Documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak talks about his new film, Red Ant Dream, and the architecture of revolutionary desire

 

Red Ant Dream — Trailer Published on May 1, 2013

A documentary about those who live the revolutionary ideal in India

Director: Sanjay Kak
Synopsis:  ‘Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist’, the revolutionary patriot had said almost a hundred years ago, and that forewarning travels into India’s present, as armed insurrection simmers in Bastar, in the troubled heart of central India. But to the east too, beleaguered adivasis from the mineral-rich hills of Odisha come forth bearing their axes, and their songs. And in the north the swelling protests by Punjabi peasants sees hope coagulate–once more–around that iconic figure of Bhagat Singh, revolutionary martyr of the anti-colonial struggle. But are revolutions even possible anymore? Or have those dreams been ground down into our nightmares? This is a chronicle of those who live the revolutionary ideal in India, a rare encounter with the invisible domain of those whose everyday is a fight for another ideal of the world.
Gondi, Odiya, Punjabi with English Subtitles

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Talking about a revolution…

by BUDHADITYA BHATTACHARYA, The Hindu, Bangalore, May 16, 2013

 

• [Sanjay Kak. Photo: Apal Singh]
• The third in a cycle of films that interrogate the workings of Indian democracy, Red Ant Dream by Sanjay Kak looks at the revolutionary ideal as it exists in India today. Moving between Punjab, Bastar and Niyamgiri, the film documents the songs, histories and struggles of people who try to imagine a different world into being. The director responded to questions in an e-mail interview:

 

Can you talk about the beginnings of Red Ant Dream? When and why did you get interested in making this film?

 

[Photo:  A Still From the Film]

It’s always difficult to say where the beginnings of a film lie, because in a sense what you put into a documentary could be the summation of many years of thinking about an idea, your whole life even! For more than a decade all my films have been about resistance – Words on Water was about the movement against big dams in the Narmada valley, Jashn-e-Azadi about Kashmir, and now with this new film we look at the stirrings in Bastar in Chhattisgarh, the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha, and briefly Punjab. More specifically, I think Red Ant Dream was a reaction to the way in which the rebellion led by the Maoists in central India was being depicted in the media and in public discourse – as an isolated, autonomous outbreak of something like a pestilence, something alien called Maoism.

India: Brutal state’s war on the people promises new handouts and smiles

We will defeat Maoists design through development: Jairam Ramesh

PTI Mar 3, 2013

(“In the name of forest dwellers,…)

BHAWANIPATNA (ODISHA): The Centre would “fight” Naxals through welfare and empowerment schemes and protect tribals from being used as shields by the ultras, union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on Sunday said.

“In the name of forest dwellers, Maoists have created an atmosphere of fear (in the society). Our fight against Maoists is continuing. Through schemes for tribal welfare and women empowerment, with a strong political willpower, we will defeat their design,” he told a meeting of Adivasi Adhikar Samavesa at Narla in Odisha’s Kalahandi district.

Stating that Maoists were using tribals as shields, Ramesh said the Naxal issue can be tackled by strengthening Gram Sabhas and accelerating political processes and greater participation among forest dwellers.

As promised, the UPA government had undertaken several developmental schemes for uplift of tribals and many more were in the offing, Ramesh said.

The hanging of Afzal Guru is a stain on India’s democracy

Despite gaping holes in the case against Afzal Guru, all India’s institutions played a part in putting a Kashmiri ‘terrorist’ to death

Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, Sunday 10 February 2013

Indian police bring Afzal Guru to court in Delhi in 2002. Photograph: Aman Sharma/AP

Spring announced itself in Delhi on Saturday. The sun was out, and the law took its course. Just before breakfast, the government of India secretly hanged Afzal Guru, prime accused in the attack on parliament in December 2001, and interred his body in Delhi’s Tihar jail where he had been in solitary confinement for 12 years. Guru’s wife and son were not informed. “The authorities intimated the family through speed post and registered post,” the home secretary told the press, “the director general of the Jammu and Kashmir [J&K] police has been told to check whether they got it or not”. No big deal, they’re only the family of yet another Kashmiri terrorist.

