Hyderabad meeting to focus on Green Hunt, economic crisis
Apr 19, 2012, IANS
More than 300 delegates from across India, including writer and activist Arundhati Roy, historian Amit Bhattacharya, Maoist leader Tusharkanti Bhattacharya’s wife Soma Sen and Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde, will be present at the meet. At the two-day event, which includes a procession and a public meeting, the RDF will press for the withdrawal of paramilitary forces from the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. Read more »
India: Human rights activists urged to unite the struggles to free political prisoners
Release political prisoners unconditionally: CRPP
By Mohd. Ismail Khan, TwoCircles.net
Hyderabad, 24 March 2012: ‘Human rights activists should work together in cooperation, not in competition like different sects’, said well-known writer and human rights activist Arundhati Roy. She was speaking at a meeting organized by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP) A.P. chapter on the occasion of the 80 death anniversary of Shaheed Bhagat Singh.
Two locks opened in 1991 to divide depressed classes
She said, in 1991 two locks were opened in this country, one was the lock of Babri Masjid, and other was of the Indian markets. “The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the opening up of Indian markets were a deliberate attempt to weaken opposition to India becoming an ally of the US,” she said.
Arundhati Roy addressing the CRPP meeting in Hyderbad on 23rd March 2012According to Mrs. Roy those two factors were used by different governments to divide the depressed classes and to isolate them. “Babri Masjid demolition was used to terrorize and demonize Indian Muslim community, whereas 1991 reforms were used against Tribals and to help corporate houses to exploit depressed classes,” she added.
She further said that the US relationship has never benefited any country in the world. She gave the example of turmoil, and civil war kind of situation in Pakistan which according to her is the result of US strategic partnership.
She warned India of same fate if it gets closer to US. “Indo-US relations were a ‘theatrical drama’ enacted to induce India to support the US with a view to isolate Iran on one hand and to help build a cold war situation in China. India had acceded to the US at every stage right from buying nuclear reactors to opening up foreign direct investment. The big investments right now were in the education sector wherein US universities wanted to set up franchises in India. That is why all universities in India were shifting to the semester system of examinations like in the US. It was also not a coincidence that spiritual leader Sri Sri Sri Ravi Shankar insisted that education should be privatized.”
Ending her speech she urged the audience to give up the narrow thinking of political prisoners, and widen its meaning which includes every person who is in jail in any false case, even if the case is so petty like pick pocketing. Read more »
Capitalism’s Real Gravediggers
Beware the ‘Gush-Up Gospel’ Behind India’s Billionaires
Antilla Mansion on Altamount Road in Mumbai
Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “pay your respects to our new ruler.”
Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I’d read about this, the most expensive dwelling ever built, the 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the 600 servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn – a soaring wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches, bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, “trickle down” had not worked.
But “gush-up” has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2bn, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to a quarter of gross domestic product.
The word on the street (and in The New York Times) is, or at least was, that the Ambanis were not living in Antilla. Perhaps they are there now, but people still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, vastu and feng shui. I think it’s all Marx’s fault. Capitalism, he said, “ … has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.
In India, the 300m of us who belong to the new, post-“reforms” middle class – the market – live side by side with the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800m who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than 50 cents a day.
Mr Ambani is personally worth more than $20bn. He has a controlling majority stake in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of Rs2.41tn ($47bn) and an array of global business interests. RIL has a 95 per cent stake in Infotel, which a few weeks ago bought a major share in a media group that runs television news and entertainment channels. Infotel owns the only national 4G broadband licence. He also has a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations, some family-owned, some not, that run India. Some of the others are Tata, Jindal, Vedanta, Mittal, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilt across Europe, central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s largest private-sector power companies.
Since the cross-ownership of businesses is not restricted by the “gush-up gospel” rules, the more you have, the more you can have. Meanwhile, scandal after scandal has exposed, in painful detail, how corporations buy politicians, judges, bureaucrats and media houses, hollowing out democracy, retaining only its rituals. Huge reserves of bauxite, iron ore, oil and natural gas worth trillions of dollars were sold to corporations for a pittance, defying even the twisted logic of the free market. Cartels of corrupt politicians and corporations have colluded to underestimate the quantity of reserves, and the actual market value of public assets, leading to the siphoning off of billions of dollars of public money. Then there’s the land grab – the forced displacement of communities, of millions of people whose lands are being appropriated by the state and handed to private enterprise. (The concept of inviolability of private property rarely applies to the property of the poor.) Mass revolts have broken out, many of them armed. The government has indicated that it will deploy the army to quell them. Read more »
Arundhati Roy: “A few “pre-revolutionary” thoughts I had”
by Arundhati Roy at the People’s University, Washington Sq. Park, New York, November 16, 2011
opednews.com
Tuesday morning, the police cleared Zuccotti Park, but today the people are back. The police should know that this protest is not a battle for territory. We’re not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there. We are fighting for justice. Justice, not just for the people of the US, but for everybody.
