Broken Republic Read online

  © Sanjay Kak

  Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things (1997) and three volumes of nonfiction writing: The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001), An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2005) and Listening to Grasshoppers (2009). The Shape of the Beast, a collection of her interviews, was published in 2008.

  Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi.

  BROKEN REPUBLIC

  THREE ESSAYS

  ARUNDHATI ROY

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Books India 2011

  Text and photographs copyright © Arundhati Roy, 2011

  Book design by Bena Sareen

  These essays have previously appeared in Outlook

  Cover illustrations by echo3005 (front) and LHF graphics (back). Used under licence from Shutterstock.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-197284-8

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Mr Chidambaram’s War

  Walking with the Comrades

  Trickledown Revolution

  Notes

  Your blood asks, how were the wealthy

  And the law interwoven? With what

  sulfurous iron fabric? How did the

  poor keep falling into the tribunals?

  —PABLO NERUDA, The Judges

  INTRODUCTION

  The President Took the Salute

  The Minister says that for India’s sake, people should leave their villages and move to the cities. He’s a Harvard man. He wants speed. And numbers. Five hundred million migrants, he thinks, would make a good business model.

  Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Mumbai called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn’t afford it shouldn’t live in cities.

  When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger, and policemen. The forests were filling up with armed guerrillas. War had migrated too. From the edges of India, in Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, to its heart. So the people returned to the crowded city streets and pavements. They crammed into hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them.

  The Minister said that migrants to cities were mostly criminals and ‘carried a kind of behaviour which is unacceptable to modern cities’. The middle class admired him for his forthrightness, for having the courage to call a spade a spade. The Minister said he would set up more police stations, recruit more policemen and put more police vehicles on the road to improve law and order.

  To make Delhi a world-class city for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, laws were passed that made the poor vanish, like laundry stains. Street vendors disappeared, rickshaw pullers lost their licences, small shops and businesses were shut down. Beggars were rounded up, tried by mobile magistrates in mobile courts and dropped outside the city limits. The slums that remained were screened off, with vinyl billboards that said DELHIciously Yours.

  New kinds of policemen patrolled the streets, better armed, better dressed and trained not to scratch their privates in public, no matter how grave the provocation. There were cameras everywhere, recording everything.

  ~

  Two young criminals carrying a kind of behaviour which was unacceptable to modern cities escaped the police dragnet, and approached a woman sandwiched between her sunglasses and the leather seats of her shiny car at a traffic crossing. Shamelessly they demanded money. The woman was rich and kind. The criminals’ heads were no higher than her car window. Their names were Rukmini and Kamli. Or maybe Mehrunissa and Shahbano. (Who cares?) The woman gave them money and some motherly advice. Ten rupees to Kamli (or Shahbano). ‘Share it,’ she told them, and sped away when the lights changed.

  Rukmini and Kamli (or Mehrunissa and Shahbano) tore into each other like gladiators, like lifers in a prison yard. Each sleek car that flashed past them, and almost crushed them, carried the reflection of their battle, their fight to the finish, on its shining door.

  Eventually both girls disappeared without a trace, like thousands of children do in Delhi.

  The Games were a success.

  ~

  Two months later, on the sixty-second anniversary of India becoming a Republic, the armed forces showcased their new weapons at the Republic Day parade. Russian multi-barrel rocket launchers, combat aircraft, light helicopters and underwater weapons for the navy. The new T-90 battle tank was called Bhishma. (The older one was Arjun.) Varunastra was the name of the latest heavyweight torpedo, and Mareech was a decoy system to seduce incoming torpedoes. (Hanuman and Vajra are the names painted on the armoured vehicles that patrol Kashmir’s frozen streets.) That the names were drawn from Hindu epics was just a coincidence. If India is a Hindu nation, it’s only an accident.

  Dare Devils from the Army’s Corps of Signals rode motorcycles in a rocket formation. Then they formed a cluster of flying birds and finally a human pyramid.

