Author: Arundhati Roy

‘No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize Acceptance Speech

‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.’

Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with. 

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

Also read: Arundhati Roy on Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: The Dismantling of the World as We Know It

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

‘What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?’. Photo: X/@UNRWA

Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people? 

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt? 

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

‘Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this.’ Photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Wikimedia commons

Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator. 

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.

But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

‘Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams’. Photo: Shome Basu in Dhaka.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition. 

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

 

Approaching Gridlock: Free Speech and Failing Democracy

The digital revolution in India is a perfect example of how the interests of big business and Hindu supremacy coincide perfectly.

This is the full text of a speech delivered by Arundhati Roy in Stockholm on March 22, 2023.

I thank the Swedish Academy for inviting me to speak at this conference and for affording me the privilege of listening to the other speakers. It was planned more than two years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic unleashed the full scale of the horror it had in store for us and before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But those two cataclysmic events have only intensified the predicament that we have gathered here to think about – the phenomenon of democracies transmuting into something unrecognisable but with unnervingly recognisable resonances. And the escalating policing of speech in ways that are very old, as well as very new, to the point where the air itself has turned into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. We seem to be fast approaching what feels like intellectual gridlock.

I will reverse the sequence suggested by the title of this talk and begin with the phenomenon of failing democracy.

The last time I came to Sweden was in 2017, for the Gothenburg Book Fair. Several activists asked me to boycott the fair because, in the name of free speech, it had allowed the far-right newspaper Nye Tider to put up its stall. At the time I explained that it would be absurd for me to do that because Narendra Modi, the prime minister of my country, who was (and is) warmly welcomed on the world’s stage, is a life-time member of the RSS, a far-right Hindu supremacist organisation founded in 1925, and constituted in the image of the Blackshirts, the “all volunteer” paramilitary wing of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. In Gothenburg I watched the Nordic Resistance Movement march. The first Nazi march in Europe since the Second World War. It was countered on the street by young anti-fascists.

But today a far-right party, even if not openly Nazi, is part of the ruling coalition in the Swedish government. And Narendra Modi is serving his ninth year as India’s prime minister.

§

When I speak of failing democracy, I will speak mainly about India, not because it is known as the world’s largest democracy, but because it is the place I love, the place I know and live in, the place that breaks my heart every day. And mends it, too.

Remember what I say is not a call for help, because we in India know very well that no help will come. No help can come. I speak to tell you about a country that, although flawed, was once so full of singular possibilities, one that offered a radically different understanding of the meaning of happiness, fulfilment, tolerance, diversity and sustainability than that of the western world. All that is being extinguished, spiritually stubbed out.

India’s democracy is being systematically disassembled. Only the rituals remain. Next year you will surely hear a lot about our noisy, colourful elections. What will not be apparent is that the level playing field – fundamental to a fair election – is actually a steep rockface in which virtually all the money, the data, the media, the election management and security apparatus is in the hands of the ruling party. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, with its detailed, comprehensive data set that measures the health of democracies, has categorised India as an “electoral autocracy” along with El Salvador, Turkey and Hungary, and predicts that things are likely to get worse. We are talking about 1.4 billion people falling out of democracy and into autocracy. Or worse.

The process of dismantling democracy began long before Modi and the RSS came to power. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay called ‘Democracy’s Failing Light‘. At the time, the Congress party, a party of old, feudal elites and technocrats newly and enthusiastically wedded to the free market, was in power. I’ll read a short passage from the essay – not to prove how right I was, but to chart for you how much has changed since then.

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?

So 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?

That was 2009. Five years later, in 2014, Modi was elected prime minister of India. In the nine years since, India has changed beyond recognition. The “secular, socialist republic” mandated by the Indian Constitution has almost ceased to exist. The great struggles for social justice and the dogged, visionary environmental movements have been crushed. Now we rarely speak about dying rivers, falling water tables, disappearing forests or melting glaciers. Because those worries have been replaced by a more immediate dread. Or euphoria, depending on which side of the ideological line you are on.

India for all practical purposes has become a corporate, theocratic Hindu state, a highly policed state, a fearsome state. The institutions that were hollowed-out by the previous regime, particularly the mainstream media, now seethe with Hindu supremacist fervour. Simultaneously, the free market has done what the free market does. Briefly, according to Oxfam’s 2023 report, the top 1% of India’s population owns more than 40% of total wealth, while the bottom 50% of the population (700 million people) has around 3% of total wealth. We are very rich country of very poor people. But instead of being directed at those who might be responsible for some of these things, the anger and resentment that this inequality generates has been harvested and directed against India’s minorities. The 170 million Muslims who make up 14% of the population are on the frontline. Majoritarian thinking, however, cuts across class and caste barriers and has a huge constituency in the diaspora as well.

In January this year, the BBC broadcast a two-part documentary called India: The Modi Question. It traced Modi’s political journey from his debut in 2001 as chief minister of the state of Gujarat to his years as India’s prime minister. The film made public for the first time an internal report commissioned by the British Foreign Office in April 2002 about the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place in Gujarat under Modi’s watch in February and March 2002, just before elections to the state assembly. That fact-finding report, embargoed for all these years, only corroborates what Indian activists, journalists, lawyers, two senior police officers and eyewitnesses to the mass rape and slaughter have been saying for years. It estimates that “at least 2,000” people had been murdered. It calls the massacre a pre-planned pogrom that bore “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing”. It says reliable sources had informed them that when the murdering began the police were ordered to stand down. The report lays the blame for the pogrom squarely at Modi’s door.

Narendra Modi and the BBC logo. Photo: Wikipedia

The film has been banned in India. Twitter and YouTube were ordered to take down all links to it. They obeyed immediately. On February 21, the BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai were surrounded by the police and raided by Income Tax officials. As Oxfam’s offices have been. As Amnesty International’s offices have been. As many major opposition politicians’ homes and offices have been. As almost every NGO that isn’t completely aligned with the government has been. While Modi has been legally absolved by the Supreme Court in the 2002 pogrom, the activists and police officers who dared to accuse him of complicity, based on a tower of evidence and witness testimonies, are either in prison or facing criminal trials. Meanwhile, many of the convicted killers are out on bail or parole. Last August, on the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, 11 convicts walked out of prison. They had been serving life sentences for gang-raping a 19-year-old Muslim woman, Bilkis Bano, during the 2002 pogrom and murdering 14 members of her family, including her one-day-old niece and her three-year-old daughter, Saleha, by smashing her head on a rock. They were given special amnesty. Outside the prison walls, the murderer-rapists were greeted as heroes, garlanded with flowers. Once again, there was a state election around the corner. The special amnesty was part of our democratic process.

Earlier today Professor Timothy Snyder asked, “What is free speech?” Let none of what I have just said make you conclude that there isn’t free speech in India. There is freedom in speech and deed. Plenty of it. Mainstream TV anchors can freely lie about, demonise and dehumanise minorities in ways that lead to actual physical harm or incarceration. Hindu godmen and sword-wielding mobs can call for the genocide and mass rape of Muslims. Dalits and Muslims can be publicly flogged and lynched in broad daylight and the videos can be uploaded on YouTube. Churches can be freely attacked, priests and nuns beaten and humiliated.

In Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority region, where people have fought for self-determination for almost three decades, where India runs the densest military administration in the world, and where no foreign journalists are allowed to go, the government has allowed itself to freely shut down virtually all speech – online and otherwise – and freely incarcerate local journalists.

Also read: The Work of Irfan Mehraj, a Fearless Journalist Who Offered Fresh Perspectives on Kashmir

In that beautiful valley covered with graveyards, the valley from which no news comes, the people say, “In Kashmir the dead are alive, and the living are only dead people pretending.” They often refer to India’s democracy as “demon-crazy”.

In 2019, weeks after Modi and his party won a second term, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was unilaterally stripped of its statehood and the semi-autonomous status guaranteed to it by the Indian Constitution. Soon after that, parliament passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA).  This new Act manifestly discriminates against Muslims. Under it, people, mostly Muslims, now fear losing their citizenship. The CAA will complement the process of creating a National Register of Citizens (NRC). To be included in the National Register of Citizens people are expected to produce a set of state approved ‘legacy documents’ – a process not dissimilar to what the Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany required of German people. Already about two million people in the state of Assam have been struck from the National Register of Citizens and stand to lose all their rights. Huge detention centres are being constructed, with the hard labour often done by future inmates – those who have been designated “declared foreigners” or “doubtful voters”.

Our new India is an India of costume and spectacle. Picture a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It’s called the Narendra Modi Stadium and has a seating capacity of 132,000. In January 2020 it was packed to capacity for the Namastey Trump rally when Modi felicitated then US President Donald Trump. Standing up and waving to the crowd, in the city where during the 2002 pogrom Muslims had been slaughtered in broad daylight and tens of thousands driven from their homes, and where Muslims still live in ghettoes, Trump praised India for being tolerant and diverse. Modi called down a round of applause. A day later Trump arrived in Delhi. His arrival in the capital coincided with yet another massacre. A tiny one this time, a mini-massacre by Gujarat’s standards. In a working-class neighborhood only kilometers away from Trump’s fine hotel and not far from where I live. Hindu vigilantes, once again turned on Muslims. Once again the police stood by. The provocation was that the area had seen protests against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act. Fifty-three people, mostly Muslim, were killed. Hundreds of businesses, homes and mosques were burnt. Trump said nothing.

Narendra Modi and Donald Trump at the ‘Namaste Trump’ event in Ahmedabad, February 24, 2020. Photo: Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks

Burned into some of our minds from those terrible days is a different kind of spectacle: a young Muslim man is lying grievously injured, close to death, on a street in India’s capital city. He is being prodded and beaten and forced by policemen to sing the Indian national anthem. He died a few days later. His name was Faizan. He was 23 years old. No action has been taken against those policemen.

Watch: ‘My Son Died Because of Police Beating’ Says Mother of Faizan, Seen in Viral Video

None of this should matter much to the provosts of the democratic world. Actually none of it does. Because there is after all business to attend to. Because India is currently the West’s bulwark against a rising China (or so it hopes), and because in the free market you can trade a little mass-rape and lynching or a spot of ethnic cleansing or some serious financial corruption for a generous purchase order for fighter jets or commercial aircraft. Or crude oil purchased from Russia, refined, stripped of the stigma of US sanctions and sold to Europe and, yes, or so our newspapers report, to the United States, too. Everybody’s happy. And why not? For Ukrainians, Ukraine is their country. For Russia, it’s a colony, and for Western Europe and the US, it’s a frontier. (Like Vietnam was. Like Afghanistan was.) But for Modi, it’s merely yet another stage on which to perform. This time to play the role of statesman-peacemaker and offer homilies such as “today’s era is not an era of war”.

Inside what is increasingly feeling like a cult, there is sophisticated jurisdiction. But there is no equality before law. Laws are applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. For example, a Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. It makes solidarity, speaking up for one another, more important than ever. But that, too, has become a perilous activity, and this is what I mean by the title of my lecture – Approaching Gridlock.

Unfortunately, at just such a moment, the list of things that cannot be said and words that must not be uttered is lengthening by the minute. Time was when governments and mainstream media houses controlled the platforms that controlled the narrative. In the West that would, for the most part, be white folks. In India, Brahmin folks. And then of course there are fatwa folks for whom censorship and assassination mean the same thing. But today censorship has turned into a battle of all against all. The fine art of taking offence has become a global industry. The question is how does one negotiate this hydra-headed, multi-limbed, hawkeyed, forever-awake, ever-vigilant, heresy-hunting machine? Is it even possible, or is it a tide that must ebb before we can even discuss it?

In India, like in other countries, the weaponisation of identity as a form of resistance has become the dominant response to the weaponisation of identity as a form of oppression. Those who have historically been oppressed, enslaved, colonised, stereotyped, erased, unheard and unseen precisely because of our identities – our race, caste, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference – are now defiantly doubling down on those very identities to face off against that oppression. It is a powerful, explosive moment in history in which, enabled by the social media, wild, incandescent anger is battering down old ideas, old patterns of behaviour, entitled assumptions that have never been questioned, loaded words, and language that is coded with prejudice and bigotry. The intensity and suddenness of it has shocked a complacent world into re-thinking, re-imagining and trying to find a better way of doing and saying things. Ironically, almost uncannily, this phenomenon, this fine-tuning, seems to be moving in step with our lurch into fascism.

This explosion has profound, revolutionary aspects to it, as well as absurd and destructive ones. It’s easy to swoop down on its more extreme aspects and use these to tar and dismiss the whole debate. (For example: should women now be called ‘people who menstruate’? Should an art professor in the US teaching the rich diversity of Islam be summarily sacked for showing her students a 14th-century painting of Prophet Mohammed after announcing that she was going to do so and excusing from her class all students who might be offended or upset by it? Should there be an established, immutable hierarchy of historical suffering that everybody must accept?) That is the fuel which the far-right uses to consolidate itself. But to buckle under it, fearfully and unquestioningly as many who think of themselves as liberal and left-wing do, is to disrespect this transformation, too. Because in the politics of identity there is all too often an important pivot, a hinge, which when it turns upon itself begins to reinforce as well as replicate the very thing it wishes to resist. That happens when identity is disaggregated and atomised into micro-categories. Even these micro-identities then develop a power hierarchy and a micro-elite, usually located in big cities, big universities, with social media capital, which inevitably mimics the same kind of exclusion, erasure and hierarchy that is being challenged in the first place.

If we lock ourselves into the prison cells of the very labels and identities that we have been given by those who have always had power over us, we can at best stage a prison revolt. Not a revolution. And the prison guards will appear soon enough to restore order. In fact, they’re already on their way. When we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, eventually it is the always the Right, and usually the status quo, that benefits disproportionately.

Sealing ourselves into communities, religious and caste groups, ethnicities and genders, reducing and flattening our identities and pressing them into silos precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the Hindu caste system in India. Divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable compartments, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another, because they are in constant conflict. It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative/surveillance machine in which society administers/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom – and these categories are minutely graded, too – is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy. Leave aside his Russian imperialism, imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as “crones”. By his standards I’d qualify as a crone for sure. But I’d still like people to read him. Or, if you like, try reading the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. I can guarantee you that you’ll be appalled on every count; race, sex, caste, class. Does that mean he should be banned? Or re-written? Even Jane Austen wouldn’t make the cut. It goes without saying that by these standards every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.

Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine. It should be challenged, analysed, argued about, calibrated. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.

What does all this do to literature? As a fiction writer, few things perturb me more than the word “appropriation”, which is one of the rallying calls of the new censorship. In this context, appropriation, crudely put, is about predators, even contrite predators attempting to write, or represent, speak over, or actually tell the stories of their prey on their behalf. It’s pretty skanky, and a useful principle to keep in mind while critiquing something. But it’s not a good reason to ban or censor things. Yes, the mic has been hogged. Yes, we’ve heard too much from one kind of people and too little from others. But the web of life is dense and intricate, its creatures and their deeds cannot be essentialised and so easily and unintelligently catalogued.

Coming specifically to fiction, there can be no fiction without appropriation. Because we fiction writers are predators too. If serial killers are merciless sociopaths, novelists are merciless appropriators. To construct our fictional worlds, we appropriate everything that crosses our path and we put it all in play. That is what makes great novels dangerous and revelatory things. Speaking for myself, I have tried to learn my craft not only from politically irreproachable writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, but also from imperialists like Kipling, and from bigots, racists, troublemakers and rascals who write beautifully. Should they now be rewritten to march to the beat of some narrow manifesto? The recent decision to re-edit the work of Roald Dahl – my God, who next? Nabokov? Shall Lolita vanish from our shelves? Or shall she be re-cast as an undercover pre-teen activist? Shall old masterpieces be repainted? Shorn of the male gaze? It’s so sad to even have to say all this. Where will it leave us? On a shore without footprints? In a world without history?

