My Seditious Heart Read online

  PRAISE FOR ARUNDHATI ROY

  “The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable.”

  —JOHN BERGER

  “Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.”

  —NAOMI KLEIN

  “Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach.”

  —NOAM CHOMSKY

  “Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays.”

  —HOWARD ZINN

  “Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time … courageous, visionary, and erudite.”

  —CORNEL WEST

  “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness. And in these extraordinary essays—which are clarions for justice, for witness, for a true humanity—Roy is at her absolute best.”

  —JUNOT DÍAZ

  “Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings.”

  —WALLACE SHAWN

  “[Roy is] an electrifying political essayist…. So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons … that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing.”

  —BOOKLIST

  “The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  MY SEDITIOUS HEART

  COLLECTED NONFICTION

  ARUNDHATI ROY

  MY

  SEDITIOUS

  HEART

  COLLECTED NONFICTION

  © 2019 Arundhati Roy

  Published in 2019 by

  Haymarket Books

  P.O. Box 180165

  Chicago, IL 60618

  773-583-7884

  www.haymarketbooks.org

  [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-60846-674-0

  Trade distribution:

  In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

  In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

  This book was published with the generous support of

  Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

  Printed in Canada by union labor.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  24681097531

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  The End of Imagination

  The Greater Common Good

  Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin

  The Ladies Have Feelings, So … Shall We Leave It to the Experts?

  The Algebra of Infinite Justice

  War Is Peace

  On Citizens’ Rights to Express Dissent

  Democracy: Who Is She When She’s at Home?

  War Talk: Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs

  Ahimsa (Nonviolent Resistance)

  Come September

  The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky

  Confronting Empire

  Peace Is War: The Collateral Damage of Breaking News

  An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

  Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)

  When the Saints Go Marching Out: The Strange Fate of Martin, Mohandas, and Mandela

  In Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi

  Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?

  How Deep Shall We Dig?

  The Road to Harsud

  Public Power in the Age of Empire

  Peace and the New Corporate Liberation Theology

  Breaking the News

  “And His Life Should Become Extinct”: The Very Strange Story of the Attack on the Indian Parliament

  Custodial Confessions, the Media, and the Law

  Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial, and Celebration

  Azadi

  Nine Is Not Eleven (and November Isn’t September)

  Democracy’s Failing Light

  Mr. Chidambaram’s War

  The President Took the Salute

  Walking with the Comrades

  Trickledown Revolution

  Kashmir’s Fruits of Discord

  I’d Rather Not Be Anna

  Speech to the People’s University

  Capitalism: A Ghost Story

  A Perfect Day for Democracy

  The Consequences of Hanging Afzal Guru

  The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate

  Professor, P.O.W.

  My Seditious Heart

  Appendix

  The Great Indian Rape-Trick I

  The Great Indian Rape-Trick II

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Notes

  Index

  MAP OF INDIA

  For

  Vinod Mehta

  I had no idea how much I would

  miss you—

  FOREWORD

  In the winter of 1961 the tribespeople of Kothie, a small hamlet in the western state of Gujarat, were chased off their ancestral lands as though they were intruders. Kothie quickly turned into Kevadiya Colony, a grim concrete homestead for the government engineers and bureaucrats who would, over the next few decades, build the gigantic 138.68-meter-high Sardar Sarovar Dam. It was one of four mega dams—and thousands of smaller dams—that were part of the Narmada Valley Development Project, planned on the Narmada and her forty-one tributaries. The people of Kothie joined the hundreds of thousands of others whose lands and homes would be submerged—farmers, farmworkers, and fisherfolk in the plains, ancient indigenous tribespeople in the hills—to fight against what they saw as wanton destruction. Destruction, not just of themselves and their communities, but of soil, water, forests, fish, and wildlife—a whole ecosystem, an entire riparian civilization. The material welfare of human beings was never their only concern.

  Under the banner of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), they did everything that was humanly and legally possible under the Indian Constitution to stop the dams. They were beaten, jailed, abused, and called “antinational” foreign agents who wanted to sabotage India’s “development.” They fought the Sardar Sarovar as it went up, meter by meter, for decades. They went on hunger strike, they went to court, they marched on Delhi, they sat in protest as the rising waters of the reservoir swallowed their fields and entered their homes. Still, they lost. The government reneged on every promise it had made to them. On September 17, 2017, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the Sardar Sarovar Dam. It was his birthday present to himself on the day he turned sixty-seven.

