[Redditolavoro] Arundhati Roy on the Maoist movement in India - Free Speech Radio News - 17 November 2011

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Arundhati Roy on the Maoist movement in India - Free Speech Radio News - 17 
November 2011
"You cannot equate violence of the resistance with the structural violence 
of the Indian state which is resulting in 250.000 farmers killing 
themselves, 80% of the population living in poverty.  You really can't 
equate the two.  And that's what many people do. "
Arundhati Roy on the Maoist movement in India
- Free Speech Radio News - 17 November 2011
FSRN: In India's rural forests, mining corporations and state militias have 
launched a violent assault on the Maoist guerillas and landless tribal 
communities.  Activist and author Arundhati Roy spent weeks with the Maoist 
fighters in the conflict zone, and her time there is the subject of a new 
book called 'Walking with the Comrades'.  It's a first-hand account of the 
hidden side of the global economy and an analysis of a long-running and 
often misunderstood armed movement.  She joins us from New-York.  Arundhati 
Roy, welcome to FSRN.


ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you so much.


FSRN: Let's begin with the region where you spent time, Dantekaranya, in 
India.  Describe the place and the people who live there.


AR: It's a kind of large strait of uninterrupted forest inhabited mostly by 
various indigenous tribes.  In the area that I visited, there was mostly one 
tribe, called the Gonds.  And there, for the last 30 years, there has been a 
sort of incipient Maoist movement which has right now surfaced in a really 
serious way because of the fact that the Indian government has signed over 
much of this forest land, the rivers, the mountains, everything to various 
multinational corporations for building dams, steel plants and aluminium 
refineries.  There are, all together in India, about 100 million indigenous 
people, seriously under threat, living very very fragile lives.


FSRN: You talk about the agreements, the formal agreements, that have been 
made between these multinational corporations and the Indian goverment.  One 
of those companies that is operating in the region is called Vedanta.  Can 
you tell us about that company and how it operates in the area?


AR: Vedanta wasn't exactly in the area that I visited.  They're just coming 
there.  But it has signed huge agreements for the mining of bauxite in the 
state of Orissa.  Vedanta is one of the largest corporations in the world. 
It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.  It's leader lives in the former 
house of the Shah of Iran.  It is mining in areas where these indigenous 
tribes, the Dongria, the Gonds, live.  And it's one of the most ruthless 
mining company in the world, I would say.  Actually, the process of mining 
bauxite and turning it into aluminium is one of the most toxic processes in 
the world.  Aluminium is sort of central to the weapons industry.  So, 
because it's such a toxic process, it has been sort of exported out of 
Europe and America to countries like India.  But that process requires such 
a lot of water and such a lot of electricity, and it creates such a lot of 
toxic wastes that it devastates the entire environment where an aluminium 
refinery might be set up.  Vedanta is one of the companies, but there are 
many others as well.


FSRN: And the effects of a move like that, with the mining of bauxite, not 
only comes in and takes parts of the land to displace people, but as you 
outline, it creates these toxic pools.  There a photographs in your book 
that shows the effects of this kind of mining and what it does to the land. 
And one of those areas is, as you describe in your book, a sacred place for 
the indigenous people there.


AR: Yes, it's a sacred place and one of them is a mountain called the 
Niyamgiri, which means 'the mountain of justice'.  It is as sacred to them 
as a church or a mosque is to a christian or a muslim.  But since they are 
the poorest people, whatever sacred it is to them, it doesn't seem to matter 
very much.


FSRN: Another aspect of this, in addition to the influence of multinational 
corporations and mining, is the military campaign.  The Indian government 
launched a campaign called 'Operation Green Hunt' against Maoist forces.  It 
came after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called them the single biggest 
internal security challenge ever faced by the country.  How does 'Operation 
Green Hunt' play out on the ground there?


AR: 'Operation Green Hunt' was announced in 2009.  And the shares of mining 
companies went up.  And then, something like 200.000 paramilitaries, heavily 
armed paramilitary forces began to move into the forest.  So now, as we 
speak, preparations are on for the army to move in.  And so we are going to 
witness India, which calls itself the larger democracy in the world, which 
has already deployed its army several times in states of the north-east, in 
Kashmir, in Telengana, in Goa, in Punjab, deploying it against its poorest 
people.  India has one of the biggest defense budgets in the world.  All 
this power is going to be directed against the poorest people in the country 
because those Memorandum of Understanding have been signed and the 
corporations are running out of patience.


FSRN: While you talk about the operation under way now, you point out that 
in 2010, the chief negociator for the Communist Party of India was shot and 
killed by the Andhra Pradesh state police, and that was at the beginning of 
a round of peace talks.  Is there a peace process now?  Where does that 
stands today?