If literature is going to be immobilised by this web of a thousand snarling threads, it will turn into some sort of rigid, leaden manifesto. And sadly, those who are so enthusiastically involved in the policing aren’t just petrifying others, they are petrifying themselves as well. They are laying landmines that they know they themselves will inevitably step on. In cagey, wary minds there can be no dancing. Only the heavy, cautious tread of this new language. Newspeak. In any case, driving things underground won’t make them go away. If these debates could take place without the bullying and vindictiveness that accompany them, then most definitely, along with the usual mess of bigotry, racism and sexism there will be glorious new voices telling stories that have never been told before, putting much of the past to shame.

Having said this, it is never a bad idea to pay close attention to words. Because sometimes a word can signify a universe.

For example, when I first became a published novelist, on the occasions when I would speak outside India I would, more often than not, be introduced on stage as an “Indian Woman Writer”. (In India it would be “the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize”.) Each time it happened I would wince inwardly and wonder at this way of labelling someone. Was it necessary or was it a way of limiting and circumscribing them? After all, it was literature we were talking about, not a visa application. I winced because I was constantly being lectured, by privileged and entitled men, not just privately, but on the front pages of newspapers about how to write, what to write, what tone to take, what topics would be suitable for a (woman) writer like me. Children’s stories was the suggestion that came up most frequently. The fiction didn’t seem to bother them as much as the non-fiction, even if they agreed in principle with what I was saying. On one occasion I was hauled up by the Supreme Court of India for contempt of court for my writing on big dams. During the trial, their Lordships, the brother judges on the bench would refer to me as ‘that woman’ as they threw my essay around in exasperation. As if I wasn’t standing right there, in front of them. I’d refer to myself privately as the Hooker that won the Booker. When I refused to apologise to the court, I was told that I wasn’t behaving like “a reasonable man” and sent to prison for a day.

Things have changed since then. Each of those words in that card-index introduction of me – Indian, Woman and Writer – is, these days, the subject heading of some anxious and difficult interrogation and almost irreconcilable conflict. Who is a woman? Or, indeed, who is a human? What is a country? Who is a citizen? And, in the era of Open AI and ChatGPT, who or what is a writer?

We know now, even if many won’t accept it, that the border between male and female is a fluid one and not what convention has assumed it to be. But what about the border between human being and machine, between art and coding, between artificial intelligence and human consciousness? Are those as hard-wired as we thought they were?

The era of ChatBots is here, and some are calling Artificial Intelligence the fourth industrial revolution. Will writers, journalists, artists and composers now be phased out in the same way that weavers, craftsmen, factory workers and old-world farmers have been? (Maybe like “hand-crafted” and “hand-woven” garments and artefacts, novels will return to being “hand-written” and sold in limited editions as works of art and not literature.) Will literature be better produced by ChatGPT or Sydney or Bing? The great linguist Noam Chomsky thinks not. If I understand him correctly, he holds that a machine learning programme can produce faux-science or faux-art by processing an almost infinite volume of data at high speed, but it can never replace the complex abilities of human instinct.

There is a great deal of anxiety around what might happen if Open AI finds its way into the world without regulations and guardrails. As there should be.

When it comes to literature, my worry is less about whether Chatbots will replace writers. (Perhaps I’m a little too old and a little too vain for that. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t view literature as a “product”. The pain, the pleasure and the sheer insanity of the process is the only reason that I write.) My worry is that, given the amount of data and information that human writers – see, I said it, I said “human writers” – have to process these days, and given the maze of tripwires we have to negotiate to be error free and politically perfect, the danger is that writers may lose their instincts and turn into Chatbots. Maybe then there will be a transfer of souls. Then Chatbots will appear to be Real Souls and Real Souls will be Chatbots pretending.

In the midst of all this fluidity and porousness, the only borders that seem to be hardening are the borders between nation-states. Those continue to be hard-wired, patrolled. When they are breached by armies, we call it war. When they are breached by people, we call it a refugee crisis. When they are breached by the unregulated movement of capital, we call it the free market. The modern nation-state is right up there with God as an idea worth killing or dying for. But now, in the digital era, are we heading for a new kind of state? The Electronic State, or what is being called a State in a Smartphone. An Avatar State, if you like.

Funded by USAID and backed by Big Tech – Amazon, Apple, Google, Oracle – the Avatar State is almost upon us. In 2019, the Government of Ukraine launched DIIA, a digital identification app for smartphones. In addition to providing more than a hundred government services, DIIA can house passports, vaccine certificates and other ID. DIIA city is its extraterritorial financial capital – a sort of venture capital hub where citizens can register and conduct business. After the Russian invasion began, DIIA, initially conceived of as a bureaucratic tool to ensure “transparency and efficiency”, was, in the words of Samantha Power, administrator of USAID, “repurposed for wartime”. From all accounts DIIA has done a tremendous service to the brave people of Ukraine. It now has a 24/7 government news channel for citizens to update themselves on the war. Refugees can use it to register themselves, and file compensation claims. Citizens can reportedly use it to upload information on collaborators and photographs of Russian troop movement. A sort of real-time public intelligence and surveillance network operated by ordinary citizens.

The DIIA app. Photo: UNDP Ukraine/Andriy Krepkikh

When the war began, Ukrainian citizens’ private data on DIIA was transferred for safekeeping onto Amazon’s military grade hard drives called AWS snowballs, the terrestrial equivalent of the Cloud, and transported out of Ukraine and uploaded to Cloud. In a war as devastating as the one Ukrainians are fighting and enduring, if a people are completely aligned behind their government, then having your State in a Smartphone surely has incredible advantages. But do those advantages accrue in peace time, too? Because as we know from Edward Snowden, surveillance is a two-way street. Our phones are our intimate enemies, they spy on us too.

In order to “protect the democratic world”, USAID plans to take DIIA or its equivalent to other states. Countries like Ecuador, Zambia, the Dominican Republic are at the head of the queue. The worry is that once an app like DIIA has been “re-purposed for war”, can it be “un-purposed” or “de-purposed” for peace? Can a weaponised citizenry be un-weaponised? Can privatised data be un-privatised?

India is quite far down this path, too. During Modi’s first term as prime minister, Reliance Industries, then India’s largest corporation, launched JIO, a free wireless data network that came bundled together with a dirt-cheap smartphone. Once it had successfully muscled the competition out of the market, it began to charge a small fee. JIO has turned India into the largest consumer of wireless data in the world – more than China and the US put together. By 2019 there were 300 million smartphone users. Along with the all the undeniable benefits of being connected to the internet, these millions of people have become a ready-made audience for hateful, socially radioactive messaging and endless fake news that flows relentlessly into their phones through the social media. It is here that you will see India unadorned. It’s here that those calls for the genocide and mass rape of Muslims are amplified. Where videos of avenging Hindu warriors massacring Muslims, fake videos of Muslims murdering Hindus, and of Muslim fruit-sellers secretly spitting on fruit to spread Covid (like Jews in Nazi Germany were accused of spreading typhus) are sent around to drive people into a frenzy of rage and hate. The Hindu supremacists’ social media channels are to the mainstream media, what a vigilante militia is to a conventional army. Militias can do things that are illegal for a conventional  army to do.

The digital revolution in India is a perfect example of how the interests of big business and Hindu supremacy coincide perfectly. As Indian citizens are ushered into the digital arena in their millions, entire lives are lived online, education, medical care, businesses, banking, the distribution of food rations to the poor. Social media corporations have to be more and more attentive to the government that controls this mind-boggling market-share. Because when that government is unhappy, as it often is, it can simply shut everything down. We await the draconian new 2023 Digital India Act which will give the government unthinkable powers over the internet. Already India imposes more internet shutdowns than any country in the world. In 2019 the seven million inhabitants of the Kashmir valley were put under a blanket telecommunication and internet siege that lasted for months. No phone calls, no texts, no messages, no OTPs, no internet. None. And nobody was around to drop a Starlink satellite for them. Today as I speak, the state of Punjab a population of 27 million is enduring its fourth consecutive day of internet shut down because the police are hunting for a political fugitive and worry about him rallying support.

By 2026 India is projected to have one billion smart phone users. Imagine that volume of data in an India-bespoke DIIA app. Imagine all that data in the hands of private corporations. Or, on the other hand, imagine it in the hands of a fascist state and its indoctrinated, weaponised supporters.

For example, say after passing a new citizenship law Country X manufactures millions of ‘refugees’ out of its own citizenry. It can’t deport them, it doesn’t have the money to build prisons for all of them. But Country X won’t need a Gulag or concentration camps. It can just switch them off. It can switch the State off in their smartphones. It could then have a vast service population, virtually a subclass of labor without rights, without minimum wages, voting rights, healthcare or food rations. They wouldn’t need to appear in the books. It would improve Country X’s  statistical markers enormously. It could be quite an efficient and transparent operation. It could even look like a great democracy.

What would a State like that smell like? Or taste like? Something unrecognisable? Or something very recognisable?

Thank you for your patience. For now, let me leave you with these thoughts. What is a country? What is a State? What is a human? And who or what is a writer?

 

Arundhati Roy on Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: The Dismantling of the World as We Know It

Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity, says the acclaimed writer.

This is the full text from the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Autumn Keynote delivered by the author at the Conway Hall on September 30, 2022.

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today in memory of Stuart Hall.

We’ve been trying to make this happen for what seems like years. I will never ever again take for granted the pleasure of being in a room together with so many fellow human beings. The pandemic has faded somewhat, but many of us are still struggling to get the measure of the trauma it has left in its wake. I can hardly believe that I never met Stuart. But reading his work makes me feel we would have spent a lot of time laughing together about things.

The main title of this lecture, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, is the title of a little book I wrote along with the actor John Cusack. It was about a trip that he and I made to Russia in December, 2013 to meet Edward Snowden in Moscow. Our other companion was Daniel Ellsberg – for those of you who are too young to remember, he was the Snowden of his time; the whistleblower who made public the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war.

Snowden, who warned us years ago that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state, continues to live in exile in Moscow. And we have tumbled enthusiastically into the surveillance state he warned about, with our little phone-companions that have become as intimate and as indispensable as any vital organ in our bodies, spying on us, recording and transmitting our most personal information so that we can be tracked, controlled, standardised and domesticated. Not just by the state, but by each other too.

Imagine if your liver, or your gall bladder didn’t have your best interests at heart, your doctor would tell you that you are terminally ill. That’s the sort of bind we find ourselves in. We can’t do without it, but it’s doing us in.

The first section of my talk will be about things that can and cannot be said. The second, about the dismantling of the world as we knew it. 

This has been a bad year for those who have said and done Things That Cannot Be Said. Or Done. In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed while she was in the custody of Iran’s moral police for the sin of not wearing her headscarf in the way that is officially mandated. In the protests that followed and are ongoing, several people have been killed.

Meanwhile, in India, in the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim schoolgirls who wanted to assert their identity as Muslim women in their classrooms by wearing hijabs were physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men. This in a place where Hindus and Muslims have lived together for centuries but have recently become dangerously polarised.

Both instances – strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries – may appear to be antagonistic, but they aren’t really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isn’t about the hijab. It’s about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women. 

In August, Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked in upstate New York by an Islamist zealot for his book, The Satanic Verses; a book that was first published in 1988. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution and the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued an edict calling for Rushdie’s death. All these years later, just when it had begun to seem that the anger and passions his book aroused had abated and Rushdie gradually came out of hiding, came the attack.

After the initial news of the 75-year-old Rushdie having survived the attack and being in good cheer, there is no news at all. One can only hope that he is recovering and will return to the world of literature with all his powers intact. Heads of state in Europe and the US have come out robustly in Rushdie’s support, some saying, a little self-servingly, “His fight is our fight”.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange, who published and exposed some of the more terrible war crimes committed by soldiers of those countries, wars in which hundreds of thousands died, is in terrible health and remains locked up in Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US, where he may face a death sentence or several life sentences.

So, we must pause before casting this horrifying attack on Rushdie in cliched terms such as a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ or ‘Democracy versus Darkness’. Because millions have been killed in invasions led by these so-called free-speech evangelists, and among those, millions have been writers, poets and artists, too.

As for the news from India, in June, Nupur Sharma, spokesperson of the BJP, India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, once a permanent, bullying presence on TV talk shows, made several intemperate comments against Prophet Mohammed in a provocative performance whose very purpose appeared to be to cause offence. There was an international uproar, and several death threats later, she has retreated from public life. But two Hindu men who supported her comments were brutally beheaded. In the days that followed, throngs of Muslim zealots have gathered to chant “tan se sar juda” (separate the head from the body) and call for the state to pass a blasphemy law. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that nothing would make the state happier.

Also read: In the Nupur Sharma Episode, Religiosity Wins Over Humanity

They’re not the only ones who conflate censorship and assassination. Earlier this month I was in Bangalore to speak on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of my friend Gauri Lankesh, the journalist who was shot down outside her home by Hindu fanatics. Hers was one in a series of assassinations that appear to be connected to the same shadowy group: Dr Narendra Dabholkar, the physician and well-known rationalist thinker, was shot in 2013; comrade Govind Pansare, a writer and member of the Communist Party of India, was shot in February 2015, and the Kannada scholar professor M.M. Kalburgi in August that same year.

Assassination is of course, not the only form of censorship we experience. In the year 2022, India ranks 150th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, below Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. We are policed not just by the government, but by mobs on the streets, by social media trolls and, ironically, by the media itself.

On the hundreds of 24×7 TV news channels we often refer to as ‘Radio Rwanda’, our baying TV anchors rage against Muslims and “anti-nationals”, call for dissenters to be arrested, sacked, punished. They have ruined lives and reputations with absolute impunity and no accountability. Activists, poets, intellectuals, lawyers and students are being arrested almost every day. As for Kashmir – the Valley from which No News Can Come– it is a giant prison. Soon there could be more soldiers there than citizens.

Every communication by Kashmiris, private as well as public, even the very rhythm of their breathing, is supervised. In schools, under the guise of learning to love Gandhi, Muslim children are being taught to sing Hindu bhajans. When I think of Kashmir these days, for some reason I think of how, in some parts of the world, watermelons are being trained to grow in square moulds so that they are cube-shaped and easier to stack. In the Kashmir valley, it looks as though the Indian government is running that experiment on humans instead of melons. At gun-point.

Down in the Gangetic plains – the cow belt – of North India, mobs of sword-wielding Hindus led by godmen, who the media for some reason calls “seers”, call for the genocide of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women with complete impunity.

We have witnessed daylight lynchings, and the genocidal killing of more than a thousand Muslims (non-government figures put that number at closer to two thousand) in Gujarat in 2002 and in hundreds in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 2013. Not surprisingly, both massacres took place just before crucial elections.

We have watched the man under whose chief ministership the Gujarat massacre took place, Narendra Modi, consolidate his position as Hindu Hriday Samrat (the Emperor of Hindu Hearts) and rise to assume the highest office in the country. He has never expressed regret or apologised for what happened. We have watched him continue to amass political capital from his dangerous, sneering anti-Muslim rhetoric. We have watched the highest court in the land absolve him of all responsibility, legal as well as moral. We have watched, nauseated, as leaders of the so-called Free World embrace him as a statesman and a democrat. 

Also read: SC Judgment on Zakia Jafri’s Plea Seeks to Invert the Binary of Victim and Defender

Last month, India celebrated the 75th anniversary of independence from British Rule. From his elevated lectern in the Red Fort in Delhi, Modi thundered about his dream of empowering women in India. He spoke with passion, clenched his fist. He wore a turban flecked with the colours of the national flag.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves at the audience during the 75th Independence Day function at the historic Red Fort, in New Delhi, August 15, 2021. Photo: PTI/Kamal Singh

Empowering women in a society built on the Hindu caste system where privileged-caste men have for centuries exercised what they believe to be their ordained right to the bodies of Dalit and Adivasi women, is not a matter of policy alone. It’s about a socialisation, and a belief system.

