Arundhati Roy's Blog, page 3

Edward Said Memorial Lecture 2012. 'Politics of Dispossession'

Capitalism: A Ghost Story is based on the Edward Said memorial Lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Princeton on March 5th. These were her preliminary comments:_________________________________________


"I met Professor Edward Said only once, towards the end of his life. As we said goodbye, he took my hand and said "You must never forget Palestine." As if I could. As if any of us could.

Though my talk today is not about Palestine, I am here in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people. And with the people of Iran who are being bullied by sanctions and threatened with war.

Until the early '90s, before it deferred to the Washington Consensus and opened its markets to global capital, the Government of India was a friend of Palestine and Iran. Since then it has had to 'Structural Adjust' its foreign policy too, and now calls itself a 'natural ally' of the US and Israel. Even so, in India it is still easier for people, to express solidarity with the people of Palestine while maintaining a discreet and dishonest silence about the ugly military occupation in their own backyard, where more than half a million Indian soldiers occupy the tiny valley of Kashmir, littering it with mass graves, torture centers and army camps. I would like to reiterate once again my solidarity with the people of Kashmir, in their struggle against the Indian Occupation. And with all those who have had their freedom snatched away from them by a checkbook, or a cruise missile, or a combination of the two.

The title of my lecture was supposed to be 'The Politics of Dispossession.' I am actually going to speak about a less studied—but closely related subject—The Politics of Possession.

My talk today, is called 'Capitalism: A Ghost Story'. It begins in Mumbai, outside the gates of a tall building called Antilla…

For the rest of the lecture, read the essay - link here

http://arundhatiroysays.blogspot.in/2012/03/capitalism-ghost-story-arundhati-roy.html

Edward Said Memorial Lecture by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is scheduled to give the Edward Said Memorial Lecture on 5th of March 2012, at Princeton University at 5.00 pm. The lecture is sponsored by the English Department.

Please contact the university regarding availability of seats if you would like to attend.

Here :http://english.princeton.edu/component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,108/extid,487/extmode,view/

Arundhati Roy on national security and the Indian media

The award-winning Indian novelist and activist speaks to Manav Bhushan about the limits to free speech in India, including government censorship through the media and "goon squads".
Author and activist Arundhati Roy released from jail (Photo by Sondeep Shankar/Getty Images)
MB: Do you think there should be any restrictions on the freedom of speech, justified on the grounds of national security, public order or morality?

AR: No. I am completely against any restrictions. Once you have restrictions, they lend themselves to interpretation and the interpretations will always favour the state or the powers that be. So I am completely against any restrictions.

MB: Examples in India and previously in Europe show that fascism begins with speeches, which breed hatred and appeal to the baser instincts of society. Do you think we need to control hate speech by members of the majority against minorities?

AR: I don't think it would be fair to say that fascism begins with speeches. There were a lot of factors which led to fascism in different countries. Speech was just a form of expression. I don't think that if there had been limits to free speech there would have been no fascism. To shut it out would be counter-productive. Certainly, I think in India the problem doesn't lie with hate speech. The problem lies with the fact that when acts of communal violence are committed, when states are happily sponsoring pogroms and murders then nothing happens.

It's not the speech which is a problem, it's the action. So if you say that you live in a society with laws regarding murder, mass murder, burning people to death and rape, and you don't take any action on that, and you want to control hate speech through a law, then that law will simply be misused. If you look at India today, I think a lot of people who don't do hate speech are charged with hate speech. For example, if I say that having 700,000 soldiers patrolling Kashmir is unacceptable, someone says that's hate speech. So I don't think that great politics or history come from the expression of people through speech. It comes from what you allow people to do to one another in a country or in a society.

MB: You mentioned your statements regarding Kashmir and the reactions from parties like the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and others. Do you think that India is moving towards more freedom of expression or less?

AR: The reactions to the things that I say about Kashmir don't come only from the BJP. They come from the congress as well. It immediately coagulates into some kind of nationalist agenda with these parties trying to out-do each other to prove their mettle as the leaders of a nation without morality, without ethics. But when it comes to silencing us, the first card they pull out is moral or ethical. But no, actually I think in India a few things are happening.

One is that there is a huge amount of noise. Perhaps it's because we have more television channels than any other country in the world. All are increasingly falling into the hands of major corporations, which have a major conflict of interest because those are the same corporations, which are making a lot of money in the privatisation of resources, in telecommunications etc. And now they are able to control the media entirely, either directly, or through advertising. So that's one form of control that is happening.

The second form of control is when the state itself goes after people for speaking about things that it does not wish them to speak about. And the third is that there has been a great outsourcing of censorship. So political parties outsource their ire to goon squads, who beat people in their homes or trash them, and create an atmosphere where you begin to have to think twice. It's important to think twice or three times before you speak on important things but you begin to think twice before saying things which ought to be said because of fear.

So this outsourcing allows the government to continue to pretend that it's democratic and that it allows free speech, but in fact in all these ways control is being exerted, from the corporates, from the goons, and also from the courts. Even the judiciary is misused hugely by political parties. For instance I have numerous cases filed against me wherever I speak so that you are just hunted down by these people in these little ways so that eventually they can just frighten you or tire you into keeping quiet. So, it isn't like a dictatorship where everyone knows what's going on and nobody is allowed to say anything; it's done in a far more sophisticated way. And now of course they are planning to control the internet.

MB: What do you think is the way out of this corporatisation of the media and the control by private parties which is witnessed not just in India, but also in countries such as the USA. And do you think that the internet provides a way out because it lowers the bar to entry?

