'The Army Has To Come Out'

Rush transcript of the DemocracyNow! programme

Amy Goodman: Today, we spend the hour with acclaimed author andactivist Arundhati Roy. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, wasawarded the Booker Prize in 1997. It’s sold over six million copies, has beentranslated in over 20 languages around the world. Since then, Roy has devotedherself to political writing and activism. In India, she is involved in themovement opposing hydroelectric dam projects that have displaced thousands ofpeople. In 2002, she was convicted of contemptof court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silenceprotest against the NarmadaDam project. She received a symbolic one-day prison sentence. She has alsobeen a vocal opponent of the Indian government's nuclearweapons program, as she is of all nuclear programs around the world. Arundhati Royhas also become known across the globe for her powerful political essays inbooks like Power Politics, War Talk, The Checkbook and theCruise Missile, and her latest, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.In June of 2005, she served as chair of the Jury of Conscience at the WorldTribunal on Iraq in Istanbul. She joins us today in our Firehouse studio for thehour here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!

Arundhati Roy: Thank you, Amy.

Amy Goodman: It's good to have you with us. What does it feel to beback in the United States? A different perspective on the world from here.

Arundhati Roy: Well, I think the last time I was here was just beforethe elections, you know, when we were hoping that Bush wouldn't come back. Butthe point was that whoever came back seemed to have been supporting the war inIraq in some way, so there was a crisis of democracy here, as much as anywhereelse in the world. It's, I think, you know, when you don't come to the UnitedStates often, from the outside, the most important thing is that it's easy toforget. It's easy for us to forget that there is dissent within this countryagainst the system that its government stands for. And it's important andheartening for me to remind myself of that, because outside there is so muchanger against America, and obviously, you know, that confusion between peopleand governments exists, and it was enhanced when Bush was voted back to power.People started saying, "Is there a difference?"

Amy Goodman: Well, of course, the way you see America and Americansoutside the United States is through the media, as projected through. Whichchannels do you access in India? What do you get to see? And what do you thinkof how the media deals with these issues?

Arundhati Roy: Well, in India, I think you get FOX News and CNN and,of course, the BBC. But also a lot of newspapers in India do publish Americancolumnists, famously Thomas Friedman. And, of course, recently George Bushvisited India, which was a humiliating and very funny episode at the same time,you know, what happened to him there and how he came and how the media reacted.

Amy Goodman: I want to get your reaction to that visit, and actuallyfirst, though, play a clip of President Bush when he went to India in March. Hepromised to increase economic integration with the U.S. and signed an agreementto foster nuclear cooperation between the two countries.

Amy Goodman: President Bush in India.

Arundhati Roy: Well, the strange thing was that before he came, theywanted him to address a joint house of Parliament, but some members ofParliament said that they would heckle him and that it would be embarrassing forhim to come there. So then they thought they would ask him to address a publicmeeting at the Red Fort, which is in Old Delhi, which is where the PrimeMinister of India always gives his independence day speech from, but that wasconsidered unsafe, because Old Delhi is full of Muslims, and you know how theythink of all Muslims as terrorists. So then they thought, "Okay, we’ll do itin Vigyan Bhawan, which is a sort of state auditorium, but that was consideredtoo much of a comedown for the U.S. President. So funnily enough, theyeventually settled on him speaking in Purana Qila, which is the Old Fort, whichhouses the Delhi zoo. And it was really from there that -- and, of course, itwasn't a public meeting. It was the caged animals and some caged CEOs that headdressed. And then he went to Hyderabad, and I think he met a buffalo there,some special kind of buffalo, because there is a picture of Bush and the buffaloin all the papers, but the point is that, insulated from the public.

There were massive demonstrations, where hundreds of thousands of peopleshowed up. But it didn't seem to matter either to Bush or to the Indiangovernment, which went ahead and signed, you know, deals where this kind ofembrace between a poorer country or a developing country and America. We havesuch a litany of the history of incineration when you embrace the government ofthe United States. And that's what happened, that the Indian government, in fullservile mode, has entered into this embrace, has negotiated itself into acorner, and now continues to do this deadly sort of dance.

But I must say that while Bush was in Delhi, at the same time on the streetswere -- I mean apart from the protests, there were 60 widows that had come fromKerala, which is the south of India, which is where I come from, and they hadcome to Delhi because they were 60 out of the tens of thousands of widows offarmers who have committed suicide, because they have been encircled by debt.And this is a fact that is simply not reported, partly because there are noofficial figures, partly because the Indian government quibbles about whatconstitutes suicide and what is a farmer. If a man commits suicide, but the landis in his old father's name, he doesn't count. If it's a woman, she doesn'tcount, because women can't be farmers.