There is a rising graph of crimes against women in India, putting it on the map of amongst the most unsafe places in the world for women. It surprises no one these days to see how often the criminals belong to or are related to members of the current ruling dispensation. In such cases, we have seen public rallies in favour of rapists. In the most recent case in which a 19-year-old girl was raped and murdered, a local leader blamed her father for “spreading raw milk before hungry cats.”

Even as Modi was delivering his Independence Day speech, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state of Gujarat announced special amnesty for 11 men who were serving life-sentences for the 2002 gang rape of 19-year-old Bilkis Bano and the murder of 14 members of her family, including her mother, her sisters, her baby brothers, her aunts, her uncle, her cousins, her cousin’s one-day-old infant, and Saleha, Bilkis’s three-year-old daughter, whose head was smashed against a rock.

This grisly crime, only one of several similar ones, was a part of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom I mentioned earlier. The panel that approved their release had several members from the BJP, one of them an elected legislator who went on record later to say that, since some of the convicts were Brahmins with ‘good sanskar’ (good upbringing), it was unlikely they were guilty at all.

In cases investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as this one was, it is legally mandated that any decision to give convicts amnesty has to be approved by the Central government, which is of course the government of Narendra Modi. So, we must assume that that permission was given.

When the convicts came out, they were greeted outside the prison walls as heroes – they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets and had their feet touched – by members of Hindu groups loosely affiliated to the BJP (the ‘looseness’ is to provide what is called plausible deniability) that make up the ‘Sangh Parivar’, the Joined Family. In a few months’ time, Gujarat goes to the polls.

In India, strange things happen just before our free and fair elections. It’s always the most dangerous time. 

Also read: ‘I Fear For Our Future’: Bilkis Bano’s Husband on Release of 11 Convicts

As the rapist-mass murderers return to take their place as respected members of society, Teesta Setalvad, the activist whose organisation, Citizens for Justice and Peace, has meticulously compiled a tower of documentary evidence that points to the complicity of the Gujarat government in general and Narendra Modi in particular with the 2002 massacre, was arrested, accused of forgery, tutoring witnesses and attempting to keep ‘the pot boiling’. 

These are the conditions in which we live and work. And say the things that cannot be said. In speech, as in everything else, the law is applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. A Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity.

In India as in other countries, the weaponisation of identity, in which identity is disaggregated and atomised into micro-categories, has turned the air itself into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. Even these micro-identities have developed a power hierarchy. In his book Elite Capture, the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo describes how certain individuals then become elevated from among these groups, individuals usually located in powerful countries, in big cities, in big universities, those with social capital on the internet, and then are given platforms by foundations, by media, by corporations to speak for and decide on behalf of the rest of their communities.

It’s an understandable response to historic pain and humiliation. But it’s not a revolutionary response. Micro-Elite Capture cannot be the only answer to Macro-Elite Capture. As some empirical research has shown, when we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, it is the Right that benefits disproportionately. A recent study by PEN America of banned school textbooks shows that the overwhelming majority of proscribed textbooks contain progressive texts on gender and race.

Sealing in communities, reducing and flattening their identities into silos can be perilous and precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the caste system in India – divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable silos, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict. It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative/surveillance machine in which society administers/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom (and these categories are minutely graded too) is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy – imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as “crones.” By his standards, I’d qualify as a crone for sure. But I’d still like people to read him. It goes without saying that by these standards, every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.

Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine. It should be challenged, debated, argued about, corrected. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.

§

And now I’d like to turn to the subheading of my talk – the dismantling of the world as we knew it. I’d like to speak a little about queens and their funerals. 

When the Queen died, some British newspapers asked me to write a piece about her passing. I was a little puzzled by the request. Perhaps because I’ve never lived in England, Queen Elizabeth II barely existed even on the peripheries of my imagination. So, I said sure, but it won’t be about the queen that you’re thinking about.

The queen I was thinking about was my mother, who founded and ran a high school, who died earlier this month. For good or for bad, she was the most singular, most profound influence in my life. We were dangerous foes and desperately good friends. She was the obstacle race that I structured myself around from the time I was very young. And now that she’s gone, and left me not heart-broken, but heart-smashed, my rather odd shape and structure doesn’t seem to make sense to me anymore. I was tempted to make this lecture about the politics of two funerals. One on the world’s stage and the other in a small town in South India. But I will resist that temptation. 

Perhaps, now’s time for me to say the first Thing that Should Not Be Said, at least not here in London, not now.

I couldn’t believe the pomp and pageantry and the days of endless television coverage of the rites and rituals of her funeral. I was transfixed by the obsequious, reverential paying of respects by those darker folks who hold high office in her former colonies, now known as the Commonwealth. There was nothing common about that wealth. It was extractive. And it flowed in one direction. We in the colonies paid for those costumes, those furs, those jewels, those gold sceptres.

There’s much to say about colonies and colonialism and the Monarchs who reigned over that barbarous period in history. Who better than Stuart Hall to tell us that story? But how’s this – just as a piece of graffiti as the somber cavalry rides past? The historian Mike Davis estimates that in the last quarter of the 19th century, between 30 and 60 million people died of hunger in the mostly man-made famines in colonial India, China and Brazil. He calls it the Great Victorian Holocaust.

Why do we love and admire those who humiliate us? That could be the most pertinent political, as well as personal, question of our times. 

Also read: South Asia’s Difficult Relationship With the British Monarchy

I apologise if this sounds like an unnuanced commentary on colonialism. That is not my position. I don’t count myself among those Indian intellectuals who rage against colonialism but choose to remain silent about the wrongs in our own societies. The Hindu caste system, for example, is one of the most brutal systems of social hierarchy the world has ever known. Many would call it a form of colonialism that pre-dates British colonialism and is prevalent even today. Caste remains the engine that runs modern India. It is remarkable how many Indian writers and intellectuals manage to completely elide the question of caste. To unsee something that stares us in the face almost every moment of every single day, they have to assume the literary or academic version of a very elaborate, tortuous yoga asana. 

All this is the subject of much of my writing, so for now I’d like to return to my bemusement about the Queen’s funeral. What was it really about? Someone please help me out here, because I don’t understand.

It can’t have been about the passing of a 96-year-old monarch of a small island country, which is having trouble even holding on to the sum of its parts – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Was it only a harking back, a nostalgic invocation, a paean to the ghost of the Empire on which the Sun Never Set? Or was it something more than that? Was it about the past, or is it about the future?

As the war in the Ukraine unfolds and the modern world as we know it comes apart at the seams, was all that pageantry actually a pantomime rally, a posturing, a parading of friends and allies, for a battle that is still to come? 

It reminded me of the opening chapter of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August about the lead up to World War I. 

“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled sashes flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens…and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of the Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying world of splendour never to be seen again”

The dangerous brinkmanship being played out in the Ukraine is being somewhat obscured by the noise of propaganda on both sides. But history’s clock could very well be racing towards sunset.

The various points of view on the war also involve some pretty tortuous yoga asanas – some pretty drastic seeing and unseeing – depending on where you have decided to place yourself. Many on the Left cannot find it in themselves to call out Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. They believe that Ukrainian outrage against Russia has been entirely confected and cultivated by Western Imperialism. That the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s never happened. They deny that millions of Ukrainians – the historian Timothy Snyder estimates five million – died in the famine of the early 1930’s under Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation.

They see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive war against an existential threat to itself by NATO. That’s not untrue. The fact that Russia does face a very serious threat is hard to deny. The hitch is that that the “defensive” war is being fought offensively on Ukrainian soil and against the Ukrainian people. 

When the Cold War ended, demilitarisation and nuclear disarmament should have begun. Instead, NATO did the opposite. It amassed more weapons, fought more wars and used the territory of its allies and proxies for the aggressive and provocative forward deployment of troops and missiles. If Russia had done through proxies in Europe or the US what NATO is doing to it, there is little doubt that we would be seeing the moral arguments and western media coverage turned inside out. 

None of this makes Vladimir Putin a revolutionary anti-imperialist or a democrat of any kind. None of it alters the fact that he believes in an overtly fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Homosexual, Christian nationalist ideology (which ironically, he calls “de-Nazification”) propounded by his two favourite ideologues, Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov. 

His claim about Ukraine, Crimea and Belarus being inseparable territories that made up Ancient Rus, a theory based on the millennial myth of the Christian baptism of its leader Volodymyr/Valdemar in Crimea in AD 988, has been (correctly) met with hilarity.

But we must ask why then is there less amusement in the same quarters when it comes to talk of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its claims of being the ancient Promised Land for the Jewish people, which translates in modern legalese as “the Nation-State of the Jewish people.”

Or in India, when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist militia and cultural guild of which Prime Minister Modi is a member, calls for an ‘Akhand Bharat’, a sort of fantasy that is futuristic and ancient all at once – a future ancient India that includes Pakistan and Bangladesh, which will be conquered and where all its people will be subjected to Hindu rule.

Ordinary people in Europe are gearing up to face the harsh winter that is nearly upon them, with very little or no heating, as Russia, in response to economic sanctions, threatens to shut off their gas supply. As Ukrainians fight on with relentless courage, and the chances of a negotiated settlement fade away, anxiety is building over the possibility of the war expanding and escalating. Putin has announced the ‘partial mobilisation’, whatever that means, of 300,000 military reservists. Perhaps for now the US is far away enough and safe enough, but all of Europe, Russia and much of Asia could become the theatre of a war unlike any the world has ever seen. A war in which there can’t be a winner.

Isn’t it time for everybody to step back? Isn’t it time to begin a real conversation about complete nuclear disarmament? 

Also read: Russia-Ukraine: The Dangers of Nuclear Brinkmanship

God forbid, Russia resorts to using US logic for turning to nuclear weapons. In an article titled, ‘If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used’, published in December 1946, Karl K. Compton, the physicist and former president of MIT, said that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved hundreds of thousands – perhaps several millions – of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months.” His logic was that the Japanese, even though they had been defeated, would not have surrendered and, if not for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people, they would have fought to the last man standing.

“Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman?” Compton asks himself. “All war is inhuman,” was his reassuring reply (to himself.) It was published in The Atlantic. President Truman wrote in to endorse this argument.

Years later, General William Westmoreland carried that logic a little further during the Vietnam war: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” In other words, we Asians don’t value our lives and so we force the White world to bear the burden of genocide.

And then there’s Robert McNamara, of course, who had a successful career arc, first as the planner of the bombing of Tokyo in 1946, which killed more than 200,000 people in two separate raids, then as the president of Ford Motor Company, next as the US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, in which US soldiers were ordered to “Kill Anything That Moves,” as a result of which 3 million Vietnamese lost their lives.

McNamara’s last job was to take care of world poverty as President of the World Bank. Towards the end of his life, in an Erroll Morris documentary called The Fog of War, he asks an anguished question: “How much evil must we do in order to do good?” 

As you must have gathered, I’m a collector of these gems. Let’s not forget that President Obama had a Kill List. And that Madeline Albright, who President Joe Biden recently described as “a force for goodness, grace, and decency – and for freedom”, when she was asked about the estimated half-a-million Iraqi children dying because of US economic sanctions, famously said, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Where are we headed? Even those of us who stand squarely with the Ukrainian people against the Russian invasion of their country cannot help but marvel at the difference in tone and tenor of the Western Media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine and the breathless admiration with which it covered the US and NATO’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. This January, Tony Blair, the most passionate purveyor of the fake news about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion, and President George Bush Jr.’s most enthusiastic ally in the invasion, was ordered Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the senior most British order of chivalry. 

Watching the funeral of the Queen the other day I nearly choked on whatever it was I was drinking as I heard one of the Bishops or Archbishops say that, unlike those who merely cling to wealth and power, Queen Elizabeth II would be loved and remembered for her “life of service” to the public. Her son, the new King of England, will inherit her wealth and station. His royal lifestyle will not be supported by his own private wealth, which reportedly amounts to about a billion dollars. It will be paid for with public money, by the British people, millions of whom, the Guardian reports, have begun to skip a meal every day just to “keep the lights on.” 

Perhaps it’s hard for the rest of us to understand the mystery of the British people’s love and enthrallment with their monarchy. Perhaps it has to do with a national sense of identity and pride which cannot and certainly ought not to be reduced to vulgar economics. But allow me to indulge in some vulgarity for a minute or two. 

A recent analysis in the Financial Times concludes that income inequality in the US and the UK is so great that they could be classed as “poor societies with some very rich people”. They’re like us ‘Third Worlders’ now, Banana Republics whose wealthy have seceded into outer space and whose poor are falling into the sea.

A 2022 Oxfam study says India’s 98 richest people own the equivalent of the combined wealth of the poorest 552 million people. For this impertinence, Oxfam offices in India have been raided by the Income Tax department and perhaps will soon be shut down, like Amnesty International and every other organisation that is critical of the Modi regime. 

Also read: Amnesty International India Shuts Down, Blames Government’s ‘Reprisal’

King Charles III, rich though he may be, is a pauper compared to Gautam Adani, the world’s third richest man, Gujarati corporate tycoon and friend to Narendra Modi. Adani’s fortune is estimated to be $137 billion – a sum that rapidly increased during the pandemic.

In 2014, when he was first elected Prime Minister of India, Modi made a point of flying from Ahmedabad, his home city in Gujarat, to Delhi in Adani’s private jet – his name and logo emblazoned across it. In the eight years of Modi’s rule, Adani’s fortune has grown from $8 billion in 2014 to what it is now. That’s an accumulation of $129 billion. I’m just saying. Please don’t read deep meaning into it. Adani’s money comes from coal mining and operating sea-ports and airports. Most recently, he was involved in the hostile takeover of NDTV, the only mainstream national TV news channel that dares to delicately criticise the Modi regime. Most of the rest of the media is already bought and paid for.

The corporations that are blasting mountain ranges, clear-felling forests and bleaching corral reefs also fund ‘happiness conferences’, sporting events, film and literature festivals. They provide courageous writers platforms on which to condemn attacks on Free Speech and make declarations about their commitment to peace, justice and human rights. And say Things  Cannot Be Said, Done.

§

Capitalism is in its Endgame. Sadly, as it goes down, it’s taking our planet with it. 

Between nuclear hawks and mining corporations, it’s a race to the bottom.

Meanwhile, for light entertainment, let’s all fight about what gods to pray to, what flags to wave, what songs to sing. In case I’ve left you feeling dejected, let me read you an email I wrote in response to a member of the audience who criticised me (gently) for sounding overly optimistic when I spoke in memory of Gauri Lankesh:

If we have no hope, let’s all sit down and give up. There are millions of excellent reasons for us to be pessimistic. That’s why I suggested we should divorce Hope from Reason. Hope should be wild, irrational and unreasonable. 

In every line I write, every word I speak, what I’m really saying is, We are not Zero. You haven’t defeated us.

For millions in the world with their backs to the wall, these debates about hope and despair are a luxury. Even here, underneath the reek of wealth in the city of London, a visitor can sense a sort of tense, vibrating unease, like the rumble beneath your feet as a train approaches the platform.

None of this will matter in the event of a nuclear war. That will simply end us. It’s time for the two sides to step back. And for the rest of the world to step in. Armageddon doesn’t contain a clause for second chances.

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

 

The Battle to Save India Has to Be Waged By Every Single One of Us

If the RSS wins this battle, its victory will be pyrrhic. Because India will cease to exist.

This is the text of the Sissy Farenthold lecture delivered by author-activist Arundhati Roy at the Lyndon B. Johnson Auditorium, University of Texas, Austin, United States. The event was organised by the Rapoport Centre for Human Rights and Justice.

Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to deliver the Sissy Farenthold lecture. Before I begin, I would like to say a few words about the war in Ukraine. I unequivocally condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and applaud the Ukrainian peoples’ courageous resistance. I applaud the courage shown by Russian dissenters at enormous cost to themselves. I say this while being acutely and painfully aware of the hypocrisy of the United States and Europe, which together have waged similar wars on other countries in the world. Together they have led the nuclear race and have stockpiled enough weapons to destroy our planet many times over. What an irony it is that the very fact that they possess these weapons, now forces them to helplessly watch as a country they consider to be an ally is decimated – a country whose people and territory, whose very existence, imperial powers have jeopardised with their war games and ceaseless quest for domination.

