‘Those Who’ve Tried To Change The System Via Elections Have Ended Up Being Changed By It’

On the anti-corruption movement that has implications for politics, media and the national discourse

Saba Naqvi Interviews Arundhati Roy

In August last year, Arundhati Roy wrote a piece that raised important questions about the Anna Hazare movement. A lot has changed since then and Arvind Kejriwal and Anna have taken divergent paths. Kejriwal will launch a political party on November 26 and in the last few months he has, along with lawyer Prashant Bhushan, taken on powerful politicians and corporates. Saba Naqvi sent Arundhati five questions on e-mail to get her views on what is an evolving situation that has implications for politics, media and the national discourse. Here are Arundhati’s very detailed answers.




What do you make of these many corruption exposes and do you see this as a healthy development?



It’s an interesting development. The good thing about it is that it gives us an insight into how the networks of power connect and interlock. The worrying thing is that each scam pushes the last one out of the way, and life goes on. If all we will get out of it is an extra-acrimonious election campaign, it can only raise the bar of what our rulers know we can tolerate, or be conned into tolerating. Scams smaller than a few lakh crores will not even catch our attention. In election season, for political parties to accuse each other of corruption or doing shady deals with corporations is not new—remember the BJP and the Shiv Sena’s campaign against Enron? Advani called it ‘Looting through liberalisation’. They won that election in Maharashtra, scrapped the contract between Enron and the Congress government, and then signed a far worse one!







"Each scam pushes the last out of the way. If all it ends in is an extra-acrimonious election campaign, it’ll only raise the bar of what our rulers think we can tolerate."





Also worrying is the fact that some of these ‘exposes’ are strategic leaks from politicians and business houses who are spilling the beans on each other, hoping to get ahead of their rivals. Sometimes it’s across party lines, sometimes it’s intra-party jockeying. It’s being done brilliantly, and those who are being used as clearing houses to front these campaigns may not always be aware that this is the case. If in this process there was some attrition and corrupt people were being weeded out of the political arena, it would have been encouraging. But those who have been ‘exposed’—Salman Khurshid, Robert Vadra, Gadkari—have actually been embraced tighter by their parties. Politicians are aware of the fact that being accused or even convicted of corruption does not always make a dent in their popularity. Mayawati, Jayalalitha, Jaganmohan Reddy—they remain hugely popular leaders despite the charges that have been brought against them. While ordinary people are infuriated by corruption, it does seem as though when it comes to voting, their calculations are more shrewd, more complicated. They don’t necessarily vote for Nice Folks.



Why do you think stories that the media knew about but never carried or paid a price for carrying are suddenly coming out like a rash and new details are emerging in the process?



Just because there is a new kid in town, we mustn’t forget that some media houses and several other groups and individuals, at cost to themselves, have played a part in exposing major scams, like the Commonwealth games, 2G and Coal-gate, which shone the light on private corporations and sections of the media as well. Ironically, the Anna Hazare movement last year concentrated solely on politicians and let the others off the hook. But you’re right, there are cases in which the facts were known, but they remained unpublished until now. And suddenly it’s raining corruption scams now—some are even being recycled. Corruption has become so blatant, so pathological that those involved don’t even try very hard to hide their tracks. Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan have all played an important part in making it hard for the media to elide the issue. But the sudden rash of exposes also has to do with the growing competition between the various coalitions of politicians, mega corporations and the media houses they own. For example, I do believe there is some substance to the speculation that the expose of Gadkari has to do with Narendra Modi—backed by big business—positioning himself to become the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate and trying to get hostile lobbies out of the way. Now since it’s the era of corruption and balancesheets—blood is passe. It’s strange how often you hear commentators saying that it’s time to move on from the Sangh parivar’s Gujarat pogrom against Muslims in 2002 and to look ahead. The Congress party-led ’84 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi has been forgotten too. Killers and fascists are OK as long as they are not financially corrupt? What the newest anti-corruption movement led by Kejriwal and Bhushan is doing is important work that ought really to be done by the media and investigation agencies, and by people pressurising the system from outside. I’m not sure a new political party that is going to fight elections is the right vehicle. Given how elections work in India, given the amount of money and the machinations that go into them, what does this decision to stand for elections mean? There is a reason why the big political parties gleefully invite everybody to stand for elections. They know they control the arena, they want to turn newcomers into clowns in their circus, and wear them down by having to perform endlessly before a carnivorous media.







"While ordinary people are infuriated by corruption, it seems, when it comes to voting, their calculations are more shrewd. They don’t always vote for Nice Folks."