Amy Goodman: So she counts as someone who committed suicide, but notas a farmer who committed suicide.

Arundhati Roy: Exactly.

Amy Goodman: Tens of thousands?

Arundhati Roy: Tens of thousands. And then, anyway, so these 60 womenwere there on the street asking the Indian government to write off the debts oftheir husbands, right? Across the street from them, in a five-star hotel wereBush's 16 sniffer dogs who were staying in this five-star hotel, and we were alltold that you can't call them dogs, because they are actually officers of theAmerican Army, you know. I don't know what the names were. Sergeant Pepper andCorporal Whatever. So, it wasn't even possible to be satirical or write blackcomedy, because it was all real.

Amy Goodman: Didn't President Bush visit Gandhi's grave?

Arundhati Roy: He visited Gandhi's grave, and first his dogs visitedGandhi’s grave. Then, you know, Gandhians were, like, wanting to purify it.And I said, "Look, I don't mind the dogs. I mind Bush much than the dogs." ButGandhi’s -- you know, obviously one can have all kinds of opinions aboutGandhi. It's not universal that everybody adores and loves him, but still hestood for nonviolence, and here it was really the equivalent of a butcher comingand tipping a pot of blood on that memorial and going away. It was -- you know,there was no room left, as I said, for satire or for anything, because it was sovulgar, the whole of it. But I have to say the Indian mainstream media was soservile. You know, you had a newspaper like the Indian Express saying, "Heis here, and he has spoken." I'm sure he doesn't get worshipped that much evenby the American mainstream press, you know. It was extraordinary.

Amy Goodman: Let me play another clip of President Bush. I think inthis one he’s talking about trade in India.

Amy Goodman: President Bush speaking in India. Arundhati Roy, yourresponse?

Arundhati Roy: Well, look, let's not forget that this whole call tothe free market started in the late 19th century in India. You know, that waswhat colonialism was all about. They kept using the words "free market." And weknow how free the free market is. Today, India has -- I mean, after 15 years ofeconomic liberalization, we have more than half of the world's malnutritionedchildren. We have an economy where the differences between the rich and thepoor, which have always been huge, has increased enormously. We have a feudalsociety whose feudalism has just been reinforced by all of this.

And, you know, it's amazing. Just in the wake of Bush's visit, you can'timagine what's happening, say, in a city like Delhi. You can't imagine the openaggression of institutions of our democracy. It's really like courts, forinstance, who are an old enemy of mine, are rolling up their sleeves and comingafter us. You have in Delhi, for example -- I have just come from being on thestreets for six weeks, where all kinds of protest are taking place. But you havea city that's been just -- it's just turned into a city of bulldozers andpolicemen. Overnight, notices go up saying tomorrow or day after tomorrow you'regoing to be evicted from here. The Supreme Court judges have come out sayingthings like, "If the poor can't afford to live in the city, why do they comehere?"

And basically, behind it all, there are two facades. One is that in 2008,Delhi is going to host the Commonwealth Games. For this, hundreds of thousandsof people are being driven out of the city. But the real agenda came in the wakeof Bush's visit, which is that the city is being prepared for foreign directinvestment in retail, which means Wal-Mart and Kmart and all these people aregoing to come in, which means that this city of millions of pavement dwellers,hawkers, fruit sellers, people who have -- it's a city that's grown up overcenturies and centuries. It's just being cleaned out under the guise of sort oflegal action. And at the same time, people from villages are being driven out oftheir villages, because of the corporatization of agriculture, because of thesebig development projects.

So you have an institution like -- you know, I mean, how do you subvertdemocracy? We have a parliament, sure. We have elections, sure. But we have asupreme court now that micromanages our lives. It takes every decision: Whatshould be in history books? Should this lamb be cured? Should this road bewidened? What gas should we use? Every single decision is now taken by a court.You can't criticize the court. If you do, you will go to jail, like I did. So,you have judges who are -- you have to read those judgments to believe it, youknow? Public interest litigation has become a weapon that judges use against us.

So, for example, a former chief justice of India, he gave a decision allowingthe Narmada Dam to be built, where 400,000 people will be displaced. The samejudge gave a judgment saying slum dwellers are pickpockets of urban land. So youdisplace people from the villages; they come into the cities; you call thempickpockets. He gave a judgment shutting down all kinds of informal industry inDelhi. Than he gave a judgment asking for all India's rivers to be linked, whichis a Stalinist scheme beyond imagination, where millions of people will bedisplaced. And when he retired, he joined Coca-Cola. You know, it's incredible.