In a moment of rare unity the Indian nation, or at least its major political parties – Congress, the Bharatiya Janata party and the Communist party of India (Marxist) – came together as one (barring a few squabbles about “delay” and “timing”) to celebrate the triumph of the rule of law. Live broadcasts from TV studios, with their usual cocktail of papal passion and a delicate grip on facts, crowed about the “victory of democracy”. Rightwing Hindu nationalists distributed sweets to celebrate the hanging, and beat up Kashmiris (paying special attention to the girls) who had gathered in Delhi to protest. Even though Guru was dead and gone, the commentators in the studios and the thugs on the streets seemed, like cowards who hunt in packs, to need each other to keep their courage up. Perhaps because, deep inside, themselves they knew they had colluded in doing something terribly wrong.

November 9: Arundhati Roy’s reading in NYC

THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS PRESENTS

** Walking with the Comrades **

Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerillas,
the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own
citizens—a war undocumented by a weak domestic press and fostered by
corporations eager to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal
lands. Chronicling her months spent living with the rebel guerillas in
the forests, Roy addresses the much larger question of whether global
capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its
colossal control.

Arundhati Roy

David Harvey

A reading by Arundhati Roy
Followed by a discussion with David Harvey
Wednesday November 9th 2011, 7.00 PM – 9.00 PM
The Proshansky Auditorium,  Cuny Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street

Free and open to the public

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a
film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide.

She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to
Empire, and Public Power in the Age of Empire. Roy was featured in the BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian was published as The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. Her recent work includes Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and a contribution to the forthcoming anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Her latest book, Walking with the Comrades was just published by Penguin Books. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

David Harvey, a leading theorist in the field of urban studies whom Library Journal called “one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century,” earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place (and more recently “nature”) have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital;The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference;Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. His numerous awards include the Outstanding Contributor Award of the Association of American Geographers and the 2002 Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his “outstanding contribution to the field of geographical enquiry and to anthropology.” He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, Roskilde in Denmark, Uppsala in Sweden, and Ohio State University.

Co-sponsored by the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change and the Center for Humanities

• Link to the post: http://pcp.gc.cuny.edu/arundhati-roy-walking-with-the-comrades-followed-by-a-discussion-with-david-harvey/
• Link to The Center for Place, Culture and Politics: http://pcp.gc.cuny.edu

Candid Interview in The Scotsman: Arundhati Roy, Author

20 June 2011

By Claire Black

A note slipped under a hotel room door. A boy with a Charlie Brown rucksack. Two unknown men on motorbikes. Hours of walking. That was Arundhati Roy’s route into the forests of central India, an area she describes as “homeland to millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world”.

This contested land is the backdrop to Roy’s new book, Broken Republic, the central essay of which is a fine piece of reportage detailing the three weeks she spent with the Maoist guerrilla movement and the tribal people, the adivasi, who are resisting the government’s plans to “develop” and mine the land on which they live.

Roy walked for hours each day, met with the most wanted guerrilla fighters, ate and talked with the insurgents, nearly half of whom are women, and spent her nights sleeping on a blue plastic sheet, a jhillie, in “the most beautiful room I have slept in in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel.”

The language is lyrical, but Roy’s critique is excoriating. This area, already ravaged by bloody battles, with guerrillas on one side and government paramilitaries on the other, is on the brink of becoming a war zone, she argues. The army is ready to move in and forcibly clear the adivasi from their land. For Roy, the stakes could not be higher – the fight is for the very “soul of India”.

From the thousand stars of the Dantewada forests, to the five stars of a London hotel, where, over a cup of tea, Roy proves no less passionate in person than in prose. Turning 50 this year, she looks much younger. Her hair, long and curly is flecked with grey but her skin is smooth. Her clothes are quirky and stylish: wide black trousers (“homemade” she smiles) and a tailcoat. Her diamond nose stud glinting.

Roy may be one of India’s most celebrated novelists, but as a political campaigner she’s an unapologetic thorn in the flesh of the Indian state. She argues that despite the headlines celebrating India’s stratospheric economic growth (until recently 10 per cent, but now revised down to 8.5 per cent) the country stands on a precipice. She believes that success is being bought at a heavy price: millions of displaced people and an unfolding ecological disaster, while the Maoist guerrilla fighters are simultaneously scapegoats for state violence, but also empowered by the brutality of the government forces.