Many have walked this plank before. If, for example, Kejriwal’s party wins just a few seats, or none at all, what would it imply? That the majority of Indian people are pro-corruption? What stands exposed in all of this, other than the grand nexus between politicians and business houses, is that the media is struggling with its role as the ‘Fourth Estate’. A new political party, however good or honest, is not going to be able to resolve that anytime soon, because that is a structural problem. The media is hobbled by its economics. Recently in an interview, Vineet Jain of the Times Group was disarmingly frank when he said the Times Group was not in the business of news, but in the business of advertising. Apart from this, we have the problem of paid news and of outright ownership. Industrialists have always owned newspapers, but the scale of the operation has changed. Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), for example, recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels. Sometimes it’s the other way around: we have media houses own mining companies. Dainik Bhaskar, with a readership of 17 million, owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate and textiles. And then, of course, we have the newspapers and TV channels owned by politicians like Karunanidhi, Jayalalitha, Jaganmohan Reddy and others.



As the boundary between big business, big politics and news melts away, it’s becoming harder for journalists and reporters to do what was once considered an almost sacred duty—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That ideal has been more or less turned on its head.





‘Being against corruption is not ideology’. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)



Can anti-corruption be a valid plank for a political party?



I don’t think so. Corrupt politicians have shown themselves to be hugely popular. I hope Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan’s party will have more to its plank than just anti-corruption.







"Since it’s the corruption and balancesheets era, blood is passe. We are asked to move on from the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat and to look ahead."





I think the middle-class definition of corruption—as a sort of accounting problem—isn’t necessarily everybody else’s definition. Corruption is a symptom of a widening gap between the powerful and the powerless which, in India, is one of the worst in the world. That is what needs to be addressed. Moral policing, or even actual policing, can’t be a solution. What is that meant to achieve? Making an unjust system cleaner and more efficient? Setting up a parallel government with tens of thousands of police and bureaucrats, which is what the Jan Lokpal Bill envisages, will not solve the problem. Have our police and bureaucrats shown themselves to be guardians of the poor? Which pool will these new, honest souls be culled from? In a country where a majority of the population is illegitimate in the ways in which they live and work, the Jan Lokpal Bill could easily become a weapon in the hands of the middle classes—“Remove these filthy illegal slums, clear away these illegal vendors crowding the pavements”—and so on. The point is how do we define corruption? If a corporate house pays a thousand crore bribe to secure a contract for a coal-field, it’s corruption. If a voter takes a thousand rupees to vote for a particular politician, it’s corruption too. If a samosa-seller pays a cop a hundred-rupee bribe for a place on the pavement, that too is corruption. But are they all the same thing? I do not mean to suggest that there shouldn’t be a grievance redressal mechanism to monitor corruption, of course there should be. But that will not solve the big problem, because the big players only become better at covering their tracks.



For a political party to view the politics of this vast and complex country through the lens of corruption is—to put it politely—inadequate. Can we understand or address the politics of caste and class, ethnicity, gender, religious chauvinism, the whole of our political history, the current process of environmental devastation—and the other myriad things that make India’s engine work, or not work—all through the narrow, brittle lens of corruption? They can only be addressed if you know your people, if you have vision and ideology, not by just changing the props or costumes activists wear on stage when one or the other group accuses them of something or the other. Being against corruption is not in itself a political ideology. Even corrupt people will say they’re against corruption.



Change will come. It has to. But I doubt it will be ushered in by a new political party hoping to change the system by winning elections. Because those who have tried to change the system that way have ended up being changed by it—look what happened to the Communist parties. I think the insurrections taking place in the countryside will move towards the cities, not under any single banner, not in some orderly or revolutionary way, necessarily. It will not be pretty. But it’s inevitable.





Sections of the ruling class see the current exposes as ‘anarchy’. After the Ambani, KG basin and oil issue was raised, there were some commentaries about Kejriwal and “his leftist” friends. Your comments on this.



By ‘anarchy’, I presume they mean chaos, which is not what anarchy means. May I say that what the ruling classes are engaged in today, that is anarchy, by their definition. (By the way, I don’t know which of Arvind Kejriwal’s friends is a ‘leftist’.) Or are we now supposed to collapse ‘chaos’, ‘anarchy’ and the ‘left’ into one big ball of wax?







"As boundaries between big business, politics and news melt, journos find it harder to do what was once sacred duty: comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable."





I want to make just one very simple suggestion, and it is far from radical. Let’s say it is just a common minimum programme. We have become a country that is more or less run by private corporations. Let’s look at two of the biggest corporations who rule us today: Reliance and Tatas. Mukesh Ambani, who holds a majority controlling share in RIL, is personally worth $20 billion. RIL has a market capitalisation of $47 billion. Its business interests include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, SEZs, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. It has a controlling interest in 27 TV news and entertainment channels. It has endowed chairs in foreign universities worth millions of dollars.



The Tatas run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, phone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, and a major brand of iodised salt. The Tatas are also hugely invested in foreign universities.