And now, I turn to India. I dedicate this talk to the increasing numbers of prisoners of conscience in India. I ask us to remember Professor G. N. Saibaba, the scholars, activists, singers, and lawyers who are known as the Bhima Koregaon 16, the activists jailed for protesting against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), and Khurram Parvez, who was arrested five months ago in Kashmir. Khurram is one of the most remarkable people that I know. He and the organisation he works for, the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), have for years meticulously documented the saga of torture, enforced disappearances, and death visited upon the people of Kashmir. So, what I say today is dedicated to all of them.

All dissent has been criminalised in India. Until recently, dissenters were called anti-national. Now we are openly labelled intellectual terrorists. The dreaded Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, under which people are being held for years without trial, has been amended to accommodate the current regime’s obsession with intellectual terrorism. We have all been branded Maoists – the colloquial term for us is Urban-Naxals‚ or jehadis, and have had targets drawn on our backs, making us fair game for mobs or legal harassment.

It has only been a few days since I left New Delhi. In these few days alone, the momentum of the events unfolding there makes it clear that we have crossed some kind of threshold. We cannot return to the shores we once recognised as our own.

In March 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an unprecedented second term to govern India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. The UP elections are usually read as the “semi-finals” for the general election expected in May 2024. The election campaign was marked by saffron-robed godmen openly calling for mass killing and a social and economic boycott of the Muslim community.

While the BJP’s victory in the elections appeared to be robust, on the ground the contest was closer than the number of seats they won suggest. The result seems to have generated in BJP workers and leaders a peculiar, untenable mix of anxiety and over-confidence. Very soon after the election results were announced, Hindus celebrated the festival of Ram Navami, which coincided with Ramzan this year. To mark Ram Navami, violent Hindu mobs armed with swords and staffs rampaged through as many as eleven cities. Led by swamis and BJP activists, they entered Muslim settlements, dog-whistling outside mosques, chanting obscene insults, openly calling for the rape and impregnation of Muslim women and the narsinghar – genocide – of Muslim men.

Also read: Khargone: Hindutva Activist ‘Threatened to Rape’ Blind Man’s Daughter for Sheltering Rioters

Any response by Muslims has led to the bulldozing of their property by the government or burning by mobs. Those arrested, almost all Muslims, are accused of conspiracy and rioting, and will likely spend years in jail. One of those charged was in jail on a different charge long before Ram Navami. Another, Wasim Sheikh, accused of pelting stones at the Hindu procession, is a double amputee and has no forearms. Their homes and shops were bulldozed by the government. In some cities crazed TV anchors rode inside the bulldozers.

A bulldozer being used to demolish illegal structures during a joint anti-encroachment drive by NDMC, PWD, local bodies and the police, in the violence-hit Jahangirpuri area, in New Delhi, Wednesday, April 20, 2022. Photo: PTI

Meanwhile, BJP leaders who openly provoked Hindu rioters in the run up to the 2020 Delhi massacre were recently acquitted by the Delhi high court, which held that there is no criminality when provocative things are said with a smile. Some of them are back on the streets of other cities, stoking similar violence. Yet the young Muslim scholar Umar Khalid is in prison. His speech about brotherhood, love and nonviolence upholding the Indian Constitution and delivered during the anti-CAA protests, is, according to a police charge-sheet, a smokescreen for a conspiracy that led to the 2020 Delhi massacre. Apparently, Muslims conspired to riot and kill themselves during Donald Trump’s state visit in order to besmirch India’s good name.

Through all of this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose own political career was jump-started by the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat when he was chief minister, remains an inspirational figure. Often silent, but more often leading the dog-whistling, he is the messiah of these mobs and their holy men who, fed on a steady drip of spurious history delivered by WhatsApp, portray themselves as victims of historic oppression and genocide perpetrated by Muslims, which must be avenged here and now.

We are currently in that dangerous place where there is no set of facts or histories that we can agree upon, or even argue with. The narratives do not overlap or even intersect with each other. It’s myth versus history. The myth is backed by state machinery, corporate money, and countless 24/7 television news channels. Its reach and power is unmatchable. The world has been here before, and we know by now that when debate and argument end, a war of attrition begins.

Imagine what it must be like to be marked for death or incarceration. As a community, Muslims are already being ghettoised, ostracised, and socially and economically boycotted. Muslims are routinely accused of ‘love jihad’ (conspiring to make Hindu women fall in love with them in order to increase the Muslim population), ‘Corona jihad’ (conspiring to deliberately spread COVID, a replay of how the Nazis accused the Jews of deliberately spreading typhus), ‘job jihad’ (conspiring to get jobs in the civil services and rule over the Hindu population) – to say nothing of ‘food jihad’, ‘dress jihad’, ‘thought jihad’, ‘laughter jihad’. (Munawar Faruqui, a young Muslim comedian, spent months in jail for a joke he never made but was accused of planning to make.) Any argument, any tiny misstep can get a Muslim lynched and the lynchers garlanded, rewarded, and assured of a bright political future. Even the most hard-bitten and cynical among us find ourselves whispering to each other, Are they still posturing, or has it begun? Is it organised or out of control? Will it happen at scale?

India as a country, as a modern nation-state, exists only and solely as a social compact between a multitude of religions, languages, castes, ethnicities, and sub-nationalities legally bound together by a constitution. Every Indian citizen belongs, in one way or another, to a minority. Our country is a social compact between its minorities. In the process of trying to create a political majority, that social compact is being undone by an artificially constructed “aggrieved Hindu majority” that is being tutored to believe that they are the only deserving citizens, the First People, of the putative Hindu Nation, a majority that defines itself against the “anti-national other.” India is being undone.

Few of us who make up this nation of minorities can put forward a neat, unblemished history of ourselves in which we are blameless victims of aggression. Our histories intersect, interlock, and aggregate. Together they make us who we are. Other than the over-arching hierarchy of caste, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity, our society is hierarchical at a molecular level. There is micro-colonialism, micro-exploitation, micro-interdependence. Every thread of this tapestry is an epic that calls for scholarship, study, argument, debate, reflection. But to isolate a single thread from this weave and use it to call for mass rape? For genocide? Is that something to be countenanced?

When the Indian subcontinent was partitioned and hundreds of independent princely kingdoms were assimilated, some of them forcibly, into either India or Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of people – Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh – turned on each other. A million people were killed. Tens of millions displaced. Any single story of individual or community catastrophe and misfortune, however true it may be, is false when it is told in ways that erase the other stories. A dangerous lie. To flatten a messy history, to rob it of nuance, to weaponise it, will have dire consequences.

All of us in the subcontinent have the choice of either working toward a shared notion of justice, toward exorcising the pain and hate that gnaws away at our collective memory, or enhancing it. The Indian prime minister, the political party which he heads, and its mothership, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the fascist organisation of which he is a member – have chosen to enhance it. They are calling up something deeply wicked from the bowels of our blood-soaked earth. The fire they have lit will not burn along a designated path. It may well burn the country down. The blaze has begun. Alongside the Muslims of India and Kashmir, Christians, too, are on the frontline of their assault. In this last year alone, there have been hundreds of attacks on churches, statues of Christ have been desecrated, priests and nuns physically assaulted.

We’re on our own. No help will come. It didn’t come to Yemen, to Sri Lanka, to Rwanda. Why should we hope otherwise in India? In international politics, only profit, power, race, class, and geopolitics determine morality. Everything else is merely a posture, a shadow dance.

Also read: An SOS for India’s Democracy and Media

India is ruled by men who have ridden to power on the daylight mass murder of thousands of Muslims… and hysteria manufactured by phantom assassination plots. Certainly, there is opposition to this hatefulness from ordinary people of every caste and creed, from those who rose against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, from the historic farmers’ movement last year, and from regional political parties in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Maharashtra that have gone toe-to-toe with the BJP and defeated it. It would be fair to say that the majority of Indians do not approve of what is happening. But their disapproval is manifested for the most part by distaste, by a karmic shrug and a turning away that is entirely ineffectual before the burning ideological fervor of a well-paid fascist cadre. The Indian National Congress, the sole national opposition party, only offers us weakness and the inability to take a moral position—to even say the word Muslim in public speeches. Modi’s rallying call for a “Congress mukt Bharat” – an India free of the Congress Party, is really a call for a government without an opposition. Whatever else we may wish to call this, democracy is not the word that comes to mind.

The ‘Dharma Sansad’ at Haridwar, where the participants called for a genocide against Muslims. Photo: Video screengrab

While India exhibits all the trappings of an electoral democracy – a constitution that calls us a secular, socialist republic, free and fair elections, a parliament run by a democratically elected ruling party and opposition, an independent judiciary and a free media – in truth this state machinery (including to an increasing extent, the judiciary, the civil services, the security forces, the intelligence services, the police, and the election apparatus) is being, if not outright taken over, then deeply influenced and often overwhelmed by the most powerful organisation in India, the overtly fascist, Hindu nationalist RSS. The RSS, founded in 1925, has long campaigned to have the constitution set aside and for India to be declared a Hindu Rashtra – a Hindu Nation. RSS ideologues have openly admired Hitler and equated the Muslims of India with the Jews of Germany.

Aryan supremacy, the idea that some humans are divine and godlike, while others are sub-human, polluted, and untouchable, is, after all, the very basis of Brahminism, the Hindu caste system, which is the organising principle of Hindu society even today. Tragically, many among even the most oppressed have rallied to the cause of the RSS, swept up by the tsunami of propaganda that has left them voting for their own subjugation. In 2025, the RSS will mark its hundredth year. One hundred years of evangelical dedication has made it a nation within a nation. Historically the RSS has been tightly controlled by a coterie of west coast Brahmins. Today it has fifteen million members, among them Modi, several of his cabinet ministers, chief ministers, and governors. It is a parallel universe now, with tens of thousands of primary schools, its own farmer, worker, and student organisations, its own publishing wing, an evangelical wing that works among forest-dwelling tribes to “purify” them and “return” them to Hinduism, a range of women’s organisations, a several-million-strong armed militia inspired by Mussolini’s black shirts, and a plethora of unimaginably violent Hindu nationalist organisations that perform the role of shell companies and provide what is known as plausible deniability.

As India haemorrhages jobs and devolves into economic chaos, the BJP has grown steadily wealthier and is now the richest political party in the world, underwritten by a recently introduced system of anonymous electoral bonds that enable an opaque system of corporate funding. It is supported by the several hundred corporate-funded TV news channels in virtually every Indian language that are mass marketed by an army of social media trolls who specialise in disinformation.

For all this, the BJP still remains merely the front office of the RSS. Now the nation within the nation is preparing to move out of the shadows and take its place on the world’s stage. Already foreign diplomats have begun to troop to the RSS headquarters to submit their credentials and pay their respects. University campuses in the United States are the new battleground in this desperate quest for legitimacy. The danger is that those leading the charge believe that what cannot be fairly won can perhaps be purchased in an unfettered capitalist economy.

Also read: Despite BJP’s Claims, Jahangirpuri Demolitions Were Far From a Legitimate Anti-encroachment Drive

The 2025 RSS centenary celebration will be an important marker in India’s history. The year before, we will have a general election. This perhaps explains the sudden acceleration of violent activity.

Meanwhile Modi the Messiah is omnipresent. His face is on our Covid vaccine certificates. And on the bags of flour and salt delivered in lieu of jobs to the millions of newly unemployed. How can people not be grateful?

How can they, who witnessed the mass cremations and shallow graves and saw the holy Ganges flow thick with bodies, its banks lined with shallow graves, during the second wave of the pandemic not believe what they are told to believe—that, if it weren’t for Modi, things would have been worse?

Our hopes have been cauterised, our imaginations infected.

If the RSS wins this battle, its victory will be pyrrhic. Because India will cease to exist. Elections will not reverse the tide. It’s too late for that. This battle will have to be waged by every single one of us. The blaze is at our door.

Thank you.

Only Political Action Can Mitigate the Disastrous Effects of Pegasus Spyware

The technology cannot be rolled back. But it needn’t be allowed to function as an unregulated, legitimate industry, reeling in profits, blossoming and flowering on the pulsing transcontinental highways of the free market.

Here in India, the summer of dying is quickly morphing into what looks very much like a summer of spying.

The second wave of the coronavirus has retreated, after leaving an estimated four million Indians dead. The official government figure for the number of coronavirus deaths is a tenth of that – 400,000. In Narendra Modi’s dystopia, even as the smoke dwindled in crematoriums and the earth settled in graveyards, gigantic hoardings appeared on our streets saying “Thank you Modiji”. (An expression of the peoples’ gratitude-in-advance for the “free vaccine” that remains largely unavailable and which 95% of the population is yet to receive.) As far as Modi’s government is concerned, any attempt to tabulate the true death toll is a conspiracy against India – as if the millions more who died were simply actors who lay down spitefully in the shallow, mass graves that you saw in aerial photos, or floated themselves into rivers disguised as corpses, or cremated themselves on city sidewalks, motivated solely by the desire to sully India’s international reputation.

This same charge has now been levelled by the Indian government and its embedded media against the international consortium of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media houses who worked with Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International to break an extraordinary story about global surveillance on a massive scale.

India is listed along with a group of countries whose governments appear to have bought Pegasus spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm. NSO, for its part, has said that it sells its technology only to governments that have been vetted for their human rights record and undertake to use it only for purposes of national security – to track terrorists and criminals.

The other countries that seem to have passed NSO’s human rights test include Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Mexico. So who, exactly, has agreed upon the definition of “terrorists” and “criminals”? Is this simply up to NSO and its clients?

Other than the exorbitant cost of the spyware, which runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars per phone, the NSO charges an annual system maintenance fee of 17% of the total cost of the programme. There has to be something treasonous about a foreign corporation servicing and maintaining a spy network that is monitoring a country’s private citizens on behalf of that county’s government.

The investigating team examined a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers. Analysis showed that more than 1,000 of these were selected by a client of NSO in India. Whether or not a number has been successfully hacked, or subject to an attempt at hacking, can only be determined if the phones are submitted for forensic examination. In India, several of those that have been examined have been found to have been infected with the Pegasus spyware. The list includes the phone numbers of opposition party politicians, dissident journalists, activists, lawyers, intellectuals, businessman, a non-compliant official of India’s Election Commission, a non-compliant senior intelligence officer, cabinet ministers and their families, foreign diplomats and even the prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan.

Indian government spokespersons have denounced the list as fake. Close watchers of Indian politics would know that even a skilled and knowledgeable fiction writer would not be able to construct such an apt, credible list of those the ruling party considers to be persons of interest or people inimical to its political project. It’s full of delightful nuance, full of stories within stories. Some unexpected names are on it. Many expected ones are not.

Also read: The Wire‘s coverage under the Pegasus Project

Pegasus, we are told, can be installed in a targeted phone with just a missed call. Imagine that. A payload of invisible spyware delivered on the missile of a missed call. An ICBM like no other. One that is capable of dismantling democracies and atomising societies without the bother of red tape – no warrants, no weapons agreements, no oversight committees, nor any kind of regulation whatsoever. Technology is value neutral of course. It isn’t anybody’s fault.

The friendly collaboration between NSO and India appears to have begun in Israel in 2017, during what the Indian media called the Modi-Netanyahu ‘bromance’ – the time they rolled up their trousers and paddled together on Dor beach. They left more than just their own footprints in the sand. It was around then that phone numbers in India began to appear on the list.

That same year the National Security Council Secretariat budget increased ten-fold. Most of the increased amount was allocated to cyber-security. In August 2019, soon after Modi won his second term as prime minister, India’s draconian anti-terrorism law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) under which thousands have been imprisoned without bail, was expanded to include individuals, not just organisations. Organisations, after all, don’t have smartphones – an important detail, even if only theoretical. But certainly one that expands the mandate. And the market.