AR: Well, I'm sure that the reason that the government is considering clamping down on the internet is because major players are worried about the fact that while they are managing to control TV and newspapers, etc, the internet still provides a space for people to tell things which need to be told. But eventually the way out, I mean ideally the way out – not just regarding the media, but regarding so many things – is that the cross-ownership of businesses really has to stop. You cannot allow major corporations, which are slowly getting a grip on everything, from water to electricity to minerals to telecommunications to control the media in the way that it is. I mean that kind of conflict of interests has to stop. So, eventually there ought to be some kind of legislation that ensures that the media cannot be controlled in this way.

MB: Do you think that the BBC model, or the kind of model that they have in Germany where you have a statutory body controlling the media, which is answerable to a parliamentary committee, would offer a more neutral medium which would allow people to get at the facts?

AR: Well, I think compared to what is going on it would be comparatively better, but I don't think that the BBC is entirely neutral. I mean if you look at the scenario of world politics, you still have to ask why media channels are extremely concerned about deaths in some places but when there is three years of continuous uprising in Kashmir, it's not covered. So why do they cherry pick and what is the politics behind it? But certainly I think it's a starting point. I don't think it's that difficult to come up with a model where there is a way of making the media more independent. Obviously it's never going to be perfect. But right now they are talking about moving in the direction of independence or moving in the direction of, not just complete control, but almost brainwashing which goes on in India certainly in many of the TV channels. You find a situation where they have so much power and they are misusing it to such a great extent that it becomes very very dangerous.

In some of my essays I talk about how the superintendent of police in Chhattisgarh told me that, "Look, there is no point in sending the police and the army out to clear the land…" He didn't say "for the mining companies" but it was understood that that's what he meant. He said, "All you have to do is put a TV in every tribal person's house. The problem with these people is that they don't understand greed." So it's not such a superficial game, it's a very deep business. The business of what's happening on television and what's being sold. It's not just potato chips and air-conditioners, it's a whole philosophy. It's a whole way of thinking that is utterly destructive, which has already destroyed so many people, and the idea is to destroy more and more.

MB: So you have written extensively about the problems in central eastern India (Chhattisgarh), where mining corporations are trying to take over the lands of the tribals there. You've also said Gandhian protests, like the one by Anna Hazare, require an audience, which doesn't exist for the tribals in Chhattisgarh. In which kind of scenario do you think that violence becomes a necessary, if not legitimate, form of expressing anguish and the need for justice?

AR: I think I might argue with you about the use of the word "violence", as well as linking the word "violence" to a form of expression. Because if violence is a form of expression, then it would suggest something cultish. It is not that. I think what is happening there is really a desperate form of defence. Of self-defence for their homeland. It's not like they arbitrarily decided to become violent. And violence is a word that the middle class and particularly the people in these TV studios like to use because it has a very different connotation from the idea of resistance or an armed struggle by a mass of people. Violence also links up with terrorism, and I don't think you can accuse these people in Chhattisgarh, who are fighting and who are being called terrorists, of violence just because they have refused to come out of the jungle and joined these police camps. So it doesn't mean that the people who are in the jungle are terrorists and Maoists.

The whole situation is that in the colonial time, the tribal people were pushed under siege by the colonial powers. But when independence came, the Indian constitution actually perpetuated colonial law, and said that the tribal lands belonged to the forest department. So it criminalised these indigenous people and their way of life. And today they have been promoted from the status of common criminals to that of terrorists. So if you don't come out of the forests, if you plant your seeds, if you live in your village, you are a Maoist terrorist and are liable to be shot on sight. So then you have a situation where a thousand security personnel surround a village, set fire to it, and rape the women, or murder its people. And there is a reaction or a response, which may not be right somewhere else, then it's called terrorism, it's called violence.

I mean you have 200,000 security forces in that forest and you have the government of India,which calls itself a superpower now, and you are planning to deploy the army and airforce against the poorest people in the world. So there, it's no longer about expression, it's about war. So Gandhian forms of protest in the cities are required. I mean I have nothing against it. I mean just because it's a Gandhian protest doesn't mean they are protesting for the right cause or asking for the right things. But it is a very effective theatre, as Gandhiji himself showed. But I think it needs an audience and it needs a middle class, a sympathetic middle class. Otherwise if people go on a hunger fast in the Bhatti mines or some other obscure place, then who cares? You need the media. You need the middle class. And you need an audience.

MB: Many people would argue that the problem which plagues the Indian media is similar to the problem which plagues Indian democracy in general: that it runs after populism, it runs after things which capture the imagination of the middle class and people in general. That's why there is no sympathy for marginalised people or marginalised causes. And that explains the difference in the kind of attention that Anna Hazare's fast gets and the kind of attention that Irom Sharmila's fast received. So what do you think of the comparison between Anna Hazare and Irom Sharmila, who were using the same method of expressing themselves?
AR: Here again I think there are some threads, which need to be separated. One is that, the word "populism" is an interesting one. Because populism and the middle class are two separate things. So you have a situation where the rituals of democracy, the rhetoric of democracy, requires you to talk about the poor and lower castes, and so on. But what it delivers, it delivers only to the middle class. And the media, especially the big media, the mass media – because 90% of its revenues come from advertising consumer products – is only geared for that middle class. That middle class is the market; it is the consumer of all these international consumer goods. That's why all the international financial companies and businesses have their eyes on them. And that middle class exists at the cost of a much larger underclass. I read the other day that we have more poor people in India than the 26 poorest countries of Africa put together. That middle class is the market and so populism only applies to them, not to the whole population.

