Development Nationalism

IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BARSAMIAN, NOVEMBER 2002.

You just finished writing an introduction to Noam Chomsky’s For Reasons of State, which is being reissued after being out of print for several years.¹ What did you learn as you read his essays?

The one fact that shocked me was that Chomsky had searched mainstream US media for twenty-two years for a single reference to American aggression in south Vietnam and had found none. At the same time, the ‘free world’ is in no doubt about the fact that the Russians invaded Afghanistan, using exactly the same model, the same formula—setting up a client regime and then inviting themselves in. I’m still taken aback at the extent of indoctrination and propaganda in the United States. It is as if people there are being reared in a sort of altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen. In India, the anarchy and brutality of daily life means there are more free spaces, simply because it’s impossible to regulate. People are beyond the reach of the bar code. This freedom is being quickly snatched away. Reading Chomsky gave me an idea of how unfree the free world is, really. How uninformed. How indoctrinated.

Why did you call your introduction ‘The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky’?

There was a poignant moment in an old interview when he talked about being a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy in 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He said that there wasn’t a single person with whom he could share his outrage. And that struck me as a most extreme form of loneliness. It was a loneliness which evidently nurtured a mind that was not willing to align itself with any ideology. It’s interesting for me, because I grew up in Kerala, where there was a communist government at the time of the war in Vietnam. I grew up on the cusp between American propaganda and Soviet propaganda, which somehow cancelled each other out.

Really the line is between the citizen and the state, regardless of what ideology that state subscribes to. Even now in India, or anywhere else, the minute you allow the state to take away your freedoms, it will. So whatever freedoms a society has exist because those freedoms have been insisted upon by its people, not because the state is inherently good or bad. And in India and all over the world, freedoms are being snatched away at a frightening pace. I think it’s not just important but urgent for us to become extremely troublesome citizens, to refuse to allow the state to take away what it is grabbing with both hands just now.

In your essay ‘Come September’ you write that in country after country freedoms are being curtailed in the name of protecting freedom. In the United States, there’s the USA PATRIOT Act, and you have something similar in India, called POTA, the Prevention of Terrorism Act.² Do you see any similarities?

Terrorism has become the excuse for states to do just what they please in the name of protecting citizens against terrorism. Hundreds of people are being held in prisons under the anti-terrorism law in India. Many of them are poor people, Dalits and adivasis, who are protesting against ‘development projects’ that deprive them of their lands and livelihoods. Poverty and protest are being conflated with terrorism. There was a fake ‘encounter’ in New Delhi’s Ansal Plaza just a couple of weeks ago, on November 3. The police claimed that they had foiled a terrorist attack, and that the people they killed were Pakistani terrorists. But from eyewitness reports, it’s pretty clear that that police story was concocted.³

Similarly, on the thirteenth of December—soon after the September 11 attack in New York—there was an attack on the Indian Parliament. Five men were killed on the spot. Nobody knows who they really were. The government, as usual, claims they were Pakistanis. They’ve held four additional suspects in prison for almost a year now: a Kashmiri Muslim professor from Delhi University, two other Kashmiri Muslim men, and a woman who’s Sikh but married to Shaukat, one of the accused. During the trial, it seemed as if almost every piece of evidence had been manufactured by the police. As for the professor, Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani, there’s no evidence whatsoever to support his arrest. All three men have been sentenced to death. It’s outrageous.⁴

In March 2000, just before Bill Clinton came here, there was a massacre of Sikhs in Chittisinghpura in the valley of Kashmir. The army claimed they killed terrorists who were responsible for the massacre. It now turns out that the people they killed were not terrorists, but just ordinary, innocent villagers. The chief minister of Kashmir actually admitted that the DNA samples that were sent to a lab for testing were fake. But nothing happens. You’ve killed these people, you’ve admitted to fudging the DNA samples, but nothing happens. Holes are blown into every bit of evidence, but nothing happens.⁵

There’s been the Tehelka scandal. The secretary of the BJP, Bangaru Laxman, and the secretary of the Samata Party, Jaya Jaitley, were caught on film accepting bribes for fake arms deals. Nothing happens.⁶ So there’s this kind of marsh into which everything sinks. A citizen’s rights are such a fragile thing now.

A few years ago there was a major massacre of Sikhs right here in the capital of India. Thousands of Sikhs were killed after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. And in Bombay after the Babri Masjid was destroyed in Ayodhya, several thousand Muslims were massacred.⁷

Yes, and nothing happened. And in Gujarat now, Narendra Modi is spearheading an election campaign, and the Congress Party and the BJP are both openly talking about playing the Hindu card, or using the caste card vs the Hindu card. So we have to ask ourselves, What is the systemic flaw in this kind of democracy that makes politicians function by creating these vote banks divided along caste lines, or communal lines, or regional lines. As I wrote in my essay ‘Democracy: Who Is She When She Is at Home?’, democracy is India’s greatest strength, but the way in which electoral democracy is practiced is turning it into our greatest weakness.⁸

We both attended a solidarity meeting on behalf of Professor Geelani, who teaches Arabic at Delhi University, and you are on the committee in his support. I’m sure you’re besieged with requests to be on such-and-such a committee, to write a letter, to do this and that. How do you make those kinds of choices?

I use my instinct, because that’s the only thing I can do. I understand clearly and deeply that no individual matters all that much. It doesn’t matter all that much eventually what I do and what I don’t do. It matters to me. I can help as much as I can help. But ultimately it isn’t the way a battle must be fought—by the support of one individual or another. I don’t believe in that kind of celebrity politics.

I just continue to do what I’ve always done, which is to write, to think about these things. I’m searching for an understanding. Not for my readers, for myself. It’s a process of exploration. It has to further my understanding of the way things work. So in a way it’s a selfish journey, too. It’s a way of pushing myself further and deeper into looking at the society in which I live. If I were to be doing it not as an exploratory thing, but just as a politician might, with some fixed agenda, and then trying to convince people of my point of view, I think I’d become jaded. Curiosity takes me where it takes me. It leads me deep into the heart of the world.

After the publishing of The God of Small Things, you could have had your pick of any publisher in New York. I’m sure they were clamouring for you. Yet you chose a small, independent press based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, South Press, to publish Power Politics and, coming up, War Talk. Was that kind of spontaneous, instinctive choice you made?

I wasn’t some big policy decision on my part. I didn’t even think at the time, actually, that this is a political step. But I use my political instincts a lot. It’s important for me to stay that way. People really imagine that most people are in search of fame or fortune or success. But I don’t think that’s true. I think there are lots of people who are more imaginative than that. When people describe me as famous and rich and successful, it makes me feel queasy. Each of those words falls on my soul like an insult. They seem tinny and boring and shiny and uninteresting to me. It makes me feel unsuccessful because I never set out to be those things. And they make me uneasy. To be famous, rich and successful in this world is not an admirable thing. I’m suspicious of it all.

Failure attracts my curiosity as a writer. Loss, grief, brokenness, failure, the ability to find happiness in the saddest things—these are the things that interest me. I don’t want to play out the role of someone who’s just stepped out of The Bold and the Beautiful. At the same time, it is interesting to be able to meditate on wealth and fame and success, because I have them and I can play with them, disrespect them, if you know what I mean. I don’t suppose that if you haven’t been there, you fully understand how empty it all is, in so many ways. And yet, there are wonderful things about being a writer who is widely read.

I can go to Korea, to Japan, to South Africa, to Latin America, and I know that I’ll meet kindred souls. And they won’t be hard for me to find. I won’t have to spend ten years looking for them because my writing has preceded me. I’m a paid-up member of SIN—the Sweethearts International Network. It’s a bond between people that arises from literature and politics. I can’t think of a more wonderful thing. Writing gives you this gift. It plugs you directly into the world.

There used to be a saying in American journalism—it’s not being followed today because of the corporatization of the media—that the function of journalists was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In a way, what you’re saying seems to mirror that. That you feel that you want to make those people in power uneasy and uncomfortable.