AR: No, there isn't a peace process at all now.  India's willing to talk to 
Pakistan, to talk to anybody else, but not to the poor.  Right now, as I 
said, I think that ... when one side kills the peace emissary of the other 
side, it is pretty clear that they don't want to have peace talks.  But it's 
going to take them a while to move large numbers of soldiers into the area. 
And the army is sort of refusing to be deployed unless it has the impunity 
of this law called the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which allows solders 
to kill on suspicion.  They have that law covering them in Kashmire, in the 
north-east, which is why we're now dicovering mass graves there.  But the 
army won't want to move in unless it has the cover of this law.  Otherwise, 
it'll just be courts and all kinds of litigations and so on.  There's a lot 
of reaction against this law in India, so I think they're going to pretend 
to repeal it and then put provisions into some other laws and make it apply 
across the country.  Because, in fact, there's a lot of unrest all over the 
country.  It's gradually becoming very militarize.  You can't push through 
this free market policies without taking over people's land, without 
privatizing, without building dams and so on.  In order to control a restive 
population, you need to militarize.  And to militarize, the security forces 
need the impunity.  So I think all that is being negociated now, so there's 
a sort of quiet ominous silence, I would say.


FSRN: Arundhati Roy, one of the aspect of your new book 'Walking with the 
Comrades' is its questioning, its investigation, its exploration of the 
comrades themselves: 'Who are the comrades?'  And although the government 
often paints the Maoist movement in one bright brush, you write of how the 
Communist movement has evolved.  That, in the beginning, under the founder 
of the Naxalite movement, it was stuck to a strict ideology and followed 
China even as atrocities were taking place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge 
or killings in Bangladesh.  But at least, in the area where you were, it has 
changed somewhat.  Naxalites are made up of largely displaced tribal people. 
Primarily, it's local concerns rather than a global ideology that motivates 
them.  How has the movement changed over time?


AR: As I said, there were a whole lot of ideological and moral questions 
that I had about their alignments in the past.  Their epicenter was China, 
not really the concerns of the country they lived in.  So they did keep 
quiet over the genocide in Bangladesh, what was going on in Cambodia.  That 
was unfortunate.  Now, the real question is: how Maoist are the Maoists? 
Since they really are made up of... 99,9% of the guerilla army are 
indigenous, what we call adivasi people, 45% of them are women.  The party 
in the past has not had a very good reputation in the ways it deals with 
women within its own quarters.  I thought that had changed when I was there, 
I was quite impressed by the women that I met there and by how freely they 
spoke about their problems and what they were trying to do about it.  But I 
think the main question that I have right now, is, what is this battle 
about?  Is it a battle for a redefinition of the meaning of progress, of the 
meaning of civilization, of what constitutes human's happiness?  And 
Communist Parties have not shown any great difference in the way they 
approach the environment or anything in their past, in Russia or in China. 
And so I ask the comrades: you're resisting this corporate take over now, 
but theoretically, if you were to come to power, would you leave the bauxite 
in the mountain?  Do you have a different view of development?  And I think 
that's a kind of pressure that we all need to keep up because it is a 
question that the whole world has to consider.  Today, the planet is in 
crisis and there has to be a radical questionning of what is going on.  Just 
like America, in America, you have 400 people who own as much wealth as half 
of the American population.  In India, we have 100 people who own assests 
equal to one fourth of the GDP.  And we have 80% of the population living on 
less than 50 cents a day.  So something has to change radically.  The idea 
of capitalism, of progress, the measure of these things linked to 
consumption, all of this has to change.  While I support the resistance in 
the forest, I do think it's time to begin to ask what exactly they are 
fighting for.


FSRN: Well, it's not just those broad questions, philosophical questions, 
but also some of the practices.  The practices of summary executions, 
mistaken killings where civilians have been victims.  It's not a movement 
without criticism in India.  And you bring up those issues too.


AR: I do.  The fact is that one of the problem is that the way the Indian 
government and the Indian security forces are trying to break the movement 
is by infiltrating it with informers and spies and so on.  And also the fact 
that the Indian legal system, the courts, are completely outside the reach 
of ordinary people.  So when that is happening, or if, let say, a thousand 
paramilitaries go and burn a village with information from somebody, you 
wonder who can the villagers turn to.  Because they can't go and file a 
police case, they can't go to court, the whole machinery of democracy is 
ranged against them.  The democracy in India is only for the middle class. 
So then, this kind of system of rough justice surfaces and of course, 
sometimes it works, but sometimes it's completely wrong.  And what are we to 
do about it?  Thses are not of course new questions.  There are questions 
that armed resistance and armed struggles have faced all along.  It becomes 
the responsibility of those of us who don't condemn them outright to 
actually keep the pressure on and to question these things.
FSRN: Some of the most memorable people that you speak with and meet while 
you're in the forest, and that we come to meet as readers, are women.  As 
you report, 45% of the members are women and that traditionnal 
discrimination and violence in some of the tribal communities have motivated 
some of the women to join the movement.  And also, once the women are inside 
the Communist Party, they faced discrimination over the years.  Can you tell 
us about one of the woman you met?