But the issue with Anna Hazare and Irom Sharmila is different. Irom Sharmila is also a middle class person, and there are plenty of middle class people in Manipur who support her. But that's the nationalism issue. Her stage is a much smaller one and the middle class population (of India as a whole) is very hostile to that. Or at the most it might say, "Oh poor thing", but we can't do anything about the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which is a law that allows even non-commissioned officers in the Army to shoot on suspicion, and which has been abused in Manipur, to rape and kill women, which is why Irom Sharmila is fasting to get the AFSPA repealed. But far from being repealed, this act has been extended to Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir and today the reason that the army has not been deployed in Chhattisgarh yet, is that the army refuses to be deployed unless it has the protection and the impunity that the AFSPA would offer. So, it's slightly different. The Anna Hazare movement appealed across the board to the middle class of India whereas Manipur is a sort of secessionist, anti-national struggle against the army.

MB: With regard to Manipur and Kashmir, which go against the concept of nationalism, there appears to be a huge divergence in what people regard as facts. For example, there is no consensus on how many people are tortured in Kashmir, or how many women have been raped. And there seems to be this gulf between the people who are there and the people who speak from outside of this concept of nationalism. Do you think this gulf is a result of the restrictions imposed by the Indian state on the freedom of speech or is there some other explanation for this?

AR: Well, obviously, that is one huge explanation for that. But the issue with Kashmir is that we can't even say it is the "Indian state" because the Indian elite has fused into the Indian state in some ways. That's the difference between a democracy like ours and a dictatorship – that the sort of upper classes have fused into the state, so they are as nationalist as the state. So I don't think you need a knock on the door by the Indian state of the editors of the big newspapers, because they are happy to comply with that kind of censorship. And anybody who goes to Kashmir just has to get out of the airport and all of a sudden you know that you are in an occupy zone. And it doesn't take long to figure out how dense that occupation is and how closely supervised not just the media, but everything that happens there is. And certainly it's not just the Indian journalists who are reporting out of Kashmir, but even Kashmiri journalists are either threatened, or co-opted. Many of them will not be hired unless they have been approved by the authorities. And to have a 24-hour military occupation for 20 years, it's like the control has seeped into the groundwater. It comes out of the taps when you put the tap on. It's so sophisticated the ways in which they control people. So yes, sure that is one of the main things.

What is very interesting is that while there is all this control over the media, if you're a foreign journalist or a foreign academic then you require security clearance to come into India. If you're a businessman, you don't. If you want to buy a mine or sell a mine, it's fine, but if you're an academic or a journalist, you need security clearance. And at the same time, there is this rash of literary festivals in India. Ten years ago there was a rash of beauty contests and today there is a rash of literary festivals. Everywhere you go there is a literary festival being sponsored by mining companies, by infrastructure companies, big corporations, and by the government. And you have writers coming and going. I don't know what kind of visas they get. I don't think they need any security clearance. And if you wanted to have a literary festival in Kashmir, like the Sri Lankan government is having a literary festival after a war in which 40,000 people were massacred. So there is this kind of false celebration of freedom of expression. So I think we've reached a period where we are way beyond the "manufacture of consent". We now have the manufacture of dissent, you have the manufacture of news itself, and you have a kind of ritualisation of free speech to a point where nothing can be heard. Or then you clamp down. So it's quite a sophisticated game that goes on.

MB: So, by and large, do you think that we have a sophisticated kind of PR campaign which gives the stamp of appearing to be a democracy, which allows freedom of expression, but at the same time very closely monitors the kind of content that is allowed to come out and the way that it projects the image of India?

AR: In America, for example, you have this sophisticated legislation regarding free speech, where they have auctioned the platforms off to the highest bidders. So it's too expensive for ordinary people to afford free speech. It isn't really free. Here too that has happened, but what we do have, on the positive side in India, is firstly that you have this large population that is outside the newspaper, but they are showing about in TV. But there is this kind of anarchy, where these people can't control the entire population that easily yet. You have a lot of pamphlets and little newspapers and magazines and maverick things that are going on, which I think are wonderful. And you do have a lot of activity on the internet, Facebook and other social media, which the government is trying to clamp down on.

See, while it takes a lot of energy out of us to try and decode what is going on, it also takes a lot of energy out of them to have to keep pretending to be this great democracy and dealing with it in ways which would be different from say China, which would just clamp down. And the silencing of the media in China or in other openly dictatorial countries is different from what is happening here. Here, I think it is a battle of wit and it is Brahmanical in its cunningness. But it's moved beyond the Manusmrti, where you poured lead into a Dalit's ear if he overheard something. It's moved beyond that, but the sentiments are not that different. And the profits to be made out of appearing to be a democracy and having all this wonderful media and all that also have to be put into the balance sheets. India does gain a lot of brownie points from appearing to be a democracy, which is why nobody says half as much about Kashmir as they will about Tibet or about the uprising in the Middle East. So when major media start reporting very enthusiastically about one uprising, and keeps very quiet about another, you have to work it out – why is it happening? What's the story here?

This is the lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted by Manav Bushan for Free Speech Debate in January 2012

Source:
http://freespeechdebate.com/en/discus...

Arundhati Roy: Foreword to “Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy”

“….But Anuradha was different”– by Arundhati Roy


"Comrade Anu" -- Anuradha Ghandy
That is what everyone who knew Anuradha Ghandy says. That is what almost everyone whose life she touched thinks.