During the passing of the amendment in parliament, home minister Amit Shah said, “Sir, guns do not give rise to terrorism, the root of terrorism is the propaganda that is done to spread it… And if all such individuals are designated terrorists, I don’t think any member of Parliament should have any objection.”

The Pegasus scandal has now created an uproar in the monsoon session of parliament. The opposition has demanded that the home minister step down. Modi’s ruling party, comfortable in its brute majority, fielded Ashwini Vaishnaw, the newly sworn in Minister of Railways, Communications and Electronics and Information Technology of India to defend it on the floor of the House. Humiliatingly for him, his number was on the leaked list of numbers as well.

If you set aside the bluster and obfuscating bureaucratese of the government’s many statements, you will find no outright denial about the purchase and use of Pegasus. NSO hasn’t denied the sale either. The government of Israel has opened an enquiry into the allegations of abuse of the spyware, as has the French government. In India, the money trail will, sooner or later, lead us to the smoking gun. But where will the smoking gun lead us?

Also read: Given India’s Military Ties With Israel, Modi Would Have Had No Problem Acquiring Pegasus

Consider this. There are 16 activists, lawyers, trade unionists, professors, and intellectuals, many of them Dalit, who have been jailed for years in what is known as the Bhima-Koregaon (BK) case. They are accused, outlandishly, of conspiring to incite the violence that took place between Dalits and privileged caste groups on January 1, 2019, when tens of thousands of Dalits gathered to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima-Koregaon (in which Dalit soldiers fought with the British to defeat the Peshwas, a tyrannical Brahmin regime).  The phone numbers of eight out of the 16 BK accused and the numbers of some of their close family members have appeared on the leaked database. Whether all or any of them were the subject of an attempted or actual hack cannot be ascertained because their phones are in police custody and not available for forensic examination.

The 16 arrested in connection with the Elgar Parishad case. One of them, Father Stan Swamy, passed away in custody. Photo: The Wire.

Over the years some of us have become scholars of the sinister lengths to which Modi’s government will go to entrap those it considers enemies – and it’s more than simply surveillance. The Washington Post recently published the findings of a report by Arsenal Consulting, a digital forensics firm in Massachusetts, that examined electronic copies of the computers and emails belonging to two of the BK accused, Rona Wilson and Surendra Gadling. Investigators found that both their computers had been infiltrated by an unidentified hacker, and incriminating documents had been placed in hidden folders on their hard drives. Among them, for some added frisson, was a ludicrous letter outlining a corny plot to kill Modi.

The grave implications of the Arsenal report have not stirred India’s judiciary or its mainstream press to act in the cause of justice. Quite the contrary. While they worked hard to cover it up and contain the possible fallout of the report, one of the BK-accused, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest, Father Stan Swamy, a man who had spent decades of his life in the state of Jharkhand working among forest-dwelling tribespeople fighting against corporate takeover of their homelands, died an excruciating death after being infected with coronavirus in prison. At the time of his arrest he had Parkinson’s disease and had survived a bout of cancer.

So, what are we to make of Pegasus? To cynically dismiss it as a new technological iteration of an age-old game in which rulers have always spied on the ruled would be a serious mistake. This is no ordinary spying. Our mobile phones are our most intimate selves. They have become an extension of our brains and bodies. Illegal surveillance through mobile phones isn’t new in India. Every Kashmiri knows that. Most Indian activists do too. However, for us to cede to governments and corporations the legal right to invade and take over our phones is to voluntarily submit ourselves to being violated.

Also read: Presence of Over 60 Women in Leaked List Highlights ‘Bodily Violation’ Posed by Spyware

The revelations of the Pegasus Project show that the potential threat of this spyware is more invasive than any previous form of spying or surveillance. More invasive even than the algorithms of Google, Amazon, and Facebook inside whose warp and weft millions live their lives and play out their desires. It’s more than having a spy in your pocket. It’s like having the love of your life, or worse, having your own brain, including its inaccessible recesses, informing on you.

Spyware such as Pegasus puts not just the user of each infected phone, but the entire social circle of their friends, families, and colleagues at political, social and economic risk.

The person who has probably thought longer and deeper about mass surveillance than anybody else in the world is the dissident and former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. In a recent interview to The Guardian, he warned, “If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.” We should pay attention to him. He’s been on the inside track and has been watching it coming.

I met Snowden in Moscow almost seven years ago, in December 2014. It was about a year and a half since he had turned whistleblower, disgusted by his government’s indiscriminate mass surveillance of its own citizens. He had made his great escape in May 2013, and was slowly getting used to life as a fugitive. Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers), John Cusack (of John Cusack) and I travelled to Moscow to meet him. For three days, we holed up in a hotel room with the icy Russian winter pressing against the windowpanes, speaking of surveillance and spying. How far would it go? Where would it take us? Who would we become?

Edward Snowden speaks via video link during the Estoril Conferences – Global Challenges, Local Answers in Estoril, Portugal, May 30, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Rafael Marchante

When news of the Pegasus Project broke, I went back and looked at the transcript of our recorded conversation. It ran into a few hundred pages. It made my hair stand on end. Snowden, barely into his 30s then, was grimly prophetic: “The technology cannot be rolled back, technology is not going anywhere… it is going to be cheaper, it is going to be more effective, it is going to be more available. If we do nothing, we sort of sleepwalk into a total surveillance state where we have both a super state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited ability to know and [therefore be able to] target [that]force and that’s a very dangerous combination…This is the direction of the future.”

In other words, we are headed towards being governed by states that know everything there is to know about people, and about whom people know less and less. That asymmetry can only lead in one direction. Malignancy. And the end of democracy.

Snowden is right. The technology cannot be rolled back. But it needn’t be allowed to function as an unregulated, legitimate industry, reeling in profits, blossoming and flowering on the pulsing transcontinental highways of the free market. It needs to be legislated against. Driven underground. The technology may exist, the industry needn’t.

So, where does that leave us? Back in the world of good, old-fashioned politics, I’d say. Only political action can halt or mitigate this. Because that technology, when it is used, if not legally then illegally, will always exist within the complicated matrix that describes our times: nationalism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, casteism, sexism. This will remain our battlefield regardless of how technology develops.

We will have to migrate back to a world in which we are not controlled and dominated by our intimate enemy – our mobile phones. We have to try and rebuild our lives, struggles, and social movements outside the asphyxiating realm of digital surveillance. We must dislodge the regimes that are deploying it against us. We must do everything we can to prise open their grip on the levers of power, everything we can to mend all that they have broken, and take back all they have stolen.

This article was originally published on The Guardian.

It’s Not Enough to Say the Govt Has Failed. We Are Witnessing a Crime Against Humanity.

The politics of India’s COVID-19 catastrophe.

During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further. From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans). With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. “If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” he said.

“Shamshan! Shamshan!” the mesmerised, adoring crowd echoed back.

Perhaps he is happy now that the haunting image of the flames rising from the mass funerals in India’s cremation grounds is making the front page of international newspapers. And that all the kabristans and shamshans in his country are working properly, in direct proportion to the populations they cater for, and far beyond their capacities.

“Can India, population 1.3 billion, be isolated?” the Washington Post asked rhetorically in a recent editorial about India’s unfolding catastrophe and the difficulty of containing new, fast-spreading COVID-19 variants within national borders. “Not easily,” it replied. It’s unlikely this question was posed in quite the same way when the coronavirus was raging through the UK and Europe just a few months ago. But we in India have little right to take offence, given our prime minister’s words at the World Economic Forum in January this year.

Modi spoke at a time when people in Europe and the US were suffering through the peak of the second wave of the pandemic. He had not one word of sympathy to offer, only a long, gloating boast about India’s infrastructure and COVID-19-preparedness. I downloaded the speech because I fear that when history is rewritten by the Modi regime, as it soon will be, it might disappear, or become hard to find. Here are some priceless snippets:

“Friends, I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension … It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona all over the world. It was said that there would be a tsunami of corona infections in India, somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said 2 million Indians would die.”

“Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18% of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”

Modi the magician takes a bow for saving humanity by containing the coronavirus effectively. Now that it turns out that he has not contained it, can we complain about being viewed as though we are radioactive? That other countries’ borders are being closed to us and flights are being cancelled? That we’re being sealed in with our virus and our prime minister, along with all the sickness, the anti-science, the hatred and the idiocy that he, his party and its brand of politics represent?

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When the first wave of COVID-19 came to India and then subsided last year, the government and its supportive commentariat were triumphant. “India isn’t having a picnic,” tweeted Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the online news site The Print. “But our drains aren’t choked with bodies, hospitals aren’t out of beds, nor crematoriums & graveyards out of wood or space. Too good to be true? Bring data if you disagree. Unless you think you’re god.” Leave aside the callous, disrespectful imagery – did we need a god to tell us that most pandemics have a second wave?

This one was predicted, although its virulence has taken even scientists and virologists by surprise. So where is the COVID-19-specific infrastructure and the “people’s movement” against the virus that Modi boasted about in his speech? Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes. Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for the felling of city trees. Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find. Parks and car parks are being turned into cremation grounds. It’s as if there’s an invisible UFO parked in our skies, sucking the air out of our lungs. An air raid of a kind we’ve never known.

Also read: COVID-19: The Adityanath Government Has Moved From Denial to Intimidation

Oxygen is the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange. Senior politicians, journalists, lawyers – India’s elite – are on Twitter pleading for hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. The hidden market for cylinders is booming. Oxygen saturation machines and drugs are hard to come by.

There are markets for other things, too. At the bottom end of the free market, a bribe to sneak a last look at your loved one, bagged and stacked in a hospital mortuary. A surcharge for a priest who agrees to say the final prayers. Online medical consultancies in which desperate families are fleeced by ruthless doctors. At the top end, you might need to sell your land and home and use up every last rupee for treatment at a private hospital. Just the deposit alone, before they even agree to admit you, could set your family back a couple of generations.

None of this conveys the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and, above all, the indignity that people are being subjected to. What happened to my young friend T is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar stories in Delhi alone. T, who is in his 20s, lives in his parents’ tiny flat in Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi. All three of them tested positive for COVID-19. His mother was critically ill. Since it was in the early days, he was lucky enough to find a hospital bed for her. His father, diagnosed with severe bipolar depression, turned violent and began to harm himself. He stopped sleeping. He soiled himself. His psychiatrist was online trying to help, although she also broke down from time to time because her husband had just died from COVID-19. She said T’s father needed hospitalisation, but since he was COVID-19 positive there was no chance of that. So T stayed awake, night after night, holding his father down, sponging him, cleaning him up. Each time I spoke to him I felt my own breath falter. Finally, the message came: “Father’s dead.” He did not die of COVID-19, but of a massive spike in blood pressure induced by a psychiatric meltdown induced by utter helplessness.

Healthworkers wearing personal protective equipments (PPE) walk ahead of an ambulance transporting the body of a person who died from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), during his funeral at a graveyard in New Delhi, India, April 27, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

What to do with the body? I desperately called everybody I knew. Among those who responded was Anirban Bhattacharya, who works with the well-known social activist Harsh Mander. Bhattacharya is about to stand trial on a charge of sedition for a protest he helped organise on his university campus in 2016. Mander, who has not fully recovered from a savage case of COVID-19 last year, is being threatened with arrest and the closure of the orphanages he runs after he mobilised people against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019, both of which blatantly discriminate against Muslims. Mander and Bhattacharya are among the many citizens who, in the absence of all forms of governance, have set up helplines and emergency responses, and are running themselves ragged organising ambulances and coordinating funerals and the transport of dead bodies. It’s not safe for these volunteers to do what they’re doing. In this wave of the pandemic, it’s the young who are falling, who are filling the intensive care units. When young people die, the older among us lose a little of our will to live.

T’s father was cremated. T and his mother are recovering.

§

Things will settle down eventually. Of course, they will. But we don’t know who among us will survive to see that day. The rich will breathe easier. The poor will not. For now, among the sick and dying, there is a vestige of democracy. The rich have been felled, too. Hospitals are begging for oxygen. Some have started bring-your-own-oxygen schemes. The oxygen crisis has led to intense, unseemly battles between states, with political parties trying to deflect blame from themselves.

On the night of April 22, 25 critically ill coronavirus patients on high-flow oxygen died in one of Delhi’s biggest private hospitals, Sir Ganga Ram. The hospital issued several desperate SOS messages for the replenishment of its oxygen supply. A day later, the chair of the hospital board rushed to clarify matters: “We cannot say that they have died due to lack of oxygen support.” On April 24, 25 more patients died when oxygen supplies were depleted in another big Delhi hospital, Jaipur Golden. That same day, in the Delhi high court, Tushar Mehta, India’s solicitor general, speaking for the government of India, said: “Let’s try and not be a cry baby … so far we have ensured that no one in the country was left without oxygen.”

Ajay Mohan Bisht, the saffron-robed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who goes by the name Yogi Adityanath, has declared that there is no shortage of oxygen in any hospital in his state and that rumourmongers will be arrested without bail under the National Security Act and have their property seized.

Yogi Adityanath doesn’t play around. Siddique Kappan, a Muslim journalist from Kerala, jailed for months in Uttar Pradesh when he and two others travelled there to report on the gang-rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Hathras district, is critically ill and has tested positive for COVID-19. His wife, in a desperate petition to the chief justice of the Supreme Court of India, says her husband is lying chained “like an animal” to a hospital bed in the Medical College hospital in Mathura. (The Supreme Court has now ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to move him to a hospital in Delhi.) So, if you live in Uttar Pradesh, the message seems to be, please do yourself a favour and die without complaining.

The threat to those who complain is not restricted to Uttar Pradesh. A spokesperson for the fascist Hindu nationalist organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – of which Modi and several of his ministers are members, and which runs its own armed militia – has warned that “anti-India forces” would use the crisis to fuel “negativity” and “mistrust” and asked the media to help foster a “positive atmosphere”. Twitter has helped them out by deactivating accounts critical of the government.

Watch: Ground Report: Delhi Struggles to Survive Second Wave of COVID-19

Where shall we look for solace? For science? Shall we cling to numbers? How many dead? How many recovered? How many infected? When will the peak come? On April 27, the report was 323,144 new cases, 2,771 deaths. The precision is somewhat reassuring. Except – how do we know? Tests are hard to come by, even in Delhi. The number of COVID-19-protocol funerals from graveyards and crematoriums in small towns and cities suggest a death toll up to 30 times higher than the official count. Doctors who are working outside the metropolitan areas can tell you how it is.

If Delhi is breaking down, what should we imagine is happening in villages in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Madhya Pradesh? Where tens of millions of workers from the cities, carrying the virus with them, are fleeing home to their families, traumatised by their memory of Modi’s national lockdown in 2020. It was the strictest lockdown in the world, announced with only four hours’ notice. It left migrant workers stranded in cities with no work, no money to pay their rent, no food and no transport. Many had to walk hundreds of miles to their homes in far-flung villages. Hundreds died on the way.

This time around, although there is no national lockdown, the workers have left while transport is still available, while trains and buses are still running. They’ve left because they know that even though they make up the engine of the economy in this huge country, when a crisis comes, in the eyes of this administration, they simply don’t exist. This year’s exodus has resulted in a different kind of chaos: there are no quarantine centres for them to stay in before they enter their village homes. There’s not even the meagre pretence of trying to protect the countryside from the city virus.

These are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like diarrhoea and tuberculosis. How are they to cope with COVID-19? Are COVID-19 tests available to them? Are there hospitals? Is there oxygen? More than that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern? There isn’t. Because there is only a heart-shaped hole filled with cold indifference where India’s public heart should be.

§

Early this morning, on April 28, news came that our friend Prabhubhai has died. Before he died, he showed classic COVID-19 symptoms. But his death will not register in the official COVID-19 count because he died at home without a test or treatment. Prabhubhai was a stalwart of the anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley. I stayed several times at his home in Kevadia, where decades ago the first group of indigenous tribespeople were thrown off their lands to make room for the dam-builders and officers’ colony. Displaced families like Prabhubhai’s still remain on the edges of that colony, impoverished and unsettled, transgressors on land that was once theirs.