  Overhead Sukhoi fighter jets made a trishul, a trident in the sky. Each jet cost more than a billion rupees. Four billion then, for Shiva’s Trident.

  The thrilled crowd turned its face up to the weak, winter sun and applauded. High in the sky, the winking silver sides of the jets carried the reflection of Rukmini’s and Kamli’s (or Mehrunissa’s and Shahbano’s) fight to the death.

  The army band played the national anthem. The President drew the pallu of her sari over her head and took the salute.

  February 2011

  Mr Chidambaram’s War

  The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.

  Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Natu
re of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.1

  If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, whose homeland is similarly under attack.

  In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, ‘So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress.’ Some even say, ‘Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country, Europe, the United States, Australia—they all have a “past”.’ Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t ‘we’?

  In keeping with this line of thought, the government has announced Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the ‘Maoist’ rebels headquartered in the jungles of central India. Of course, the Maoists are by no means the only ones rebelling. People are engaged in a whole spectrum of struggles all over the country—the landless, the homeless, Dalits, workers, peasants, weavers. They’re pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources. However, it is the Maoists the government has singled out as being the biggest threat.

  A few years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are now, the prime minister described the Maoists as ‘the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country’.2 This will probably go down as the most popular and often-repeated thing he ever said. For some reason, the comment he made in January 2009, at a meeting of state chief ministers, when he described the Maoists’ army as one of ‘modest proportions’ doesn’t seem to have had the same raw appeal.3 He revealed his government’s real concern on 9 June 2009, when he told Parliament: ‘if Left Wing extremism continues to flourish in important parts of our country which have tremendous natural resources of minerals and other precious things, that will certainly affect the climate for investment’.4

  Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist)—CPI (Maoist)—one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian State. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, more than a million people attended their rally in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh.)

  BAUXITE MINES, DAMANJODI, ORISSA, 2005

  If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.

  NIYAMGIRI, ORISSA, 2010

  The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities.

  But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the rebels, the PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been working there for decades.

  Not many ‘outsiders’ have any first-hand experience of the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview with one of its top leaders, Comrade Ganapathy, didn’t do much to change the minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an unforgiving, totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent whatsoever.5 Comrade Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade people that were the Maoists ever to come to power, they would be equipped to properly address the almost insane diversity of India’s caste-ridden society. His casual approval of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka was enough to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not just because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage its war, but also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has befallen the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, whom it claimed to represent, and for whom it surely must take some responsibility.

  Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla 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. They are people who, even after sixty years of India’s so-called Independence, have not had access to education, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.

  If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government that has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have—their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to ‘develop’ their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.

  Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian State, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, is fighting only for survival.

  In 2008 an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas. It said, ‘the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions. Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development.’6 A very far cry from the ‘single biggest internal security challenge’.

  Thirteen tonnes of stone and rock yield one tonne of bauxite. The ‘Red Mud’ in these stilling ponds is the toxic residue produced by the refining process in which bauxite is turned into aluminium.

  Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the brakes on this twenty-first-century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about Maoist ‘terrorism’. But they’re only speaking to themselves.

  The people who have taken to arms are not spending their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to… They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justic
e.

  In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe, the government has declared war on these dangerous people. A war which, it tells us, may take between three and five years to win. There’s no whisper about ‘talks’ or ‘negotiations’. Odd, isn’t it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11 the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan? It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging war against the poor, it’s playing hard-ball.

  It’s not enough that Special Police—with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions—are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It’s not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It’s not enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the ‘people’s militia’ that has killed and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada, leaving 50,000 people in roadside police camps and the rest of the population in the area (about 300,000 people) homeless, or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. According to one report it plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven).7 Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian Air Force have been given the right to fire in ‘self-defence’, the very right that the government denies its poorest citizens.

  Fire at whom? How in god’s name will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathizers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the superintendent of police showed me pictures of nineteen ‘Maoists’ whom ‘his boys’ had killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, ‘See ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from outside.’