  Even as they went down fighting, the people of the Narmada taught the world some profound lessons—about ecology, equity, sustainability, and democracy. They taught me that we must make ourselves visible, even when we lose, whatever it is that we lose—land, livelihood, or a worldview. And that we must make it impossible for those in power to pretend that they do not know the costs and consequences of what
they do. They also taught me the limitations of constitutional methods of resistance. “The Greater Common Good,” the second essay in this collection, is about the historic struggle in the Narmada valley. Although I wrote it almost twenty years ago, in 1999, it is still, in some ways, the bedrock on which much of my thinking rests. Today, even the harshest critics of the Narmada Bachao Andolan have had to admit that the movement was right about almost everything it said. But it’s too late. For decades, the Sardar Sarovar sponged up almost all of Gujarat’s irrigation budget. It hasn’t delivered anything like what the planners and politicians promised it would. Nor have its benefits, such as they are, gone to the farmers in whose name it was built. Now it straddles the river it murdered, like a beast brooding over a kill that it cannot eat. A monument to human folly.

  One would have thought that this would be lesson enough.

  Almost exactly a year after he inaugurated the dam, on October 31, 2018, the prime minister traveled to Kevadiya Colony again, this time to inaugurate the world’s tallest statue. The Statue of Unity is a 182-meter-tall bronze likeness of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a popularly revered freedom fighter and India’s first deputy prime minister, after whom the Sardar Sarovar Dam was named. Sardar Patel was, by all accounts, a man who lived simply. But there’s nothing simple about the $430-million-dollar statue that has been built in his memory. It towers out of a 12-square-kilometer artificial lake and is made of 200,000 cubic tons of cement concrete and 25,000 tons of reinforced steel, all of it plated with 1,700 tons of bronze.1 Indian expertise proved unequal to a task on such a scale, so the statue was forged in a Chinese foundry and erected by Chinese workers under Chinese supervision. So much for nationalism. The Statue of Unity is nearly four times as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and more than six times higher than the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. On a clear day, it is visible from a distance of 7 kilometers. The whole of the village of Kothie, had it still existed, could have been accommodated in its big toe. Kothie’s former residents and their comrades-in-arms are probably meant to feel like dirt in the statue’s toenails. As are the writers who write about them.

  Four hundred kilometers south of the Statue of Unity, on Altamount Road, in the city of Bombay, home to the largest slums in Asia, is modern India’s other great monument, Antilla, the most expensive private home ever built. It has twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, and six floors of private parking. It’s home to Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and the CEO of India’s richest corporation, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), with a market capitalization of $47 billion. Mukesh Ambani’s personal wealth is estimated to be $20 billion. His global business interests include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, fresh food retail, and a TV consortium that runs twenty-seven news channels in almost every regional language. Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is the largest telecommunications network in India, with a subscriber base of 250 million people. Jio Institute, a state-of-the-art private university that Reliance plans to start but does not actually exist yet, has already made it to the government’s list of the six “Institutions of Eminence.” Such is the craven desire to please Mukesh Ambani, the real ruler of India. In December 2018, all of Bollywood’s A-list superstars danced like chorus extras at his daughter’s $100-million-dollar wedding. Beyoncé performed. Hillary Clinton arrived to pay her respects. The country must have suffered a temporary shortage of flowers and jewelry.

  I find myself thinking of the essays in this book as pieces of laundry—poor people’s washing—strung out across the landscape between these two monuments, interrupting the good news bulletins and spoiling the view.

  They were written over a period of twenty years during which India was changing faster than ever before. The opening of the Indian markets to international finance had created a new middle class—a market of millions—and had investors falling over themselves to find a foothold. The international media, for the most part, was at pains to portray the world’s favorite new finance destination in the best possible light. But the news was certainly not all good. India’s fleet of brand new billionaires and its new consumers was being created at an immense cost to its environment and to an even larger underclass. Backstage, away from the razzle-dazzle, labor laws were dismantled, trade unions disbanded. The state was withdrawing from its responsibilities to provide food, education, and health care. Public assets were turned over to private corporations, massive infrastructure and mining projects were pushing hundreds of thousands of rural people off their lands into cities that didn’t want them. The poor were in free fall.

