Is India on a totalitarian path?

Arundhati Roy on corporatism, nationalism and world’s largest vote.

Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh of “Democracy Now” interviewed Arundhati Roy in New York

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What about the changes that have taken place in India since it opened its economy in the early ’90s?

ARUNDHATI ROY: What we’re always told is that there’s going to be a trickle-down revolution i.e. the kind of opening up of the economy that happened in the early ’90s was going to lead to an inflow of foreign capital, and eventually the poor would benefit. I started out by standing outside this 27-story building that belonged to Mukesh Ambani, with its ballrooms and its six floors of parking and 900 servants and helipads and so on. And it had this 27-story-high vertical lawn, and bits of the grass had sort of fallen off in squares. And so, I said, “Well, trickle down hasn’t worked, but gush up has,” because after the opening up of the economy, we are in a situation where, you know, 100 of India’s wealthiest people own—their combined wealth is 25 percent of the GDP, whereas more than 80 percent of its population lives on less than half a dollar a day.

These new economic policies created a big middle class at the cost of a much larger underclass, displacing millions and forcing 250,000 farmers to commit suicide. And if you talk about all this on the Indian television channels, you actually get insulted.

AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering if you could read from Capitalism: A Ghost Story.

ARUNDHATI ROY: “In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF ‘reforms’ middle class—the market—live side by side with the spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than half a dollar, which is 20 Indian rupees, a day.

“According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.”

AMY GOODMAN: Who is Narendra Modi?

ARUNDHATI ROY: He started as an activist of the self-proclaimed fascist organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, whose heroes were Mussolini and Hitler. The bible of the RSS was written by Golwalkar, who said that the Muslims of India were like the Jews of Germany. They have a very clear idea of India as a Hindu nation, very much like the Hindu version of Pakistan.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Following liberalisation and the growth of an enormous middle class of 300 million that has embraced neoliberalism, there has been a gradual shift to a more right-wing, intolerant conception of India as a Hindu state. How do these two factors would play up with Modi in this election?

ARUNDHATI ROY: In the late ’80s, the government opened two locks. One was the lock of the free market and the other of the Babri Masjid that eventually led to two kinds of manufactured totalitarianisms or terrorisms. Anybody who speaks against economic totalitarianism is a Maoist terrorist, whether you are a Maoist or not. And the other is the Islamist terrorist. Both the Congress party and the BJP have different prioritisations for which terrorist is on the top of the list. But whoever wins the elections, they always have an excuse to continue to militarise.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Does this mean that there will be no difference whether the Congress or the BJP wins?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah! It’s like whoever is in power gets 60 percent of the cut, and whoever is not gets 40 percent. That’s how the corporates work. They have enough money to pay the government and the opposition. All these institutions of democracy have been hollowed out, and their shells have been placed back, and we continue this sort of charade in some ways.

“This new election is going to be [about] who the corporates choose,” Roy says, “[about] who is not going to blink about deploying the Indian army against the poorest people in this country, and pushing them out to give over those lands, those rivers, those mountains, to the major mining corporations.”

And these very corporations that are involved in the pillaging of not just the poor, but the mountains, rivers and almost everything have now turned their attention to the arts. Apart from owning the TV channels, they fund for example, the Jaipur Literature Festival, where the biggest writers in the world come and discuss free speech, and the logo is shining out there behind you, however, you don’t hear about the fact that in the forest the bodies are piling up. The public hearings where people have the right to ask these corporations what is being done to their environment and homes are just silenced.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we end, I was wondering if you could read from one of your essays. It’s an excerpt that you read at the New School, when hundreds of people came out to see you here recently.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, it was the first political essay I wrote after The God of Small Things, and it was an essay called “The End of Imagination,” when the Indian government conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998.

“In early May (before the bomb), I left home for three weeks. I thought I would return. I had every intention of returning. Of course, things haven’t worked out quite the way I planned.” Of course, by which I meant that India just wasn’t the same anymore.

“While I was away, I met a friend of mine whom I have always loved for, among other things, her ability to combine deep affection with a frankness that borders on savagery.

“’I’ve been thinking about you,’ she said, ‘about The God of Small Things — what’s in it, what’s over it, under it, around it, above it…’

“She fell silent for a while. I was uneasy and not at all sure that I wanted to hear the rest of what she had to say. She, however, was sure that she was going to say it. ‘In this last year,’ she said, ‘less than a year actually—you’ve had too much of everything—fame, money, prizes, adulation, criticism, condemnation, ridicule, love, hate, anger, envy, generosity—everything. In some ways it’s a perfect story. Perfectly baroque in its excess. The trouble is that it has, or can have, only one perfect ending.’ Her eyes were on me, bright with a slanting, probing brilliance. She knew that I knew what she was going to say. She was insane.

“She was going to say that nothing that happened to me in the future could ever match the buzz of this. That the whole of the rest of my life was going to be vaguely unsatisfying. And, therefore, the only perfect ending to the story would be death. My death.

“The thought had occurred to me too. Of course it had. The fact that all this, this global dazzle—these lights in my eyes, the applause, the flowers, the photographers, the journalists feigning a deep interest in my life (yet struggling to get a single fact straight), the men in suits fawning over me, the shiny hotel bathrooms with endless towels—none of it was likely to happen again. Would I miss it? Had I grown to need it? Was I a fame-junkie? Would I have withdrawal symptoms?

“I told my friend there was no such thing as a perfect story. I said in any case hers was an external view of things, this assumption that the trajectory of a person’s happiness, or let’s say fulfilment, had peaked (and now must trough) because she had accidentally stumbled upon ‘success.’ It was premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody’s dreams.

“You’ve lived too long in New York, I told her. There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. And sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.

“The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.

“’Which means exactly what?’

“I tried to explain, but didn’t do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. And this is what I wrote: To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”