Come on Rajib, at least give it an attempt at a rebuttal; if you see something
that is untrue, incorrect interpretation, subversive motives or otherwise
untenable; would you?
Dismissing her as 'out of her mind' might give you a feeling of superiority - a
typical response of those who cannot articulate a thought, but persuades no
one. You oght not to join that crowd :-). It merely reaffirms the bitter truths
of Indian misgovernment and its intelligentsia's irrelevance.
---- Rajib Das <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As usual the woman is out of her mind! She rails for
> railing's sake!
>
> In one single interview, she cannot keep her
> ideological position constant. Unless being anti
> something (in her case, her perception of India) can
> be called an ideology.
>
> I hear she is getting out of political writing /
> speaking and into doing another book. Good for her -
> Great for us!
>
> And how dare she not mention the glorious struggles in
> Assam - after mentioning the Maoists, Kashmir - even
> Nagaland!
>
>
> --- Chandan Mahanta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> ZNet| On India’s Growing Violence: ‘It’s
> Outright War and Both Sides are Choosing Their
> Weapons’ A {
> text-decoration: none;
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> color: 0000FF; text-decoration: underline }
>
>
> Sender's Comments: Read it. Will do you
> good.
> cm
>
>
> The article below is from ZNet.
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> ZNet | A Community of People Committed to Social
> Change
>
>
> On India’s Growing Violence: ‘It’s
> Outright
> War and Both Sides are Choosing Their Weapons’
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> Louvre Abu Dhabi
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> Arab Peace Initiative
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> Bolivia's Morales
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> Road Map Overtaken
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> Peace, Democracy,
> Iraq?
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> Most Recent
> From Arundhati Roy
>
>
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>
>
> Breaking
> the News
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> 'And His Life Should Become Extinct'
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> India and the U.S.
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> A Fury Building Up Across
> India
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> Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
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> by
> Arundhati Roy and Shoma Chaudhury
> Tehelka
> March 26, 2007
>
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> The following is an interview with Arundhati Roy,
> conducted by Shoma Chaudhury of Tehelka.
>
> There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the
> country. How do you read the signs? In what context
> should it be read?
>
> You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We
> have a growing middle class, reared on a diet of
> radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike
> industrializing Western countries, which had colonies
> from which to plunder resources and generate slave
> labor to feed this process, we have to colonize
> ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat
> our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and
> marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism)
> can only be sated by grabbing land, water and
> resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing
> is the most successful secessionist struggle ever
> waged in independent India — the secession of the
> middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.
> It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one.
> They’re fighting for the right to merge with the
> world’s elite somewhere up there in the
> stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the
> resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the
> water and electricity. Now they want the land to make
> more cars, more bombs, more mines — supertoys for
> the new supercitizens of the new superpower. So it’s
> outright war, and people on both sides are choosing
> their weapons. The government and the corporations
> reach for structural adjustment, the World Bank, the
> ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy
> makers, help from the ‘friendly’ corporate media
> and a police force that will ram all this down
> people’s throats. Those who want to resist this
> process have, until now, reached for dharnas, hunger
> strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what they thought
> was friendly media. But now more and more are reaching
> for guns. Will the violence grow? If the ‘growth
> rate’ and the Sensex are going to be the only
> barometers the government uses to measure progress and
> the well-being of people, then of course it will. How
> do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read
> sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters, is
> this: the shit has hit the fan, folks.
>
> You once remarked that though you may not resort to
> violence yourself, you think it has become immoral to
> condemn it, given the circumstances in the country.
> Can you elaborate on this view?
>
> I’d be a liability as a guerrilla! I doubt I used
> the word ‘immoral’ — morality is an elusive
> business, as changeable as the weather. What I feel is
> this: non-violent movements have knocked at the door
> of every democratic institution in this country for
> decades, and have been spurned and humiliated. Look at
> the Bhopal gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
> The nba had a lot going for it — high-profile
> leadership, media coverage, more resources than any
> other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound
> to want to rethink strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins
> to promote satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in
> Davos, it’s time for us to sit up and think. For
> example, is mass civil disobedience possible within
> the structure of a democratic nation state? Is it
> possible in the age of disinformation and
> corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger strikes
> umbilically linked to celebrity politics? Would
> anybody care if the people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti
> mines went on a hunger strike? Irom Sharmila has been
> on a hunger strike for six years. That should be a
> lesson to many of us. I’ve always felt that it’s
> ironic that hunger strikes are used as a political
> weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway.
