will not even catch our attention. In election season, for political parties to accuse each other of corruption or doing shady deals with corporations is not new—remember the BJP and the Shiv Sena’s campaign against Enron? Advani called it ‘Looting through liberalisation’. They won that election in Maharashtra, scrapped the contract between Enron and the Congress government, and then signed a far worse one!
Also worrying is the fact that some of these ‘exposes’ are strategic leaks from politicians and business houses who are spilling the beans on each other, hoping to get ahead of their rivals. Sometimes it’s across party lines, sometimes it’s intra-party jockeying. It’s being done brilliantly, and those who are being used as clearing houses to front these campaigns may not always be aware that this is the case. If in this process there was some attrition and corrupt people were being weeded out of the political arena, it would have been encouraging. But those who have been ‘exposed’—Salman Khurshid, Robert Vadra, Gadkari—have actually been embraced tighter by their parties. Politicians are aware of the fact that being accused or even convicted of corruption does not always make a dent in their popularity. Mayawati, Jayalalitha, Jaganmohan Reddy—they remain hugely popular leaders despite the charges that have been brought against them. While ordinary people are infuriated by corruption, it does seem as though when it comes to voting, their calculations are more shrewd, more complicated. They don’t necessarily vote for Nice Folks.


Why do you think stories that the media knew about but never carried or paid a price for carrying are suddenly coming out like a rash and new details are emerging in the process?Just because there is a new kid in town, we mustn’t forget that some media houses and several other groups and individuals, at cost to themselves, have played a part in exposing major scams, like the Commonwealth games, 2G and Coal-gate, which shone the light on private corporations and sections of the media as well. Ironically, the Anna Hazare movement last year concentrated solely on politicians and let the others off the hook. But you’re right, there are cases in which the facts were known, but they remained unpublished until now. And suddenly it’s raining corruption scams now—some are even being recycled. Corruption has become so blatant, so pathological that those involved don’t even try very hard to hide their tracks. Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan have all played an important part in making it hard for the media to elide the issue. But the sudden rash of exposes also has to do with the growing competition between the various coalitions of politicians, mega corporations and the media houses they own. For example, I do believe there is some substance to the speculation that the expose of Gadkari has to do with Narendra Modi—backed by big business—positioning himself to become the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate and trying to get hostile lobbies out of the way. Now since it’s the era of corruption and balancesheets—blood is passe. It’s strange how often you hear commentators saying that it’s time to move on from the Sangh parivar’s Gujarat pogrom against Muslims in 2002 and to look ahead. The Congress party-led ’84 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi has been forgotten too. Killers and fascists are OK as long as they are not financially corrupt? What the newest anti-corruption movement led by Kejriwal and Bhushan is doing is important work that ought really to be done by the media and investigation agencies, and by people pressurising the system from outside. I’m not sure a new political party that is going to fight elections is the right vehicle. Given how elections work in India, given the amount of money and the machinations that go into them, what does this decision to stand for elections mean? There is a reason why the big political parties gleefully invite everybody to stand for elections. They know they control the arena, they want to turn newcomers into clowns in their circus, and wear them down by having to perform endlessly before a carnivorous media.
Many have walked this plank before. If, for example, Kejriwal’s party wins just a few seats, or none at all, what would it imply? That the majority of Indian people are pro-corruption? What stands exposed in all of this, other than the grand nexus between politicians and business houses, is that the media is struggling with its role as the ‘Fourth Estate’. A new political party, however good or honest, is not going to be able to resolve that anytime soon, because that is a structural problem. The media is hobbled by its economics. Recently in an interview, Vineet Jain of the Times Group was disarmingly frank when he said the Times Group was not in the business of news, but in the business of advertising. Apart from this, we have the problem of paid news and of outright ownership. Industrialists have always owned newspapers, but the scale of the operation has changed. Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), for example, recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels. Sometimes it’s the other way around: we have media houses own mining companies. Dainik Bhaskar, with a readership of 17 million, owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate and textiles. And then, of course, we have the newspapers and TV channels owned by politicians like Karunanidhi, Jayalalitha, Jaganmohan Reddy and others. 
As the boundary between big business, big politics and news melts away, it’s becoming harder for journalists and reporters to do what was once considered an almost sacred duty—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That ideal has been more or less turned on its head.