I don’t think that people in power become uneasy and uncomfortable. But you can annoy and provoke them. People who are powerful are not people who have subtle feelings like uneasiness. They got there because of a certain capacity for ruthlessness. I don’t even consider their feelings when I write. I don’t write for them.

That reminds me of something connected with Chomsky. I’ve attended many of his lectures. He’s often introduced as someone who speaks truth to power. I asked him about that once. He said he dosn’t do that. He’s not interested in that.

Power knows the truth.

He wants to provide information to people who are powerless, not to those who are oppressing them.

Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase—speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it’s doing. We don’t have to tell it what it’s doing. We have to tell other people what Enron is doing. Similarly, the people who are building the dams know what they’re doing. The contractors know how much they’re stealing. The bureaucrats know how much they’re getting as bribes.

Power knows the truth. There isn’t any doubt about that. It is really about telling the story. Good fiction is the truest thing that ever there was. Facts are not necessarily the only truths. Facts can be fiddled with by economists and bankers. There are other kinds of truth. It’s about telling the story. As a writer, that’s the best thing I can do. It’s not just about digging up facts.

When I wrote The God of Small Things, it isn’t just that I had a story and then told it. The way you tell a story, the form that narrative takes, is a kind of truth, too. When I wrote ‘The Greater Common Good’, it isn’t that no one knew these facts before. There were volumes and volumes of books on dams—pro-dam, anti-dam, balanced views, and so on. But really, in the end, it’s about how you tell that story to somebody who doesn’t know it. To me, as a writer, that is something that I take great pleasure in. Telling the story in a way that ordinary people can understand, snatching our futures back from the experts and the academics and the economists and the people who really want to kidnap or capture things and carry them away to their lairs and protect them from the unauthorized gaze or the curiosity or understanding of passers-by. That’s how they build their professional stakes, by saying, ‘I am an expert on something that you can’t possibly understand. My expertise is vital to your life, so let me make the decisions.’

Who tells the stories is absolutely critical. Who is telling the stories in India today?

This is a very important question. When The God of Small Things came out, my mother said to me, ‘Why did you have to call the village Ayemenem? Why did you have to say the river was the Meenachil?’ I said, ‘Because I want people to know that we have stories.’ It’s not that India has no stories. Of course we have stories—beautiful and brilliant ones. But those stories, because of the languages in which they’re written, are not privileged. So nobody knows them.

When The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, there was a lot of hostility towards me from regional-language writers, people who write in Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil and Marathi. It was a perfectly understandable hostility. The Indian writers who are well known and financially rewarded are those who write in English—the elite.

All of my political writing is translated into Indian languages, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Hindi and so on. Now I have a relationship with the regional press in Kerala, the Hindi press in the north, the Bengali press in Bengal. Now the English-language media is far more hostile to me than the regional media.

It goes on forever, the question of who tells the story. Even within regional-language writing, the Brahmins and the upper caste have traditionally told the stories. The Dalits have not told their stories. There’s an endless pecking order.

Look at, say, the case of Vietnam now. To the world today, thanks to Hollywood and thanks to the US mass media, the war in Indochina was an American war. Indochina was the lush backdrop against which America tested its technology, examined its guilt, worried about its conscience, dealt or did not deal with its guilt. And the ‘gooks’ were just the other guys who died. They were just stage props. It doesn’t matter what the story was. It mattered who was telling it. And America was telling it.

In India, I occupy an interesting space. As a writer who lives in India, writes in English and has grown up in a village in Kerala, I have spent the first half of my life battling traditions, Indian traditions, that wanted me to be a particular kind of Indian woman, which I have refused to be. And now I’m up against the monstrosity of the other side. The monstrosity of the modern world. People like me confront this contradiction. It’s a very interesting place to be in, really. Where even politically, you’re caught between the fascist regional forces, the BJP and VHP, for instance, versus the monstrous market forces, the Enrons and the Bechtels.

Speaking of Enron, the Houston-based energy giant multinational which was deeply involved in a dam project in Maharashtra, it has collapsed, laying off thousands of workers, most of whom have lost their pensions and retirement benefits. There’s been a corporate crime wave in the United States, a huge amount of corruption. You might recall that it wasn’t too long ago that the United States was lecturing a lot of the world about having transparency and clear and open procedures. It’s rather ironic.

People often don’t understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume government equals corruption, private companies equal efficiency. But government officials are not genetically programmed to be corrupt. Corruption is linked to power. If it is the corporations that are powerful, then they will be corrupt. I think there have been enough studies that show that corruption has actually increased in the era of privatization. Enron, for instance, openly boasted about how it paid some 20 million dollars to ‘educate’ Indian politicians.⁹ It depends on how you define corruption. Is it just the bribe-taker? Or is the bribe-giver corrupt as well? Today we see a formidable nexus between the powerful elites in the world. Imperialism by email. This time around, the white man doesn’t have to go to poor countries and risk diarrhoea and malaria or dying in the tropics. He just has his local government in place, which takes charge of ‘creating a good investment climate’. And those who are protesting against privatization and development projects—making investments unsafe—are called terrorists.

You’re critic of corporate globalization. But what kind of arrangements would you like to see, in terms of governance, of relations between different countries?

I am a critic of corporate globalization because it has increased the distance between the people who take decisions and the people who have to suffer those decisions. Earlier, for a person in a village in Kerala, his or her life was being decided maybe in Trivandrum or, eventually, in Delhi. Now it could be in the Hague or in Washington, by people who know little or nothing of the consequences their decisions could have. And that distance between the decision-taker and the person who has to endure or suffer that decision is a very perilous road, full of the most unanticipated pitfalls.

It’s not that everything is designed to be malevolent, of course. Most of it is, but the distance between what happens on paper, in policy documents, and what happens on the ground is increasing enormously. That distance has to be eliminated. Decentralization and the devolving of power to local groups is very important. The current process is fundamentally undemocratic.

You have written that ‘a writer’s bad dream’ is ‘the ritualistic slaughter of language’.¹⁰ Can you talk about some examples of how language is constructed?

The language of dissent has been co-opted. WTO documents and World Bank resettlement policies are now written in very noble-sounding, socially just, politically democratic-sounding language. They have co-opted that language. They use language to mask their intent. But what they say they’ll do and what they actually do are completely different. The resettlement policy for the Sardar Sarovar dam sounds reasonably enlightened. But it isn’t meant to be implemented. There isn’t the land. It says communities should be resettled as communities. But just nineteen villages from Gujarat have been scattered in 175 different locations.¹¹

The policy’s only function is to ease the middle-class’s conscience. They all say, ‘Oh, how humane the world is now compared to what it used to be.’ They can’t be bothered that there’s no connection between what’s happening on the ground and what the policy says. So the issue is not how nice the World Bank president is or how wonderfully drafted their documents are. The issue is, who are they to make these decisions?

There’s a sequence in DAM/AGE in which World Bank president James Wolfensohn is visiting New Delhi, and he comes out to meet some demonstrators from the NBA. He utters a stream of platitudes about how he cares for the poor, how his focus in on alleviating their suffering and their poverty. In the film you say that you couldn’t bear to hang around and wait for him to come out of his meeting, to hear that.

I was there when they blockaded the road. It was evening by the time Wolfensohn was forced to come out. He arrived in his pinstripe suit like a cartoon white man coming to address the peasants of India. I couldn’t bear to hear or see this played out again. At the end of the twentieth century, to see the White Man back again, addressing the peasants of India and saying how concerned he was about them.

Only a few weeks later, I was in London, at the release of the World Commission on Dams report, and Wolfensohn was there.¹² He talked about how he had met with the people of the valley. Missing from his account were the police and those steel separators, and the fact that he had been dragged out of the office and forced to meet them. He made it sound like a genuine grassroots meeting.