> We are in a different time and place now. Up against a
> different, more complex adversary. We’ve entered the
> era of NGOs — or should I say the era of paltu shers
> — in which mass action can be a treacherous
> business. We have demonstrations which are funded, we
> have sponsored dharnas and social forums which make
> militant postures but never follow up on what they
> preach. We have all kinds of ‘virtual’ resistance.
> Meetings against SEZs sponsored by the biggest
> promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental
> activism and community action given by corporations
> responsible for devastating whole ecosystems. Vedanta,
> a company mining bauxite in the forests of Orissa,
> wants to start a university. The Tatas have two
> charitable trusts that directly and indirectly fund
> activists and mass movements across the country. Could
> that be why Singur has drawn so much less flak than
> Nandigram? Of course the Tatas and Birlas funded
> Gandhi too — maybe he was our first NGO. But now we
> have NGOs who make a lot of noise, write a lot of
> reports, but whom the sarkar is more than comfortable
> with. How do we make sense of all this? The place is
> crawling with professional diffusers of real political
> action. ‘Virtual’ resistance has become something
> of a liability.
>
> There was a time when mass movements looked to the
> courts for justice. The courts have rained down a
> series of judgments that are so unjust, so insulting
> to the poor in the language they use, they take your
> breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgment, allowing
> the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it
> didn’t have the requisite clearances, said in so
> many words that the questions of corporations
> indulging in malpractice does not arise! In the ERA of
> corporate globalization, corporate land-grab, in the
> ERA of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel,
> that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes the
> ideological heart of the most powerful institution in
> this country. The judiciary, along with the corporate
> press, is now seen as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal
> project.
>
> In a climate like this, when people feel that they are
> being worn down, exhausted by these interminable
> ‘democratic’ processes, only to be eventually
> humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course it
> isn’t as though the only options are binary —
> violence versus non-violence. There are political
> parties that believe in armed struggle but only as one
> part of their overall political strategy. Political
> workers in these struggles have been dealt with
> brutally, killed, beaten, imprisoned under false
> charges. People are fully aware that to take to arms
> is to call down upon yourself the myriad forms of the
> violence of the Indian State. The minute armed
> struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks
> and the colors fade to black and white. But when
> people decide to take that step because every other
> option has ended in despair, should we condemn them?
> Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram
> had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal
> government would have backed down? We are living in
> times when to be ineffective is to support the status
> quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being
> effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to
> condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.
>
> You have been traveling a lot on the ground — can
> you give us a sense of the trouble spots you have been
> to? Can you outline a few of the combat lines in these
> places?
>
> Huge question — what can I say? The military
> occupation of Kashmir, neo-fascism in Gujarat, civil
> war in Chhattisgarh, MNCs raping Orissa, the
> submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada
> Valley, people living on the edge of absolute
> starvation, the devastation of forest land, the Bhopal
> victims living to see the West Bengal government
> re-wooing Union Carbide — now calling itself Dow
> Chemicals — in Nandigram. I haven’t been recently
> to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, but we know
> about the almost hundred thousand farmers who have
> killed themselves. We know about the fake encounters
> and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each of
> these places has its own particular history, economy,
> ecology. None is amenable to easy analysis. And yet
> there is connecting tissue, there are huge
> international cultural and economic pressures being
> brought to bear on them. How can I not mention the
> Hindutva project, spreading its poison
> sub-cutaneously, waiting to erupt once again? I’d
> say the biggest indictment of all is that we are still
> a country, a culture, a society which continues to
> nurture and practice the notion of untouchability.
> While our economists number-crunch and boast about the
> growth rate, a million people — human scavengers —
> earn their living carrying several kilos of other
> people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they
> didn’t carry shit on their heads they would starve
> to death. Some fucking superpower this.
>
> How does one view the recent State and police violence
> in Bengal?
>
> No different from police and State violence anywhere
> else — including the issue of hypocrisy and
> doublespeak so perfected by all political parties
> including the mainstream Left. Are Communist bullets
> different from capitalist ones? Odd things are
> happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in
> broad daylight. The Chinese government tabled a bill
> sanctioning the right to private property. I don’t
> know if all of this has to do with climate change. The
> Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest
> capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect
> our own parliamentary Left to be any different?
> Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes you
> wonder — is the last stop of every revolution
> advanced capitalism? Think about it — the French
> Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese
> Revolution, the Vietnam War, the anti-apartheid
> struggle, the supposedly Gandhian freedom struggle in
> India… what’s the last station they all pull in
> at? Is this the end of imagination?
>
> The Maoist attack in Bijapur — the death of 55
> policemen. Are the rebels only the flip side of the
> State?
>
> How can the rebels be the flip side of the State?
> Would anybody say that those who fought against
> apartheid — however brutal their methods — were
> the flip side of the State? What about those who
> fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the
> Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those
> who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they
> the flip side of the State? This facile new
> report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this
> meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced
> to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the
> real politics out of everything. However pristine we
> would like to be, however hard we polish our halos,
> the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine
> choices. There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh
> sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh government,
> which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if
> you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists. The
> lynchpin of this war, apart from the formal security
> forces, is the Salva Judum — a government-backed
> militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms,
> forced to become SPOs (special police officers). The
> Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in
> Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds
> of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any
> banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the
> government wants to import these failed strategies
> into the heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been
> forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into
> police camps. Hundreds of villages have been forcibly
> evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore, are being
> eyed by corporations like the Tatas and Essar. Mous
> have been signed, but no one knows what they say. Land
> acquisition has begun. This kind of thing happened in
> countries like Colombia — one of the most devastated
> countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes are
> fixed on the spiraling violence between
> government-backed militias and guerrilla squads,
> multinational corporations quietly make off with the
> mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theater
> being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh.
>
> Of course it’s horrible that 55 policemen were
> killed. But they’re as much the victims of
> government policy as anybody else. For the government
> and the corporations they’re just cannon fodder —
> there’s plenty more where they came from. Crocodile
> tears will be shed, prim TV anchors will hector us for
> a while and then more supplies of fodder will be
> arranged. For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and
> SPOs they killed were the armed personnel of the
> Indian State, the main, hands-on perpetrators of
> repression, torture, custodial killings, false
> encounters. They’re not innocent civilians — if
> such a thing exists — by any stretch of imagination.
>
>
> I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of
> terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have
> committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt they
> cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local
> people — but who can? Still, no guerrilla army can
> survive without local support. That’s a logistical
> impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing,
> not diminishing. That says something. People have no
> choice but to align themselves on the side of whoever
> they think is less worse.
>
> But to equate a resistance movement fighting against
> enormous injustice with the government which enforces
> that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed
> the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent
> resistance. When people take to arms, there is going
> to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen
> and outright criminal. The government is responsible
> for the monstrous situations it creates.
>
> ‘Naxals’, ‘Maoists’, ‘outsiders’: these
> are terms being very loosely used these days.
>
> ‘Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the
> early stages of repression by governments who have
> begun to believe their own publicity and can’t
> imagine that their own people have risen up against
> them. That’s the stage the CPM is at now in Bengal,
> though some would say repression in Bengal is not new,
> it has only moved into higher gear. In any case,
> what’s an outsider? Who decides the borders? Are
> they village boundaries? Tehsil? Block? District?
> State? Is narrow regional and ethnic politics the new
> Communist mantra? About Naxals and Maoists — well…
> India is about to become a police state in which
> everybody who disagrees with what’s going on risks
> being called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to
> be Islamic — so that’s not good enough to cover
> most of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So
> leaving the definition loose, undefined, is effective
> strategy, because the time is not far off when we’ll
> all be called Maoists or Naxalites, terrorists or
> terrorist sympathizers, and shut down by people who
> don’t really know or care who Maoists or Naxalites
> are. In villages, of course, that has begun —
> thousands of people are being held in jails across the
> country, loosely charged with being terrorists trying
> to overthrow the state. Who are the real Naxalites and
> Maoists? I’m not an authority on the subject, but
> here’s a very rudimentary potted history.