I don’t think that there are corporations like these elsewhere in the world—none with this range of business interests, that control our lives so minutely, that can hold us to ransom and can shut us down as a country if they are unhappy with the deals they are being given. This is the biggest danger facing us.



What our economists like to call a level playing field is actually a machine spinning with a centrifugal force that funnels the poor out like disposable residue, and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, which is why 100 people have wealth equivalent to 25 per cent of the GDP and hundreds of millions live on less than `20 a day. It is why most of our children suffer from severe malnutrition, why two lakh farmers have killed themselves and why India is home to a majority of the world’s poor.







"Unless mega corporations are reined in, unless cross-ownership of business is regulated, unless media is freed from its control, we are headed for a shipwreck."





Whether you are Communist, Capitalist, Gandhian, Hindutva-ist, Islamist, Feminist, Ambedkarite, Environmentalist, whether you are a farmer, a businessman, journalist, writer, poet, or fool, even if you believe in privatisation and in the new economy—whatever—if you have a modicum of concern or affection, leave alone love, for this country, surely you must see that this is the clear and present danger? Even if these corporations and politicians were scrupulously honest, it is an absurd situation for a country to be in. Unless mega corporations are reined in and limited by legislation, unless the levers of such untrammelled power (which includes the power to buy politics and policymaking, justice, elections and the news) is taken away from them, unless the cross-ownership of businesses is regulated, unless the media is freed from the absolute control of big business, we are headed for a shipwreck. No amount of noise, no amount of anti-corruption campaigns, no amount of elections can stop that.



You have in the past described the system as “hollowed out”. In that case do you see all this as a pantomime?



Pantomime is a harsh word. I see what is happening now as part of the unrest, anger and frustration that is building up in the country. Sometimes the noisiness of it makes it hard to see clearly. But unless we look things in the eye—instead of heading off in strange quixotic directions—we can look forward to the civil war, which has already begun, reaching our doorsteps very soon.

‘Terrorism Isn’t The Disease; Egregious Injustice Is’

NARENDRA BISHT

INTERVIEW

‘Terrorism Isn’t The Disease; Egregious Injustice Is’

On laws like AFSPA, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, sedition, democracy, terrorism and more

PANINI ANAND INTERVIEWS ARUNDHATI ROY

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ALSO IN THIS STORY

No one individual critic has taken on the Indian State like Arundhati Roy has. In a fight that began with Pokhran, moved to Narmada, and over the years extended to other insurgencies, people’s struggles and the Maoist underground, she has used her pensmanship to challenge India’s government, its elite, corporate giants, and most recently, the entire structure of global finance and capitalism. She was jailed for a day in 2002 for contempt of court, and slapped with sedition charges in November 2010 for an alleged anti-India speech she delivered, along with others, at a seminar in New Delhi on Kashmir, titled ‘Azadi—the only way’. Excerpts from an interview to Panini Anand:
How do you look at laws like sedition and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or those like AFSPA, in what is touted as the largest democracy?
I’m glad you used the word touted. It’s a good word to use in connection with India’s democracy. It certainly is a democracy for the middle class. In places like Kashmir or Manipur or Chhattisgarh, democracy is not available. Not even in the black market. Laws like the UAPA, which is just the UPA government’s version of POTA, and the AFSPA are ridiculously authoritarian—they allow the State to detain and even kill people with complete impunity. They simply ought to have no place in a democracy. But as long as they don’t affect the mainstream middle class, as long as they are used against people in Manipur, Nagaland or Kashmir, or against the poor or against Muslim ‘terrorists’ in the ‘mainland’, nobody seems to mind very much.

“India’s democracy is for the middle class; for Kashmir or Manipur, it’s not available. Not even in the black market."

Are the people waging war against the State or is the State waging war against its people? How do you look at the Emergency of the ’70s, or the minorities who feel targeted, earlier the Sikhs and now the Muslims?
Some people are waging war against the State. The State is waging a war against a majority of its citizens. The Emergency in the ’70s became a problem because Indira Gandhi’s government was foolish enough to target the middle class, foolish enough to lump them with the lower classes and the disenfranchised. Vast parts of the country today are in a much more severe Emergency-like situation. But this contemporary Emergency has gone into the workshop for denting-painting. It’s come out smarter, more streamlined. I’ve said this before: look at the wars the Indian government has waged since India became a sovereign nation; look at the instances when the army has been called out against its ‘own’ people—Nagaland, Assam, Mizoram, Manipur, Kashmir, Telangana, Goa, Bengal, Punjab and (soon to come) Chhattisgarh—it is a State that is constantly at war. And always against minorities—tribal people, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, never against the middle class, upper-caste Hindus.