She died in a Mumbai hospital on the morning of 12 April 2008, of malaria. She had probably picked it up in the jungles of Jharkhand where she had been teaching study classes to a group of Adivasi women. In this great democracy of ours, Anuradha Ghandy was what is known as a ‘Maoist terrorist,’ liable to be ar­rested, or, more likely, shot in a fake ‘encounter,’ like hundreds of her colleagues have been. When this terrorist got high fever and went to a hospital to have her blood tested, she left a false name and a dud phone number with the doctor who was treating her. So he could not get through to her to tell her that the tests showed that she had the potentially fatal malaria falciparum. Anuradha’s organs began to fail, one by one. By the time she was admitted to the hospital on 11 April, it was too late. And so, in this entirely unnecessary way, we lost her.
She was 54 years old when she died, and had spent more than 30 years of her life, most of them underground, as a committed revolutionary.




I never had the good fortune of meeting Anuradha Ghandy, but when I attended the memorial service after she died I could tell that she was, above all, a woman who was not just greatly admired, but one who had been deeply loved. I was a little puz­zled at the constant references that people who knew her made to her ‘sacrifices.’ Presumably, by this, they meant that she had sac­rificed the comfort and security of a middle-class life, for radical politics. To me, however, Anuradha Ghandy comes across as someone who happily traded in tedium and banality to follow her dream. She was no saint or missionary. She lived an exhilarating life that was hard, but fulfilling.

The young Anuradha, like so many others of her generation, was inspired by the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. As a stu­dent in Elphinstone College, she was deeply affected by the fam­ine that stalked rural Maharashtra in the 1970s. It was working with the victims of desperate hunger that set her thinking and pitch-forked her into her journey into militant politics. She be­gan her working life as a lecturer in Wilson College in Mumbai, but by 1982 she shifted to Nagpur. Over the next few years, she worked in Nagpur, Chandrapur, Amravati, Jabalpur and Yavatmal, organizing the poorest of the poor — construction workers, coal-mine workers — and deepening her understand­ing of the Dalit movement. In the late 1990s, even though she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she went to Bastar and lived in the Dandakaranya forest with the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) for three years. Here, she worked to strengthen and expand the extraordinary women’s organization, perhaps the biggest feminist organization in the country — the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan (KAMS) that has more than 90,000 members. The KAMS is probably one of India’s best kept secrets. Anuradha always said that the most fulfilling years of her life were these years that she spent with the People’s War (now CPI-Maoist) guerillas in Dandakaranya. When I visited the area almost two years after Anuradha’s death, I shared her awe and excitement about the KAMS and had to re-think some of my own easy assumptions about women and armed struggle. In an essay in this collection, writing under the pseudonym Avanti, Anuradha says:

As we approach March 8, early in the dawn of this new century remarkable developments are taking place on the women’s front in India. Deep in the forests and plains of central India, in the backward villages of Andhra Pradesh and up in the hills among the tribals in the state, in the forests and plains of Bihar and Jharkhand women are getting organized actively to break the shackles of feudal patriarchy and make the New Democratic Rev­olution. It is a women’s liberation movement of peasant women in rural India, a part of the people’s war being waged by the op­pressed peasantry under revolutionary leadership. For the past few years thousands of women are gathering in hundreds of vil­lages to celebrate 8 March. Women are gathering together to march through the streets of a small town like Narayanpur to op­pose the Miss World beauty contest, they are marching with their children through the tehsil towns and market villages in back­ward Bastar to demand proper schooling for their children. They are blocking roads to protest against rape cases, and confronting the police to demand that the sale of liquor be banned. And hun­dreds of young women are becoming guerrilla fighters in the army of the oppressed, throwing off the shackles of their tradi­tional life of drudgery. Dressed in fatigues, a red star on their ol­ive green caps, a rifle on their shoulders, these young women brimming with the confidence that the fight against patriarchy is integrally linked to the fight against the ruling classes of this semi-feudal, semi-colonial India, are equipping themselves with the military knowledge to take on the third largest army of the exploiters. This is a social and political awakening among the poorest of the poor women in rural India. It is a scenario that has emerged far from the unseeing eyes of the bourgeois media, far from the flash and glitter of TV cameras. They are the signs of a transformation coming into the lives of the rural poor as they par­ticipate in the great struggle for revolution.
But this revolutionary women’s movement has not emerged overnight, and nor has it emerged spontaneously merely from propaganda. The women’s movement has grown with the growth of armed struggle. Contrary to general opinion, the launching of armed struggle in the early 1980s by the communist revolutionary forces in various parts of the country, the militant struggle against feudal oppression gave the confidence to peasant women to par­ticipate in struggles in large numbers and then to stand up and fight for their rights. Women who constitute the most oppressed among the oppressed, poor peasant and landless peasant women, who have lacked not only an identity and voice but also a name, have become activists for the women’s organizations in their vil­lages and guerrilla fighters. Thus with the spread and growth of the armed struggle the women’s mobilization and women’s or­ganization have also grown, leading to the emergence of this revo­lutionary women’s movement, one of the strongest and most powerful women’s movements in the country today. But it is un­recognized and ignored, a ploy of the ruling classes that will try to suppress any news and acknowledgement as long as it can.
Her obvious enthusiasm for the women’s movement in Dandakaranya did not blind her to the problems that women comrades faced within the revolutionary movement. At the time of her death, that is what she was working on — how to purge the Maoist Party of the vestiges of continuing discrimination against women and the various shades of patriarchy that stubbornly per­sisted among those male comrades who called themselves revolu­tionary. In the time I spent with the PLGA in Bastar, many com­rades remembered her with such touching affection. Comrade Janaki was the name they knew her by. They had a worn photo­graph of her, in fatigues and her huge trademark glasses, stand­ing in the forest, beaming, with a rifle slung over her shoulder.
She’s gone now — Anu, Avanti, Janaki. And she’s left her com­rades with a sense of loss they may never get over. She has left be­hind this sheaf of paper, these writings, notes and essays. And I have been given the task of introducing them to a wider audience.