There are some exciting things happening culturally in India. In addition to DAM/AGE, the documentary by Aradhana Seth, there’s another one by Sanjay Kak called Words on Water, about resistance in the Narmada valley.¹³ Are you encouraged that those kinds of films are being made and seen?

There are many independent film-makers who are doing interesting work. But, more important in India is that there is a vital critique of what is happening. For instance, in Madhya Pradesh there is a huge and growing resistance to the privatization of power. Privatization of the essential infrastructure, water, power, is strangling the agricultural community. Mass protests are building up. The move to corporatize agriculture, the whole business of genetically modified foods, pesticides, cash crops like cotton and soyabean, are crushing the Indian agricultural sector. The myth of the Green Revolution is coming apart. In Punjab, the lands irrigated by the Bhakra dam are becoming salinized and waterlogged. The soil is yielding less and less and the farmers have to use more and more fertilizers. Punjabi farmers, once the most prosperous in India, are committing suicide because they’re in debt.

The WTO has now forced India to import rice, wheat, sugar, milk, all these products which India has in abundance. The government’s warehouses are overflowing with excess food grains, while people starve. They’re all being dumped. In Kerala, coffee, tea and rubber plantations are closing down, laying off their labour or not paying them.

In India now there is a move toward Hindutva and more and more communal politics. This hasn’t happened overnight. People point to December 6, 1992, when the mosque in Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid, was destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists. But it must have its roots deeper than just ten years ago.

It has its roots in the independence movement. The RSS was set up in the 1920s. Today it is the cultural guild to which L.K. Advani and Vajpayee and all of these people owe allegiance. So the RSS has been working toward this for eighty years now. There is a link between religious fascism and corporate globalization. When you impose corporate globalization on to an almost feudal society, it reinforces inequalities. The people who are becoming more and more prosperous are the ones who have had social advantages over many, many years. It’s the kind of situation in which fascism breeds.

On the one hand, you have the government privatizing everything, selling off the public sector in chunks—telecommunications, water, power—to multinationals. On the other hand, they orchestrate this baying nationalism, nuclearism, communalism. I’ve talked about this in my essays ‘Power Politics’ and ‘Come September’.

Every day the Times of India has a quote on the front page, and today’s is from George Eliot: ‘An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.’¹⁴ What do you think about elections as a mechanism for democracy? I ask that because people have had enormous influence and impact outside the electoral system, for example, Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. They never ran for elective office.

I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn’t mean you’re a democratic country. They’re a very vitally important part of a democracy. But there are other things that ought to function as checks and balances. If elections are the only thing that matter, then people are going to resort to anything to win that election.

You can only campaign in a particular constitutional framework. If the courts, the press, the Parliament are not functioning as checks and balances, then this is not a democracy. And today in India, they are not functioning as checks and balances. If they were, Narendra Modi would be in jail today. He would not be allowed to campaign for office. Several candidates would be in jail today. Not to mention several senior people in the Congress Party who ought to have been in jail from 1984 onward for their roles in the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

The good thing about elections is that however unaccountable politicians are at least every five years they have to stand for election. But the bureaucracy and the judiciary are completely unaccountable. Nobody understands the terrifying role that the judiciary is playing in India today. The Supreme Court is taking the most unbelievable positions. Its decisions affect the lives of millions of people. Yet to criticize them is a criminal offence.

Recently, the Chief Justice of India, B.N. Kirpal, made an outrageous order on the day before he retired.¹⁵ Out of a case that had nothing to do with linking rivers, Kirpal ordered that all the rivers in India should be linked up in ten years’ time. It was an arbitrary, uninformed order based on a whim—nothing more. He asked state governments to file affidavits. They never did. The government of India filed an affidavit stating that the project would take forty-one years and cost billions of dollars. This kind of decision is almost as, if not more, dangerous than communal politics. Yet, because of the contempt-of-court law, nobody will question the court. Not the press. Everybody’s scared of going to jail.

By sending me to jail, think of what they did: I had a one-year criminal trial, for which you have to have a criminal lawyer which costs an unimaginable amount of money. How is any journalist going to afford a one-year criminal trial and then face the prospect of going to jail, of losing his or her job? What editor, which journalist is going to take that risk? So they’ve silenced the press. And now the courts have started to rule on vital issues like globalization, privatization, river-linking, the rewriting of history textbooks, whether a temple should be built in Ayodhya—every major decision is taken by the court. No one is allowed to criticize it. And this is called a democracy.

So you’re saying that dissent is being criminalized in India.

I’m saying that a democracy has to function with a system of checks and balances. You cannot have an undemocratic institution functioning in a democracy, because then it works as a sort of manhole into which unaccountable power flows. All the decisions are then taken by that institution because that is the one institution that cannot be questioned. So there is a nexus between the judiciary and the executive. All the difficult decisions are being taken by the judiciary, and it looks as if the judiciary is admonishing the executive and saying, ‘You’re very corrupt. We are forced to become an activist judiciary and to take these decisions.’

If you speak to the middle class, they believe that the Supreme Court is the only institution that functions properly. There’s a sort of hierarchical thinking that the buck must stop somewhere. They like the fact that the Supreme Court is so supremely unaccountable.

The contempt-of-court law is so draconian that if tomorrow I had documentary evidence to prove that a judge was corrupt, and had taken money from somebody to make a particular decision, I couldn’t produce that evidence in court because it would constitute contempt of court. It would be seen to be ‘lowering the dignity of the court’ and in such a case truth is not a defence.

Are there organizations—NGOs—in the country that are working on this issue? The issue of the autocracy of the court?

It’s a very important political issue that we need to fight. But few have understood it yet.

This business of NGOs is a very interesting one in India. I’m no great fan of NGOs. Many of them are funded by various western agencies. They end up functioning like the whistle on a pressure cooker. They divert and sublimate political rage and make sure that it does not build to a head. Eventually it disempowers people.

In the first interview we did, in early 2001, you described India as two separate convoys, going in different directions. One into the digital future of the promised land of glitzy electronic things, and the rest of the country, the poor, the anonymous, going in the other direction. Since then, do you see those convoys coming closer together, or are they getting more and more distant from each other?

The way that the machine of neoliberal capitalism works, that distance has to increase. If what you have to plough back into the system is always your profit, obviously that distance is going to increase. Just mathematically, it’s going to increase. Whoever has more makes more, and makes more and makes more.

Tell me about the current situation in the Narmada valley. It seems that despite the heroice efforts and sacrifices that the NBA and its members and supporters have made, it looks like the dams are going through. Is that assessment correct?

Construction on the Maheshwar dam has been stopped for now, but the Sardar Sarovar dam is inching up. That part of the anti-dam movement has really come up against a wall. The question has to be asked: if non-violent dissent is not viable, then what is?

If reasoned, non-violent dissent is not honoured, then by default you honour violence. You honour terrorism. Because you cannot just put this plastic bag over the head of the world and say, ‘Don’t breathe.’ Across India, insurgents and militants have taken over great swathes of territory where they just won’t allow the government in. It’s not just Kashmir. It’s happening all over: Andhra Pradesh, parts of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and almost the whole of the Northeast, which doesn’t consider itself a part of India.

Do you see the possibility of the NBA extending itself beyond its current lifespan into a more national movement of resistance? Could it be a model that people could emulate?

People in cities think that the movement has lost. In one sense, they’re right, because the Sardar Sarovar dam is going up. But if you go to the valley, you’ll see the great victories of that movement; which are cultural, which are empowering. People know that they have rights. In the Narmada valley, the police cannot treat adivasis, and in particular adivasi women, the way they do elsewhere. These are great and important victories. The section of the NBA that was fighting against the Maheshwar dam are the younger activists in the valley. They have now expanded their operations way beyond the valley and are fighting the privatization of power in the whole state of Madhya Pradesh. They are spearheading the anti-privatization movement.