How does one curb the cycle of violence if the State takes no action against ultra-left ‘terrorist groups’? Wouldn’t it jeopardise internal security?
I don’t think anybody is advocating that no action should be taken against terrorist groups, not even the ‘terrorists’ themselves. They are not asking for anti-terror laws to be done away with. They are doing what they do, knowing full well what the consequences will be, legally or otherwise. They are expressing fury and fighting for a change in a system that manufactures injustice and inequality. They don’t see themselves as ‘terrorists’. When you say ‘terrorists’ if you are referring to the CPI (Maoist), though I do not subscribe to Maoist ideology, I certainly do not see them as terrorists. Yes they are militant, they are outlaws. But then anybody who resists the corporate-state juggernaut is now labelled a Maoist—whether or not they belong to or even agree with the Maoist ideology. People like Seema Azad are being sentenced to life imprisonment for possessing banned literature. So what is the definition of ‘terrorist’ now, in 2012? It is actually the economic policies that are causing this massive inequality, this hunger, this displacement that is jeopardising internal security—not the people who are protesting against them. Do we want to address the symptoms or the disease? The disease is not terrorism. It’s egregious injustice. Sure, even if we were a reasonably just society, Maoists would still exist. So would other extremist groups who believe in armed resistance or in terrorist attacks. But they would not have the support they have today. As a country, we should be ashamed of ourselves for tolerating this squalor, this misery and the overt as well as covert ethnic and religious bigotry we see all around us. (Narendra Modi for Prime Minister!! Who in their right mind can even imagine that?) We have stopped even pretending that we have a sense of justice. All we’re doing is genuflecting to major corporations and to that sinking ocean-liner known as the United States of America.


Is the State acting like the Orwellian Big Brother, with its tapping of phones, attacks on social networks?
The government has become so brazen about admitting that it is spying on all of us all the time. If it does not see any protest on the horizon, why shouldn’t it? Controlling people is in the nature of all ruling establishments, is it not? While the whole country becomes more and more religious and obscurantist, visiting shrines and temples and masjids and churches in their millions, praying to one god or another to be delivered from their unhappy lives, we are entering the age of robots, where computer-programmed machines will decide everything, will control us entirely—they’ll decide what is ethical and what is not, what collateral damage is acceptable and what is not. Forget religious texts. Computers will decide what’s right and wrong. There are surveillance devices the size of a sandfly that can record our every move. Not in India yet, but coming soon, I’m sure. The UID is another elaborate form of control and surveillance, but people are falling over themselves to get one. The challenge is how to function, how to continue to resist despite this level of mind-games and surveillance.

"Contemporary Emergency has gone to the workshop for denting-painting. It’s come out smarter, and more streamlined.”

Why do you feel there’s no mass reaction in the polity to the plight of undertrials in jails, people booked under sedition or towards encounter killings? Are these a non-issue manufactured by few rights groups?
Of course, they are not non-issues. This is a huge issue. Thousands of people are in jail, charged with sedition or under the UAPA, broadly they are either accused of being Maoists or Muslim ‘terrorists’. Shockingly, there are no official figures. All we have to go on is a sense you get from visiting places, from individual rights activists collating information in their separate areas. Torture has become completely acceptable to the government and police establishment. The nhrc came up with a report that mentioned 3,000 custodial deaths last year alone. You ask why there is no mass reaction? Well, because everybody who reacts is jailed! Or threatened or terrorised. Also, between the coopting and divisiveness of ngos and the reality of State repression and surveillance, I don’t know whether mass movements have a future. Yes, we keep looking to the Arab ‘spring’, but look a little harder and you see how even there, people are being manipulated and ‘played’. I think subversion will take precedence over mass resistance in the years to come. And unfortunately, terrorism is an extreme form of subversion.


Without the State invoking laws, an active police, intelligence, even armed forces, won’t we have anarchy?
We will end up in a state of—not anarchy, but war—if we do not address the causes of people’s rising fury. When you make laws that serve the rich, that helps them hold onto their wealth, to amass more and more, then dissent and unlawful activity becomes honourable, does it not? Eventually I’m not at all sure that you can continue to impoverish millions of people, steal their land, their livelihoods, push them into cities, then demolish the slums they live in and push them out again and expect that you can simply stub out their anger with the help of the army and the police and prison terms. But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe you can. Starve them, jail them, kill them. And call it Globalisation with a Human Face.

'The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report'- Arundhati Roy

The celebrated dissenter on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, mass uprisings in the Arab world, the Anna Hazare movement, her old comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, Maoism, writing and much else.

