Into the Inferno: Hollow Language
and Hollow Democracies
What can we do, now that democracy
and the free market are one?
by Arundhati Roy
www.commondreams.org/, July 16,
2009
While we're still arguing about whether
there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart?
Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By
democracy I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration.
I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants,
such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy? Attempts
to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different
systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative
defence of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but
it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably,
someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?"
Whether democracy should be the utopia
that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate
question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic
phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy
is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or
in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to
suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian
or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system
of representative democracy - too much representation, too little
democracy - needs some structural adjustment.
The question here, really, is what have
we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens
once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out
and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions
has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that
democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory
organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost
entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible
to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back
to being what it used to be?
What we need today, for the sake of the
survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments
whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term
gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer
to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual
freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out
to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy
is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors
our greatest folly - our nearsightedness? Our inability to live
entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our
inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between
creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence
seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder
the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make
up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.
It would be conceit to pretend that my
new book of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers, provides answers
to these questions. It only demonstrates, in some detail, the
fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that
democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the
justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays
were written as urgent, public interventions at critical moments
in India - during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat;
just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammad Afzal, the
accused in the 13 December 2001 parliament attack; during US President
George Bush's visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir
in the summer of 2008; and after the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Often they were not just responses to events, they were responses
to the responses.
Though many of them were written in anger,
at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something,
the essays do have a common thread. They're not about unfortunate
anomalies or aberrations in the democratic pro_cess. They're about
the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy and the ways
in which it is practised in the world's largest democracy. (Or
the world's largest "demon-crazy", as a Kashmiri protester
on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: "Democracy
without Justice = Demon Crazy.")
In January 2008, on the first anniversary
of the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I
gave a lecture in Istanbul. Dink was shot down on the street outside
his office for daring to raise a subject that is forbidden in
Turkey - the 1915 genocide of Armenians, in which more than one
million people were killed. My lecture was about the history of
genocide and genocide denial, and the old, almost organic relationship
between "progress" and genocide.
I have always been struck by the fact
that the political party in Turkey that carried out the Armenian
genocide was called the Committee for Union and Progress. Most
of the essays in Listening to Grasshoppers are, in fact, about
the contemporary correlation between union and progress, or, in
today's idiom, between nationalism and development - those unimpeachable
twin towers of modern, free-market democracy. Both of these in
their extreme form are, as we now know, encrypted with the potential
of bringing about ultimate, apocalyptic destruction (nuclear war,
climate change).
Though the essays were written between
2002 and 2008, the invisible marker, the starting gun, is the
year 1989, when in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan capitalism
won its long jihad against Soviet communism. (Of course, the wheel's
in spin again. Could it be that those same mountains are now in
the process of burying capitalism? It's too early to tell.) Within
months of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the Indian government, once a leader of the Non-Aligned
Movement, performed a high-speed somersault and aligned itself
with the United States, monarch of the new unipolar world.
The rules of the game changed suddenly
and completely. Millions of people who lived in remote villages
and deep in the heart of untouched forests, some of whom had never
heard of Berlin or the Soviet Union, could not have imagined how
events that occurred in those faraway places would affect their
lives. The process of their dispossession and displacement had
already begun in the early 1950s, when India opted for the Soviet-style
development model in which huge steel plants and thousands of
large dams would occupy the "commanding heights" of
the economy. The era of privatisation and structural adjustment
accelerated that process at a mind-numbing speed.
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").
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 eco_systems, 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, com_puters, 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
"pro_gress" 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 of electoral democracy can turn a tiny minority into
a thumping mandate.
In the run-up to the polls, there was
absolute consensus across party lines about the economic "reforms".
Several people have sarcastically suggested that the Congress
and BJP form a coalition. In some states they already have. In
Chhattisgarh, for example, the BJP runs the government and Congress
politicians run the Salwa Judum, a vicious, government-backed
"people's" militia. The Judum and the government have
formed a joint front against the Maoists in the forests, who are
engaged in a brutal and often deadly armed struggle. Among other
things, this has become a fight to the finish, against displacement
and against land acquisition by corporations waiting to begin
mining iron ore, tin and all the other wealth stashed below the
forest floor. So, in Chhattisgarh, we have the remarkable spectacle
of the two biggest political parties of India in an alliance against
the Adivasis of Dantewara, India's poorest, most vulnerable people.
Already 644 villages have been emptied. Fifty thousand people
have moved into Salwa Judum camps. Three hundred thousand are
on the run, and are being called Maoist terrorists or sympathisers.
The battle is raging, and the corporations are waiting.
It is significant that India is one of
the countries that blocked a European move in the UN asking for
an international probe into war crimes that may have been committed
by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against
the Tamil Tigers. Governments in this part of the world have taken
note of Israel's Gaza blueprint as a good way of dealing with
"terrorism": keep the media out and close in for the
kill. That way they don't have to worry too much about who's a
"terrorist" and who isn't. There may be a little flurry
of international outrage, but it goes away pretty quickly.