What you have achieved since September 17th, when the Occupy movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language into the heart of empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies, mesmerized into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfillment.
As a writer, let me tell you, this is an immense achievement. And I cannot thank you enough.
We were talking about justice. Read more »
Arundhati Roy on Occupy Wall Street, Empire, Obama, and Walking with the Comrades
Democracy Now, November 15, 2011
AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the renowned Indian writer, global justice activist, Arundhati Roy. She has written many books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. Her journalism and essays have been collected in books including An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati Roy’s latest book, just out, is called Walking with the Comrades, a chronicle of her time in the forests of India alongside rebel guerrillas who are resisting a military campaign by the Indian government.
Last week, I sat down with Arundhati Roy when she came to New York—she had just visited Occupy Wall Street on her first day in New York—to talk about the significance of this, but also we spoke about the Arab Spring. We talk about her walk with the Maoists in India. Tomorrow, she will be speaking at Washington Square Park, part of a national day of action. First, Arundhati discusses Occupy Wall Street.
ARUNDHATI ROY: You know, what they are doing becomes so important because it is in the heart of empire, or what used to be empire, and to criticize and to protest against the model that the rest of the world is aspiring to is a very important and a very serious business. So I think that it makes me—it makes me very, very hopeful that after a long time you’re seeing some nascent political, real political anger here.
It does—I mean, it does need a lot of thinking through, but I would say that, to me, fundamentally, you know, people have to begin to formulate some kind of a vision, you know, and that vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth, of power, both political as well as corporate. You know, that has to be dismantled. And that has to be the aim of this movement. And that has to then move down into countries like mine, where people look at the U.S. as some great, aspirational model. Read more »
Arundhati Roy, transcript of Q and A at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 11/9/2011
By Sarahana, Impose Magazine
[Arundhati Roy at CUNY Graduate Center. All photos by Sarahana]14 years ago, Indian author Arundhati Roy made her debut with The God of Small Things, a novel that won the Booker prize and went on to sell more than 6 million copies worldwide. But the world of fiction was quickly abandoned when she turned to full time activism, churning out fiery political essays, and generally getting into trouble with the Indian government and religious fundamentalists.
Most recently, she spent time with Indian Maoist insurgents — at their invitation — in the jungles from which they operate. The essay she’s brought back has been published as Walking with the Comrades, from which she read a few excerpts at an event hosted at City University of New York’s Graduate Center (despite the center’s further slashed, and quickly depleting, funds).
This is a transcript of the Q&A that followed the reading.
Some redundancies have been removed and friendly titles have been added.
—– TRANSCRIPT OF Q&A —–
(Love Makes Our Battle Ferocious)
Ruth Gilmore (CUNY): Thank you Arundhati for that amazing reading and the thoughts that you brought to my mind and all of our minds as you described this war against the forest people. One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot having read some of your work over the years and listening to you read now is how much beauty you put into a story [..?] and I think all the time about how you help people to think about the worst things that are happening in the world so that we can do something about it. And I wonder if you would talk, if you’d be interested in talking, a little bit about the sort of political project and the aesthetic project and finding all of the beauty in moments of the greatest hurt[?].
Arundhati Roy: Well I don’t actively look for it because it’s there. You know if you read the rest of the essay that I read from, actually we spent so much of our time just laughing, you know, inside [the forest], because I always sense that when you’re outside the immediate area of resistance, it’s much easier to feel despair because you have that choice. You can always say, “Okay, doesn’t matter, I won’t study politics, I’ll do interior design” or something whereas people who are in there, they don’t have a choice, you know. Even despair is not a choice because whether you’re a pessimist or whether you’re an optimist, no one is asking you, like you have to fight that battle some way or the other and there’s a sort of clarity there. And a lot of beauty, and a lot of hope.
I think for me it’s not a strategy, the way I write. It’s just the way I write. Or it’s just the way I think. Read more »
Arundhati Roy Advocates Buffer State Status For Kashmir
Kashmir Observer
New York, Nov 12: Internationally acclaimed novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has reiterated her support for an end to what she termed as “brutal” Indian occupation of Kashmir.
“I think that the people of Kashmir have the right to self- determination—they have the right to choose who they want to be, and how they want to be,” she said in the course of a discussion on ‘Kashmir: The Case for Freedom’ at Asia Society.
“Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world and one of the most ignored,” Roy said. Read more »
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
Interview: Arundhati Roy
By Dinyar Godrej, New Internationalist, Issue 445
Arundhati Roy is probably the most `do something’ public intellectual of our time. In her interview with New Internationalist she offers her take on market-friendly democracy, people power and the wealth that is fed by people’s lives.
Your writings have grappled with ruthless state violence which is often at the behest of corporate interests. Much of the corporate-owned media in India shies away from covering the civil war-like conditions in many parts of the country. The establishment tends to brand anyone who attempts to present the other side’s points of view as having seditious intent. Where is the democratic space?
You’ve partially answered your own question – newspapers and television channels do not make their money from subscriptions or viewership; in fact, corporate advertisements actually subsidize TV viewership and newspaper and magazine readership, so in effect, the mass media is run with corporate money.
Some media houses are directly owned by corporations, some indirectly by majority share-holdings. Some media houses in, say, Central India, have a direct interest in mining and infrastructure projects, so they have a vested interest in the push to displace people in the huge, ongoing land-grab in which land and resources are forcibly taken from the poor and given to the rich – a process which goes by the name of `development’. It would be foolish to expect objective reporting: not because the journalists are bad people, but because of the economic structure of the organizations they work for. In fact, what is surprising is that despite all of this, occasionally there is some very good reporting.
But overall we either have silence, or a completely distorted picture, in which those resisting their impoverishment are being labelled `terrorists’ – and these are not just the Maoist rebels who have taken to arms, but others who are involved in unarmed, but militant, struggles against the government. A climate has been created which criminalizes dissent of all kinds. Read more »
Candid Interview in The Scotsman: Arundhati Roy, Author
20 June 2011This 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. Read more »
FT interview explores the path of Arundhati Roy: author, activist, advocate
Arundhati Roy
By Amy Kazmin
Financial Times, June 3 2011
As a young girl, Arundhati Roy once raided her teacher’s garden in her native village in Kerala, the lush tropical state in the south of India. She dug up the carrots, removed the edible orange roots, then carefully replanted the green tops in the soil. It took four days for the greenery to wither and the crime to be discovered. The culprit was never identified.
Roy tells this story on a sweltering night in May in New Delhi, at the India launch of her new book, Broken Republic. She argues that India’s much-touted democratic institutions now resemble the post-raid carrots in the teacher’s garden: the green tops, or external forms, are present and visible, but the substance, or essence, is missing.
Sitting with the Booker Prize-winning novelist and political activist the next morning, in her tasteful, spacious apartment, I ask her what triggered the garden raid. Was it payback for an offence committed by the teacher? “I must have wanted carrots, and it was just like, Why not mess with power?” she says, then throws back her head and laughs.
On the cusp of turning 50, Roy, once the poster-child of the new India and now its most vociferous, high-profile critic, is still messing with power. For the past decade, India’s establishment has been selling the world its story: of an emerging superpower and vibrant democracy that is enjoying rapid economic growth. Roy, meanwhile, has used her special way with words, and her fame, to challenge that narrative, creating a picture of a state serving only a rapacious middle class, and trampling the poor in its rush for high living and global status.
Her latest book focuses on India’s newest unfolding tragedy: its hidden war against Maoist rebels, who have established a firm foothold among the neglected tribal people of India’s heartland. New Delhi has ignored the tribal belt – and the hardships of its residents – for years. Now, though, the government, and India’s corporations, want to mine the minerals buried beneath the region’s soil – and are dismayed to find the Maoists in their way. Read more »
India: the “Operation Green Hunt” War on the People moves against Delhi students at JNU
Witch-Hunt Of JNU Students In The Name Of Proctorial Enquiry!
In a leaflet announcing speeches on campus by Arundhati Roy and Amit Bhaduri, campus activists used this image to depict repression in India. The university administration says the image is offensive and a crime against the Indian state under the Official Emblem Act, and those responsible "must" be punished.
By JNU Forum Against War On People
28 May, 2011
Countercurrents.org
The Indian state’s war against the people in the form of Operation Green Hunt launched almost two years back is aimed at facilitating the corporate plunder of peoples’ land, forests, and resources. In the process the state has unleashed a spate of violent repression of the people fighting against this corporate loot. Braving extreme forms of state repression, Green Hunt has been resisted and fought back by vast sections of the people across the country, including peasants, workers, adivasis, dalits, students, intellectuals, peoples’ movements and democratic organisations. Outside the country too, the Indian state’s war campaign in central and eastern India has been opposed by the pro-people organisations and individuals. They have all vocally protested the crimes committed by the Indian state and its armed forces in these regions on a daily basis – be it the murder of adivasi villagers and political activists in their hundreds, use of brutal torture, burning and loot of hundreds of villages, thousands of arrests and forced displacements in still larger numbers.