AR: Inside the forest, I met women who had watched their partners, who had 
had their partners being captured, tortured and killed.  I met women who had 
seen their families being slaughtered or who had watched their sisters or 
mothers being raped, and then had taken the gun.  When I was outside, I met 
an extraordinary woman called Padma, who used to be with the Maoists.  And 
then she had been arrested and she had been beaten so much that her organs 
were all hammered.  She had to have most of them removed.  Her knees were 
smashed because the police said: 'we don't want you to be walking in that 
forest again'.  When I met her, she was only in her thirties but she had to 
drag herself up the steps and down the steps.  But now, she's working with 
an organisation of the parents, the relatives of murdered people.  And she 
would just criss-cross the state in whatever vehicule she could get and 
collect the dead bodies to take them back to the homes of the people who 
were just too poor to even make that journey (travel from this end of their 
state to the other to pick up their loved-ones who have been killed).


FSRN: While you were there, there are numbers of vivid scenes that we come 
across and one of them is a moment where you're looking through a laptop, I 
believe it is, and through media reports that have come out.  And you find a 
video interview with yourself, with you detailing your own work.  I was 
interested to hear how people you spent time with in the forest viewed you, 
and how they saw your visit there and what they hoped that you would bring 
to the outside world.


AR: The thing is that ... just in order to be invited to go into the forest 
required a certain amount of trust from their part.  Because, as I said, 
having spies and informers infiltrating them was one of the major tactics 
used by the security and the intelligence services.  I think what happened 
with me is they viewed me as somebody who was not going to just go in there 
and please them, and say 'I'm a Maoist' and 'I'm on your side' and 'I 
believe in everything that you do'.  But as somebody who is prepared to be 
open-minded and prepared to criticize them, but from a position of 
integrity.  Not from a vested interest or from a position where I was really 
working for somebody else, or somebody else's agenda.  And also not to be 
superficial because what happens is that, in this kind of atrocity based 
analysis, where terrible things are done by both sides, you tend to forget 
what is actually going on.  You cannot equate violence of the resistance 
with the structural violence of the Indian state which is resulting in 
250.000 farmers killing themselves, 80% of the population living in poverty. 
You really can't equate the two.  And that's what many people do.  The 
liberal Indian intellectuals just say: 'this is bad, that is bad, poor 
people are stuck in the middle, so let's just leave it'.  Even the idea of 
non-violence, at some point, becomes immoral.  When you are watching a 
violent onslaught on a people who then respond, and you just say 'no, at any 
cost, you have to be non-violent'... if you were in the middle of that 
conflict and you said it, that would be one thing.  But from a very safe 
distance, to sit there and say it, I think it's unacceptable.  I think that 
was it.  They saw me as somebody who wasn't someone who was playing for 
popularity or longing to please the establishment, who would think it 
through for myself.  Even if that resulted in criticizing them.


FSRN: Questions fill your writing in this book.  Questions about 
preconceptions, about the role of the military or corporations, about the 
idea even of armed struggle, of justice, of poverty.  It's a continual and 
focused inquiry that animates this book.  What questions do you still have 
at this point?


AR: The question now is no an analytical question so much as a question of 
'what do we do to this mantle, what we know is an absolutely destructive way 
of thinking, way of living?'  What is it that connects the Wall Street 
Occupation to the people in the forest?  And I think what connects it is 
absolute exclusion of the majority of the people in the world for the 
obscene benefit of a very few.  So after having gone through almost ten or 
twelve years of travelling, thinking, writing about these things, I come to 
some pretty simple conclusion.  One of which is that there has to be a lid 
on the amassing of wealth for any individual or any corporation.  I believe 
that this cross-ownership of businesses has to stop, like a mining 
corporation can't own a newspaper and a university and a NGO and a hospital 
and a law school and a few television companies.  It's just suicidal.  I 
think we really have to enter a period where we begin to put a lid on all of 
this and a cap on all of this just for the survival of, not just human 
being, but the planet itself.


FSRN: Arundhati Roy's new book is called 'Walking with the Comrades'.(*)  It 
documents the weeks she spent with Maoist guerillas in the forest of India, 
and it brings a critical look at the violent government response to the 
movement