Can anti-corruption be a valid plank for a political party?I don’t think so. Corrupt politicians have shown themselves to be hugely popular. I hope Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan’s party will have more to its plank than just anti-corruption.
I think the middle-class definition of corruption—as a sort of accounting problem—isn’t necessarily everybody else’s definition. Corruption is a symptom of a widening gap between the powerful and the powerless which, in India, is one of the worst in the world. That is what needs to be addressed. Moral policing, or even actual policing, can’t be a solution. What is that meant to achieve? Making an unjust system cleaner and more efficient? Setting up a parallel government with tens of thousands of police and bureaucrats, which is what the Jan Lokpal Bill envisages, will not solve the problem. Have our police and bureaucrats shown themselves to be guardians of the poor? Which pool will these new, honest souls be culled from? In a country where a majority of the population is illegitimate in the ways in which they live and work, the Jan Lokpal Bill could easily become a weapon in the hands of the middle classes—“Remove these filthy illegal slums, clear away these illegal vendors crowding the pavements”—and so on. The point is how do we define corruption? If a corporate house pays a thousand crore bribe to secure a contract for a coal-field, it’s corruption. If a voter takes a thousand rupees to vote for a particular politician, it’s corruption too. If a samosa-seller pays a cop a hundred-rupee bribe for a place on the pavement, that too is corruption. But are they all the same thing? I do not mean to suggest that there shouldn’t be a grievance redressal mechanism to monitor corruption, of course there should be. But that will not solve the big problem, because the big players only become better at covering their tracks.
For a political party to view the politics of this vast and complex country through the lens of corruption is—to put it politely—inadequate. Can we understand or address the politics of caste and class, ethnicity, gender, religious chauvinism, the whole of our political history, the current process of environmental devastation—and the other myriad things that make India’s engine work, or not work—all through the narrow, brittle lens of corruption? They can only be addressed if you know your people, if you have vision and ideology, not by just changing the props or costumes activists wear on stage when one or the other group accuses them of something or the other. Being against corruption is not in itself a political ideology. Even corrupt people will say they’re against corruption.Change will come. It has to. But I doubt it will be ushered in by a new political party hoping to change the system by winning elections. Because those who have tried to change the system that way have ended up being changed by it—look what happened to the Communist parties. I think the insurrections taking place in the countryside will move towards the cities, not under any single banner, not in some orderly or revolutionary way, necessarily. It will not be pretty. But it’s inevitable.
Sections of the ruling class see the current exposes as ‘anarchy’. After the Ambani, KG basin and oil issue was raised, there were some commentaries about Kejriwal and “his leftist” friends. Your comments on this.By ‘anarchy’, I presume they mean chaos, which is not what anarchy means. May I say that what the ruling classes are engaged in today, that is anarchy, by their definition. (By the way, I don’t know which of Arvind Kejriwal’s friends is a ‘leftist’.) Or are we now supposed to collapse ‘chaos’, ‘anarchy’ and the ‘left’ into one big ball of wax?

I want to make just one very simple suggestion, and it is far from radical. Let’s say it is just a common minimum programme. We have become a country that is more or less run by private corporations. Let’s look at two of the biggest corporations who rule us today: Reliance and Tatas. Mukesh Ambani, who holds a majority controlling share in RIL, is personally worth $20 billion. RIL has a market capitalisation of $47 billion. Its business interests include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, SEZs, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. It has a controlling interest in 27 TV news and entertainment channels. It has endowed chairs in foreign universities worth millions of dollars.
The Tatas run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, phone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, and a major brand of iodised salt. The Tatas are also hugely invested in foreign universities.
I don’t think that there are corporations like these elsewhere in the world—none with this range of business interests, that control our lives so minutely, that can hold us to ransom and can shut us down as a country if they are unhappy with the deals they are being given. This is the biggest danger facing us.What our economists like to call a level playing field is actually a machine spinning with a centrifugal force that funnels the poor out like disposable residue, and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, which is why 100 people have wealth equivalent to 25 per cent of the GDP and hundreds of millions live on less than `20 a day. It is why most of our children suffer from severe malnutrition, why two lakh farmers have killed themselves and why India is home to a majority of the world’s poor.
Whether you are Communist, Capitalist, Gandhian, Hindutva-ist, Islamist, Feminist, Ambedkarite, Environmentalist, whether you are a farmer, a businessman, journalist, writer, poet, or fool, even if you believe in privatisation and in the new economy—whatever—if you have a modicum of concern or affection, leave alone love, for this country, surely you must see that this is the clear and present danger? Even if these corporations and politicians were scrupulously honest, it is an absurd situation for a country to be in. Unless mega corporations are reined in and limited by legislation, unless the levers of such untrammelled power (which includes the power to buy politics and policymaking, justice, elections and the news) is taken away from them, unless the cross-ownership of businesses is regulated, unless the media is freed from the absolute control of big business, we are headed for a shipwreck. No amount of noise, no amount of anti-corruption campaigns, no amount of elections can stop that.