Do you see any opening for resolving the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir? The Indian prime minister has said, ‘Kashmir is ours. They,’ presumably the Pakistanis or the Kashmiris, ‘will never get it. That decision has been made.’¹⁶ Tens of thousands of Kashmiris have died. It’s a militarized state. There’s martial law. There’s a suspension of the constitution. You know better than I do about the human rights abuses that go on there.

Kashmir is the rabbit that the governments of both India and Pakistan pull out of their hats whenever they’re in trouble. They don’t want to resolve the conflict. For them, Kashmir is not a problem; it’s a solution. Let’s never make the mistake of thinking that India and Pakistan are searching for a solution and haven’t managed to find one. They’re not searching for a solution, because if they were you would not hear intractable statements like this—absurd statements like this—being made.

After the nuclear tests that India and Pakistan conducted, the issue of Kashmir has been internationalized to some extent. That could be a good thing, though not if the US acts as a unilateral superpower and takes it upon itself to impose a ‘solution’. Before you would not discuss human rights violations in Kashmir. There were only these militants who were shot in encounters, Pakistani terrorists and so on. That has changed.

Now with the elections, the dislodging of Farooq Abdullah, and Mufti Muhammad Sayeed coming in, I sense a slight break in the refusal to admit what is really happening in Kashmir.¹⁷ I hear people asking questions about the status of Kashmir. I hear more people saying that maybe Kashmiris should be consulted, instead of this being made to seem like an issue between India and Pakistan.

The first step toward a solution would be for India and Pakistan to open up the borders, to allow people to come and go. If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters—the adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

You’re from the southwest of India, Kerala, and now you’re living in the north. Language, music, food—there’s a completely different vibration between the north and the south. Also it seems that the communal tensions in the south are much less than in the north. Am I misreading that?

Kerala has the highest number of RSS cells now. But so far, you’re absolutely right. The BJP just haven’t even managed to get a toehold in the electoral political scene, but they are very hard at work. The first time I ever saw an RSS march—with all these men in khaki shorts—was this year in Kerala, when I went to court. I was just shocked to see them marching in the gloom. It put a chill into my heart.

Talk a little bit about the print media.

The difference between Indian newspapers and newspapers that you’d see in America or England or Europe is the number of stories that there are about politics and politicians. Almost too many. Politicians keep us busy with their shenanigans and eventually every single issue, whether it’s a caste massacre in Bihar or communal violence in Gujarat or the issue of displacement by dams, is turned into a noisy debate about whether the chief minister should resign or not. The issue itself is never followed up. The murderers are never punished.

If you know anything about a particular issue, if you know the facts and the figures, you see how shockingly wrong newspapers always are. It’s quite sad, the lack of discipline in terms of just getting it right, the lack of rigour. The encouraging thing is that there is a tradition of little magazines, community newspapers, pamphlets—an anarchic network of maverick publications, which makes the media hard to control. The big English national dailies don’t reach the mass of the people in India. They don’t matter as much as they imagine they do. But let’s say there’s a war against Pakistan or somebody, everybody just becomes jingoistic and nationalistic, just like what happens in the United States. It’s no different.

BJP leader L.K. Advani is one of the most powerful members of the government. He took issue with Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winner in economics, on the issue of economics and India.¹⁸

He said that it was much more important for India to have weapons than to educate people.

Education and health was not the answer for India’s development. It was defence.

Advani is the hard core of the centre—though today I was delighted to read on the front page of the papers that Advani has been denounced by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as a pseudo-secularist. ‘Pseudo-secularist’ was a term that Advani had coined to dismiss all those who were not communal fascists, and for him to have his own coinage used against him is delightful.¹⁹

The Sangh Parivar—the Hindu right-wing family of parties, cultural guilds, the Hindutva lot—squabble with each other in public in order to make everybody feel they’re at loggerheads. At the end of it all, Vajpayee keeps the moderates happy, Advani keeps the hardliners happy, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal keep the rabid fringe happy. Everybody thinks they actually have differences, but the differences are just short of being serious. It’s like a travelling, hydra-headed circus. It’s like a Hindi movie. It has everything: sex, violence, pathos, humour, comedy, tragedy. Full value for the money. You go home satiated.

India Today, a weekly magazine, has a fairly large circulation. It recently had a cover story entitled ‘India Is Now the Electronic Housekeeper of the World’.²⁰ General Electric, American Express, Citibank, AT&T and other US corporations are shifting what they call their back-office operations to India. It’s called the fastest-growing industry in India, and the workers are mostly young women. Many are hired to answer customer service questions for US customers. They might be on the other end of the line when I want someone to look up the balance on my credit card account or when Avis telemarkets a cheap vacation package to San Diego. They take on American names and American personas and tell jokes in American English. The people who are in favour of corporate globalization say this is a great thing. These girls would not ordinarily get jobs, and now they have an opportunity to earn some money. Is there anything wrong with that argument?

The call-centre industry is based on lies and racism. The people who call in are being misled into believing that they are talking to some white American sitting in America. The people who work in those call centres are told that they’re not good enough for the market, that US customers will complain if they find out that their service is being provided by an Indian. So Indians must take on false identities, pretend to be Americans, learn a ‘correct’ accent. It leads to psychosis.

One way of looking at this is to say, ‘These people at least have jobs.’ You could say that about prostitution or child labour or anything—‘At least they’re being paid for it.’ Their premise is that either these workers don’t have jobs or they have jobs in which they have to humiliate themselves. But is that the only choice? That’s the question.

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn’t as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It’s not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It’s more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It’s the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America and, to some extent, Europe.

When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you’re part of that network you have to do it. You don’t have the independence of being non-aligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call-centre jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It’s important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it’s important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each other’s throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.

There’s lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it’s become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it’s a very narrow definition of terrorism.

Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war—people who believe that it isn’t only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well.

If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it’s in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same.

Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al-Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected bin Laden. Bush was elected (in a manner of speaking), so US citizens are more responsible for his actions than Iraqis are for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans are for the Taliban. And yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed, either by economic sanctions or cruise missiles, and we’re told that these deaths are the result of ‘just wars’. If there is such a thing as a just war, who is to decide what is just and what is not? Whose god is going to decide that?

The United States has only 3 or 4 per cent of the world’s population, yet it’s consuming about a third of the world’s natural resources, and to maintain that kind of disparity and imbalance requires force, the use of violence.

The US solution to the spiralling inequalities in the world is not to search for a more equal world, or a way of making things more egalitarian, but to espouse the doctrine of ‘full-spectrum dominance’. The US government is now speaking about putting down unrest from space.²¹ It’s a terrorist state and it is laying out a legitimate blueprint for state-sponsored terrorism.

Do you find the persistence of romantic images of India in the west—that this is a country of sitar players and yogis and people who meditate, who are in a kind of ethereal zone? Are those clichés still pretty alive and active?

All clichés are structured around a grain of truth, but there are other clichés now, too. I think that the BJP’s few years in power have given an ugly edge to India’s image internationally. What happened in Gujarat—the pogrom against the Muslim community—has also become a part of the image of what India is: complex, difficult to understand, full of anachronisms and contradictions, and so on. People from India are in the centre of a lot of the intellectual debate about where the world is headed. I think the anarchy of Indian civil society is an important example in the world today, even though India has its back against the wall and is being bullied and bludgeoned by the WTO and the IMF and by our own corrupt politicians. I was in Italy last month at a film festival, and there were documentary films being screened about the Narmada and about other human-rights issues. The whole Italian press had gathered. Journalists were expecting me to talk about how terrible things are in India. I did talk about that. But I said, ‘We’re not yet in such a bad way that we have a prime minister who owns three television channels and three newspapers and all the publishing houses and the retail outlets and the book shops. And at least when I’m taken to prison, I know that I’m taken to prison. I know that physically my body is being put in prison. It’s not like my mind has been indoctrinated to the point that I think I’m free when I’m not.’