It has been hard to work out how to read these writings. Clearly, they were not written with a view to be published as a collection. At first reading they could seem somewhat basic, often repetitive, a little didactic. But a second and third reading made me see them differently. I see them now as Anuradha’s notes to herself. Their sketchy, uneven quality, the fact that some of her assertions explode off the page like hand-grenades, makes them that much more personal. Reading through them you catch glimpses of the mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic but was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the ter­rible injustices she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought. Having decided to do something real and urgent for the country she lived in, and the people she lived amongst, in these writings, Anuradha tries to tell us (and herself) why she became a Marxist-Leninist and not a liberal activist, or a radical feminist, or an eco-feminist or an Ambedkarite. To do this, she takes us on a basic guided tour of a history of these movements, with quick thumb-nail analyses of various ideologies, ticking off their advan­tages and drawbacks like a teacher correcting an examination pa­per with a thick fluorescent marker. The insights and observations sometimes lapse into easy sloganeering, but often they are pro­found and occasionally they’re epiphanic — and could only have come from someone who has a razor sharp political mind and knows her subject intimately, from observation and experience, not merely from history and sociology textbooks.

Perhaps Anuradha Ghandy’s greatest contribution, in her writing, as well as the politics she practiced, is her work on gender and on Dalit issues. She is sharply critical of the orthodox Marxist interpretation of caste (‘caste is class’) as being somewhat intellec­tually lazy. She points out that her own party has made mistakes in the past in not being able to understand the caste issue properly. She critiques the Dalit movement for turning into an identity strug­gle, reformist not revolutionary, futile in its search for justice with­in an intrinsically unjust social system. She believes that without dismantling patriarchy and the caste-system, brick, by painful brick, there can be no New Democratic Revolution.In her writings on caste and gender, Anuradha Ghandy shows us a mind and an attitude that is unafraid of nuance, unafraid of engaging with dogma, unafraid of telling it like it is — to her comrades as well as to the system that she fought against all her life. What a woman she was.
- Arundhati Roy





Source:
Scripting the Change:

Editors: Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen

Year: 2012[2011]
Pages: xxiv+480
Publisher: Daanish Books




http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/arundhati-roy-foreword-to-scripting-the-change-selected-writings-of-anuradha-ghandy/

Arundhati Roy: Foreword to "Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy"

"….But Anuradha was different"– by Arundhati Roy


"Comrade Anu" -- Anuradha Ghandy
That is what everyone who knew Anuradha Ghandy says. That is what almost everyone whose life she touched thinks.

She died in a Mumbai hospital on the morning of 12 April 2008, of malaria. She had probably picked it up in the jungles of Jharkhand where she had been teaching study classes to a group of Adivasi women. In this great democracy of ours, Anuradha Ghandy was what is known as a 'Maoist terrorist,' liable to be ar­rested, or, more likely, shot in a fake 'encounter,' like hundreds of her colleagues have been. When this terrorist got high fever and went to a hospital to have her blood tested, she left a false name and a dud phone number with the doctor who was treating her. So he could not get through to her to tell her that the tests showed that she had the potentially fatal malaria falciparum. Anuradha's organs began to fail, one by one. By the time she was admitted to the hospital on 11 April, it was too late. And so, in this entirely unnecessary way, we lost her.
She was 54 years old when she died, and had spent more than 30 years of her life, most of them underground, as a committed revolutionary.




I never had the good fortune of meeting Anuradha Ghandy, but when I attended the memorial service after she died I could tell that she was, above all, a woman who was not just greatly admired, but one who had been deeply loved. I was a little puz­zled at the constant references that people who knew her made to her 'sacrifices.' Presumably, by this, they meant that she had sac­rificed the comfort and security of a middle-class life, for radical politics. To me, however, Anuradha Ghandy comes across as someone who happily traded in tedium and banality to follow her dream. She was no saint or missionary. She lived an exhilarating life that was hard, but fulfilling.

The young Anuradha, like so many others of her generation, was inspired by the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. As a stu­dent in Elphinstone College, she was deeply affected by the fam­ine that stalked rural Maharashtra in the 1970s. It was working with the victims of desperate hunger that set her thinking and pitch-forked her into her journey into militant politics. She be­gan her working life as a lecturer in Wilson College in Mumbai, but by 1982 she shifted to Nagpur. Over the next few years, she worked in Nagpur, Chandrapur, Amravati, Jabalpur and Yavatmal, organizing the poorest of the poor — construction workers, coal-mine workers — and deepening her understand­ing of the Dalit movement. In the late 1990s, even though she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she went to Bastar and lived in the Dandakaranya forest with the People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) for three years. Here, she worked to strengthen and expand the extraordinary women's organization, perhaps the biggest feminist organization in the country — the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan (KAMS) that has more than 90,000 members. The KAMS is probably one of India's best kept secrets. Anuradha always said that the most fulfilling years of her life were these years that she spent with the People's War (now CPI-Maoist) guerillas in Dandakaranya. When I visited the area almost two years after Anuradha's death, I shared her awe and excitement about the KAMS and had to re-think some of my own easy assumptions about women and armed struggle. In an essay in this collection, writing under the pseudonym Avanti, Anuradha says:

As we approach March 8, early in the dawn of this new century remarkable developments are taking place on the women's front in India. Deep in the forests and plains of central India, in the backward villages of Andhra Pradesh and up in the hills among the tribals in the state, in the forests and plains of Bihar and Jharkhand women are getting organized actively to break the shackles of feudal patriarchy and make the New Democratic Rev­olution. It is a women's liberation movement of peasant women in rural India, a part of the people's war being waged by the op­pressed peasantry under revolutionary leadership. For the past few years thousands of women are gathering in hundreds of vil­lages to celebrate 8 March. Women are gathering together to march through the streets of a small town like Narayanpur to op­pose the Miss World beauty contest, they are marching with their children through the tehsil towns and market villages in back­ward Bastar to demand proper schooling for their children. They are blocking roads to protest against rape cases, and confronting the police to demand that the sale of liquor be banned. And hun­dreds of young women are becoming guerrilla fighters in the army of the oppressed, throwing off the shackles of their tradi­tional life of drudgery. Dressed in fatigues, a red star on their ol­ive green caps, a rifle on their shoulders, these young women brimming with the confidence that the fight against patriarchy is integrally linked to the fight against the ruling classes of this semi-feudal, semi-colonial India, are equipping themselves with the military knowledge to take on the third largest army of the exploiters. This is a social and political awakening among the poorest of the poor women in rural India. It is a scenario that has emerged far from the unseeing eyes of the bourgeois media, far from the flash and glitter of TV cameras. They are the signs of a transformation coming into the lives of the rural poor as they par­ticipate in the great struggle for revolution.
But this revolutionary women's movement has not emerged overnight, and nor has it emerged spontaneously merely from propaganda. The women's movement has grown with the growth of armed struggle. Contrary to general opinion, the launching of armed struggle in the early 1980s by the communist revolutionary forces in various parts of the country, the militant struggle against feudal oppression gave the confidence to peasant women to par­ticipate in struggles in large numbers and then to stand up and fight for their rights. Women who constitute the most oppressed among the oppressed, poor peasant and landless peasant women, who have lacked not only an identity and voice but also a name, have become activists for the women's organizations in their vil­lages and guerrilla fighters. Thus with the spread and growth of the armed struggle the women's mobilization and women's or­ganization have also grown, leading to the emergence of this revo­lutionary women's movement, one of the strongest and most powerful women's movements in the country today. But it is un­recognized and ignored, a ploy of the ruling classes that will try to suppress any news and acknowledgement as long as it can.
Her obvious enthusiasm for the women's movement in Dandakaranya did not blind her to the problems that women comrades faced within the revolutionary movement. At the time of her death, that is what she was working on — how to purge the Maoist Party of the vestiges of continuing discrimination against women and the various shades of patriarchy that stubbornly per­sisted among those male comrades who called themselves revolu­tionary. In the time I spent with the PLGA in Bastar, many com­rades remembered her with such touching affection. Comrade Janaki was the name they knew her by. They had a worn photo­graph of her, in fatigues and her huge trademark glasses, stand­ing in the forest, beaming, with a rifle slung over her shoulder.
She's gone now — Anu, Avanti, Janaki. And she's left her com­rades with a sense of loss they may never get over. She has left be­hind this sheaf of paper, these writings, notes and essays. And I have been given the task of introducing them to a wider audience.

It has been hard to work out how to read these writings. Clearly, they were not written with a view to be published as a collection. At first reading they could seem somewhat basic, often repetitive, a little didactic. But a second and third reading made me see them differently. I see them now as Anuradha's notes to herself. Their sketchy, uneven quality, the fact that some of her assertions explode off the page like hand-grenades, makes them that much more personal. Reading through them you catch glimpses of the mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic but was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the ter­rible injustices she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought. Having decided to do something real and urgent for the country she lived in, and the people she lived amongst, in these writings, Anuradha tries to tell us (and herself) why she became a Marxist-Leninist and not a liberal activist, or a radical feminist, or an eco-feminist or an Ambedkarite. To do this, she takes us on a basic guided tour of a history of these movements, with quick thumb-nail analyses of various ideologies, ticking off their advan­tages and drawbacks like a teacher correcting an examination pa­per with a thick fluorescent marker. The insights and observations sometimes lapse into easy sloganeering, but often they are pro­found and occasionally they're epiphanic — and could only have come from someone who has a razor sharp political mind and knows her subject intimately, from observation and experience, not merely from history and sociology textbooks.

