Indian Hollow "Democracy": Arundhati Roy
Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms”, deregulation and privatisation. “Freedom” has come to mean “choice”. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. “Market” no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. “Justice” has come to mean “human rights” (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”
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This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress”, “anti-development”, “anti-reform” and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, health care and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against a market?
This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing. Two decades of this kind of “progress” in India have created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it – and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering – the massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines and Special Economic Zones. All of them promoted in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.
The battle for land lies at the heart of the “development” debate. Before he became India’s finance minister, P Chidambaram was Enron’s lawyer and member of the board of directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his world-view. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In an interview a year ago, he said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India’s population to live in cities. Realising this “vision” would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about 500 million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister. The portfolios are separated only by an osmotic membrane. Underlying this nightmare masquerading as “vision” is the plan to free up vast tracts of land and all of India’s natural resources, leaving them ripe for corporate plunder.
Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a state that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called “ecocide”. In eastern India, bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas, hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising riverbeds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga and the Yamuna, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.
Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and microclimates, have been replaced by water-guzzling hybrid and genetically modified “cash” crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of groundwater.
As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the past few years, more than 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. While state granaries are bursting with food that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land.
It’s as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water. The cream is India’s “market” of many million consumers (of cars, cellphones, computers, Valentine’s Day greeting cards), the envy of international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away.
Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn’t bargain for the violent civil war that has broken out in India’s heartland: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal.
As if to illustrate the connection between “union” and “progress”, in 1989, at exactly the same time that the Congress government was opening up India’s markets to international finance, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in the opposition, began its virulent campaign of Hindu nationalism (popularly known as “Hindutva”
. In 1990, its leader, L K Advani, travelled across the country whipping up hatred against Muslims and demanding that the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque that stood on a disputed site in Ayodhya, be demolished and a Ram temple built in its place. In 1992 a mob, egged on by Advani, demolished the mosque. In early 1993, a mob rampaged through Mumbai attacking Muslims, killing almost 1,000 people. As revenge, a series of bomb blasts ripped through the city, killing about 250 people. Feeding off the communal frenzy it had generated, the BJP defeated the Congress in 1998 and came to power at the Centre.
It’s not a coincidence that the rise of Hindutva corresponded with the historical moment when America substituted communism with Islam as its great enemy. The radical Islamist mujahedin – whom President Reagan once entertained in the White House and compared to America’s Founding Fathers – suddenly began to be called terrorists. The Indian government, once a staunch friend of the Palestinians, turned into
Israel’s “natural ally”. Now India and Israel do joint military exercises, share intelligence and probably exchange notes on how best to administer occupied territories.
By 1998, when the BJP took office, the “progress” project of privatisation and liberalisation was about eight years old. Though it had campaigned vigorously against the economic reforms, saying they were a process of “looting through liberalisation”, once it came to power the BJP embraced the free market enthusiastically and threw its weight behind huge corporations like Enron. (In representative democracies, once they are elected, the people’s representatives are free to break their promises and change their minds.)
Within weeks of taking office, the BJP conducted a series of thermonuclear tests. Though India had thrown its hat into the nuclear ring in 1975, politically, the 1998 nuclear tests were of a different order altogether. The orgy of triumphant nationalism with which the tests were greeted introduced a chilling new language of aggression and hatred into mainstream public discourse. None of what was being said was new, only that what was once considered unacceptable was suddenly being celebrated. Since then, Hindu communalism and nuclear nationalism, like corporate globalisation, have vaulted over the stated ideologies of political parties. The venom has been injected straight into our bloodstream.
In February 2002, following the armed raid on a train coach in which 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide of Muslims in the state. The Islamophobia generated all over the world by the 11 September 2001 attacks put the wind in their sails.
The machinery of the state of Gujarat stood by and watched while more than 2,000 people were massacred. Gujarat has always been a state rife with tension between Hindus and Muslims. There had been riots before. But this was not a riot. It was a genocidal massacre, and though the number of victims was insignificant compared to the horror of, say, Rwanda, Sudan or the Congo, the Gujarat carnage was designed as a public spectacle whose aims were unmistakable. It was a public warning to Muslim citizens from the government of the world’s favourite democracy.
After the carnage, Narendra Modi pressed for early elections. He was returned to power with a decisive mandate from the people of Gujarat. Five years later he even repeated this success: he is now serving a third term as chief minister, widely appreciated by business houses for his faith in the free market, illustrating the organic relationship between “union” and “progress”. Or, if you like, between fascism and the free market. In January 2009, that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India’s biggest corporations, Ratan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), celebrated the development policies of Narendra Modi and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister.
Only two months ago, the nearly $2bn 2009 general election was concluded. That’s a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports, the actual amount that was spent is closer to $10bn. Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from?
The Congress and its allies, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have won a comfortable majority. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of the independent candidates who stood for elections lost. Clearly, without sponsorship, it’s hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to.
When you take a closer look at the calculus that underlies election results, words like “comfortable” and “majority” turn out to be deceptive, if not outright inaccurate. For instance, the actual share of votes polled by the UPA in these elections works out at only 10.3 per cent of the country’s population. It’s interesting how the cleverly layered mathematics. Into the Inferno: Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies. What can we do, now that democracy and the free market are one? by Arundhati Roy