Rajesh Joshi

 

Rajesh Joshi: The 10th anniversary of September the 11th attacks on the US is upon us. What do you think has changed in the world, or hasn’t changed, in these years?
Arundhati Roy: Plenty has changed. The numbers of wars that are being fought has been expanded and the rhetoric that allows those wars —that are essentially a battle for resources —is now disguised in the rhetoric of the war on terror, and has become more acceptable in some ways and yet more transparent in other ways.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that has happened is that increasingly we are seeing that these wars can’t be won. They can be initiated. But they can’t be won. Like the war in Vietnam was not won. The war in Iraq has not been won. The war in Afghanistan has not been won. The war on Libya will not be won. There is this initial pattern where you claim victory and then these occupation forces get mired in a kind of slow war of attrition. That’s also partially responsible for the global economy slowly coming apart.

The other difficulty is that the more the weapons of conventional warfare become nuclear —and all this kind of air bombing and so on —the more it becomes clear to people who are fighting occupations that you can’t win a conventional war. So, ironically the accumulation of conventional weaponry is leading to different kinds of terrorism and suicide bombings and a sort of desperate resort to extremely violent resistances. Violent, ideologically as well, because you have to really motivate people to want to go and blow themselves up. So, [it's a ] very, very dangerous time.

You have been very critical of the war on terror, especially the US policy. Would you have preferred a Saddam Hussain or a Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

Well, it does look as if the Taliban regime is going to return in Afghanistan in some form or shape. And obviously, people like Saddam Hussain were first created and put in place and supported and funded and armed by the US. This process is something that a country that seeks hegemonic power can put in the despots it wants, topple them when it wants and then get mired in these kinds of battles where eventually it’s having to desperately scramble to get some foothold of a some face-saving measure in, say, Afghanistan. So, eventually, you are not ever going to get rid of despots or dictators or Taliban. The Taliban was also created by them. That kind of ideology was almost handed out as a kind of weaponry by them at the time they were fighting the Soviets which nobody really mentions. They just talk about Pakistan having had those camps but those camps were actually funded by the CIA and by Saudi Arabia, which is now one of the greatest despotic regimes wholly embraced by the US.

How do you look at the mass uprisings across the Arab world? Do you think it’s a positive development?

Obviously there are very positive things about it but the jury is still out on them, in terms of what happened in Egypt for instance. Hosni Mubarak was in power for 40 years. We knew that three months before the uprising in Tahrir Square, the papers were reporting that he was on his death bed. Then this uprising happened. And then you had such enthusiastic reporting by the western press about the uprising — the press decides which revolutions to report and which not to report and therein lies politics. You had similar huge uprisings, let’s say in Kashmir which was more or less blacked out and yet you had this being reported very enthusiastically but at the end of it you had headlines which said: 'Egypt Free, Army Takes Over'.

And today there are ten thousand people being tried in military tribunals. There is probably the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood happening now; it’s a negotiated emergence. I would say that it would be a successful uprising and a real democracy if they manage to completely stop the Egyptian role in the siege of Gaza. I don’t know if that’s going to happen.

There are lots of manipulations going on. In India, as well as in these places, there is also the use of people’s power. People are angry. People are genuinely furious. People who have lived under these despotic regimes are desperate. But just moving the big blocks a little bit allows an eruption to take place. Is that eruption really going to end up in a genuine democracy or is that anger going to be channelised into something else?... We are still waiting.

Aren’t you happy that dictatorships are falling like a pack of cards?

I would be happy if they were not going to be replaced by military regimes. I would be happy if I was sure that whatever takes its place isn’t going to be another manipulation... I would be happy. But at this moment in Egypt, people are being picked and tried in military tribunals just the way they were under Hosni Mubarak. Of course, I am happy but why should you be celebrating something unless what you are celebrating is the right thing?

You have been supporting people’s movements everywhere but you are very critical of the Anna Hazare movement. Common people participated in the movement, after all.

I don’t support all people’s movements. I certainly didn’t support the Ram Janambhumi movement which was one of the largest people's movement in this country – the movement to topple the Babri masjid and build a temple there. I think all kinds of fascism could describe itself as people’s movements and I don’t support fascism. I am not an indiscriminate supporter of people’s movements. In this particular case, I think it’s very important to read what was going on and what was going on was not simple. We are at a stage where huge corruption scandals mostly involving mining corporations and telecom companies and so on have been exposed for their links to the government, links to the media, for looting billions of dollars and there is no accountability, neither from the government nor from the corporations. And there is a huge amount of popular anger against them.

The reason I am very suspicious about what is happening here is that I feel that this anger from the top to the bottom is channelised into a people’s movement and that anger which was a very amorphous anger was being used to push through this very specific piece of legislation which I don’t think anybody— including a lot of the people who were pushing it— has read. And if you read that bill, it is not only legally ludicrous but the people who call themselves Team Anna themselves said that people were angry and we provided them the medicine. The Team Anna are themselves saying that the people didn’t read the bill but they said ‘give us some medicine for the sickness’, but they didn’t read what it said on the label of the medicine bottle. Very, very few people have read it. And that medicine is far more dangerous than the illness itself. That’s why I am worried. Then it became this moral movement which started to use the old symbols of religious fascism that all of us have seen, that started to exclude the minorities.

