Special Feature: Arundhati Roy
by Vivienne Egan
“There is a civil war in India,” says Arundhati Roy, matter-of-factly. She is speaking to a crowded lecture theatre at the University of Westminster, London, on the release date of her latest book, Broken Republic. She is fervent and articulate and has a strong sense of the ironies of India’s geo-political climate.
A guest of the conference Democracy and Dissent in China and India, convened by the University of Westminter, Arundhati Roy gave the C R Parekh lecture, speaking with passion, eloquence and dry humour about exposing the crippling poverty, astonishing injustice and mind-boggling hypocrisy that plagues the Indian state.
“[India] is presented to all of you as a great success story, but it is a country where 800 million people live on less than 30 cents a day. It’s a country that has more poor people than the poorest countries of Africa put together,” says Roy with feeling. “It is a country [with] … displaced people, most of them Untouchables in the caste system or adivasis, indigenous people, in numbers larger than whole European countries. But they are not allowed the language of nostalgia or memory because it is within the idea of the nation state,” she says.
They are being displaced, Roy explains, because of the government’s wish to attract investment by multinational mining corporations. The vast wealth of natural resources in the remote countryside of India, in places like Orissa (a region focused on in Roy’s Broken Republic essays), are being sold off to mining corporations. Moreover, it seems that the government and corporations are steady bedfellows – Mr. P. Chidambaram, the Indian Home Minister, incidentally, was once a corporate lawyer for the very multinational corporations that are buying up the minerals.
The villages of indigenous and poor are being destroyed by police and paramilitaries, the inhabitants beaten, killed, raped, and shunted into roadside camps, into the already overcrowded cities, or simply onto the road, and all of this, Roy says, is sanctioned by the government, which she says “is militarising at a speed that you cannot imagine”
Comprising of three progressive essays, Broken Republic is reflective of Roy’s political activism, but also of her deft prose. Her treatment of this delicate, even incendiary subject matter is a song of the injustice faced by the poor as much as it is an intellectual exposé of the cronyism in government, the media and big business. Roy has deflected the spotlight she receives from her Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things onto her political work, and uses her international fame both as a way of revealing to the rest of the world alarming truths about what happens in India and also as a means of insurance: she knows she won’t be thrown in jail because it will then become an international issue: “exactly what [the government] don’t want,” she says, wryly.
Mix into all this is the vicious Indian news cycle—24-hour TV stations owned by the elites are propping up the claims of the government—and you have a powerful apparatus perfectly poised to drive India’s economy skyward, at whatever human or environmental cost. Internally and externally, the propaganda works to attract foreign investment to India over neighbouring China, emphasising India’s ‘democracy’.
“India is offered to the western world as this great democracy, a wonderful investment destination, as opposed to China which is communist, which is authoritarian, which does not have free speech. So India is the shining star, the rising star.” Roy speaks of foreign correspondents who have told her “quite straight” that they are under orders from their editors not to write anything negative about India, “because it is the preferred finance destination.” Her book asks the challenging question of whether as a civilisation, we can resist the allure of trillions of dollars worth of resources and leave them where they are. It is a powerful and challenging question.
Broken Republic is an eloquent dissertation on behalf of the voiceless. Roy speaks of what happens in remote locations to the people in the forest who “[aren’t] on Twitter, or Facebook, or even [have] a cell phone, let alone enough to eat,” she tells the lecture theatre. “You tell me one institution – one democratic, public institution that a poor person from a village or a slum, whose family members have been killed or tortured or dismembered or raped, show me one institution in India where that person can go and expect justice, and I will withdraw everything I’ve said. But there isn’t an answer to that.”
But the poverty stricken adivasis—the indigenous and tribal people of India—are fighting back against their displacement, with the means they can. Roy writes of her visit to a camp in Dantewada, an enclave at the heart of the Maoist rebellion in India, an uprising that has been labeled by the government as “India’s single biggest internal security challenge”. But, as Roy relates in Broken Republic, “the Maoists’ guerilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa.”
Many of the rebels are, however, armed and ready to combat Operation Greenhunt, the masthead under which the Indian government is waging war against its own people. “I don’t know how Maoist the Maoists really are,” says Roy, “but there is a bandwidth of resistance movements.” They are struggling against the military and the police and the ignorance of most of the rest of the world.
The resistance forces even managed to fend off an incursion two years ago, stopping 200,000 paramilitaries whose job was expressly to remove them from their land – despite a constitutional law forbidding the removal of people from their lands for any purpose. The result was “huge industrial contracts being stopped in their tracks by the poorest people in the world, which something that you really have to salute.” Roy notes the irony when the government is ignoring the constitution and the rebels are attempting to uphold it.
During the lecture, Roy tells us that she was asked on TV about the Indian government’s target to eradicate poverty by 2020. Her reply was chilling: “I said yes, I think that’s possible. By eradicating the poor.”
It can only be hoped that global recognition will be the result of the zealous efforts of people like Roy and her colleagues, but there is also an optimistic tenacity within the embattled poor, as Roy asserts with hope: “the spirit of democracy, the ferocity of the belief that ‘you don’t have the right to do this to us’ is there in the people.”
Broken Republic is published by Hamish Hamilton and is available in the UK
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