Amy Goodman: Arundhati Roy is our guest for the hour. We’ll be backwith her in a minute.

[break]

Amy Goodman: Our guest today for the hour is Arundhati Roy. She justrecently flew in from New Delhi, India. She is the author of a number of books,her Booker Prize award-winning book, The God of Small Things, and thenher books of essays, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, TheCheckbook and the Cruise Missile among them. Arundhati, you were justtalking about what is happening in India. Thomas Friedman, the well-known,much-read New York Times columnist and author, talks about the callcenter being a perfect symbol of globalization in a very positive sense.

Arundhati Roy: Yes, it is the perfect symbol, I think, in many ways. Iwish Friedman would spend some time working in one. But I think it's a veryinteresting issue, the call center, because, you know, let's not get into thepsychosis that takes place inside a call center, the fact that you have peopleworking, you know, according to a different body clock and all that and thelanguages and the fact that you have to de-identify yourself.

Amy Goodman: And just for people who aren't familiar with what we'retalking about, the call center being places where, well, you might make a callto information or to some corporation, you actually are making that call toIndia, and someone in a call center is picking it up.

Arundhati Roy: But, you know, the thing is that it's a good example ofwhat's going on. The call center is surely creating jobs for a whole lot ofpeople in India. But it comes as part of a package, and that package, while itgives sort of an English-speaking middle or lower middle class young person ajob for a while, they can never last, because it's such a hard job. It actuallyis also part of the corporate culture, which is taking away land and resourcesand water from millions of rural people. But you're giving the more vocal andthe better off anyway -- the people who speak even a little bit of English arethe better off among the millions of people in India. So, to give these peoplejobs, you're taking away the livelihoods of millions of others, and this is whatglobalization does.

It creates -- obviously it creates a very vocal constituency that supportsit, among the elite of poor countries. And so you have in India an elite, anupper caste, upper class wealthy elite who are fiercely loyal to the neoliberalprogram. And that's exactly, obviously, what colonialism has always done, andit's exactly what happened in countries in Latin America. But now it's happeningin India, and the rhetoric of democracies in place, because they have learnedhow to hollow out democracy and make it lose meaning. All it means, it seems, iselections, where whoever you vote for, they are going to do the same thing.

Amy Goodman: You mentioned the dams, and a judge just in the last weekhas ruled that one of the major dam projects is allowed to continue. Justphysically on the ground, what does it mean, and who are the people who areresisting, and what do they do?

Arundhati Roy: I mean, that actually is something that reached feverpitch in the last few weeks in India, because, you know, the movement againstdams is actually a very beautiful political argument, because it combinesenvironmental issues, issues of water, of resources and of displacement, with apolitical vision for a new kind of society. No political ideology, classicpolitical ideology has really done that properly. Either it's only environmentalor it's only about people. Here somehow, that's why I got so drawn into it. Butthis struggle was against the notion of big dams, and it's been a nonviolentstruggle for 25 years.

But now, the dams are still being built, and the argument has been reducedmerely to displacement. And even there, the courts are now saying you build adam and just give people cash and send them off. But the fact is that these areindigenous people. You know, you can't just give -- lots of them are indigenouspeople. The others are farmers. But you can't -- the levels of displacement areso huge. This dam, the Sardar Sarovar dam displaces 400,000, but just in theNarmada Valley you're talking about millions of people. All over India, you’retalking about many millions who are being displaced. So where are they going togo? Well, the court came out with a judgment with marked a different era inIndia, where they even stopped pretending that they were interested inresettlement or rehabilitation. They just said, "Build the dam." So it's veryinteresting that people were watching this nonviolent movement unfold itsweapons on the streets, which is the activists who went on indefinite hungerstrike. People paid attention, but then they got kicked in the teeth.

Meanwhile, across India, from West Bengal to Orissa, to Jharkhand, toChhattisgarh, to Andhra Pradesh, the Maoist movement has become very, verystrong. It's an armed struggle. It's taking over district after district. Theadministration cannot get in there. And the government's response to that is todo what was done in Peru with the Shining Path, which is to set up armed defensecommittees, which is really creating a situation of civil war. You know,hundreds of villages are being emptied by the government, and the people arebeing moved into police camps. People are being armed. The Chief Minister ofChhattisgarh says, "You’re either with the Maoists and Naxalites or you’rewith the Salva Judum," which is this government-sponsored resistance, andthere’s no third choice.