Some of your comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan are part of that movement. How can you say that the movement has streaks of fascism? Do you doubt Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan’s integrity or is it their understanding?

It’s not a question of doubting their integrity. I doubt their (Prashant Bhushan and Medha Patkar’s) understanding for sure on the Lokpal bill — I am not doubting their integrity. Neither of them has brought in the politics they spent their life time doing; they left it outside at the doorstep. I just want somebody to have a proper conversation about that bill that they were insisting be passed without discussion through Parliament by the 30th of August. If you look at the bill, it’s so terrifying. Firstly, it’s so un-worked out. It asks for ten people of integrity —and proper class —to be running a bureaucracy that would contain about 30,000 officers. There is no comment on where those officers are coming from, who they are; there is no idea of what you mean by corruption in a society like ours. Sure there is corruption — from poor people having to bribe government officers to get their ration bills to corporates paying and getting rivers and mountains to mine for free.
But corruption is a value system, which has to be pinned to a legal system. And I keep saying that there are huge numbers, millions of Indians, who live untitled and unidentified outside this legal system. Supposing you live in Delhi. You have huge number of slums, illegal hawkers, squatters' settlements. Suddenly some middle class community can say, ‘I live in Jorbagh there is a slum there, it’s illegal. The politicians are keeping them there because they get votes; the municipalities are allowing them because they get bribes. Get them out of here. These are illegal people’. What’s the meaning of corruption has not been debated. Forget the fact that they are asking for a bill where these ten people are at the top and there is an additional bureaucracy of 30,000 who will be given a huge amount of money by the government and they have the right to prosecute, to sentence, to tap phones, to dismiss, to suspend and to enquire into the activities of everybody from the PM to the judiciary downwards. They are just setting up a parallel hierarchy! What’s happening is that the middle class which has benefited from these policies of privatisation and globalisation has become impatient with democracy.

If globalisation and privatisation is not the answer, according to you, then what is?

I think that the only way that we can begin to move to a place where people have some rights is by learning how to become an opposition which demands accountability. What the Jan Lokpal bill does is to set up another Super Cop. I am saying that the beginning of moving towards a society that we would like to live in is to force accountability. And that is only when people begin to stand by those who are fighting for their rights and demand that something happens. Not when they look away and say: that’s not my problem that people are being killed in Dantewada. I am a middle-class person and I believe that I should benefit. If we live in a democracy and you believe that everybody does have certain minimum rights, then you’ve got to be able to open your eyes to it. That’s what I try and do in whatever way I could by standing by those resistance movements that are questioning everything from big dams to mining to all these things—who are refusing to give up their lands, who are standing up to the biggest powers, whether it’s the army or the corporations and all of that.

You are a fierce critic of the Manmohan Singh government’s economic policies but India’s development has been praised by President Barack Obama of the US and British Prime Minister David Cameron. Many would say you are using your celebrity status as a Booker Prize winner author to criticise the path that India has taken after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Booker Prize and all that is meaningless. There are plenty of famous people who can use their fame to sell shoes or coca cola. Nobody can use their fame meaninglessly. For me, I am a writer; I am somebody who sees the world in a particular way. And I keep saying that these words like ‘India’s development’ have become meaningless because who is India? When you say 'India' are you talking about the few hundred billionaires or are you talking about the 830 million people who live on less than 20 rupees a day? Surely, some people in India have developed very fast beyond their wildest dreams but they have done that by standing on the shoulders and the bodies of large number of other Indians. I keep saying when you have ten people in a room and one person become a billionaire and two people are doing really well and the rest of seven are starving and someone says, 'Hey, there are seven people are starving in this room', and you say, 'Why are you being negative? People have developed!' It doesn’t matter who I am, what I won, what I didn’t win. If I am saying something that is relevant it will have a place in this world. If I am being stupid, if I am being negative, if I am being meaningless, I won’t have a place in this world. So, there is no point in personalising things because it doesn’t really help.

Is Maoism the answer?
Of course it’s not the answer. However, as I keep saying what I believe is the answer is the diversity of resistance and the Maoists are at one end — the very militant end of the diversity. And they fight deep in the forests which are being filled with paramilitary and police and surely in that tribal village where no television camera ever reaches, where no Gandhian hunger strike is ever going to make the news, there is only the possibility of an armed resistance. Outside, that armed resistance will be crushed in a minute. The Maoists have not had any success outside. You need to look at other kind of resistance outside. The resistance movements often confuse the necessity for tactical differences with ideological differences. But the fact is that one of the things I think is wonderful in India is that there is a huge bandwidth of resistance movements who are being very effective and who are insisting on their rights and who are winning some battles. When you come back to this business of corruption, I would like to say that you have hundreds of secret memorandums of understanding (MoUs) between the governments and private corporations, which will result in a kind of social engineering across central India — forests, mountains, rivers — all of it given away to corporations. Millions of people are fighting for their rights. Nobody stood there and said can you declare those MoUs.