In India, we are fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it’s gone. Every person that’s walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in its place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists—the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings. It’s threatened, but we’re fighting to retain it. We don’t have to re-conjure it. It’s there. It’s with us. It’s not got signposts all the way. There is that space that hasn’t been completely mapped and taken over and tagged and trademarked. I think that’s important. And it’s important that in India we understand that it’s there and we value it.

Just from hearing you speak and the expression on your face, which I wish people could see, it’s obvious that you care a lot about this country. You have a deep affection for it.

I’m not a patriot. I’m not somebody who says, ‘I love India,’ and waves a flag around in my head. It’s my place. I’m used to it. When people talk about reclaiming the commons, I keep saying, ‘No, reclaim the wilderness.’ Not reclaim it, but claim it, hold on to it. It’s for that reason that I cannot see myself living away from India. As a writer, it’s where I mess around. Every day, I’m taken by surprise by something.

I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. There is just a space for the unpredictable here, which is life as it should be. It’s not always that the unpredictable is wonderful—most of the time it isn’t. Most of the time it’s brutal and it’s terrible. Even when it comes to my work and myself, I’m ripped apart here. I’m called names. I’m insulted. But it’s the stuff of life. The subjects I write about raise these huge passions. It’s why I keep saying, ‘What’s dissent without a few good insults?’²² You have to be able to take that. If they call you names, you have to just smile and know that you’ve touched a nerve.

The point is that we have to rescue democracy by being troublesome, by asking questions, by making a noise. That’s what you have to do to retain your freedoms. Even if you lose. Even if the NBA loses the battle against the Sardar Sarovar, it has demonstrated the absolute horrors of what it means to displace people, what it means to build a big dam. It’s asked these questions. It hasn’t gone quietly. That’s the important thing. It’s important not to just look at it in terms of winning and losing.

If you look at it another way, look at what we’re managing to achieve. We’re putting so much pressure that the other side is having to strip. It’s having to show itself naked in all its brutality. It’s having to drop its masks, its disguises, and reveal its raw and crude and brutal nature. And that’s a victory. Not just in terms of who’s winning and who’s losing, because I’m the kind of person who will always be on the losing side by definition. I have to be, because I’m on this side of the line. I’ll never be on that side of the line.

Many journalists have come to you, the BBC, Deutsche Welle. What is interesting for you in these interviews? They must have the same questions, like ‘When are you going to write another novel?’

I’m the kind of person who sharpens my thinking in public. It could be in an interview or at a lecture. I like talking to strangers. I like talking to people who have read my work. It’s a process of thinking aloud. It’s not just journalists that ask you the same question. In our lives, whether you’re famous or not famous, there’s so much repetition, and it’s not a terrible thing. If you look at every person you’re talking to as a human being, and you’re having a conversation with them, then it’s never boring. It’s only if you’re not interested in that person and you’re only interested in yourself that it becomes boring. Then you start reciting what amounts to press handouts, which would be terrible.

I’m not necessarily the kind of writer who holes up somewhere and then emerges. I did that with my novel. I don’t talk when I’m writing fiction. It’s a very private act. But in my political work, I think aloud. I like to pit my mind against another person’s, or think together with people. It’s not necessarily just with journalists or interviewers with whom I work. It’s an interesting process.

There’s a great historic figure in American history, the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He once said that ‘power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.’²³

In India, very often, people—not just the government, but people—say, ‘Oh look, we’re so much better off than, say, people in Afghanistan or people in Nepal or people in Pakistan.’ Somehow they seem to suggest that this has to do with the fact that our government is not as violent as the governments in these other countries. But I think it’s because the people are more anarchic, in the sense that it is because we are a troublesome people, a troublesome constituency. And that is why it’s difficult to imagine India under army rule. It’s unthinkable that Indian society would defer to the army like it does in Pakistan. Even if resistance movements like the movement in the Narmada valley don’t succeed in their ultimate goal of stopping a particular dam or ‘development’ project, they do create a spirit among exploited, oppressed people: ‘You can’t do this to us. And if you do, we’re going to be extremely troublesome about it.’

There were a lot of people who were very annoyed with me when I criticized the Supreme Court and I refused to apologize. But you have to ask these public questions. The minute you start giving ground, you’re on a slippery slope.

If you put your ear to the ground in this part of the world today, what do you hear?

Communal talk. Talk about religious identity, ethnic identity, tribal identity. Economically, as globalization is pushed down our throats, people are fractured into tribal, communal groups. The world is getting more and more fractured. Nationalism, nuclearism, communalism, fascism, these things are springing up.

There’s always been tension between the majority community—the Hindus in India—and the large Muslim minority. But you are clearly seeig an increase in that tension.

There was a terrible episode of bloodshed and massacre and mayhem during the Partition. About a million people were massacred. The wounds of that were never allowed to heal by the Congress Party, which harnessed this hatred and used it to play electoral games. Our kind of electoral democracy seems to demand the breaking up of the electorate into vote banks. But today all the things that the Congress Party did at night, the BJP and its Sangh Parivar does in the daytime. They do it with pride, as policy. Now they’re in power, they’re in government, they have penetrated every state organ. Whether it’s rewriting the history books, or placing their people in the bureaucracy, in the police, in the army. Of course, when the Congress Party was in power, it was their people. But their people were not self-professedly communal people. They did it as a sly, undercover game.

In the past, historians or politicians or bureaucrats would not openly say that India is a Hindu country. But now nobody is shy about saying this. The RSS now has thousands of branches all over the country. They have funds, they have means, they have resources to indoctrinate young minds. Once you inject this poison into the bloodstream, it’s very hard to work it out of the system. So now the fact is, whether the BJP wins the next elections or not, their agenda is on the table. The country has been militarized and communalized and nuclearized. The Congress has no means to deal with it. It hasn’t been able to counter that in any moral or political way.

Let’s say you want to write about a particular topic that interests you. First of all, how do you make that selection, and the how do you go about researching it?

You should never ask me these method questions, because there’s never any method! It’s not as though I cold-bloodedly go out and select some topic for academic or career reasons. In the case of the nuclear tests, the nuclear tests happened while I was in the United States. My first reaction was one of rage at the hypocrisy there: ‘The blacks can’t manage the bomb.’ Then I came back here and saw the shrill jingoism. So I wrote ‘The End of Imagination’. When you start getting into the debate about national security, every country can justify having nuclear weapons. I think it’s very important not to enter the debate on their terms, on the terms that the army and the politicians and the bureaucracy would like to set. Because every country can have a pragmatic realpolitik justification for why it needs nuclear weapons.

In the case of the Narmada, it was more something that I really had for years wanted to understand. In February 1999, the Supreme Court lifted its stay on the building of the Sardar Sarovar dam. Suddenly it looked as if this battle, which many of us on the outside of this movement had thought was being won, had been dealt a body blow. I started reading. I went to the valley, I met the activists, and felt that the movement needed to tell its story in a way which is accessible to an ordinary reader. It needed a novelist’s skill. It’s a complex issue and much of the time the establishment depends on the fact that people don’t understand. I wanted to build a narrative that could puncture that—to deal with all their arguments, to deal with their facts and figures, to counter them in a way ordinary people could understand.

One thing leads to another. If you read all the political essays, each one dovetails into the next. Going to the Narmada valley, you see that the fight against the Sardar Sarovar, which is a state-built dam, is different from the fight against the Maheshwar dam, which was the first privatized project in India. Then you start asking these questions about the privatization of infrastructure and it leads you to the whole question of privatization and what is going on there. So that led to my essay ‘Power Politics’.

It is interesting to see how the establishment deals with dissent. It gives you a fair idea of who the establishment really is. You see who crawls out of the woodwork to take you on. Very often, it’s an unexpected person. It’s not the people who are completely on the other side of the spectrum, who are completely opposed to your point of view. It will be cowardly people who position themselves as being ‘balanced’ critics. They really can’t deal with the real questions, because they’re instinctively undemocratic. There is nothing they condemn more passionately than passion. But I insist on the right to be emotional, to be sentimental, to be passionate. If displacement, dispossession, killing and injustice on the scale that takes place in India does not enrage us, what will?