There is no hospital in Kevadia. There’s only the Statue of Unity, built in the likeness of the freedom fighter and first deputy prime minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who the dam is named after. At 182 metres high, it’s the tallest statue in the world and cost $422 million. High-speed elevators inside take tourists up to view the Narmada dam from the level of Sardar Patel’s chest. Of course, you cannot see the river valley civilisation that lies destroyed, submerged in the depths of the vast reservoir, or hear the stories of the people who waged one of the most beautiful, profound struggles the world has ever known – not just against that one dam, but against the accepted ideas of what constitutes civilisation, happiness and progress. The statue was Modi’s pet project. He inaugurated it in October 2018.

The friend who messaged about Prabhubhai had spent years as an anti-dam activist in the Narmada valley. She wrote: “My hands shiver as I write this. Covid situation in and around Kevadia Colony grim.”

People with breathing problems due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) wait to receive oxygen support for free at a Gurudwara (Sikh temple) in Ghaziabad, India, April 27, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

The precise numbers that make up India’s COVID-19 graph are like the wall that was built in Ahmedabad to hide the slums Donald Trump would drive past on his way to the “Namaste Trump” event that Modi hosted for him in February 2020. Grim as those numbers are, they give you a picture of the India-that-matters, but certainly not the India that is. In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but die as disposables.

“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”

Try not to pay attention to the fact that the possibility of a dire shortage of oxygen had been flagged as far back as April 2020, and then again in November by a committee set up by the government itself. Try not to wonder why even Delhi’s biggest hospitals don’t have their own oxygen-generating plants. Try not to wonder why the PM Cares Fund – the opaque organisation that has recently replaced the more public Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, and which uses public money and government infrastructure but functions like a private trust with zero public accountability – has suddenly moved in to address the oxygen crisis. Will Modi own shares in our air-supply now?

“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”

§

Understand that there were and are so many far more pressing issues for the Modi government to attend to. Destroying the last vestiges of democracy, persecuting non-Hindu minorities and consolidating the foundations of the Hindu Nation makes for a relentless schedule. There are massive prison complexes, for example, that must be urgently constructed in Assam for the two million people who have lived there for generations and have suddenly been stripped of their citizenship. (On this matter, our independent Supreme Court came down hard on the side of the government and leniently on the side of the vandals.)

There are hundreds of students and activists and young Muslim citizens to be tried and imprisoned as the primary accused in the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place against their own community in north-east Delhi last March. If you are Muslim in India, it’s a crime to be murdered. Your folks will pay for it. There was the inauguration of the new Ram Temple in Ayodhya, which is being built in place of the mosque that was hammered to dust by Hindu vandals watched over by senior BJP politicians. (On this matter, our independent supreme court came down hard on the side of the government and the vandals.) There were the controversial new Farm Bills to be passed, corporatising agriculture. There were hundreds of thousands of farmers to be beaten and teargassed when they came out on to the streets to protest.

Watch: The Virus and the Math of Vaccine, Votes and Worship

Then there’s the multi-multi-multimillion-dollar plan for a grand new replacement for the fading grandeur of New Delhi’s imperial centre to be urgently attended to. After all, how can the government of the new Hindu India be housed in old buildings? While Delhi is locked down, ravaged by the pandemic, construction work on the “Central Vista” project, declared as an essential service, has begun. Workers are being transported in. Maybe they can alter the plans to add a crematorium.

There was also the Kumbh Mela to be organised, so that millions of Hindu pilgrims could crowd together in a small town to bathe in the Ganges and spread the virus even-handedly as they returned to their homes across the country, blessed and purified. This Kumbh rocks on, although Modi has gently suggested that it might be an idea for the holy dip to become “symbolic” – whatever that means. (Unlike what happened with those who attended a conference for the Islamic organisation Tablighi Jamaat last year, the media has not run a campaign against them calling them “corona jihadis” or accusing them of committing crimes against humanity.) There were also those few thousand Rohingya refugees who had to be urgently deported back to the genocidal regime in Myanmar from where they had fled – in the middle of a coup. (Once again, when our independent supreme court was petitioned on this matter, it concurred with the government’s view.)

So, as you can tell, it’s been busy, busy, busy.

Over and above all this urgent activity, there is an election to be won in the state of West Bengal. This required our home minister, Modi’s man Amit Shah, to more or less abandon his cabinet duties and focus all his attention on Bengal for months, to disseminate his party’s murderous propaganda, to pit human against human in every little town and village. Geographically, West Bengal is a small state. The election could have taken place in a single day, and has done so in the past. But since it is new territory for the BJP, the party needed time to move its cadres, many of who are not from Bengal, from constituency to constituency to oversee the voting. The election schedule was divided into eight phases, spread out over a month, the last on April 29. As the count of coronavirus infections ticked up, the other political parties pleaded with the election commission to rethink the election schedule. The commission refused and came down hard on the side of the BJP, and the campaign continued. Who hasn’t seen the videos of the BJP’s star campaigner, the prime minister himself, triumphant and maskless, speaking to the maskless crowds, thanking people for coming out in unprecedented numbers? That was on 17 April, when the official number of daily infections was already rocketing upward of 200,000.

Now, as voting closes, Bengal is poised to become the new corona cauldron, with a new triple mutant strain known as – guess what – the “Bengal strain”. Newspapers report that every second person tested in the state capital, Kolkata, is Covid positive. The BJP has declared that if it wins Bengal, it will ensure people get free vaccines. And if it doesn’t?

“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”

§

Anyway, what about the vaccines? Surely they’ll save us? Isn’t India a vaccine powerhouse? In fact, the Indian government is entirely dependent on two manufacturers, the Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech. Both are being allowed to roll out two of the most expensive vaccines in the world, to the poorest people in the world. This week they announced that they will sell to private hospitals at a slightly elevated price, and to state governments at a somewhat lower price. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the vaccine companies are likely to make obscene profits.

Under Modi, India’s economy has been hollowed out, and hundreds of millions of people who were already living precarious lives have been pushed into abject poverty. A huge number now depend for survival on paltry earnings from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which was instituted in 2005 when the Congress party was in power. It is impossible to expect that families on the verge of starvation will pay most of a month’s income to have themselves vaccinated. In the UK, vaccines are free and a fundamental right. Those trying to get vaccinated out of turn can be prosecuted. In India, the main underlying impetus of the vaccination campaign seems to be corporate profit.

As this epic catastrophe plays out on our Modi-aligned Indian television channels, you’ll notice how they all speak in one tutored voice. The “system” has collapsed, they say, again and again. The virus has overwhelmed India’s health care “system”.

Union home minister Amit Shah during a roadshow in Nadia, West Bengal, April 11, 2021. Photo: PTI

The system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health, far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated, because things that are important but do not strictly qualify as healthcare have been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34%. The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet study shows, 78% of the healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets.

Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime.

The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.

§

The hashtag #ModiMustResign is trending on social media. Some of the memes and illustrations show Modi with a heap of skulls peeping out from behind the curtain of his beard. Modi the Messiah speaking at a public rally of corpses. Modi and Amit Shah as vultures, scanning the horizon for corpses to harvest votes from. But that is only one part of the story. The other part is that the man with no feelings, the man with empty eyes and a mirthless smile, can, like so many tyrants in the past, arouse passionate feelings in others. His pathology is infectious. And that is what sets him apart. In north India, which is home to his largest voting base, and which, by dint of sheer numbers, tends to decide the political fate of the country, the pain he inflicts seems to turn into a peculiar pleasure.

Fredrick Douglass said it right: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” How we in India pride ourselves on our capacity to endure. How beautifully we have trained ourselves to meditate, to turn inward, to exorcise our fury as well as justify our inability to be egalitarian. How meekly we embrace our humiliation.

When he made his political debut as Gujarat’s new chief minister in 2001, Modi ensured his place in posterity after what has come to be known as the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. Over a period of a few days, Hindu vigilante mobs, watched over and sometimes actively assisted by the Gujarat police, murdered, raped and burned alive thousands of Muslims as “revenge” for a gruesome arson attack on a train in which more than 50 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive. Once the violence subsided, Modi, who had until then only been appointed as chief minister by his party, called for early elections. The campaign in which he was portrayed as Hindu Hriday Samrat (“The Emperor of Hindu Hearts”) won him a landslide victory. Modi hasn’t lost an election since.

Several of the killers in the Gujrat pogrom were subsequently captured on camera by the journalist Ashish Khetan, boasting of how they hacked people to death, slashed pregnant women’s stomachs open and smashed infants’ heads against rocks. They said they could only have done what they did because Modi was their chief minister. Those tapes were broadcast on national TV. While Modi remained in the seat of power, Khetan, whose tapes were submitted to the courts and forensically examined, appeared as a witness on several occasions. Over time, some of the killers were arrested and imprisoned, but many were let off In his recent book, Undercover: My Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva, Khetan describes in detail how, during Modi’s tenure as chief minister, the Gujarat police, judges, lawyers, prosecutors and inquiry committees all colluded to tamper with evidence, intimidate witnesses and transfer judges.

Also read: COVID Crisis: A Personal Experience of Treatment in Lucknow

Despite knowing all this, many of India’s so-called public intellectuals, the CEOs of its major corporations and the media houses they own, worked hard to pave the way for Modi to become the prime minister. They humiliated and shouted down those of us who persisted in our criticism. “Move on”, was their mantra. Even today, they mitigate their harsh words for Modi with praise for his oratory skills and his “hard work”. Their denunciation and bullying contempt for politicians in opposition parties is far more strident. They reserve their special scorn for Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, the only politician who has consistently warned of the coming COVID-19 crisis and repeatedly asked the government to prepare itself as best it could. To assist the ruling party in its campaign to destroy all opposition parties amounts to colluding with the destruction of democracy.

So here we are now, in the hell of their collective making, with every independent institution essential to the functioning of a democracy compromised and hollowed out, and a virus that is out of control.

The crisis-generating machine that we call our government is incapable of leading us out of this disaster. Not least because one man makes all the decisions in this government, and that man is dangerous – and not very bright. This virus is an international problem. To deal with it, decision-making, at least on the control and administration of the pandemic, will need to pass into the hands of some sort of non-partisan body consisting of members of the ruling party, members of the opposition, and health and public policy experts.

As for Modi, is resigning from your crimes a feasible proposition? Perhaps he could just take a break from them – a break from all his hard work. There’s that $564m Boeing 777, Air India One, customised for VVIP travel – for him, actually – that’s been sitting idle on the runway for a while now. He and his men could just leave. The rest of us will do all we can to clean up their mess.

No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

A Battle for Love

It must be militantly waged and beautifully won. 

I thank the organisers of the 2021 Elgar Parishad for inviting me to speak at this forum to mark what would have been Rohit Vemula’s 32nd birthday and the 1818 victory of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. Not far from here, Mahar troops fighting in the British Army defeated the Peshwa King Bajirao II under whom Mahars and other Dalit castes were cruelly persecuted and ritually debased in indescribable ways. 

From this platform let me join the other speakers to express my solidarity with the farmers’ protest that is calling for the immediate withdrawal of the three Farm Acts that have been rammed down the throats of millions of farmers and farm workers and brought them onto the streets. We are here to express our sorrow and anger for the many who have died during the course of the protest.

The situation on Delhi’s borders where the farmers have been peacefully camping for two months is becoming tense and dangerous. Every possible trick and provocation is being used to divide and discredit the movement. Now, more than ever, we must stand by the farmers. 

We are also here to demand the release of the dozens of political prisoners – including those who have come to be known as the ‘Bhima Koregaon 16’ – jailed on ludicrous charges under draconian anti-terror laws. Many of them are not just comrades but personal friends of mine with whom I have laughed, walked and broken bread. Nobody, not even their captors probably believe that they have committed the hackneyed crimes they are being accused of – planning the assassination of the Prime Minister, or plotting murder. Everybody knows they are in jail for their intellectual clarity and moral courage – both of which are viewed by this regime as a significant threat. To make up for non-existent evidence, the charge sheets against some of the accused run into tens of thousands of pages. 

It could take a judge several years to just read these, let alone adjudicate upon them.   

It’s as hard to defend yourself against trumped up charges as it is to wake up a person who is pretending to sleep. In India we have learned that relying on legal redress is a risky proposition. In any case where and when have courts ever turned back the tide of Fascism? In our country laws are selectively applied depending on your class, caste, ethnicity, religion, gender and political beliefs. So, while poets and priests, students, activists, teachers and lawyers are in prison, mass murderers, serial killers, daylight lynch mobs, disreputable judges and venomous TV anchors are handsomely rewarded and can aspire for high office. The highest, even. 

Also read: A List of Activists, Scholars and Scribes Whose Personal Liberty Remains at Judiciary’s Mercy

Nobody with even average intelligence can miss the pattern of how the 2018 Bhima Koregaon rally, the 2020 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests and now the farmers protests have sought be discredit and sabotaged by agent provocateurs in exactly the same way. The immunity they enjoy speaks volumes about the support they enjoy with the current regime. I could show you how this pattern has repeated itself over decades to bring these people to power. As state elections approach, we await with dread what lies in store for the people of West Bengal.

Over the last two years the Elgar Parishad as an event and an organisation has been relentlessly defamed and demonised by the corporate media.

Elgar Parishad: to many ordinary people those two words conjure up a shady cabal of radicals – terrorists, jihadis, urban Naxals, Dalit Panthers – plotting to destroy India. In this climate of name-calling, of threat, dread and anxiety, just to have organised this meeting is in itself an act of courage and defiance that deserves to be saluted. 

It’s incumbent on those of us up here on the stage to speak as candidly as we can. 

Roughly three weeks ago, on January 6, as we watched an outlandish mob storm through the US Capitol carrying Confederate flags, weapons, gibbets and crucifixes, wearing furs and antlers – the thought that ran through my head was, “My goodness, in our country we are already ruled by the Indian equivalent of these people. They’ve taken our Capitol Hill. They’ve won.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: Facebook/Narendra Modi

Our institutions have been overrun by them. Our Leader appears before us in a different set of furs and antlers every day. Our favoured elixir is cow urine. They are well on their way towards destroying every democratic institution in this country. The US might have managed to claw itself back from the brink to some semblance of imperial “normalcy.” But we in India are being dragged back centuries into a past that we have tried so hard to escape. 

It isn’t us – it isn’t this gathering of the Elgar Parishad that is radical or extreme.

It isn’t us who are acting illegally and unconstitutionally. It isn’t us who have looked away from, or overtly encouraged pogroms in which Muslims have been killed in their thousands. It isn’t us who benignly watch while Dalits are publicly flogged on city streets. It isn’t us who are pitting people against one another, ruling through hatred and divisiveness. That is being done by those that we have elected as our government and by their propaganda machine that calls itself the media.

Also read: The New Ruling Elite Will Still Face Defiance

Two hundred years have gone by since the battle of Bhima Koregaon.

The British have gone, but a form of colonialism that pre-dates them by centuries, lives on. The Peshwas are gone, but Peshwai –Brahminism – has not. Brahminism, I don’t need to clarify to this audience, but I do for others who many not know – is the term the anti-caste movement has historically used for the jaati vyavastha.

The caste-system. It does not refer to Brahmins alone. Brahminism  has been to the workshop though, and has emerged fitted-out with a modern, democratic sounding vocabulary and a stream-lined caste-management manual and program (not new, but overhauled) that has mounted an existential challenge to the Dalit-Bahujan led political parties that once offered some hope.

Right now, the chosen vaahan (vehicle) of 21st century Brahminism is the far-right, Brahmin-controlled RSS, which, after a century of unceasing labour, has, through its best-known member, Narendra Modi, taken power in Delhi.