You have in the past described the system as “hollowed out”. In that case do you see all this as a pantomime?

Pantomime is a harsh word. I see what is happening now as part of the unrest, anger and frustration that is building up in the country. Sometimes the noisiness of it makes it hard to see clearly. But unless we look things in the eye—instead of heading off in strange quixotic directions—we can look forward to the civil war, which has already begun, reaching our doorsteps very soon.




Source:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?283000

Roy Against the Machine

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 Normally, arriving 30 minutes early for a Sharjah book fair event at the Sharjah Expo Centre's huge conference hall would guarantee you a seat, but not this time. Every chair except for two rows of reserved seating was taken; the walls of the auditorium were lined with people. A few minutes and about a hundred people later, Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi, the president of the Emirates Publishing Association, presented Arundhati Roy to a standing ovation
.

Earlier that day, when I spoke to Roy, we talked about her work as a writer, her books and her experiences as an activist, championing human rights, environment issues and the anti-globalisation movement.
Her activities have not been without controversy. Vocal in her opposition to her country's nuclear policy, its ambitions of becoming a free market and the issue of Kashmir (she supports its independence) have incurred the wrath of Indian nationalists, and after she spent two months visiting the Maoist rebels in the Indian forests in 2010, highlighting the plight of India's tribal people, the Adivasis, she was accused of being a national traitor.However, she dismisses the idea that she's any kind of activist.
"I don't even know what an activist is," she says. "I don't know why people keep saying that I am an activist as if I'm walking around, carrying a banner all the time. I write because I have a space in which I can be heard and that is what I do. I write about my society and its issues."
Prior to meeting her, I expected the 50-year-old writer to be a fierce woman, full of angst and anger, but instead I found that she possesses both the infinite tenderness of a mother and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber, to paraphrase from The God of Small Things. Wearing a burnt orange cotton sari with an olive green blouse and long, white beads, she is a gracious woman who seems so instantly familiar that you want to greet her with a kiss on the cheek. And while her countenance may make you stop in your tracks, watch out: she carries a pen filled with the ink of ire.In her work, she is known for focusing on the uneven tug of war between global capitalism and those under its feet. When The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and sent Roy's international profile skyrocketing, she used the clout to unleash a blaze of dissent against India's nuclear ambitions, political corruption and the marginalisation of its poor and powerless.
The God of Small Things, which centres on the lives of twins, a boy and a girl, growing up in Aymanam Kerala - where Roy herself grew up - is a book that gives you butterflies in your stomach; it's filled with tastes, smells and sounds. It brings coolness to your skin and a twinge of pain to your heart. Remarkably, I can still conjure up these images after having read the book only once, 14 years ago, in 1998.
Roy is the daughter of a Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu. Her mother moved her family to Aymanam after divorcing Roy's father. It was an experience, Roy says, that strongly influenced her writing of The God of Small Things."In the Syrian Christian community, I grew up as an outsider," she recalls. "People would say: 'Why don't you go back to your father?' Then, there was the caste system, albeit a hidden one, but nonetheless very rigid. In retrospect, it was the battle to understand who you are."
The caste system is an issue that's obviously close to Roy's heart. But is there anything that can be done to change the national consciousness?


"The debate about changing the society's mindset began with Bhimrao Ramaji Ambedkar [the architect of the Indian constitution] and [Mahatma] Gandhi. The constitution was a compromise where caste was institutionalised. People like to think of Gandhi as someone that was against the caste system, but this is a lie. Gandhi himself believed in the caste system. He said that the untouchables should remain scavengers and Brahmins should take care of the spiritual needs of society - that every caste should remain where it is, but we should respect them.

"There is such intellectual dishonesty going around in India concerning him and his history. He is a fascinating figure, but he should not be someone that we cannot question or talk about - this is wrong."
Another cause Roy is associated with is anti-globalisation, a topic which she has written about extensively. Does she think her work, together with that of others such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Howard Zinn are collectively making a chink in the globalisation machine's armour?
"I think it's hard to say," she says. "There is a chink in the machine, but I don't know if it is because of our work. The machine is creating such enormous disparity, such enormous violence, that there is bound to be a blowback. How can I take credit for that? I don't know."
The God of Small Things has yet to be followed by a second novel but, after 14 years, she confirms that another is on its way. An attempt to squeeze out some details is met with a sly chuckle.
"I am writing a new novel, but when I finish it, it will be as much as a surprise to me as it is to you."