Indian occupation forces attempt to keep the lid on Kashmir news

Murtaza Shibli
Guardian.co.uk, 28 October 2010


The current unrest in Kashmir has met with an increasingly brutal response from the Indian military.

The news that the prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy may be arrested for her remarks about Kashmir is not surprising. It is a sign of growing Indian intolerance towards the issue. During the current phase of the Kashmiri intifada, the only Indian response to Kashmiri demands for justice and self-determination has been the use of overwhelming military force. More than 112 civilians – mostly youths – have been killed and several thousand injured, mainly by the Indian military and paramilitary.

In the absence of strong international criticism, the Indian state has been emboldened to crush any dissent or demands of justice ferociously. Intimidating Kashmiri civil society has always been part of the standard Indian response, but it has grown exponentially over the last few months. In early July, the police arrested Mian Qayoom, president of the Kashmir Bar Association (the main lawyers’ body), for protesting against human rights violations. He was arrested under the draconian Public Safety Act, which authorises incarceration for up to two years if the authorities feel that the detainee may disturb peace and order or threaten the security of the state.

Several other human rights activists, such as Ghulam Nabi Shaheen and political workers remain behind bars, along with hundreds of Kashmiri youths who have been detained for offences such as throwing stones at gun-toting Indian armed forces.

India: ‘Fact-finding team’ on killing of CPI(Maoist) spokesperson Azad to release probe details

Times of India

NAGPUR: A ‘fact-finding team,’ formed by democratic rights and civil liberties organizations to probe into the alleged fake encounter of Naxal leader and party spokesperson Azad and journalist Hem Chandra Pandey on July 1, is set to release their findings before the media at Hyderabad on Sunday.

CPI (Maoist) spokesperson Azad

The team, which began its probe on Saturday in Adilabad, was sent on the behalf 24 organizations espousing the cause of democratic rights and civil liberties. The probe members already visited the villages close to the Wankedi jungle where Azad and his journalist friend were gunned down. The controversy flared up recently when railway minister Mamta Banerjee cornered the security agencies by supporting the claim of Naxals and pro-Maoist organizations that Azad was ‘murdered.’

“The autopsy report (of Azad) suggested that the entry and exit wounds were narrow in diameter, indicating that bullets were fired from close range. In case of a real encounter, the diameter of bullet wounds and exit points would be different, establishing the fact that the encounter was fake,” said activist Kranti Chetan, general secretary of Andhra Pradesh civil liberties committee.

The allegations of pro-Naxal front organizations were that Azad and Pandey were picked up by Andhra Pradesh-based security and intelligence agencies from Nagpur railway station on July 1. They were later taken to Adilabad and gunned down. The activists had rubbished outright the claim of security agencies that Azad and Pandey were intercepted while crossing over to Adilabad from Maharashtra and killed after an exchange of fire.

Protests of pro-Maoist organizations and civil liberty bodies against Azad’s killing, Operation Green Hunt and government of India’s ‘anti-tribal’ policy also gathered steam in the recent past. International rights organizations held protests in London, New York and California coinciding with the Indian Independence day to highlight the issue.

NY Times turns spotlight on Indian forces facing broad revolt in Kashmir

Aabid Nabi, right, sat next to his brother Fida Nabi, who was shot in the head during a protest, in a hospital in Srinagar. Mr. Nabi later died from his injury.

[In the context of the rapidly growing collaboration between the US and India on political, economic, .and military concerns, the US has been pushing India to take a larger role in the imperialist ventures in South and West Asia.  In this, the relations between Washington and India and Pakistan grow in importance.  And Kashmir, long ignored by the Western media, becomes an important testing ground.  This article raises current events in Kashmir to active consideration, as the ability of India to handle this crisis will condition its public role in the regional conflicts ahead.-ed.]

August 12, 2010

By LYDIA POLGREEN

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — Late Sunday night, after six days on life support with a bullet in his brain, Fida Nabi, a 19-year-old high school student, was unhooked from his ventilator at a hospital here.

Mr. Nabi was the 50th person to die in Kashmir’s bloody summer of rage. He had been shot in the head, his family and witnesses said, during a protest against India’s military presence in this disputed province.