Many, including Karl Marx himself, believed that modern capitalism would end or at least override caste in India. Has it?

Across the world capitalism has ensured that wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In India, the 63 richest people have more money than the 2018-19 Union Budget for 1.3 billion people. A recent Oxfam study has found that in India during the coronavirus pandemic, while hundreds of millions lost their jobs during the lockdown – 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 – India’s billionaires increased their wealth by 35%. 

One hundred of the richest among them – let’s call them the corporate class – made enough to be able to distribute, if they wanted to, almost Rs 1,00,000 each to 138 million of India’s poorest people. A mainstream newspaper headlined this news as follows: “Covid deepened inequalities: wealth, education, gender”.

The missing word in the report as well as in the newspaper headline, is of course, caste. 

The question is, does this tiny corporate class – which owns ports, mines, gas fields, refineries, telecommunication, high-speed data and cell phone networks, universities, petrochemical plants, hotels, hospitals, food distribution outlets and television cable networks – does this class which virtually owns and runs India, also have a caste?

To a great extent, yes. Many of the biggest Indian corporations are family owned. To name a few of the biggest – Reliance Industries Ltd (Mukesh Ambani), Adani Group (Gautam Adani), Arcelor Mittal (Lakshmi Mittal), O.P. Jindal Group (Savitri Devi Jindal), Birla Group (K.M. Birla). They all call themselves Vaishyas, the trader caste. They are only doing their divinely ordained duty – making money. 

Also read: Why Returns Generated by Family Run Companies Outdoes Non-Family Ones

Empirical studies about the ownership of corporate media and the caste breakdown of their editors, columnists and senior journalists reveal the strangle-hold of the privileged castes, mainly Brahmin and Bania, on designing and disseminating the news – real as well as fake.

Dalits, Adivasis and increasingly Muslims are almost absent from this landscape. The situation is no different in the higher and lower judiciary, the upper echelons of the civil services, the foreign service, the world of chartered accountants, or plum jobs in education, health, publishing, or in any sphere of governance. Between them, the population of Brahmins and Vaishyas is probably less than 10% of the population. Caste and capitalism have fused to create a peculiarly lethal, peculiarly Indian alloy. 

Prime Minister Modi, so relentless in his attack on the dynastic politics of the Congress party, is entirely dedicated to supporting and enriching these corporate dynasties. The palanquin in which he is showcased, for better or for worse, also rests on the shoulders of mostly Vaishya and Brahmin family-owned corporate media dynasties. To name a few, Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Hindu, India Today, Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran. Reliance Industries has a controlling share in 27 channels.

I use the verb “showcased” because Modi has never directly addressed the press in his nearly seven years as Prime Minister. Not once.

While the rest of us are having our personal data mined and our irises scanned, an opaque system has been put in place to allow the corporate world to repay the unflinching loyalty that has been shown to them. In 2018 an electoral bond scheme was introduced which allows anonymous donations to be made to political parties. So, we now have an actual, institutionalised, hermetically sealed pipeline that circulates money and power between the corporate and political elite. Small wonder then that the BJP is the richest political party in the world. 

Smaller wonder then, that while this tiny class-caste elite consolidates its hold on this country in the name of the people, in the name of Hindu nationalism, it has begun to treat people, including its own voters, as an enemy force, to be managed, manipulated, waylaid, taken by surprise, attacked by stealth and ruled with an iron fist.

We have been turned into a nation of ambush announcements and illegal ordinances. 

A police personnel’s boot is seen on a man’s face in Sindhu on January 29. Photo: PTI

Demonetisation broke the back of the economy, overnight. 

The abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir led to seven million people suddenly locked down for months under a military and digital siege – a crime against humanity being committed in our name – and played out for the world to see. A year later, a stubbornly defiant people continue their struggle for freedom even as every bone in Kashmir’s collective body is being broken, official fiat by official fiat.

The blatantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens led to months of protest led by Muslim women. It ended with an anti-Muslim pogrom in North-East Delhi, fuelled by vigilantes and watched over by the police, for which Muslims are being blamed.

Hundreds of young Muslim men, students and activists including Umar Khalid, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Meeran Haider, Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita are in jail. The protests are portrayed as an Islamist jihadi plot. The women who led the iconic Shaheen Bagh sit-in, the backbone of the nation-wide uprising, were, we’re told, being used for “gender-cover”, and the public pledges to the Constitution that took place at almost every protest site have been dismissed as “secular cover.” 

The inference is that everything to do with Muslims is by default “jihadi” (used incorrectly as a euphemism for terrorism) and anything that is contraindicative is just details. The policemen who forced grievously wounded Muslim men to sing the National Anthem, even as they lay piled up against each other on the street, have not even been identified, let alone charged. One of injured subsequently died from having a patriotic police lathi pushed down his throat. This month the Home Minister praised the Delhi Police for its handling of the “riots”. 

And now a year after the massacre, while a battered community is trying to get back on its feet, the Bajrang Dal and VHP are announcing Rath Yatras and motorcycle parades to raise money for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya in those very same colonies where the pogrom took place.

We also had the lockdown ambush – 1.3 billion of us locked down with four hours notice. Millions of urban workers forced to walk thousands of kilometres towards home, while being beaten like criminals.  

Representative image of a migrant family walking through a New Delhi road. Photo: PTI

While the pandemic raged, responding to the change of status of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, China occupied swathes of Indian territory in Ladakh. Our hapless government has been forced to pretend that it hasn’t happened. Whether there is or isn’t a war, a negative growth economy must now haemorrhage money to keep thousands of troops equipped and permanently battle ready. In sub-zero temperatures many soldiers lives will be lost just to the weather. 

On top of that list of induced calamities we now have the three Farm Acts that will break the back of Indian agriculture, hand the controls to corporations and blatantly deny farmers legal recourse without even a nod to their constitutional rights. 

It’s like watching a vehicle being dismantled, its engine broken, its wheels removed, its upholstery stripped, the vandalised shell left on the highway while other cars, driven by people who aren’t wearing antlers and furs, whizz by. 

This is why we desperately need this Elgar – this consistent, collective, defiant expression of rage – against Brahmanism, against capitalism, against Islamophobia and against patriarchy. Patriarchy, the underpinning of it all – because if men don’t or can’t control women, they know they control nothing. 

While the pandemic rages, while farmers are on the streets, states ruled by the BJP are rushing through anti-religious conversion ordinances. I will take a moment to talk about these because they are a compendium of insights into this regime’s anxieties about caste, about masculinity, about Muslims and Christians, about love, women, demography and history. 

Also read: As India Bolsters Its Anti-Muslim Credo, Where Is Hindu Society’s Outrage?

The UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020 (popularly known as the ordinance against ‘love jihad’) is barely two months old. Already, weddings have been disrupted, families have had cases filed against them, and dozens of young Muslim men are in jail. So now, in addition to being lynched for beef they haven’t eaten, cows they haven’t killed, crimes they haven’t committed (although for Muslims being murdered is increasingly being viewed as a criminal act), in addition to being jailed for jokes they haven’t made (as the case of the young comedian Munawar Faruqui), Muslims can now be jailed for committing the crime of falling in love and getting married.

In our reading of this ordinance I will leave aside some basic questions, such as how do you define “religion”? Would someone who persuaded a person of faith to become an atheist become liable for prosecution?

The 2020 UP ordinance provides “for prohibition of unlawful conversion from one religion to another by misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage…” The definition of allurement includes gifts, gratification, free education in reputed schools, or the promise of a better lifestyle. (Which roughly describes the transactions involved in almost every arranged marriage in India.)

The accused (the person who has caused the conversion to take place) faces a jail sentence of between one and five years. The accusers can be any family member including a distant relative. The burden of proof rests on the accused.  The “victim” may be granted a Rs 5,00,000 compensation by the court payable by the accused. You can imagine the infinite possibilities of extortion and blackmail that this sets up.  

Now for the best part: if the converted person is a minor, a woman, or belongs to a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe the punishment to the “Religion Convertor” is doubled from two to ten years. In other words, this Ordinance accords women, Dalits and Adivasis the same status as minors. It infantilises us: we are not considered to be adults responsible for our own actions.

In the eyes of the Uttar Pradesh government, only the privileged-caste Hindu male has full agency. It’s the same spirit in which the Chief Justice of India asked why women, (who are in more ways than one the backbone of Indian agriculture), were being “kept” at the farmers’ protests. And the government of Madhya Pradesh proposed that working women who don’t live with their families be registered at police stations and tracked by the police for their own safety. 

If Mother Teresa were alive, under this Ordinance she’d be serving a jail sentence for sure. My guess is 10 years and a lifetime of debt given how many people she converted to Christianity. This could become the fate of every Christian priest working among the poor in India. 

Also, what about the person who said:

“Because we have the misfortune of calling ourselves Hindus we are treated thus. If we were members of another Faith, none would dare treat us such. Choose any religion which gives you equality of status and treatment. We shall repair our mistake now.”

Those were the words, many of you will know, of Babasaheb Ambedkar. A clear call for mass conversion with the promise of a better lifestyle. Under this Ordinance, in which “mass conversion” is defined as when “two or more people convert”, those words would make Ambedkar criminally liable. Mahatma Phule too would likely be indicted for his overt approval of mass conversion when he said:

“The Muslims, destroying the carved stone images of the cunning Arya Bhats, forcibly enslaved them and brought the Shudras and Ati-Shudras in great numbers out of their clutches and made them Muslims, including them in the Muslim Religion. Not only this, but they established inter-dining and intermarriage with them and gave them all equal rights…”

A great part of the millions of Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists who make up the population of this subcontinent are testimony to historical change and to mass conversion. The rapid depletion in numbers of the “Hindu population” is what initially gave rise to privileged caste anxiety about demography and galvanised the politics of what is today called Hindutva. 

Today however, with the RSS in power, the tide has turned. The only mass conversions happening at scale are those being conducted by the Vishwa Hindu Prashad – the process known as “ghar wapsi” (returning home) which began with Hindu Reformist groups in the late 19th century. Ghar wapsi involves forest-dwelling tribes-people being “returned” to Hinduism. But not before undergoing a shuddhi (purification) ceremony to purge the pollution they have incurred by straying from ‘home’. 

How does the UP ordinance then deal with this inconvenience that ought, by logic, to criminalise this practice?

Also read: A Day in the Life of a ‘One-Man Hindutva Army’ in Uttar Pradesh

It includes a clause that says: “Provided that, if any person reconverts to his/her immediate previous religion the same shall not be deemed to be a conversion under this Ordinance.” By doing this the Ordinance perpetuates and legalises the myth that Hinduism is an ancient autochthonous religion that predates and subsumes the religions of the hundreds of indigenous tribes and Dalit and Dravidian peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Which is untrue and ahistorical.

In India, these are the ways in which mythology is turned into history and history into mythology.

Privileged caste chroniclers see no contradiction whatsoever in simultaneously claiming to be indigenous as well as the descendants of Aryan conquerors, depending on what suits them.

At the beginning of his career in South Africa, while campaigning for a separate entrance for Indians in the Durban Post Office so that they would not have to share the same entrance as Black Africans who he often called “kaffirs” and “savages”, Gandhi argued that Indians and the English sprang from “common stock, called the Indo-Aryan.” He made sure to distinguish the privileged-caste ‘Passenger Indians’ from oppressed caste indentured labourers. That was in 1893. But the circus hasn’t stopped. 

The range of speakers present today shows the Elgar Parishad’s intellectual ability to see the concerted attack that is coming at us from all directions – not just one or the other. Nothing makes this regime happier than when we seal ourselves into silos, into little tanks in which we splash around angrily, each for ourselves or our communities – never seeing the big picture, our anger often directed at one another. It is only when we breach the banks of our designated tanks that we can turn into a river. And flow as an unstoppable current.

To do that we have to exceed our brief, we have to dare to dream like Rohit Vemula did. He is here today with us, amongst us, an inspiration to a whole new generation even in death, because he died dreaming. He died insisting on his right to expand into the fullness of his humanity, his ambitions, his intellectual curiosity. He refused to shrink, to contract, to fit the mould that was offered to him. He refused the labels the real world wanted to pin on him. He knew that he was made up of nothing less than stardust. He has become stardust. 

A poster with Rohit Vemula’s face drawn on it.

We have to be watchful of the traps that limit and essentialise us. None of us are just the sum of our identities. We are that too, but much much more.

While we square off against our foes, we must be able to recognise our friends. We must look for allies because none of us can fight this battle alone. The audacious anti-CAA protests last year and the grand farmers protest that surrounds us now has shown that. The many farmers’ unions that have come together represent people with different ideological beliefs, different histories.

There are deep contradictions between big and small farmers, between landlords and landless agricultural workers, between Jat Sikhs and Mazhabi Sikhs, between the Left Unions and the Centrists. There are caste contradictions too and horrifying caste violence, as Bant Singh who had both his arms and a leg hacked off  in 2006, has told you today. Those differences are not buried. They are spoken about – as Randeep Maddoke who was meant to be here today has, in his brave documentary film Landless. And yet, they have come together to confront this state to fight what we know is an existential battle. 

Perhaps here in this city where Ambedkar was literally blackmailed into signing the Poona Pact, and where Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule did their revolutionary work, we can give our struggle a name. Perhaps it should be the Satya Shodhak Resistance – SSR to the RSS. 

The battle of Love against Hate. A battle for Love. It must be militantly waged and beautifully won. 

Thank you.

The above is the text of Arundhati Roy’s speech at the Elgar Parishad 2021. This is the first time that the Elgar Parishad was held after December 31, 2017-January 1, 2018.

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

India’s Day of Shame

Could it be that August 5, 2020 is not actually what it’s being cracked up to be? Could it be instead the little limpet of shame clamped to the soaring cliff of glory? 

On August 5, 2019, a year ago today, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir were locked into their homes under a strict military curfew. Thirteen thousand people, ranging from young children and teenage stone pelters to former chief ministers and major pro-India politicians, were arrested and put into preventive detention, where many of them still remain. At midnight on 4 August, phones went dead and internet connections were cut.

On August 6, a Bill was passed in parliament stripping the State of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and special status enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It was divested of statehood and downgraded into two Union Territories, Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir. Ladakh would have no legislature and would be governed directly by New Delhi. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The problem of Kashmir, we were told, had been finally solved once and for all. In other words, Kashmir’s decades long struggle for self-determination, which has cost tens of thousands of lives of soldiers, militants and civilians, thousands of enforced ‘disappearances’ and cruelly tortured bodies—was over. On the floor of the House, Home Minister Amit Shah went further. He said he was prepared to lay down his life to take over the territories of what India calls Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and what Kashmiris call Azad Kashmir, as well as the frontier provinces of Gilgit-Baltistan. He also threw in Aksai Chin, once part of the erstwhile Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, now a part of China.

He was wading into dangerous territory, literally as well as figuratively. The borders he was talking about lie between three nuclear powers. Amidst the unseemly celebrations on India’s streets, the extra wattage generated by Kashmir’s humiliation intensified the glow of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s already god-like halo. Provocatively, the Indian Meteorological Department began to include Gilgit-Baltistan into its weather reports. Few of us in India paid attention to the Chinese government when it urged India to “be cautious in its words and deeds on the border issue.”

Also read: Demolition Men Do Not Build Nations, They Destroy Them

In the year that has gone by, the struggle in Kashmir has by no means ended. In just the last few months media reports say that 34 soldiers, 154 militants and 17 civilians have been killed. A world traumatised by the coronavirus has understandably paid no attention to what the Indian government has done to the people of Kashmir. The curfew and communication siege, and everything else that such a siege entails (no access to doctors, hospitals, work, no business, no school, no contact with loved ones), lasted for months. Even the United States didn’t do this during its war against Iraq. 

Just a few months of coronavirus lockdown, without a military curfew or communications siege, has brought the world to its knees and hundreds of millions to the limits of their endurance and sanity. Think of Kashmir under the densest military deployment in the world. On top of the suffering coronavirus has laid on you, add a maze of concertina wire on your streets, soldiers breaking into your homes, beating the men and abusing the women, destroying your food stocks, amplifying the cries of humans being tortured on Public Address Systems.