Source :
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/roy-against-the-machine

If we do not love people, what are we fighting for?

Arundhati Roy speaks at the Sharjah International Book Fair on 9th November 2012.
She moved quietly and with grace. All eyes were on her as she made her way on to a stage in front of a packed hall in Sharjah. Her greying hair and petite figure draped in a simple red  sari  belied the vibrant energy she was known for. 
Arundhati Roy's presence at the Sharjah International Book Fair 2012 was greeted with applause – it was a success even before she said her first word.
Known for her fearless criticism of governments and corporate giants, the award-winning author was at the fair to talk about 'God of Small Things', her most famous work of fiction that won the Man Booker Prize in 1997.
The air was thick with anticipation. What would she say? Here was a woman disliked by both the ruling party and opposition – a rarity in India. The Indian government often called her a rebel, a woman against globalisation and progress. The UAE was about to find out if this was true or not.
After the formal introduction and welcome, she took to the stage with the interviewer. When talking about her book, Roy said she began writing it only because of a river in Ayemenem, where she grew up. As she described how she wrote it, a smile lit up her face, and she lyrically described a beautiful river lit by a 'broken yellow moon'. Right at the beginning, it was evident that Roy was a woman who used language to empower. Her easy yet refined rhetoric exuded a calm confidence.
Arundhati Roy wants to be the voice of the downtrodden. She has been working actively to eliminate the caste system in India. She said, “the caste system continues to be the engine that drives Indian politics.” 
In her own words, she writes about 'incredible bravery and profound struggles'. In the interview, Roy emerges as a deeply sensitive human being who cares about people and issues that others hardly even notice. And her cause is very personal. She has spent two and a half weeks in the forest with guerrillas, to write about them of the experience, she said that there was the expected fighting, but she spent most of her time with them just ‘cracking up’.
Writing fiction for her was a lonely affair. Maybe that’s why she enjoys writing about real issues and real people. She feels connected to the people of her country when she writes. But is she happy doing this? The answer is thought-provoking. “Happiness is a weapon,” and she doesn’t want to be a victim.
Roy’s opinions extend beyond India as well. As expected, she was asked for her opinion Obama’s second term. Contrary to all the cries of ‘better change’ that the world has been screaming, she doesn’t think that there will be any change – for the better. According to her, Obama increased attacks in Afghanistan two-fold. How, she wonders, could he stand on that stage, hugging his daughters and wife even as he rips apart thousands of families in other parts of the world?
There were many memorable moments during Roy’s talk. One of them was when she was asked what she thinks of wearing the hijab. Her response was received with a round of applause. “Removing the hijab off women who want to wear it is not liberating them, it’s undressing them.”
So who is Arundhati Roy? Is she a human rights activist? “I don’t believe in human rights,” she is quick to respond. For her, it is jargon – a term coined by NGOs and governments to ‘evade the real issue’. 
Is she a writer? Yes, but she is much more. She is an empathetic human being who takes other people’s problems seriously. And for the rest of us, she is a picture of hope. 
Someone who doesn’t make empty promises for a better world. Someone who acknowledges that there are many more unseen, unheard people working harder than she is. Someone who we can trust – because she is more about ‘doing’ than ‘talking. She isn’t a larger than life celebrity. Arundhati Roy is simply a passionate believer in change.
By Georgina Paul
The writer is a MA Media and Communications student specializing in Journalism at Manipal University, Dubai.

All roads lead to Sharjah book fair

Arundhati Roy and Ahlam Mostaghanmi help attract record attendance

 People are descending on Sharjah International Book Fair in record-breaking numbers this year as it makes a significant impact in terms of both popularity and size. Attendance at the event has already surpassed 135,000 in the first three days.

 The annual book fair which counts itself among the biggest in the world saw a record 70,000 visitors turning out on Friday alone. The director of the fair, Ahmad Al Ameri, said: “We are delighted that so many people are coming to enjoy all the wonderful events here. It is no doubt that two very popular authors increased the visitor figures on Friday. It is particularly good to see families coming. It is important that our children grow up with a love of reading and the written word.”

 Best-selling novelist Arundhati Roy packed a hall at the fair yesterday when 2,000 people arrived to hear her speak on writing, politics, and her love for her homeland India. Roy, author of The God of Small Things, which won the 1998 Man Booker Prize for fiction, announced that she is writing a second book, but would not reveal what it is about. “Fiction is a lonely business,” she said. “Writing the book was like being in jail, the book took me over and even if I had wanted to escape from it, I couldn’t.”