What does the state do? It has to defend itself.

Implicit in that statement is that the state is the enemy of the people and it has to defend itself. And if you see what’s happening in the world, increasingly that’s true that states and their armies are turning upon what traditionally were their own peoples. Wars are not always being fought between countries; they are also being fought by the state against their own people — a kind of vertical colonisation as opposed to a horizontal one.

Do you love to mess with power?

I do believe that the only way to keep power accountable is to always question it, to always mess with it in some way or the other.

Some people would say it’s very convenient of you to criticise things from a safe corner. What do you think your role is going to be in the future? Are you going to be a writer or have you every thought of joining politics?

It’s not a serious question, I am afraid. What I do is politics. What I write is politics. Traditionally this is what writers have done. So to separate commentary from writing, from politics, minimises politics, minimises writing, and minimises commentary. This has historically been the role of writers. I could surely go and wear a khadi sari and sit in the forest and become a martyr but that’s not what I plan to do. I have no problem being who I am, writing what I have because I am not playing for sainthood here. I am not playing for popularity. I am not asking to be hailed as a leader of the masses. I am a writer who has a particular set of views and I use whatever skills I have, I deploy whatever skills I have, whatever means I have to write about them, not always on my own behalf but from the heart of the resistance.

In an interview to Financial Times you once said, and I quote: “I feel like I’ve done a very interesting journey over the last 11 years, but now I’m ready to do something different. Two years ago, I told myself, ‘no more, enough of this’, and I was working on some fiction. Then this huge uprising happened in Kashmir.” Some would say your activism is just another career move — I’ve done this and now let’s move on and do something more exciting?

It’s not about more exciting things, it’s about writing again. If I am a writer and I have written in a certain way, then suddenly you feel like, for example The God of Small Things is a very political book but then there became another phase of very urgent and immediate politics and it became non-fiction. But I think fiction is a deeper, more subversive kind of politics. Like if you read The God of Small Things, dealing with issues of caste for example. It’s not about the government or the state versus the people; it’s about the absolute malaise within your own society. Fiction is a much better way of dealing with it. You can’t allow yourself to just be bogged down doing the same thing, thinking the same ways or using the same techniques of writing. It’s always a challenge. And it can never be that I will stop being a political person. Of course, I think that everybody, even a fashion model, is political. It’s the kind of politics you choose is what you choose to do. There is no escaping that. This idea that politics is only going out and standing for elections or addressing rallies is a very superficial thing.

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Rajesh Joshi works with BBC Hindi Service where this interview was first broadcast in Hindi

This Jan Lokpal bill would increase the possibilities of the penetration of international capital in India - Arundhati Roy

In an exclusive interview, writer Arundhati Roy said there are serious concerns about the Jan Lokpal Bill, corporate funding, NGOs and even the role of the media.

Sagarika Ghose: Hello and welcome to the CNN-IBN special. The Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement has thrown up multiple voices. Many have been supportive of the movement, but there have been some who have been sceptical and raised doubts about the movement as well. One of these sceptical voices is writer Arundhati Roy who now joins us. Thanks very much indeed for joining us. In your article in 'The Hindu' published on August 21, entitled 'I'd rather not be Anna', you've raised many doubts about the Anna Hazare campaign. Now that the movement is over and the crowds have come and we've seen the massive size of those crowds, do you continue to be sceptical? And if so, why?

Arundhati Roy: Well, it's interesting that everybody seems to have gone away happy and everybody is claiming a massive victory. I'm kind of happy too, relieved I would say, mostly because I'm extremely glad that the Jan Lokpal Bill didn't go through Parliament in its current form. Yes, I continue to be sceptical for a whole number of reasons. Primary among them is the legislation itself, which I think is a pretty dangerous piece of work. So what you had was this very general mobilisation about corruption, using people's anger, very real and valid anger against the system to push through this very specific legislation or to attempt to push through this very specific piece of legislation which is very, very regressive according to me. But my scepticism ranges through a whole host of issues which has to do with history, politics, culture, symbolism, all of it made me extremely uncomfortable. I also thought that it had the potential to turn from something inclusive of what was being marketed and touted and being inclusive to something very divisive and dangerous. So I'm quite happy that it's over for now.