When people try to dismiss those who ask the big public questions as being emotional, it is a strategy to avoid debate. Why should we be scared of being angry? Why should we be scared of our feelings, if they’re based on facts? The whole framework of reason versus passion is ridiculous, because often passion is based on reason. Passion is not always unreasonable. Anger is based on reason. They’re not two different things. I feel it’s very important to defend that. To defend the space for feelings, for emotions, for passion. I’m often accused of the crime of having feelings. But I’m not pretending to be a ‘neutral’ academic. I’m a writer. I have a point of view. I have feelings about the things I write about—and I’m going to express them.

That reminds me of a famous Urdu couplet by Muhammad Iqbal: ‘Love leaped into Nimrod’s fire without hesitation./Meanwhile, reason is on the rooftop, just contemplating the scene.’²⁴ There is that kind of juxtaposition of the intellect versus feeling.

I think the opposite. I think that my passion comes from my intellect. So much of the way I love comes from the way I think. Thinking makes great loving. I don’t acknowledge this artificial boundary between the intellect and the heart. They’re not as separate as literature and poetry makes them out to be. Their fusion is what makes artists and writers. I believe in succumbing to the beauty of feelings and I believe in the rigour of the intellect, too. I don’t believe in over-ripe passion. But I believe that there isn’t anything as wonderful as a fierce intellectual passion.

Do you ever experience writer’s block, where you have real difficulty in writing? Do you have any techniques to get out of it? Do you exercise or walk around the block or eat oranges?

No. I haven’t gone through that. Not yet. I don’t look at writing as a profession, a career. If I can’t write, I won’t write. I’ll do something else. It’s important to understand that one is not that significant. It doesn’t matter. If you can do something, great; if you can’t do it, it’s okay.

Often I tell myself, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t write.’ Because I don’t want to enter an arena that I know will consume my soul. I don’t want to take on Narendra Modi or write about the riots in Gujarat. But, it’s very hard to keep quiet. This hammering sets up in my head. My non-fiction is wrenched out of me. It’s written when I don’t want to write. So when people say, ‘You’re very brave’ or ‘You’re very courageous,’ I feel a bit embarrassed. Because it isn’t bravery or courage. I have to do it. Often I don’t want to see or understand. But I can’t not, because the story clamours to be told and then I’m just the go-between that sits down and tells it, in some way.

What advice would you give to people, in terms of thinking outside the box, outside of what’s called conventional wisdom, for example?

I’m very bad at giving advice!

For yourself, then, how do you do it? And how did you develop it, because it’s something that’s acquired. It’s not necessarily innate, like a sense of smell.

I wonder. I didn’t grow up within a conventional kind of family and I wasn’t in a city. I was this child who was wandering all over the place, spending hours on the river alone, fishing. My childhood’s greatest gift was a lack of indoctrination. So it’s not that I’m somebody who’s remarkable because I’ve learned to think outside the box. The fact is that the box was never imposed on me. I never went to a formal school until I was about ten. There was a delightful absence of a box.

We were in a way very cosmopolitan and in a way completely local and rural. It’s an odd combination. I always had trouble if anyone asked me the most normal questions, like, ‘Where are you from, what’s your name, what’s your mother tongue, what does your father do?’ I had no answers for any of these questions, because I just didn’t know my father and it was difficult to explain the complexities of my childhood. But if you asked me completely unconventional questions, then I could answer them, because I would think about them. These normal things were not easy for me to reply to.

As you’ve grown older, have you got an opportunity to know your father?

I’ve met him. Yes. At least I know what he looks like.

I was at Delhi University a few days ago, and a student asked me, ‘What would you do in a public sector that is inefficient and has an overbloated bureaucracy and is losing money?’ What’s wrong with privatizing that?

People in India especially, but in the third world generally, are being made to believe that this is the only choice. You have a choice between a corrupt public sector and an efficient private sector. If those are the only two options, anyone would say, ‘I’ll have the efficient private sector.’ In fact, many of the public sector units that are being privatized were actually profit-making. For instance, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, which manufactures turbines and heavy electrical machinery, was one of the foremost manufacturers in the world. As soon as the government decided to privatize it about ten years ago, they deliberately allowed everything to go to seed and then they said, ‘Look, isn’t it terrible?’ It’s propaganda, this opposition of the sleek, efficient private sector and the corrupt, terrible government. Of course, the public power sector has been incredibly corrupt and inefficient. The transmission and distribution losses have been tremendous. But what does the government do? It signs up with Enron. What is happening with Enron today? The government is paying Enron not to produce electricity, because it’s so expensive.

So Enron, even though it’s bankrupt in the United States and disgraced, is still sucking money out of the Indian economy?

There’s a big litigation process on, but, yes, that’s the situation.

Bill Gates of Microsoft, one of the sahibs of the new world economic order, was shopping in Delhi last week. He met with top government officials and CEOs. You saw something very interesting on TV about how Indians view Gates.

I was watching some music channel—not MTV, but some other music channel—this morning. On the screen it said, ‘What does Bill Gates really want?’ Then they had interviews with maybe twenty young students. Every single one of them said he’s here to blow open the market for Windows and he’s just trying to get publicity by giving money for AIDS. Nobody was under any illusions about what his visit was about.

Does that encourage you, that people have that understanding?

Three or four months ago, I went to a seminar on the power sector, and I thought to myself, ‘What are you doing here? How can you be sitting in this seminar on the privatization of power?’ If someone had told me four years ago that I would be attending meetings about electricity, I would have laughed. But it was uplifting to listen to the kind of minds that are at work here. People can just take the whole thing apart and critique it. The first critique of the Power Purchase Agreement with Enron came from a small NGO in Pune called Prayas.²⁵ Everything they said has come true. That is a great thing about India. There is a very strong intellectual ability to take something apart, in a way that I really appreciate and admire.

To what extent do you think that the British used ‘divide and rule’ as a strategy to maintain control of India—a vast country? The British had very few soldiers and administrators here.

The British certainly used divide-and-rule tactics, but the British empire survived because it co-opted the Indian elite. It’s the same technique that empire uses now to propagate its neoliberal reign.

Have you read the work of Martin Luther King, Jr? He was influenced by Gandhi. People in the United States generally know about his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from the 1963 March on Washington, but not a lot of Americans know about the speech he gave in New York in 1967 at Riverside Church. He became increasingly radical later in his life, and in New York he said, ‘True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.’²⁶

That is the terrible dilemma of living in India, isn’t it? Every moment of every day, you’re faced with the brutal inequalities of the society you live in. So it is impossible to forget, even for a moment. Just to enjoy the ordinary daily things—the clothes you wear, the fun you have, the music you listen to, the roof over your head, the meal in the evening—involves knowing that other people don’t have these privileges.

We have been taught that peace is the opposite of war. But is it? In India, peace is a daily battle for food and shelter and dignity.

Martin Luther King, Jr wrote in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ that true peace is not merely ‘the absence of tension’ but ‘the presence of justice’.²⁷

Or at least the journey toward justice, toward some vision of egalitarianism. Which is what I think is fundamentally the problem with the whole ethic of neoliberal neocapitalism. You make it all right to grab. You say that it’s all right to get ahead by hitting the next person on the head. It’s all right to accumulate capital and profits at someone else’s expense. It destroys the fabric of concern and fellow-feeling. There is a finite amount of capital in the world, and if you accumulate, you’re grabbing from somebody. That’s not right.

Another of the sahibs who recently has been in Delhi is Paul O’Neill, the US treasury secretary. He was talking on November 22 to an audience of corporate leaders, and he was very critical of India, a country, he said, where ‘corruption and bribery are widespread, frightening away honest businessmen and investors’.²⁸

If it’s frightening away investors like Enron and Bechtel, it can only be a good thing.