>
> The Communist Party of India, the CPI, was formed in
> 1925. The CPI (M), or what we now call the CPM — the
> Communist Party Marxist — split from the CPI in 1964
> and formed a separate party. Both, of course, were
> parliamentary political parties. In 1967, the CPM,
> along with a splinter group of the Congress, came to
> power in West Bengal. At the time there was massive
> unrest among the peasantry starving in the
> countryside. Local CPM leaders — Kanu Sanyal and
> Charu Mazumdar — led a peasant uprising in the
> district of Naxalbari which is where the term
> Naxalites comes from. In 1969, the government fell and
> the Congress came back to power under Siddhartha
> Shankar Ray. The Naxalite uprising was mercilessly
> crushed — Mahasweta Devi has written powerfully
> about this time. In 1969, the CPI (ML) — Marxist
> Leninist — split from the CPM. A few years later,
> around 1971, the CPI (ML) devolved into several
> parties: the CPM-ML (Liberation), largely centered in
> Bihar; the CPM-ML (New Democracy), functioning for the
> most part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar; the CPM-ML
> (Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties have
> been generically baptised ‘Naxalites’. They see
> themselves as Marxist Leninist, not strictly speaking
> Maoist. They believe in elections, mass action and —
> when absolutely pushed to the wall or attacked —
> armed struggle. The MCC — the Maoist Communist
> Centre, at the time mostly operating in Bihar — was
> formed in 1968. The PW, People’s War, operational
> for the most part in Andhra Pradesh, was formed in
> 1980. Recently, in 2004, the MCC and the pw merged to
> form the CPI (Maoist) They believe in outright armed
> struggle and the overthrowing of the State. They
> don’t participate in elections. This is the party
> that is fighting the guerrilla war in Bihar, Andhra
> Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.
>
> The Indian State and media largely view the Maoists as
> an “internal security†threat. Is this the way to
> look at them?
>
> I’m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed
> in this way.
>
> The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given the
> autocratic ideology they take their inspiration from,
> what alternative would they set up? Wouldn’t their
> regime be an exploitative, autocratic, violent one as
> well? Isn’t their action already exploitative of
> ordinary people? Do they really have the support of
> ordinary people?
>
> I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that
> both Mao and Stalin are dubious heroes with murderous
> pasts. Tens of millions of people were killed under
> their regimes. Apart from what happened in China and
> the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the
> Chinese Communist Party (while the West looked
> discreetly away), wiped out two million people in
> Cambodia and brought millions of people to the brink
> of extinction from disease and starvation. Can we
> pretend that China’s cultural revolution didn’t
> happen? Or that millions of people in the Soviet Union
> and Eastern Europe were not victims of labor camps,
> torture chambers, the network of spies and informers,
> the secret police. The history of these regimes is
> just as dark as the history of Western imperialism,
> except for the fact that they had a shorter life-span.
> We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq, Palestine
> and Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and
> Chechnya. I would imagine that for the Maoists, the
> Naxalites, as well as the mainstream Left, being
> honest about the past is important to strengthen
> people’s faith in the future. One hopes the past
> will not be repeated, but denying that it ever
> happened doesn’t help inspire confidence…
> Nevertheless, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave
> and successful struggle against the monarchy. Right
> now, in India, the Maoists and the various
> Marxist-Leninist groups are leading the fight against
> immense injustice here. They are fighting not just the
> State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias.
> They are the only people who are making a dent. And I
> admire that. It may well be that when they come to
> power, they will, as you say, be brutal, unjust and
> autocratic, or even worse than the present government.
> Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume that in
> advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight them too.
> And most likely someone like myself will be the first
> person they’ll string up from the nearest tree —
> but right now, it is important to acknowledge that
> they are bearing the brunt of being at the forefront
> of resistance. Many of us are in a position where we
> are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those
> who we know have no place for us in their religious or
> ideological imagination. It’s true that everybody
> changes radically when they come to power — look at
> Mandela’s ANC. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the
> IMF driving the poor out of their homes — honoring
> Suharto, the killer of hundreds of thousands of
> Indonesian Communists, with South Africa’s highest
> civilian award. Who would have thought it could
> happen? But does this mean South Africans should have
> backed away from the struggle against apartheid? Or
> that they should regret it now? Does it mean Algeria
> should have remained a French colony, that Kashmiris,
> Iraqis and Palestinians should accept military
> occupation? That people whose dignity is being
> assaulted should give up the fight because they
> can’t find saints to lead them into battle?
>
> Is there a communication breakdown in our society?
>
> Yes.
>
> >
> _______________________________________________
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> > assam@assamnet.org
> >
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> >
>
>
>
>
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