Short Report on Arundhati Roy Meeting on 12th June
My Impressions
by Nickglais
Arundhati Roy spoke to an audience of about 500 people at Friends Meeting House in Euston about the War on the People of India by the Indian State on 12th June 2011.
My impressions of the meeting are very positive as Arundhati’s resistance to the murderous activities of the Indian State is an inspiration and listening to her energises you for further struggle.
She told the audience about her recent speech at School of Oriental and African Studies when she was confronted by a hostile questioner who said she should be thankful she was born in India the world’s largest democracy has if she had been born in China she would be in prison.
AlJazeera English broadcast “Faultlines” interviews Indian author Arundhati Roy.
This is a very thoughtful and interesting discussion of the big picture (in india and the region) and the sources of Indian state aggression (in both hindu fundamentalism and corporate occupation).
““The Gandhian ethos is a very frightening ethos in the forest; because the Gandhian ethos requires… performance that requires an audience, you know. And in the forest, there’s no audience… in a society that doesn’t belong to the rest of society. How do hungry people go on a hunger strike? How do people who don’t have any money not pay their taxes or do civil disobedience?”
October 26, 2010 — I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir.
I said what millions of people here say every day. I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state.
Yesterday I travelled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice.
This was originally on newstatesman.com. This is the first part of a 2-part essay.
Exclusive essay: India in crisis
by Arundhati Roy
The law locks up the hapless felon
who steals the goose from off the common,
but lets the greater felon loose
who steals the common from the goose.
Anonymous, England, 1821
In the early morning hours of the 2nd of July 2010, in the remote forests of Adilabad, the Andhra Pradesh State Police fired a bullet into the chest of a man called Cherukuri Rajkumar, known to his comrades as Azad. Azad was a member of the Polit Bureau of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), and had been nominated by his party as its chief negotiator for the proposed peace talks with the Government of India. Why did the police fire at point-blank range and leave those telltale burn marks, when they could so easily have covered their tracks? Was it a mistake or was it a message?
They killed a second person that morning — Hem Chandra Pandey, a young journalist who was traveling with Azad when he was apprehended. Why did they kill him? Was it to make sure no eyewitness remained alive to tell the tale? Or was it just whimsy?
In the course of a war, if, in the preliminary stages of a peace negotiation, one side executes the envoy of the other side, it’s reasonable to assume that the side that did the killing does not want peace. It looks very much as though Azad was killed because someone decided that the stakes were too high to allow him to remain alive. That decision could turn out to be a serious error of judgment. Not just because of who he was, but because of the political climate in India today.
Earlier this year, Indian writer Arundhati Roy slipped into the tribal base areas of India’s growing Maoist movement. She produced the following remarkable description of revolutionary energy emerging from some of the world’s poorest and most threatened people. This widely-circulated essay is even more important as the Indian military prepares a murderous Operation Green Hunt to target the tribal people and the Maoists, occupy their remote political base areas and clear the ground for multinational corporate exploitation.
Click for map of where Farsi is spoken
Now this important essay is available in Farsi — an important language of the Middle East and Central Asia.
Published on Saturday, September 29, 2001 in the Guardian/UK. Thanks to Radical Eyes for suggesting this.
The Algebra of Infinite Justice
by Arundhati Roy
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.
Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international coalition against terror”, mobilized its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.
This following article attacks one of the world’s most important revolutionary movements — the Maoist insurgency in India.
It starts with an aggressive dismissal of Arundhati Roy and her passionate reporting from a Maoist liberated zone. This article moves on to dismiss the revolutionary movement’s accomplishments, its connection with the people, its goals of New democracy and its historical antecedents in the Naxalite uprising. The whole discussion radiates a gut-level dislike of revolutionary violence.
For all those reasons, Kasama was reluctant to make the article available here. After all, we don’t agree with the overall verdict, tone or method (to put it mildly).
However a growing revolutionary movement will have such detractors. There is value in knowing (and vetting) their arguments. This piece originally appeared as part of Platypus Review 26 (August 2010) on the website of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
This was originally posted on kafila.org. It’ was a comment to a piece originally written by Jairus Banaji.
“Only a “civic” anxiety could have mis-read what Arundhati painfully tries to make us see. That certain people are not living under conditions we can even imagine unless we witness and hear it. Does human life have to carry as complex a message that intellectual discourses carry?! What the hell do we mean by “social change” when all that it can mean is something of a middle-class passport to “conscious political” livelihood?! Whereas, the SOCIAL itself is UNDER THREAT in certain societies and CHANGE can only mean either daily annihilation or resistance?!”