Roy has written many essays on a wide range of issues that affect modern-day India. She added: “When I write essays, then I feel a part of the people of India.”

The 50-year-old also rejected the idea that she is an activist, saying: “There is something ‘missionary’ about the word activist that I don’t like.” However, much of her work focuses on the plight of the poorest and most marginalised sections of Indian society. “Writing is in my DNA. When you write you must be accurate about the detail, space and place. I think fishermen must make good writers; they spend so much time keeping quiet and plotting against the fish,” she added.

She also told the audience that, given the chance, she would not rewrite her famous novel. “I don’t have the urge to rewrite. Not because I think it is perfect but I am not the type to keep changing something when it is finished.”

Source:
    http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/society/all-roads-lead-to-sharjah-book-fair-1.1102608?utm_content=

���Fairy princess��� to ���instinctive critic���

If you ignore her legion of detractors and her yearn for criticism, Indian author Arundhati Roy can be an interesting, even affable person. Seldom does her reputation fail to precede her before she walks into a room. But she says the reputation of being an instinctive critic has been crafted for her by what she calls a ���corporate controlled press��� The author was present at the Sharjah International Book Fair and spoke to a crowded hall of book lovers on Friday.
Though she says that she finds it hard to understand the term ������human rights activist������, Roy is known across the globe to be one of India���s most controversial writers, environmentalist and human rights campaigners.
Before turning to activism and being a staunch critic of India���s political structure, the now 50-year-old author won the Man Booker prize for her first and only fictional title The God of Small Things in 1997. Overnight, her novel became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author and catapulted her to a status of what she calls being ���India���s fairy princess���. The novel is a tragic love story, which revolves around topics like politics, class relations, cultural tensions and social discrimination, which are issues still prevalent in India.
Fifteen years later, when Roy is asked if she would change anything about the book, her response is: ���When I read it now, I do not have that urge to re-write or correct it. That isn���t because it���s a perfect book but it���s because I am not that kind of a person who wants to keep fiddling with something that I���ve already done.���
���But what I find myself constantly surprised by is the fact that the book which was written all those years ago deals with certain aspects of Indian life and society and these are things which continue to haunt me and enrage me. Here I am speaking of issues like caste system, poverty, the growing communist movement in India, the extreme left, and the naxalite movement.���However, Roy believes that not much has changed with the political state of the country that was reflected in the book 15 years ago.
I have spent the last 15 years writing overtly political essays, but those concerned have not been able to deal with what is going on with the Dalit movement in India. Caste, ethnicity and religion continue to be the engine that drives Indian politics. These are things that continue to be uppermost on my mind,��� said Roy.
Since her first book, Roy has gone on to write essays on several important issues that shaped India���s political, environmental and social history.
She is a strong critic of India���s nuclear policies, the Narmada dam project, the 2002 violence in Gujarat, and more recently she voiced her opinion against anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare.Speaking about as to why she never forayed into writing fiction again, she said: ���It took me four and half years to finish the God of Small Things and I���ve never been a particularly ambitious person.��� After the release of the book in 1997, she said that she had become part of the ���Miss Universe parade���.
���But I had the space to raise a dissenting voice and if I had kept quiet, I would not be able to write with any degree of honesty again. So, I stepped off the pedestal and overnight turned from being a Fairy Princess into a seditionist. How is it possible that Indian liberal intellectuals cannot stand up and take a moral position?���
Roy believes that she is far from being a hated figure that the media would like to portray her as. ���I feel embraced, I feel loved and I feel I can go almost anywhere and say ���can you give me lunch?���
However, Roy remained stubbornly tight-lipped about her next work of fiction saying only that she ���hope(d) to finish a second book���.
Roy blames her instinctive writing tendencies in her DNA and said that she does not consider herself to be a ���great, courageous person���.
���I cannot be preening and accepting accolades about my courage. I am doing what I do and I enjoy what I do, I don���t have a choice. I am a person of instinct. But when everything around is sizzling, bubbling and boiling and I feel like there is no space in my body for my organs anymore. I feel that it is harder to keep quiet than not to write.���
Roy said that through her non-fictional writing, she felt like she was a part of the people of her country. ���Fiction is a lonely affair. But when I write non-fiction, I feel like I am a part of the people of my country, but not in a nationalistic way. I am not a nationalist in that sense.���But yet, when she was asked to suggest an alternative state to India���s problems, she skirted around the issue and said that there was a structural flaw in the way Indians imagine themselves. ���We need building blocks for a kind of intellectual honesty.���
The author interacted with the crowds and signed copies of her books for fans over the weekend at the event organised by DC Books and was also attended by Shaikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, president of the Emirates Publishers Association, and Counsul-General of India Sanjay Verma among other dignitaries.