Perhaps Anuradha Ghandy's greatest contribution, in her writing, as well as the politics she practiced, is her work on gender and on Dalit issues. She is sharply critical of the orthodox Marxist interpretation of caste ('caste is class') as being somewhat intellec­tually lazy. She points out that her own party has made mistakes in the past in not being able to understand the caste issue properly. She critiques the Dalit movement for turning into an identity strug­gle, reformist not revolutionary, futile in its search for justice with­in an intrinsically unjust social system. She believes that without dismantling patriarchy and the caste-system, brick, by painful brick, there can be no New Democratic Revolution.In her writings on caste and gender, Anuradha Ghandy shows us a mind and an attitude that is unafraid of nuance, unafraid of engaging with dogma, unafraid of telling it like it is — to her comrades as well as to the system that she fought against all her life. What a woman she was.
- Arundhati Roy





Source:
Scripting the Change:

Editors: Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen

Year: 2012[2011]
Pages: xxiv+480
Publisher: Daanish Books




http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/arundhati-roy-foreword-to-scripting-the-change-selected-writings-of-anuradha-ghandy/

Arundhati Roy on the Salman Rushdie Controversy at the Jaipur Lit Fest

Team Anna advocating un-Gandhian law: Arundhati Roy

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Noting that the anti-corruption agitation by Team Anna is a 'corporate-sponsored media campaign', writer Arundhati Roy on Friday said that the law (Lokpal) they are advocating is 'un-Gandhian'.

Roy also criticised Team Anna for keeping mum on corporate power and cross-ownership of business.
"Their anti-corruption agitation was a corporate- sponsored media campaign and hence Team Anna chose to remain silent," she said, adding that even though the movement was said to follow Gandhian principles, the law they advocate is highly 'un-Gandhian'.

"They want a centralised, draconian agency with powers to prosecute, investigate and punish," she said, while delivering the 4th Anuradha Ghandy memorial lecture.

"This movement did not say a word about privatisation, corporate power and economic reforms. It did not demand end to cross-ownership of businesses or laws that could dismantle concentration of wealth and power," she said, adding that there was only public mauling of politicians.

Roy said that Hazare's definition of corruption came from an accountant's imagination.

She also said that the media, 'which is hostile to people's movement, became travel agents for Anna Hazare'. According to her, the movement capitalised on genuine rage against corporate scams and fury of ordinary Indians.

"A round-the-clock corporate sponsored media campaign proclaimed it to be the voice of the people," she said.



Source:
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/nation/west/team-anna-advocating-un-gandhian-law-arundhati-roy-370

Capitalism : The Big Ghost, says Arundhati Roy

Writer/activist Arundhati Roy known to take on the establishment, took on the country's richest man on Friday. Addressing the audience at St Xavier's College for the Anuradha Gandhy Memorial lecture, she was in her usual belligerent form. "Since we are talking about poonjiwad ka pret (the ghost of capitalism) I shall start with one and only Mukesh Ambani. I had gone to see Antilla on Altamount Road; and my friend who had accompanied me said, 'Here we are, pay your respects to our new ruler.'"

That was just a beginning: "I'd read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the 600 servants. (But) nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn - a soaring wall of grass -- attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, 'trickle down' had not worked. When I walked away, (I saw) a board on a nearby building that read: 'Bank of India'."

Hoisting Ambani and his multi-million dollar house as the symbol of India's capitalism, the Booker winner spoke of how a handful of corporates have cornered the country's major share of wealth.

Mentioning Tata, Jindal, Essar, Infosys, Vedanta, Mittal and Reliance as some of the corporate houses that have cornered India's one-fourth of GDP, Roy stressed on how cross-ownership of businesses had made the rich richer and the poor, poorer. She backed her arguments with well-accumulated statistics and allegations of politician-corporate nexus underestimating the quantity of reserves, and the actual market value of public assets, leading to the siphoning off of billions of dollars of public money.

"We have no law against cross-ownership of businesses; and thus, we have a situation where corporates are not misusing their position but using a position that the government has provided them," Roy said. Castigating policy makers on how, for 0.2 per cent royalty, India was allowing corporates to mine minerals worth trillions of dollars, how so "many secret MoUs" were being signed, and dams being built without the consent of the people, she said, "India is colonising itself."

Roy used her quintessential wit to take pot shots at farcical corporate social responsibility initiatives of companies and how companies invested in various foundations to form public opinion in favour of capitalism.

"The Tatas run two of the largest charitable trusts in India. Recently, they donated $50m to that needy institution called the Harvard Business School. The Jindals, with a major stake in mining, metals and power, run the Jindal Global Law School, which recently had a workshop on how to hold protests," she said.

She also attacked the US for its "war economy" and Indian companies "aligning with this model", and the Indian Left for having failed to adapt to Indian conditions and completely botching up the caste and class issue. "That is why they have been restricted to tribal belts in India," she said.

She ended her speech with another attack on the symbol of India's capitalism, Antilla, which she called the single biggest secessionist movement in India that divided upper and lower class. She concluded: "As early stars appear in Mumbai's darkening sky, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appear outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blaze on... Someone said Antilla has snatched Mumbai's nights. It's time to snatch it back."

Post her speech, a student, looking at Marxist books on sale outside the venue, summed up the evening: "Dude, I am a hardcore Capitalist. I don't believe in dismantling capitalism. But what she was talking about is not Capitalism, it was crony Capitalism. And that's a scourge."



Source:http://mumbaimirror.com/article/2/20120121201201210203447652d0b42ca/Mukesh-Ambani-the-biggest-ghost-of-capitalism-says-Arundhati-Roy.html

Beware the 'gush-up gospel' behind India's billionaires

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

Antilla belongs to India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I'd read about this, the most expensive dwelling ever built, the 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the 600 servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn – a soaring wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches, bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, "trickle down" had not worked.

But "gush-up" has. That's why in a nation of 1.2bn, India's 100 richest people own assets equivalent to a quarter of gross domestic product.