A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officer patrols an empty street during a lockdown on the first anniversary of the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, in Srinagar August 5, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Danish Ismail

Add to this a judicial system—including the Supreme Court of India—that has for a whole year allowed the internet siege to continue and ignored the six hundred habeas corpus petitions by distraught people seeking the whereabouts of their family members. Add further a new Domicile Law that opens the floodgates by allowing Indians a right of residence in Kashmir. The precious State Subject Certificates of Kashmiris are now legally void except as backup evidence to bolster their applications to the Indian government for domicile status in their own homeland. Those whose applications are rejected can be denied residency and shipped out. What Kashmir faces is nothing less than cultural erasure.

Also read: Omar Abdullah Interview: New Domicile Law Aimed at Changing Kashmir’s Religious Composition

Kashmir’s new Domicile Law is a cognate of India’s new blatantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that is supposed to detect ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ (Muslim of course) who the home minister has called ‘termites’. In the state of Assam, the NRC has already wreaked havoc. Millions have been struck off the citizens register. While many countries are dealing with a refugee crisis, the Indian government is turning citizens into refugees, fuelling a crisis of statelessness on an unimaginable scale. 

The CAA, NRC and Kashmir’s new Domicile Law require even bona fide citizens to produce a set of documents approved by the state in order to be granted citizenship. (The Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazi Party in 1935 decreed that only those citizens who could provide legacy papers approved by the Third Reich were eligible for German citizenship.)

What should all this be called? A war crime? Or a crime against humanity?

And what should the collusion of institutions and the celebrations on the streets of India be called? Democracy?

A year down the line, these celebrations over Kashmir are distinctly muted. For good reason. We have a dragon on our doorstep and it isn’t happy. On June 17, 2020, we awoke to the horrifying news that twenty Indian soldiers including a colonel had been brutally killed by the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) in the icy reaches of the remote Galwan Valley on the Ladakh border. Over the next few days reports in sections of the Indian press suggested that there had been several points of ingress. Army veterans and respected defence correspondents have said that the PLA has occupied hundreds of square kilometres of what India considers to be its territory. Was it just naked aggression as portrayed by the Indian media? Or have the Chinese moved to protect what they see as their vital interests—a road through the high mountains of Aksai Chin and a trade route through Pakistan Occupied/Azad Kashmir? Both under threat, if the belligerent statements made by India’s home minister were to be taken seriously, and how can they not be?

Also watch | ‘Chinese Are on Indian Territory in Depsang and Pangong; LAC Has Shifted Westward’

For a ferociously nationalist government such as ours to concede what it thinks of as sovereign territory has to be its worst nightmare. It cannot be countenanced. But what can be done? A simple solution was found. Just days after the Galwan Valley tragedy, Prime Minister Modi addressed the nation. ‘Not an inch of land has been occupied by anyone,’ he said, ‘no one has entered our borders’ and ‘none of our posts have been occupied by anyone’.

Modi’s critics fell about laughing. The Chinese government was quick to welcome his statement, because that’s what they were saying, too. But Modi’s statement isn’t as stupid as it sounds. While army commanders of both countries are discussing withdrawal and the ‘disengagement’ of troops and the social media is full of jokes about the art of exiting without entering, and while the Chinese continue to hold territory they claim to be their own, to the vast, uniformed majority of India’s population, Modi has won. It was on TV. And who’s to say which is more important? TV or Territory?

Whichever way you slice it, in the long term, India now requires a battle-ready army on two fronts—the western frontier with Pakistan and the eastern frontier with China. In addition, the government’s hubris has alienated its neighbours Nepal and Bangladesh. We have been reduced to boasting that in the event of war, the United States—reeling from its own crises—will come to India’s rescue. Really? Like it rescued the Kurds in Syria and Iraq? Like it rescued the Afghans from the Soviets? Or the South Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese?

Also read: Why It’s Necessary to Believe ‘All Is Well’ in India’s Border Clash With China

Last night a Kashmiri friend messaged me: ‘Will India, Pakistan and China fight over our skies without seeing us?’ It’s not an unlikely scenario. None of these countries is morally superior or more humane than the other. None of them is in this for the greater good of humanity.

But even without an official war, for India to keep a standing army on the Ladakh border, supplied and equipped for high-altitude warfare, for it to even remotely match China’s arsenal, India’s defence budget would probably have to double or triple in size. Even that won’t be enough. It will come as a huge blow to an economy that was already in steep decline (with unemployment at a 45- year high) before the COVID-19 lockdown, and is now predicted to shrink between 3.2 and 9.5%. Modi is not doing too well in the early rounds of this game of Chinese Checkers. 

The first week of August comes with some other milestones, too. Despite the ill-planned, draconian, back-breaking lockdown, despite woefully few tests compared to other countries, confirmed cases of coronavirus in India are now growing at perhaps the fastest rate in the world. Amongst its victims is our sabre-rattling home minister, who is spending 5 August in a hospital bed. Not for him the cures being peddled by the quacks, godmen and members of parliament in his party—drinking cow urine, a magic potion called Coronil, blowing conch shells and banging pots and pans, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa, chanting ‘Go, Corona, Go!’ in the flat intonations of a Sanskrit Sloka. Oh no. For him the most expensive private hospital and the best (Allopathic) government doctors on call. 

And where will India’s Prime Minister be on August 5? 

If Kashmir had really been ‘solved’ once and for all, he would be there to be feted by adoring socially distanced crowds. But Kashmir isn’t solved. It’s shut down again. And Ladakh is almost a battle front. So, Modi has wisely decided to retreat from those troubled borders to a very safe place to make good another long-standing election promise. By the time you read this, he will, accompanied by prayers from priests and people across the country, as well as the blessings of India’s Supreme Court, have laid a silver slab that weighs 40 kg as the foundation for the Ram Mandir, a temple that will rise from the ruins of the Babri Masjid, a mosque that was hammered into the dust by Hindu vigilantes led by members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in 1992. It’s been a long journey. Let’s call it a Triumph of the Will. 

Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat at the Ram Mandir bhoomi pujan in Ayodhya on Wednesday. Photo: PTI

Lockdown or no lockdown, as I write this, I can sense the very air trembling in anticipation of the historic moment. Only the naïve or the hopelessly indoctrinated can still believe that hunger and joblessness will lead to revolution—that temples and monuments cannot feed people. They can. The Ram Mandir is food for millions of starved Hindu souls. The further humiliation of the already humiliated Muslims and other minorities only sharpens the taste of victory on the tongue. How can bread compete?

It would be easy to look at the 365 days between August 5, 2019 and August 5, 2020—the final ‘integration’ of Kashmir into India, the passing of the CAA and NRC, and the inauguration of the Ram Mandir—as the defining period in which India under Modi has formally declared itself a Hindu Nation, the dawning of a new era. 

But declarations can contain unacknowledged defeats. And showy beginnings can contain unforeseen ends. It’s worth remembering that despite Modi’s larger-than-life presence and the BJP’s massive majority in Parliament, only 17.2% of India’s population voted for them. Perhaps, as the Chinese suggest, in this matter we should proceed with caution. Think a little. Why did Modi decide to inaugurate the Ram Mandir now? After all it’s not Dussehra or Diwali, and the date has no particular relevance in the Ramayana or the Hindu calendar. And there’s a partial lockdown in most parts of India—many of the priests and policemen preparing and securing the site have already tested COVID-19 positive. The massive crowds that could turn out at a later date will be missing.

So why August 5? Is it to rub salt into Kashmir’s wounds, or is it to put balm on India’s? Because, whatever they tell us on TV, there’s been a tectonic shift on the borders. Big plates are moving. The world order is changing. You can’t bully people and act like the top dog in the neighbourhood when you’re not top dog. That’s not a Chinese saying. It’s just common sense. 

Could it be that August 5, 2020 is not actually what it’s being cracked up to be? Could it be instead the little limpet of shame clamped to the soaring cliff of glory? 

When and if India, China and Pakistan fight over Kashmir’s skies, the least the rest of us can do is to keep our eyes on its people.

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

‘Modi Can Lie About NRC but it is a Crime When We Have a Laugh’

Arundhati Roy responds to demands that she be arrested for urging ‘civil disobedience with a smile’.

This is with regard to what I said while speaking at Delhi University on December 25, 2019 about the National Population Register (which the nation now knows is officially the data base for the National Register of Citizens).

I said that in his speech on December 22 at the Ramlila Grounds in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi blatantly lied to us about the National Register of Citizens and the non-existence of detention centres.

I said that as a response to those lies we should collectively enter ridiculous information when they came to gather our personal data for the NPR. What I was proposing was civil disobedience with a smile.

All the mainstream TV channels that were present have footage of my entire speech. Of course they did not air any of it. They just excited themselves and everybody else by commenting on it and misrepresenting it and lying about it. This has led to calls for my arrest as well as TV crews laying siege to my home.

Fortunately my speech it is up on YouTube.

My question is this: is it okay for the prime minister of this country to lie to us but a criminal offence and a security threat for us people to have a laugh?

Amazing times. Amazing mass media.

‘The Tide Will Turn’: Read Arundhati Roy’s Letter to Bangladeshi Photographer Shahidul Alam

“If we can do this to Shahidul Alam, think of what we can do to the rest of you – all you nameless, faceless, ordinary people. Watch. And be afraid.”

Each year, PEN International highlights the cases of five persecuted writers – be they imprisoned, facing prosecution or otherwise at risk – that are emblematic of the type of threats and attacks faced by writers and journalists around the world.

This year, PEN International is campaigning for Dawit Isaak imprisoned in Eritrea, Miroslava Breach Velducea killed in Mexico, Oleg Sentsov imprisoned in Russia, Shahidul Alam detained in Bangladesh and Wael Abbas imprisoned in Egypt.

Writers David Lagercrantz, Jennifer Clement, Tom Stoppard, Salil Tripathi and Khaled Hosseini are taking part in this year’s campaign.

As part of the campaign, Arundhati Roy has written an open letter to Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam, who has been detained since August 5, 2018. The letter has been reproduced in full below.

§

To,
Shahidul Alam
Champakali 2/5
Dhaka Central Jail
Keraniganj,
Dhaka
Bangladesh
November 15th 2018
PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer

Dear Shahidul,

It’s been more than a hundred days now since they took you away. Times aren’t easy in your country or in mine, so when we first heard that unknown men had abducted you from your home, of course we feared the worst. Were you going to be “encountered” (our word in India for extra-judicial murder by security forces) or killed by “non-state actors”? Would your body be found in an alley, or floating in some shallow pond on the outskirts of Dhaka? When your arrest was announced and you surfaced alive in a police station, our first reaction was one of sheer joy.

Am I really writing to you? Perhaps not. If I were, I wouldn’t need to say very much beyond, “Dearest Shahidul, no matter how lonely your prison cell, know that we have our eyes on you. We are looking out for you.”

If I were really writing to you I wouldn’t need to tell you how your work, your photographs and your words, has, over decades, inscribed a vivid map of humankind in our part of the world—its pain, its joy, its violence, its sorrow and desolation, its stupidity, its cruelty, its sheer, crazy complicatedness—onto our consciousness. Your work is lit up, made luminous, as much by love as it is by a probing, questioning anger born of witnessing at first hand the things that you have witnessed. Those who have imprisoned you have not remotely understood what it is that you do. We can only hope, for their sake, that someday they will.

Also Read: Why the Bangladesh Government Is Scared of Shahidul Alam

Your arrest is meant to be a warning to your fellow citizens: “If we can do this to Shahidul Alam, think of what we can do to the rest of you—all you nameless, faceless, ordinary people. Watch. And be afraid.”

The formal charge against you is that you have criticized your country in your (alleged) Facebook posts. You have been arrested under the Section 57 of Bangladesh’s infamous Information and Communications Technology Act (ICT) which authorizes “the prosecution of any person who publishes, in electronic form, material that is fake and obscene; defamatory; tends to deprave and corrupt its audience; causes or may cause deterioration in law and order; prejudices the image of the state or a person; or causes or may cause hurt to religious belief.”

What sort of law is this, this absurd, indiscriminate, catch-all, fishing trawler type of law? What place does it have in a country that calls itself a democracy? Who has the right to decide what the correct “image of the state” is, and should be? Is there only one legally approved and acceptable image of Bangladesh? Section 57 potentially criminalizes all forms of speech except blatant sycophancy. It’s an attack, not on intellectuals, but on intelligence itself. We hear that over the last five years more than 1200 journalists in Bangladesh have been charged under it, and that 400 trials are already underway.

Shahidul Alam. Credit: Shahidul Alam/Facebook

In India too, this sort of attack on our intelligence is becoming normalized. Our equivalent of Bangladesh’s ICT Act is the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act under which hundreds of people including students, activists, lawyers and academics are being arrested in wave after wave. The cases against them, like the one against you, are flimsy and ludicrous. Even the police know that they are likely to be acquitted by higher courts. But the hope is that by then, their spirits will have been broken by years in prison. The process is the punishment.

This is what we are up against, these neat definitions of the perfect nation, the perfect man, the perfect citizen, the perfect Hindu, the perfect Muslim.

So, as I write this letter to you, dear Shahidul, I am tempted to add, dear Sudha, dear Saibaba, dear Surendra, dear Shoma, dear Mahesh, dear Sudhir, dear Rona, dear Arun, dear Vernon, and also, dear Tariq, dear Aijaz, dear Aamir, dear Kopa, dear Kamla, dear Madavi, dear Maase, dear Raju, dear hundreds and hundreds of others.

How is it possible for people to defend themselves against laws like these? It’s like having to prove one’s innocence before a panel of certified paranoics. Every argument only serves to magnify their paranoia and heighten their delusions.

As both our countries hurtle towards general elections, we know that we can expect more arrests, more lynching, more killing, more bloggers hacked to death, more orchestrated ethnic, religious and caste conflagrations— more false-flag “terrorist” strikes, more assassinations of journalists and writers. Elections, we know, means fire in the ducts.

Your Prime Minister, who claims to be a secular democrat, has announced that she will build 500 mosques with the billion dollars the Government of Saudi Arabia has donated to Bangladesh. These mosques are supposedly meant to disseminate the “correct” kind of Islam.

Also Read: The Court Should Not Have to Bow Before the Unreasonableness of the UAPA

Here in India, our rulers have dropped all pretense of the secularism and socialism that are enshrined in our constitution. In order to distract attention from the catastrophic failures of governance and deepening popular resentment, as institution after institution—our courts, universities, banks, intelligence agencies—is pushed into crisis, the ruling power, (not the Government, but its holding company, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,) is alternately cajoling and threatening the Supreme Court to pass an order clearing the decks for the construction of a giant Hindu temple on the site where the Babri Masjid once stood before it was demolished by a rampaging mob. It’s amazing how politicians’ piety peaks and troughs with election cycles.

This is what we are up against, these neat definitions of the perfect nation, the perfect man, the perfect citizen, the perfect Hindu, the perfect Muslim. The postscript to this is the perfect majority and the satanic minority. The people of Europe and the Soviet Union have lived through the devastation that these sorts of ideas caused. They have suffered the matchless terror of neatness. Only recently Europe marked the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht—the event that marked the beginning of the Holocaust. There too it all began quite slowly. There too it began with elections. And there too the old murmurs have started up again.

Here we’re going to witness our own scorched-earth elections in the coming days. They will use their fishing-trawler laws, they will jump at shadows to decimate the opposition.

Fortunately, we are an irredeemably untidy people. And hopefully we will stand up to them in our diverse and untidy ways.

Dear Shahidul, I believe the tide will turn. It will. It must. This foolish, shortsighted cruelty will give way to something kinder and more visionary. This particular malaise, this bout of ill-health that has engulfed our planet will pass.

I hope to see you in Dhaka very soon.

With love
Arundhati