8/7/2010: Press Conference by Concerned Citizens (Press Club, New Delhi)

Institute a Judicial Inquiry into the Killing of Azad, Polit Bureau Member of CPI (Maoist) and Freelance Journalist Hem Chandra Pandey

Stop War on People, Take up Peace Process Genuinely and Sincerely

The Government of India has not issued a statement or given a public clarification so far on the killing of Azad, spokesperson of CPI (Maoist), and Delhi-based journalist Hem Chandra Pandey on 2 July 2010. Subsequent to these incidents, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram who has been outspoken on his ‘abjure violence for 72 hours’ position, has been remarkably silent on these instances of state violence, and on his offer of ceasefire and dialogue with the Maoists. Nor has he responded to strong and widespread protests against these instances of the state’s violence. This is especially consequential because Azad was communicating with the Home Minister through Swami Agnivesh on his offer of ceasefire and dialogue.

Irina Bokova, Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the only United Nations agency with a mandate to defend freedom of expression and freedom of Press, asked the Government of India to investigate the circumstances under which freelance journalist Hem Chandra Pandey was killed. Asia-Pacific Director Jacqueline Park of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has said that “specialized in covering social issues, he ( Hemant Pandey) had gone to Nagpur to interview a leader of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), Cherukuri Rajkumar, alias Azad, who was said to be attempting to negotiate a truce with the authorities”. Further the basic principles of Article 21 of the Constitution and United Nations Declaration of Human Rights demand that there should be a judicial inquiry into this assassination.

Hundreds of organizations throughout the world have condemned the killing of Azad and Hem Chandra Pandey and demanded an enquiry by a constitutionally mandated agency. Yet the Government of India continues to remain silent. Swami Agnivesh, the interlocutor of the Government has publicly expressed his anguish and declared that he fears that the system of communication opened to negotiate the peace process was used to trace and then kill Azad.

New Delhi, India: Public Meeting Demands Investigation of Azad and Pandey murders

A Report onThe Public Meeting in Delhi on 3 August Demanding Judicial Inquiry

into the  Killing of Azad, the Spokesperson and Polit Bureau member of the CPI ( Maoist)

along with Journalist Hem Chandra Pandey

3^RD AUGUST 2010, NEW DELHI

The Public Meeting to demand the judicial enquiry into the killings of Azad, the spokesperson and Polit Bureau member of the CPI (Maoist) along with journalist Hem Chandra Pandey at Rajendra Bhavan, New Delhi was addressed by a large number of prominent citizens in the presence of packed auditorium. Dr. B D Sharma, former National Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes of Government of India chaired the public meeting and started the proceedings of the meeting by calling upon the audience to observe one minute’s silence in commemoration of Azad and Hem Chandra Pandey. Dr Anup Saraya a well-known doctor and democratic rights activist convened the meeting to start it proceedings.

G N Saibaba, conducting the meeting for the Chair told the audience that when he was killed, Azad was in the process of preparing the ground for talks on behalf of his party with the Government of India through Swami Agnivesh. In the manner and at the juncture in which he along with Hem Pandey has been killed has triggered a public uproar, and there is a strong demand to institute a judicial investigation into the circumstances of the killing of Azad and Hem Pandey.

Struck Off the Travel Posters

Bharati Chaturvedi

Environmentalist and founder of the green non-profit, Chintan

July 29, 2010

Where are you currently holidaying? Chances are, if you are on a trip to India, you would have seen the many dramatic images they put out for tourists.

In the 1980s, Indian government offices were lined with colourful posters with a breathtaking image that said ‘India’ in both English and Hindi. Sometimes, it would be a photograph of the Taj Mahal, and sometimes, one of India’s many indigenous people. I would stare at these posters with fascination — that was the closest I had ever come to these brightly dressed fellow Indians.

But you would have seen the newer ones, from the mid 2000s. The Incredible India campaign. The photographs this time showed another, slicker India. A skinny woman in silver leotards doing yoga on a mountainous ledge, for example. I’m struck by how the rural and the indigenous folk are no longer extravagantly advertised. But I also know there is a reason for this: they are now engaged in numerous David versus Goliath kind of battles against the government and giant private companies over their land and natural resources. The country is not officially proud to show them off.

“Operation Green Hunt” — the Cultural War

From the Odiya-language film "Swayamsidha"

BJP seeks ban on movie with Maoist theme

2010-07-21 22:40:00

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Orissa Wednesday sought a ban on an Oriya film with a Maoist theme and accused its producer and actors of gloryfying the Left-wing extremists’ ideology.