A response to Jairus Banaji
By Manash
I must confess I found the highly reputed Jairus Banaji’s response to Arundhati utterly disappointing and irrelevant. I will simply raise a few questions against his reading of Arundhati’s article and leave it there.
Banaji asks, “But where does the rest of India fit in? What categories do we have for them?” –
Well, the irony is, the rest of India does “fit in” somehow, somewhere, in the scheme of things, unlike those hungry tribal boys who eat up their bananas on their way to meet a “kaamraid” and understand defending life with guns. Unless these tribals are psychopaths, I don’t understand any meaningful explanation for them to live the way they are doing. And as far as the “rest of India” is concerned, the “categories” of civil society and all such civil discourses keep the academia, the media, the law, and the government going. Why should civil-society suddenly, deliberately feature in a debate which is precisely about people who are forced to lead an un-civic life?! Why should pro-civil society intellectuals behave like judges in their suggestive remarks about the tribals being innocent victims of (Maoist) politics? Are we to believe that the whole debate which involves the life and death so many poor people needs a kind of judge-versus-vanguard quarrel?! I feel “Who are with the Maoists?” isn’t the question we face. The question we face is: Who are with the tribals?
This was originally posted on kafila.org. H/T to J. Ramsey.
Arundhati Roy’s powerful article Walking with the Comrades touched off an intense debate within India. To provide a snapshot, we are posting a critique and a response to Roy’s piece.
“…[A]re we seriously supposed to believe that the extraordinary tide of insurrection will wash over the messy landscapes of urban India and over the millions of disorganised workers in our countryside without the emergence of a powerful social agency, a broad alliance of salaried and wage-earning strata, that can contest the stranglehold of capitalism? Without mass organisations, battles for democracy, struggles for the radicalisation of culture, etc., etc.? Does any of this matter for her?”
Response to Arundhati Roy: Jairus Banaji
This is a guest post by JAIRUS BANAJI
Arundhati Roy’s essay “Walking with the Comrades” is a powerful indictment of the Indian state and its brutality but its political drawbacks are screamingly obvious. Arundhati clearly believes that the Indian state is such a bastion of oppression and unrelieved brutality that there is no alternative to violent struggle or ‘protracted war’. In other words, democracy is a pure excrescence on a military apparatus that forms the true backbone of the Indian state. It is simply its ‘benign façade’. If all you had in India were forest communities and corporate predators, tribals and paramilitary forces, the government and the Maoists, her espousal of the Maoists might just cut ice. But where does the rest of India fit in? What categories do we have for them? Or are we seriously supposed to believe that the extraordinary tide of insurrection will wash over the messy landscapes of urban India and over the millions of disorganised workers in our countryside without the emergence of a powerful social agency, a broad alliance of salaried and wage-earning strata, that can contest the stranglehold of capitalism? Without mass organisations, battles for democracy, struggles for the radicalisation of culture, etc., etc.? Does any of this matter for her?
The following appeared in Outlook (April 12). The implications, danger and urgency of this should speak for itself. Arundhati Roy has just publicly stepped out in defense of the tribal people and Maoist fighters targeted by the Indian governments Operation Green Hunt.
Chhatisgarh Police Mulls Action Against Arundhati Roy
First came the report in today’s Hindi daily Nai Duniya, published from Bhopal, with the dateline Raipur, that the police in Chhattisgarh was considering action against author Arundhati Roy under under Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act-2005. And then came the corroboration from various police sources.
Apparently, one Vishwajit Mitra, has lodged a complaint at the Telibanda police station in Raipur, pointing out that the contents and photographs of Arundhati Roy’s essay Walking With The Comrades, published in the March 29 issue of Outlook could attract action as an offence under Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act-2005.
The complaint has also been sent to the governor Shekhar Dutt, Chief Minister Raman Singh and Director General of Police Vishwaranjan, demanding legal action against Arundhati Roy.
Nai Duniya had earlier reported that DGP Vishwaranjan had confirmed receipt of the complaint and asked the State Intelligence Bureau to enquire into the merits of the case against the Booker prize winning author.
The Indian Express quotes the police as saying: “We are examining it to find out whether any offence has been committed”.