The word on the street (and in The New York Times) is, or at least was, that the Ambanis were not living in Antilla. Perhaps they are there now, but people still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, vastu and feng shui. I think it's all Marx's fault. Capitalism, he said, " ... has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells".

In India, the 300m of us who belong to the new, post-"reforms" middle class – the market – live side by side with the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800m who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than 50 cents a day.

Mr Ambani is personally worth more than $20bn. He has a controlling majority stake in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of Rs2.41tn ($47bn) and an array of global business interests. RIL has a 95 per cent stake in Infotel, which a few weeks ago bought a major share in a media group that runs television news and entertainment channels. Infotel owns the only national 4G broadband licence. He also has a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations, some family-owned, some not, that run India. Some of the others are Tata, Jindal, Vedanta, Mittal, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh's brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilt across Europe, central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India's largest private-sector power companies.

Since the cross-ownership of businesses is not restricted by the "gush-up gospel" rules, the more you have, the more you can have. Meanwhile, scandal after scandal has exposed, in painful detail, how corporations buy politicians, judges, bureaucrats and media houses, hollowing out democracy, retaining only its rituals. Huge reserves of bauxite, iron ore, oil and natural gas worth trillions of dollars were sold to corporations for a pittance, defying even the twisted logic of the free market. Cartels of corrupt politicians and corporations have colluded to underestimate the quantity of reserves, and the actual market value of public assets, leading to the siphoning off of billions of dollars of public money. Then there's the land grab – the forced displacement of communities, of millions of people whose lands are being appropriated by the state and handed to private enterprise. (The concept of inviolability of private property rarely applies to the property of the poor.) Mass revolts have broken out, many of them armed. The government has indicated that it will deploy the army to quell them.

Corporations have their own sly strategy to deal with dissent. With a minuscule percentage of their profits they run hospitals, educational institutes and trusts, which in turn fund NGOs, academics, journalists, artists, film-makers, literary festivals and even protest movements. It is a way of using charity to lure opinion-makers into their sphere of influence. Of infiltrating normality, colonising ordinariness, so that challenging them seems as absurd (or as esoteric) as challenging "reality" itself. From here, it's a quick, easy step to "there is no alternative".

The Tatas run two of the largest charitable trusts in India. (They donated $50m to that needy institution the Harvard Business School.) The Jindals, with a major stake in mining, metals and power, run the Jindal Global Law School, and will soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. Financed by profits from the software giant Infosys, the New India Foundation gives prizes and fellowships to social scientists.

Having worked out how to manage the government, the opposition, the courts, the media and liberal opinion, what remains to be dealt with is the growing unrest, the threat of "people power". How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people's fury and redirect it into blind alleys? The largely middle-class, overtly nationalist anti-corruption movement in India led by Anna Hazare is a good example. A round-the-clock, corporate-sponsored media campaign proclaimed it to be "the voice of the people". It called for a law that undermined even the remaining dregs of democracy. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, it did not breathe a word against privatisation, corporate monopolies or economic "reforms". Its principal media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from huge corporate corruption scandals and used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms and more privatisation.

After two decades of these "reforms" and of phenomenal but jobless growth, India has more malnourished children than anywhere else in the world, and more poor people in eight of its states than 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa put together. And now the international financial crisis is closing in. The growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out.

Capitalism's real gravediggers, it turns out, are not Marx's revolutionary proletariat but its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. They seem to have difficulty comprehending reality or grasping the science of climate change, which says, quite simply, that capitalism (including the Chinese variety) is destroying the planet.

"Trickle down" failed. Now "gush-up" is in trouble too. As early stars appear in Mumbai's darkening sky, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appear outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blaze on. Perhaps it is time for the ghosts to come out and play.

The writer is author of 'The God of Small Things'. Her newest book is 'Broken Republic' 


Source:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/925376ca-3d1d-11e1-8129-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1jOkvXdrB

Annihilation of debate is annihilation of politics: Arundhati Roy

January 10, 2012 chennai 
Arundhati Roy reacts to the objection to her attending the fair organised by The Book Sellers and Publishers Association of South India.

"The protest began when The Cage by Gordon Weiss (former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka) was released.
The book indicts the Sri Lankan government for war crimes, but is also sharply critical of the LTTE's tactics. The protestors did not mention the book, but accused the publishers of being RSS, anti-Dalit, anti-Tamil, anti-Kashmir and anti-Muslim.

I was a little puzzled, because the books being released were a collection of haunting poems by Cheran, the well-known Tamil poet, a book on Dalits and Water by Ko. Raghupathy, a book on Dalit politics and culture by Stalin Rajangam, Curfewed Night, a memoir about Kashmir by Basharat Peer and Broken Republic about the Maoist insurrection, by me, all of which completely bely the accusations being hurled at the publisher.

On Facebook the protestors call themselves the May 17th Fighters. (May 17th is the day the war in Sri Lanka officially ended.) It appears that their main objection was Weiss's criticism of the LTTE.
Whether Weiss is right or wrong in his analysis is not the point. After a war in which an estimated 40,000 Tamils, mostly civilians were killed, I cannot believe that people want to shut out the possibility of debate, of introspection about what went wrong.

It is an insult to the memory of those who were killed as well as to those Tamils who survived and have to continue to live in Sri Lanka.
 
The annihilation of criticism, introspection, debate, difference of opinion, is the annihilation of politics itself. It is a way of thinking and acting that could have been one of the reasons for the LTTE's defeat."




Source :

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/cities/chennai/annihilation-debate-annihilation-politics-arundhati-roy-403