A delegation representing the state youth unit of the party met Governor M.C. Bhandare and submitted a memorandum demanding a ban on the release of ‘Swayamsidha’ in which two leaders of the state’s ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) would be seen in prominent roles.

‘At a time when the country is struggling to fight Maoism, how could a movie like this be allowed to be screened? We want a ban on the release of the film,’ Bibhuti Jena, president of the BJP’s state youth wing, told reporters.

However, the producer of the movie, Prabhat Ranjan Mallick, denied the charge and said ‘it (the movie) was an attempt to bring the so-called Naxals (Maoists) to the mainstream’.

Sidhant Mohapatra, a BJD member of the Lok Sabha, will be seen in the role of a Maoist leader in the film.

Kashmir Press on Strike to Lift Restrictions

Journalists protesting censorship in Srinagar, capital of Kashmir

Srinagar, July 10, KONS: In a major development during a highly volatile situation in the valley, Srinagar newspapers on Saturday suspended publication indefinitely to protest against “draconian” government measures which, according them, have “made it impossible for journalists to cover news stories and bring out newspapers.”

Media associations in Kashmir, which met for the second day on Saturday after announcing a one-day strike yesterday, extended their stir indefinitely saying that publications would not be resumed until concrete measures were taken to “restore the complete freedom of the media in Kashmir.”

Kashmir’s media professionals, both print and electronic, held an angry protest demonstration at the Press Enclave here, coming down heavily on the state government for its curbs and restrictions. Having gagged themselves with black bands, the journalists carried placards demanding lifting the “undeclared ban on newspapers” and the ‘curfew on news.”

Indian Journalists Protest Killing of Azad’s Companion

IJU, APUWJ demand probe

The Indian Journalists Union (IJU) and the AP Union of Working Journalists (APUWJ) today demanded an inquiry by an independent authority into the killing of Hemchandra Pandey, a freelance journalist, in an encounter along with top Maoist leader Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad in Adilabad last week.

Hemchandra Pandeys wife Babita cries over his coffin in New Delhi on Wednesday.

HYDERABAD: There was mild tension at Basheerbagh as media personnel made a vain bid to take out a procession with the body of Hemchandra Pandey, the journalist gunned down by the police in the company of Maoist leader Azad in the forests of Adilabad district last week.

Police prevented them from marching to the Basheerbagh crossroads, sparking off heated argument. Miffed, journalists hunkered down on the road and shouted slogans against the encounter killing.

Pandey’s body was brought in an ambulance to the old Press Club at Basheerbagh around 2 pm. Amid slogans of `Hemchandra Pandey Amar Hai,’ his mortal remains were placed outside the club to allow journalists to pay their last respects.Senior journalists and civil rights activists including singer Gadar and Virasam member Varavara Rao and others paid last respects to the journalist.

Journalists condemned the killing of Pandey and demanded that all `encounters’ be treated as murders and action taken against the policemen involved in the killing.After the tributes were paid, journalists tried to take the body in a procession to Basheerbagh crossroads but a huge posse of policemen, already deployed anticipating trouble, stopped them right in front of the Press Club.

India’s Government-Media Operations against Arundhati Roy

Operation Green Hunt’s Urban Avatar

By Arundhati Roy

14 June, 2010, The Dawn

While the Indian Government considers deploying the army and air force to quell the rebellion in the countryside, strange things are happening in the cities.

On the 2nd of June the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) held a public meeting in Mumbai. The main speakers were Gautam Navlakha, editorial consultant of the Economic and Political Weekly and myself. The press was there in strength. The meeting lasted for more than three hours. It was widely covered by the print media and TV. On June 3rd, several newspapers, TV channels and online news portals like Rediff.com, covered the event quite accurately. The Times of India (Mumbai edition), had an article headlined “We need an idea that is neither Left nor Right”, and the Hindu’s article was headlined “Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?” The recording of the meeting is up on YouTube.

The day after the meeting, the Press Trust of India (PTI) put out a brazenly concocted account of what I had said.

The PTI report was first posted by the Indian Express online on June 3rd 2010 at 13.35 pm. The headline said: “Arundhati backs Maoists, dares authorities to arrest her.”