It’s interesting that he should be lecturing Indians about corruption and bribery, because the United States has just gone through what Business Week calls the most unprecedented ‘corporate crime wave’ in its history.²⁹ Not just Enron, but WorldCom, Xerox, Tyco, Arthur Andersen—a huge number of corporations have been guilty of insider trading and all kinds of shenanigans.

When have America’s own shortcomings prevented it from lecturing to other people? That’s par for the course.

Howard Zinn, the great American historian, said there was the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and today we live in the Age of Irony.³⁰

Irony is a kind word for the crimes of the American empire.

In your essay entitled ‘Come September’ you are very critical of US policy in support of Israel and its repression of the Palestinians. You must know that this is a hot-button issue in the United States. It’s difficult to talk about Israel critically without immediately being labelled in the most unflattering terms. Why did you choose to talk about this?

I was talking about the eleventh of September, and I thought I should remind people that the eleventh of September 1922 was when imperial Britain marked out a mandate on Palestine, after the Balfour Declaration. Eighty years on, the Palestinians are still under siege. How can one come to the United States and not mention Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory? The US government is funding it and supporting it politically and morally. It’s a crime.

Diaspora communities are notorious for having very inflammatory views. If you look at the most right-wing, unreasonable, vituperative Hindus, many live in the United States. Every time you get a letter to the editor saying, ‘I think there should be nuclear war and Pakistan should be destroyed,’ it will be somebody who lives in Urbana-Champaign or some other US town. I’ve never been to Israel, but I’ve been told that in Israel the media reflects a broader spectrum of opinion than you see in the United States.

What do you think of the report that just came out looking at the Indian diaspora community in the United States? Apparently, some segments of it are sending a lot of money to support Hindu fundamentalist organizations.³¹

The report seems quite credible. It’s quite important that this kind of dogged work is being done. These groups hide behind the fact that they do charity work, though their charity is all about the Hinduization of tribal people. But in India, these things will not be investigated.

What was your take on the US presidential election in the year 2000, especially in light of the US tendency to be very critical of how elections are conducted in other countries?

I have to say that I didn’t follow it very closely, because if you don’t live in America, whether it’s Bush or Clinton or Gore, it doesn’t seem to make that much difference. I personally feel that if the September 11 attacks had happened when Clinton was in power, it could have been worse for the world in a way, because he at least doesn’t sound as stupid as Bush. Bush is vicious but he’s comical. He’s easy meat. Whereas Clinton is far cleverer and more calculating. He’s more of a showman. I don’t think there’s much to choose between them.

You have used the word ‘bully’ to describe the United States and its policies. I think maybe some Americans might have difficulty identifying their state as a bully because of a lack of information about what’s going on outside.

People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America. I certainly do. Every time I write something, that anger does come out, and then I pull it back, because I tell myself, ‘They don’t know. These are people who don’t know what is being done in their name.’ Yet, I keep wondering if that’s because it suits them not to know. I have to remind myself about the extent of the brainwashing that goes on there. But I think that if most people knew what was being done in their names, they would be mortified. The question is: how do we let them know?

Ben Bagdikian and others have written extensively about how the corporate media operates in the United States, and by extension in the rest of the world because of its enormous reach.³² Do you think that the reality, know the facts about what’s going on and are repressing it? Or are they truly ignorant?

I’m sure the senior people know. The junior people are sent on a beat and told to cover something and they cover it. So I don’t think everybody knows the key secret and is suppressing it. Journalists have the illusion of independence. But certainly the people who make the decisions know.

Where are the spaces for dissidents in the Indian context? What about television?

There’s no space on TV whatsoever. Not even to show a documentary film, like, say, Sanjay Kak’s film on the Narmada. We don’t even begin to think that it will be shown on TV.

Why not? Why isn’t there a station or a network?

Why not? You can’t even have a private screening of a documentary film without a censor certificate. When Anand Patwardhan made his documentary about the nuclear issue, the censor board told him, ‘You can’t show politicians in your film.’ You can’t show politicians in your film! What does that mean? You can’t have politicians making political speeches in your film!³³ It’s really Kafkaesque. Yet they can’t police everything. It’s too difficult.

In a country like the United States where books like Chomsky’s 9–11 are starting to reach wider audiences, aren’t people going to feel a bit pissed off that they had no idea about what was going on, and what was being done in their name?³⁴ If the corporate media continues to be as outrageous in its suppression of facts as it is, it might just lift off like a scab. It might become something that’s totally irrelevant, that people just don’t believe. Because, ultimately, people are interested in their own safety.

The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It’s true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can’t control the rage that’s building in the world. You just can’t. And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. Condemning violence is not going to be enough. How can you condemn violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? When the soul of your culture worships violence? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence?

With very few exceptions, the September 11 attacks are presented as actions by people who simply hate America. It’s separated from any political background. That has confused a lot of people.

It was a successful strategy, this isolation of the events of September 11 from history, insisting that terrorism is an evil impulse with no context. The minute you try and put it into a context, you are accused of excusing it or justifying it. It’s like telling a scientist who is researching drugs for malaria that he or she is in cahoots with the female anopheles mosquito. If you’re trying to understand something, it doesn’t mean you’re justifying it. The fact is, if you can justify all the wars that you have fought, all the murders that you’ve committed, all the countries that you’ve bombed, all the ecologies that you’re destroyed, if you can justify that, then Osama bin Laden can certainly use the same logic to justify September 11. You can’t have a political context for one kind of terrorism and no political context for another.

So if you were to talk to an average American, what would be something that you would say, in terms of trying to understand why there is animosity toward the United States, why there is rage and anger?

I was in America in September 2002, as you know. I was very reluctant to come. I thought there just wasn’t any point in saying these things, because I don’t believe in ‘speaking truth to power’. I don’t believe that there is any way in which you can persuade that kind of power to act differently unless it’s in its own self-interest. There isn’t any point. But my editor, Anthony Arnove, persuaded me to come, and I’m so glad that I did, because it was very, very nice for me to see how human and open the people I met were. People were clearly trying to understand what was going on in the world. It was an important trip for me.

I had exactly the opposite experience from what I expected. I had people coming up to me on the street saying, ‘Thank you for saying what you said’ and ‘We can’t say it because we’re so scared, but thank you.’ It was wonderful for me that it happened. It made me believe that the reason that so much energy and money is poured into manipulating the media is because the establishment fears public opinion. They know that ordinary people are not as ruthless, as cold, as calculating, as powerful people. Ordinary people do have a conscience. Ordinary people don’t necessarily always act in their own selfish interests. If the bubble were to burst, and people were to know all of the horrendous things that have been carried out in their name; I think it would go badly for the American establishment. And I think it has begun. I think all of America’s family secrets are spilling out backstage on the Green Room floor. I really think so. Yes, it’s true that the corporate media just blanks out everything, but on the Internet, some of the most outraged, incandescently angry pieces are written by Americans. A film like Bowling for Columbine has been shown everywhere and it connects the dots in ways which ordinary people can understand. This is important. I think it’s beginning to unravel, actually. I think the propaganda machine is going to come apart.

What about the role of intellectuals in the propaganda machine? In the United States, intellectuals are supposed to be neutral. They’re supposed to accumulate facts and present them without presuming to be on one side or the other. They’re encouraged to use obscure jargon. For example, there are no ideas—everything is a ‘notion’. No one talks, it’s all ‘discourse’. It’s what we call pomo, postmodernism. Do you have something like that in India?

We have pomo in India, too. Definitely. A lot of it has to do with the sad business of creating a little expertise, so that you come off sounding special, as if the world couldn’t do without you. A little hunk of expertise that you can carry off to your lair and guard against the unauthorized curiosity of passers-by. My enterprise is the opposite: to never complicate what is simple, to never simplify what is complicated. But I think it’s very important to be able to communicate to ordinary people what is happening in the world. There’s a whole industry working hard at trying to prevent people from understanding what is being done to them.

Chomsky calls them a mandarin class of specialists.