  At the very same time that it unlocked the protected market, the Congress government of the day (which calls itself liberal and secular on its CV), with an eye to the “Hindu vote,” opened another lock, too. The lock on an old sixteenth-century mosque. The Babri Masjid in Ayodhya had been sealed by the courts in 1949 following a dispute between Hindus and Muslims, who both laid claim to the land—Muslims asserting it was a historical place of worship, Hindus that it was the birthplace of Lord Ram. Opening the Babri Masjid, purportedly to allow Hindus to worship at the site, changed India forever. The Congress was swept aside. Leaders of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) traveled the length and breadth of the country orchestrating a storm of religious frenzy. On December 6, 1992, they, along with members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, gathered in Ayodhya and, while a shocked country and a spineless Congress prime minister watched, exhorted a mob of 150,000 “volunteers” to storm the structure and bring down the Babri Masjid.

  The demolition of the mosque and the simultaneous opening of the markets was the beginning of a complicated waltz between corporate globalization and medieval religious fundamentalism. It was obvious quite early on that, far from being antagonistic forces that represented Old and New India, they were actually lovers performing an elaborate ritual of seduction and coquetry that could sometimes be misread as hostility.

  For me, personally it was a time of odd disquiet. As I watched the great drama unfold, my own fortunes seemed to have been touched by magic. My first novel, The God of Small Things, had won a big international prize. I was a front-runner in the lineup of people who were chosen to personify the confident, new, market-friendly India that was finally taking its place at the high table. It was flattering in a way, but deeply disturbing, too. As I watched people being pushed into penury, my book was selling millions of copies. My bank account was burgeoning. Money on that scale confused me. What did it really mean to be a writer in times such as these?

  As I thought about this, almost without meaning to, I began to write a long, bewildering, episodic, astonishingly violent story about the courting ritual of these unusual lovers and the trail of destruction they were leaving in their wake. And of the remarkable people who had risen to resist them.

  The backlash to almost every one of the essays when I first published them—in the form of police cases, legal notices, court appearances, and even a short jail sentence—was often so wearying that I would resolve never to write another. But equally, almost every one of them—each a broken promise to myself—took me on journeys deeper and deeper into worlds that enriched my understanding, and complicated my view, of the times we live in. They opened doors for me to secret places where few are trusted, led me into the very heart of insurrections, into places of pain, rage, and ferocious irreverence. On these journeys, I found my dearest friends and my truest loves. These are my real royalties, my greatest reward.

  Although writers usually walk alone, most of what I wrote rose from the heart of a crowd. It was never meant as neutral commentary, pretending to be observations of a bystander. It was just another stream that flowed into the quick, immense, rushing currents that I was writing about. My contribution to our collective refusal to obediently fade away.

  When my publishers suggested that the essays be compiled into a single volume, we thought long and hard about how best to do this. Should they be arranged thematically? Could we come up with
some workable “subject headings”? We tried, but soon realized it wasn’t possible, because even though most of the essays are about specific subjects or specific events—nuclear weapons, dams, privatization, caste, class, war, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, terrorist strikes, government-backed massacres, and the rise of Hindu nationalism—they are also about how each of these connect to each other, feed off one another. We decided that it would be best to arrange the essays chronologically, in the order in which they first appeared. I have not updated any of them, but the resolute (and probably rare) reader who reads them in sequence will find they more or less update each other. Since each appeared as a stand-alone piece, sometimes separated by months and even years, I often had to restate facts or retell parts of stories. Forgive me for leaving the repetitions in.

  What I wish I could have done for the readers of this book is to recreate the prevailing atmosphere in which I published each essay. They were written when a certain political space closed down, when a false consensus was being broadcast, when I could no longer endure the relentless propaganda and the sheer vicious bullying of vulnerable people by an increasingly corporatized media and its increasingly privatized commentators. Most often I wrote because it became easier to do that than to put up with the angry, persistent hum of my own silence. I also wrote to reclaim language. Because it was distressing to see words being deployed to mean the opposite of what they really meant. (“Deepening democracy” meant destroying it. “A level playing field” actually meant a very steep slope, the “free market” a rigged market. “Empowering women” meant undermining them in every possible way.)

  I wrote because I saw that what I needed to do would challenge my abilities as a writer. I had in the past written screenplays and a novel. I had written about love and loss, about childhood, caste, violence, and families—the eternal preoccupations of writers and poets. Could I write equally compellingly about irrigation? About the salinization of soil? About drainage? Dams? Crop patterns? About the per unit cost of electricity? About the law? About things that affect ordinary people’s lives? Could I turn these topics into literature? I tried.