Things do not augur well for the forest-dwelling
people of India. Reassured by this "constructive" collaboration,
this consensus between political parties, few were more enthusiastic
about the recent general elections than major corporate houses.
They seem to have realised that a democratic mandate can legitimise
their pillaging in a way that nothing else can. Several corporations
ran extravagant advertising campaigns on TV - some featuring Bollywood
film stars - urging people, young and old, rich and poor, to go
out and vote. Shops and restaurants in Khan Market, Delhi's most
tony market, offered discounts to those whose index (voting) fingers
were marked with indelible ink. Democracy suddenly became the
cool new way to be. You know how it is: the Chinese do sport,
so they had the Olympics; India does democracy, so we had an election.
Both are heavily sponsored, TV-friendly spectator sports.
Even the BBC commissioned the India Election
Special - a coach on a train - that took journalists from all
over the world on a sightseeing tour to witness the miracle of
Indian elections. The train coach had a slogan painted on it:
"Will India's voters revive the World's Fortunes?" BBC
(Hindi) had a poster up in a café near my home. It featured
a $100 bill (with Ben Franklin) morphing into a 500 rupee note
(with Gandhi). It said: Kya India ka vote bachayega duniya ka
note? (Will India's votes rescue the world's currency notes?)
In these flagrant and unabashed ways,
an electorate has been turned into a market, voters are seen as
consumers, and democracy is being welded to the free market. Ergo:
those who cannot consume do not matter.
For better or for worse, the 2009 elections
seem to have ensured that the "progress" project is
up and running. However, it would be a serious mistake to believe
that the "union" project has fallen by the wayside.
As the 2009 election campaign unrolled,
two things got saturation coverage in the media. One was the 100,000-rupee
($2,000) "people's car", the Tata Nano - the wagon for
the volks - rolling out of Modi's Gujarat. (The sops and subsidies
Modi gave the Tatas had a lot to do with Ratan Tata's warm endorsement
of him.) The other is the hate speech of the BJP's monstrous new
debutant, Varun Gandhi (another descendant of the Nehru dynasty),
who makes even Narendra Modi sound moderate and retiring. In a
public speech Varun Gandhi called for Muslims to be forcibly sterilised.
"This will be known as a Hindu bastion, no ***** Muslim dare
raise his head here," he said, using a derogatory word for
someone who has been circumcised. "I don't want a single
Muslim vote."
Varun Gandhi won his election by a colossal
margin. It makes you wonder - are "the people" always
right? The BJP still remains by far the second largest political
party, with a powerful national presence, the only real challenge
to the Congress. It will certainly live to fight another day.
The hoary institutions of Indian democracy
- the judiciary, the police, the "free" press and, of
course, elections - far from working as a system of checks and
balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other
cover to promote the larger interests of union and progress. In
the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that
voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that
only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colourful,
somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.
Speaking of consensus, there's the small
and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir,
the consensus in India is hardcore. It cuts across every section
of the Establishment - including the media, the bureaucracy, the
intelligentsia and even Bollywood.
The war in the Kashmir Valley is almost
20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of
thousands have been tortured, several thousand have "disappeared",
women have been raped and many thousands widowed. Half a million
Indian troops patrol the Kashmir Valley, making it the most militarised
zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty
troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian army
now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in
Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean
victory?
Kashmir is set to become the conduit through
which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills
into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young
among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalised, humiliated
and marginalised. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist
strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
India's temporary, shotgun solutions to
the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun) have magnified the problem
and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier,
the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate
metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and
Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds
and temperatures that dip to minus 40° Celsius. Of the hundreds
who have died there, many have died just from the cold - from
frostbite and sunburn. The glacier has become a garbage dump now,
littered with the detritus of war, thousands of empty artillery
shells, empty fuel drums, ice-axes, old boots, tents and every
other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate.
The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures,
a pristine monument to human folly.
While the Indian and Pakistani governments
spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude
warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has
shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with
the military stand-off than with people far away, on the other
side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who
believe in peace, free speech and human rights. They live in thriving
democracies whose governments sit on the UN Security Council and
whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale
of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda,
Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan
. . . it's a long list.) The glacial melt will cause severe floods
in the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect
the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons
to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows, that sort of consumer
confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current
recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have
an even better life - and the glaciers will melt even faster.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong,
India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives,
and has worked as a film designer, actor, and screenplay writer
in India. Her latest book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Fields Notes
on Democracy, is a collection of recent essays. A tenth anniversary
edition of her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House),
for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, was recently re-released.
She is also the author of numerous nonfiction titles, including
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.
Arunhati
Roy page
Home Page