Source :
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/todayevent/2012/November/todayevent_November12.xml&section=todayevent

‘Fairy princess’ to ‘instinctive critic’

If you ignore her legion of detractors and her yearn for criticism, Indian author Arundhati Roy can be an interesting, even affable person. Seldom does her reputation fail to precede her before she walks into a room. But she says the reputation of being an instinctive critic has been crafted for her by what she calls a “corporate controlled press” The author was present at the Sharjah International Book Fair and spoke to a crowded hall of book lovers on Friday.
Though she says that she finds it hard to understand the term ‘‘human rights activist’’, Roy is known across the globe to be one of India’s most controversial writers, environmentalist and human rights campaigners.
Before turning to activism and being a staunch critic of India’s political structure, the now 50-year-old author won the Man Booker prize for her first and only fictional title The God of Small Things in 1997. Overnight, her novel became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author and catapulted her to a status of what she calls being “India’s fairy princess”. The novel is a tragic love story, which revolves around topics like politics, class relations, cultural tensions and social discrimination, which are issues still prevalent in India.
Fifteen years later, when Roy is asked if she would change anything about the book, her response is: “When I read it now, I do not have that urge to re-write or correct it. That isn’t because it’s a perfect book but it’s because I am not that kind of a person who wants to keep fiddling with something that I’ve already done.”
“But what I find myself constantly surprised by is the fact that the book which was written all those years ago deals with certain aspects of Indian life and society and these are things which continue to haunt me and enrage me. Here I am speaking of issues like caste system, poverty, the growing communist movement in India, the extreme left, and the naxalite movement.”However, Roy believes that not much has changed with the political state of the country that was reflected in the book 15 years ago.
I have spent the last 15 years writing overtly political essays, but those concerned have not been able to deal with what is going on with the Dalit movement in India. Caste, ethnicity and religion continue to be the engine that drives Indian politics. These are things that continue to be uppermost on my mind,” said Roy.
Since her first book, Roy has gone on to write essays on several important issues that shaped India’s political, environmental and social history.
She is a strong critic of India’s nuclear policies, the Narmada dam project, the 2002 violence in Gujarat, and more recently she voiced her opinion against anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare.Speaking about as to why she never forayed into writing fiction again, she said: “It took me four and half years to finish the God of Small Things and I’ve never been a particularly ambitious person.” After the release of the book in 1997, she said that she had become part of the ‘Miss Universe parade’.
“But I had the space to raise a dissenting voice and if I had kept quiet, I would not be able to write with any degree of honesty again. So, I stepped off the pedestal and overnight turned from being a Fairy Princess into a seditionist. How is it possible that Indian liberal intellectuals cannot stand up and take a moral position?”
Roy believes that she is far from being a hated figure that the media would like to portray her as. “I feel embraced, I feel loved and I feel I can go almost anywhere and say ‘can you give me lunch?”
However, Roy remained stubbornly tight-lipped about her next work of fiction saying only that she “hope(d) to finish a second book”.
Roy blames her instinctive writing tendencies in her DNA and said that she does not consider herself to be a “great, courageous person”.
“I cannot be preening and accepting accolades about my courage. I am doing what I do and I enjoy what I do, I don’t have a choice. I am a person of instinct. But when everything around is sizzling, bubbling and boiling and I feel like there is no space in my body for my organs anymore. I feel that it is harder to keep quiet than not to write.”
Roy said that through her non-fictional writing, she felt like she was a part of the people of her country. “Fiction is a lonely affair. But when I write non-fiction, I feel like I am a part of the people of my country, but not in a nationalistic way. I am not a nationalist in that sense.”But yet, when she was asked to suggest an alternative state to India’s problems, she skirted around the issue and said that there was a structural flaw in the way Indians imagine themselves. “We need building blocks for a kind of intellectual honesty.”
The author interacted with the crowds and signed copies of her books for fans over the weekend at the event organised by DC Books and was also attended by Shaikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, president of the Emirates Publishers Association, and Counsul-General of India Sanjay Verma among other dignitaries.

Source :
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/todayevent/2012/November/todayevent_November12.xml&section=todayevent