The complainant, Vishwajit Mitra, told The Indian Express that Arundhati’s essay had sought to not only “glorify” the Maoists but also denigrate the country’s established system, including the judiciary. “Referring to a Maoist ‘Jan adalat’, she says in her essay that “in most jan adalats, at least the collective is physically present to make a decision. It’s not made by judges who’ve lost touch with ordinary life”, he pointed out, alleging that the writer also sought to justify Maoist other activities.
“Let the police investigate into my complaint and take a position. I am also keeping my options open to move the appropriate court to initiate legal action against the writer”, he said.
Kasama has received the following detailed overview of the Indian government’s building offensive against revolutionary forest strongholds of tribal peoples and Maoist fighters. This came to us from A World To Win news service.
Operation Green Hunt: India’s state terror
5 April 2010. A World to Win News Service. Indian authorities have reported that the anti-Maoist military offensive called Operation Green Hunt has suffered significant blows.
On 3 April guerrillas killed at least 10 policemen and injured 10 more in a landmine attack on a police bus in the eastern state of Orissa. On 5 April, in Dantewada district in the state of Chhattisgarh, they first ambushed soldiers carrying out a jungle patrol and then ambushed a second unit sent to rescue the first. As we go to press fighting is reported to be continuing. India’s Home Minister P Chidambaram said “Something has gone very wrong. They seem to have walked into a trap set by the [Maoists] and casualties are quite high” – the security forces are said to have lost 72 soldiers. Soutik Biswas, reporting from Delhi for BBC, describes the attack as “a blow to the government” and concludes that “the government is in for a long and difficult war.”
In late 2009, with an array of military forces, hi-tech support and utmost cruelty, the government of India launched Operation Green Hunt. India is economically on the move and its rulers are eager to upgrade their partnership with global imperialism. They cannot tolerate the fact that large swaths of the country are no longer under their control, and are determined to crush anything that stands in their way, especially the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change who make up the army they lead.
Arundhati Roy during a visit to the forest where she broke the taboo of of interviewing Maoist guerrillas in their base areas.
Last month, quietly, unannounced, Arundhati Roy decided to visit the forbidding and forbidden precincts of Central India’s Dandakaranya Forests, home to a melange of tribespeople many of whom have taken up arms to protect their people against state-backed marauders and exploiters. She recorded in considerable detail the first face-to-face journalistic “encounter” with armed guerrillas, their families and comrades, for which she combed the forests for weeks at personal risk. This essay was published on Friday in Delhi’s Outlook magazine. Arundhati Roy made the pictures in this 20,000 word essay available exclusively to Dawn.
The following was first posted on Dawn.com. Kasama urges all readers to give it close attention and wide circulation. We urge all our readers to share and download this new pamphlet. It makes it much easier for people to study this important work by Arundhati Roy describing the revolutionary fighters and people of India’s Maoist political base areas. This pamphlet includes many of Roy’s remarkable photographs from her trip that bring the text to life.
The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them.
I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewara, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”
“Sri Lanka solution” threatened for Maoist-led uprising in India – Excerpts from Arundhati Roy
16 November 2009. A World to Win News Service. The Indian government is preparing “Operation Green Hunt”, a counter-insurgency operation on an unprecedented scale. As many as a hundred thousand soldiers and other security forces are to be sent into the forested hills of eastern and central India to crush the rebellion of adivasi (tribal peoples) led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). This is no short-term incursion: the authorities have announced that they plan to station massive numbers of troops in the tribal areas for years to come.
Several commentators have warned of the danger that the Indian government plans to seek a “Sri Lanka solution”, modelled on the recent protracted government offensive there. Massive ground forces and air assaults were used to defeat the Tamil Tigers, and then hundreds of thousands of the region’s civilian population were imprisoned in detention camps, where most still languish. Now what may be permanent military bases are being built in the Tamil heartland. The Indian government no doubt noted the implicit U.S. approval for that operation. At the U.S ‘s behest, the IMF granted the Sri Lankan government a huge financial package almost immediately after the massacre.
Following are excerpts from an article by Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy that appeared in the October 31 issue of the Sri Lanka Guardian (srilankaguardian. org). The full article online gives much more detail for her arguments and a more all-around representation of her views. The November 2009 issue of People’s March (peoplesmarch. googlepages. com, or bannedthought. net) has two recent statements by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and other material on this offensive.
The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh [one of several tribal peoples in the region] 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…
The following also appears on Nickglais’ Democracy and class struggle site.