The JNU Forum against War on People, formed by the students of the campus two years back to oppose the onslaught of Operation Green Hunt on the people of this country, has consistently worked towards bringing out the ground realities of state terror and repression in these regions. Against the state’s and the corporate media’s attempts to hide this reality, the Forum has continued to acquaint the campus community of the ongoing war in India’s heartland, and the students and teachers responded positively by participating in each of its programmes in their hundreds. The huge mobilisation of the students of JNU at the call of the Forum, whether it is to protest the JNU visit of P. Chidambaram –the main architect of Green Hunt– on 6 May 2010, the public meeting addressed by Arundhati Roy and Prof. Amit Bhaduri on 5 March 2011, or various protest actions at the initiative of the Forum in the last two years seem to have become a cause of worry for the Indian state and its local representative – the JNU administration.
Seen in this context, the ongoing Proctorial Enquiry conducted against the Forum allegedly for violating the Official Emblem Act, appears to be nothing but an urban extension of Operation Green Hunt. This enquiry is apparently carried out by the JNU administration to probe whether an image used in one of the campaign material for the public meeting organised by the Forum on 5 March misused the official symbol of the Indian state. The image portrays the jackboot of the Indian state coming down to stamp out and crush the people protesting against its repressive policies. The administration claims that the artwork on the boot amounts to the misuse of the symbol as per the Official Emblem Act. Hence it has initiated this Proctorial enquiry against the Forum so that its members can be punished for this ‘crime’! In their eagerness to take punitive action against the students, the officials in the administration have forgotten that this image is readily available in the internet and other public domains. It has been widely used all over the country to depict the use of brutal force by the armed forces of Indian state against the people resisting Operation Green Hunt. This is an artist’s impression which exposes the reality of Indian state’s war on people today, and was used by the Forum keeping in mind the context of a public meeting which was to discuss ‘Operation Green Hunt: Unmasking the Reality of Democracy and Development.’ This image along with the public meeting – which was addressed by Arundhati Roy and Prof. Amit Bhaduri with more than 600 students in attendance in Koyna mess – indeed unmasked the fact that there is no democracy and freedom of expression or political dissent for those who oppose the repressive polices of the Indian state such as the Green Hunt. Read more »
Arundhati Roy on Indian Democracy, Maoists
By Krishna Pokharel
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy, winner of the 1997 Man Booker prize for “The God of Small Things,” is undoubtedly India’s iconoclast no.1. During the launch of her two latest books—“Broken Republic” and “Walking With the Comrades” —on Friday evening, she came to the defence of the military tactics of India’s Maoists in her polemical best:
“When you have 800 CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary force deployed to fight country’s internal insurgencies] marching three days into the forest; surrounding a forest village and burning it and raping women, what are the poor supposed to do? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Can people who have no money boycott goods? What sort of civil disobedience we are asking them to adhere to?”
She backpedaled a little saying: “But at the same time what goes on in the forest in terms of resistance cannot go on outside the forest.”
In “Walking With the Comrades,” Ms. Roy recounts time she spent last year in the forest with the banned Maoist insurgents, who are active in large swathes of central and eastern India. In “Broken Republic,” she writes about the character of Indian democracy. Both books are published by Penguin India. Read more »
UK: June 12–Public Meeting on the War against Tribal People in India
International Campaign Against War on the People in India
Please join us for a public meeting and an audience with celebrated authors who will discuss their recent experiences in India with a special focus on the raging war against the poorest of the poor, the tribal people living in the heartland of India.
Arundhati Roy: From India and the author of recently published books
“Walking with the Comrades” and “Broken Republic”
Jan Myrdal: From Sweden and the author of
“Red Star Over India”
Basanta Indra Mohan: From Nepal and the author of
“Imperialism and Proletarian Revolution 21st Century”
Program includes: Presentations by the speakers,
film and Q&A session
Sunday, June 12, 2011, 1:30 pm till 5:00 pm
Place: Friends House, Main Hall,
173 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ
Hosted by: International Campaign Against War on People of India (ICAWPI) www.icawpi.org info@icawpi.org
c/o Gorki House, 70 Stoke Newington High Street, London N16 7PA Tel: +44(0)20 7193 1605
Co-organised by: IWA (GB), UNF Europe, ACDA, AFPRISA, TKM, GIKDER, 100FCC, WPRM-Britain, UFSO, CCRC,… (To be updated) For further information and contact with the organizers, please mail: june12-London@icawpi.org