Experts take away from people the ability to make decisions. In courts, language has evolved in such a way that ordinary people simply can’t understand. You have this phalanx of lawyers and judges who are deciding vitally important issues, but people can’t understand what is being said, what the procedure really is, what’s going on.

I noticed that in the film DAMIAGE, it was difficult to follow some of the pronouncements from the Supreme Court.

‘Vicious stultification and vulgar debunking cannot be allowed to pollute the stream of justice’ [laughs]. What is the other one? ‘Contumacious violation…’ I’ve forgotten. I used to know it by heart.

Do you see any role for specialized knowledge?

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it’s important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It’s not that somebody shouldn’t have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don’t think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and labourers starve.

The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn’t work? A CEO wouldn’t be able to deal with his own shit.

Macaulay, a Raj official in the nineteenth century, imperiously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. In recent years there’s been an enormous surge of writing produced not only by Indian writers such as yourself but also writers of Indian origin who live outside of India, like V.S. Naipaul. Why is that happening now?

It’s not that enormous a surge, actually. I remember when my novel was first published, the New Yorker organized to shoot one big photograph of Indo-Anglian writers.³⁶ There were maybe ten or fifteen of us. They’d organized this huge bus to take us to lunch, but the bus was still pretty empty. Everyone’s talking about this surge but you can count the people who are known on your fingertips. It’s being made out to be something more than it is, I think.

Like a fad?

There are people writing, but it’s not some renaissance or anything that’s happening. If it is a fad for the western world, then that’s their business. I don’t care.

Some people might say that writing in English automatically means you’re writing for a yuppie audience, because English in India particularly is a language of privilege.

That’s true. But at the same time, any language in India is very limited. If you write in Malayalam, only someone from Kerala can read it. If you write in Hindi, only those from a few states in the north can read it. So language is a very complicated issue in India. It’s interesting that The God of Small Things has been published in forty languages, so in a way it’s about language, but not as in English or German or French or Hindi. It’s something more than that. It’s language as communication, more or less.

My political writing is published in many, many Indian languages. The Hindi translation of The God of Small Things is almost ready. So it’s no longer just for yuppies. And anyway it’s not just yuppies who speak English in India. There are more people who speak English in India than in England. It’s a huge number.

One of the pleasures for me about having written The God of Small Things is that many of the people who are reading it would not normally read an English novel. So a sub-inspector from Muzaffarnagar or some person from some village somewhere will come to me and say, ‘I read it with a dictionary. I understood it.’ So I love the range of readers—from John Updike to a policeman in Muzaffarnagar.

Your article and essays appear in the Nation magazine, and you’re publishing now with South End Press. Power Politics is your first book with them and War Talk is the next one. Are you getting a lot of response from outside India? Are people writing to you?

I do receive a lot of letters, but it’s difficult for me to deal with the volume of responses and requests that I get. I’m under pressure to turn myself into an institution, to have an office and secretaries and people dealing with my mail and my accounts. I’m just not like that. I can’t be like that. So I choose the inefficient model, which is not to deal with it. I do what I can. Obviously I have a literary agent in America and in England. They help me. But in my own space, I just don’t have that. It’s hard, but it’s a choice that I make, that I just continue to be an individual who gets a lot of mail and can’t handle it.

Himanshu Thakkar is someone whom you admire. You mention him in the introduction to The Cost of Living.³⁷ I happened to meet him and he told me, ‘You know, it’s remarkable. The women are the leaders in the country. The women are advancing the movements for social justice.’ Why is that?

I don’t know but it’s absolutely correct. In India, the legacy of the freedom struggle has been a great respect for non-violent resistance. The pros and cons of violent and non-violent resistance can be debated, but I don’t think there can be any doubt that violent resistance harms women physically and psychologically in deep and complex ways. Having said that, Indian society is still deeply disrespectful of women. The daily violence, injustice and indignity heaped on women is hard to believe sometimes.

But this takes place against a backdrop of an institutionalized misogyny that is deeply culturally imbedded. One example was a report in the Times of India a couple of days ago that there’s a crisis in Haryana because there are not enough marriageable girls?³⁸ Why aren’t there enough marriageable girls? Because of female foeticide? The families have to buy brides for their sons from outside the state and their community. It’s interesting that the Times said that ‘Desperate boys are willing to marry girls from any caste.’ That’s another one of these incredible contradictions.

That is India. We don’t even blink when someone brings up a contradiction. What is interesting is that a lot of the women who are involved in resistance movements and who are activists are also redefining what ‘modern’ means. They are really at war against their community’s traditions on the one hand, and against the kind of modernity that is being imposed by the global economy on the other. They decide what they want from their own tradition and what they will take from modernity. It’s a high-wire act. Very tiring but exhilarating.

Another thing everyone probably has to deal with here is the persistence of colour, the emphasis on being fair-skinned. I was reading about Kareena Kapoor, a rising young hollywood starlet (who is opening, incidentally, a Pizza Hut in Gurgaon), and she was described as ‘cream coloured’. It’s a very favourable designation.

I’m so glad that you brought this up, because most people, foreigners, don’t even notice that there’s a colour difference between white Indians and black Indians. But it’s something that really drives me crazy here. India is one of the most racist modern societies. The kind of things people will say about being black-skinned are stunning.

There was a television programme a few years ago about this. In the audience there was a Sudanese man, an albino man, and a Punjabi woman who runs a marriage bureau. I’ve never seen anything more ridiculous. The Sudanese man talked about how terrible it was for him to live here and how girls would cross to the other side of the road. How people would pull his hair on the bus and call him hubshi, which is roughly equivalent to ‘nigger’. Then the albino said, ‘I don’t know whether I would be considered fair or dark.’ So he asked the woman who runs the marriage bureau whether she could get him a bride. She looked at him and said, ‘I can get you a polio victim.’

This was all being done without irony. At the end of it, the man who was presenting the show said, ‘It looks like all of us are very colour conscious. In actual fact, why do we spend so much time thinking about the packaging? Black people are also nice from underneath.’

If you look at the newspapers, you see advertisements for some cream called Afghan Snow or Fair and Lovely. And all these white women in Bollywood films! Ninety per cent of the women in India are black. But, according to Bollywood, if you’re not white, you’re not beautiful. The rising international popularity of Bollywood films worries me. Most of them reinforce some terrible, some very disempowering values.

Poor people, the Dalits and the adivasis, are mostly black. There’s an apartheid system at work here, for anyone who cares to notice.

Let’s go to another Bombay Bollywood star, from an older generation, Nargis. She complained bitterly about Satyajit Ray, the great Indian film-maker, saying that his films only show poverty. Then she was asked, ‘Well, what would you rather see in Indian cinema?’ And she said ‘dams’.³⁹

‘You’re not showing India in a proper light.’ That’s the great middle-class complaint: ‘Why can’t you show McDonald’s and Pizza King?’ Because here, you see, people have learned not to see the poverty. They have these filters, these contact lenses, that filter it out. They don’t understand why ‘outsiders’ get so exercised about it. They take it as a kind of affront.

I’m interested in how that operates. I’ve seen it myself, and see it in myself when I’m here. How do you look away from someone who’s terribly poor and indigent?

It’s a survival technique. Meaning, how else are you to survive? You have to find a way of continuing with your life. So you just filter it out.

‘When people describe me as famous and rich and successful, it makes me feel queasy. Each of those words falls on my soul like an insult. They seem tinny and boring and shiny and uninteresting to me. It makes me feel unsuccessful because I never set out to be those things. And they make me uneasy. To be famous, rich and successful in this world is not an admirable thing. I’m suspicious of it all.’

‘It’s one thing to have a dictator who commits genocide. It’s another thing to have an elected government with officials who have been accused of actively abetting mass murder being re-elected. Because then, all of us must bear the shame of that. All of us must bear some responsibility for that. I don’t see that it’s all that different from the American public electing president after president who has killed and massacred and bombed people all over the world.’