Sagarika Ghose: Just to come back to your article. You said that Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia have received $ 400,000 from the Ford foundation. That was one of the reasons that you were sceptical about this movement. Why did you make it a point to put in the fact that Arvind Kejriwal is funded by the Ford foundation.

Arundhati Roy: Just in order to point to the fact, a short article can just indicate the fact that it is in some way an NGO driven movement by Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejriwal, Sisodia, all these people run NGOs. Three of the core members are Magsaysay award winners which are endowed by Ford foundation and Feller. I wanted to point to the fact that what is it about these NGOs funded by World Bank and Bank of Ford, why are they participating in sort of mediating what public policy should be? I actually went to the World Bank site recently and found that the World Bank runs 600 anti-corruption programmes just in places like Africa. Why is the World Bank interested in anti-corruption? I looked at five of the major points they made and I thought it was remarkable if you let me read them out:

1) Increasing political accountability

2) Strengthening civil society participation

3) Creating a competitive private sector

4) Instituting restraints on power

5) Improving public sector management

So, it explained to me why in the World Bank, Ford foundation, these people are all involved in increasing the penetration of international capital and so it explains why at a time when we are also worried about corruption, the major parts of what corruption meant in terms of corporate corruption, in terms of how NGOs and corporations are taking over the traditional functions of the government, but that whole thing was left out, but this is copy book World Bank agenda. They may not have meant it, but that's what's going on and it worries me a lot. Certainly Anna Hazare was picked up and propped up a sort of saint of the masses, but he wasn't driving the movement, he wasn't the brains behind the movement. I think this is something very pertinent that we really need to worry about.

Sagarika Ghose: So you don't see this as a genuine people's movement. You see it as a movement led by rich NGOs, funded by the World Bank to make India more welcoming of international capital?

Arundhati Roy: Well, I mean they are not funded by the World Bank, the Ford foundation is a separate thing. But just that I wouldn't have been this uncomfortable if I saw it as a movement that took into account the anger from the 2G Scam, from the Bellary mining, from CWG and then said 'Let's take a good look at who is corrupt, what are the forces behind it', but no, this fits in to a certain kind of template altogether and that worries me. It's not that I'm saying they are corrupt or anything, but I just find it worrying. It's not the same thing as the Narmada movement, it's the same thing as a people's movement that's risen from the bottom. It's very much something that, surely lots of people joined it, all of them were not BJP, all of them were not middle-class, many of them came to a sort of reality show that was orchestrated by even a very campaigning media, but what was this bill about? This bill was very, very worrying to me.

Sagarika Ghose: We'll come to the bill in just a bit but before that I want to bring in another controversial statement in your article which has sparked a great deal of controversy among even your old associates Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, where you said, 'Both the Maoists and Jan Lokpal Movement have one thing in common, they both seek the overthrow of the Indian state.' Why do you believe that the movement for the Jan Lokpal Bill is similar to the Maoist movement in seeking the overthrow of the Indian state?

Arundhati Roy: Well, let's separate the movement from the bill, as I said that I don't even believe that most people knew exactly what the provisions of the bill were, those who were part of the movement, very few in the media and on the ground. But if you study that bill carefully, you see the creation of a parallel oligarchy. You see that the Jan Lokpal itself, the ten people, the bench plus the chairman, they are selected by a pool of very elite people and they are elite people, I mean if you look at one of the phases which says the search committee, the committee which is going to shortlist the names of the people who will be chosen for the Jan Lokpal will shortlist from eminent individuals of such class of people whom they deem fit. So you create this panel from this pool, and then you have a bureaucracy which has policing powers, the power to tap your phones, the power to prosecute, the power to transfer, the power to judge, the power to do things which are really, and from the Prime Minister down to the bottom, it's really like a parallel power, which has lost the accountability, whatever little accountability a representative government might have, but I'm not one of those who is critiquing it from the point of view of say someone like Aruna Roy, who has a less draconian version of the bill, I'm talking about it from a different point of view altogether of firstly, the fact that we need to define what do we mean by corruption, and then what does it mean to those who are disempowered and disenfranchised to get two oligarchies instead of one raiding over them.

Sagarika Ghose: So do you believe that the leaders of this movement were misleading the crowds who came for the protest because they were not there simply as an anti-corruption movement, they were there to campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill and if people knew what the Jan Lokpal Bill was all about, in your opinion, setting up this huge bureaucratic monster, many of those people might well have not come for the movement, so do you feel that the leaders were misleading the people?

Arundhati Roy: I can't say that they were deliberately misleading people because of course, that bill on the net, if anybody wanted to read it could read it. So I can't say that. But I think that the anger about corruption became so widespread and generalised that nobody looked at what, there was a sort of dissonance between the specific legislation and the anger that was bringing people there. So, you have a situation in which you have this powerful oligarchy with the powers of prosecution surveillance, policing. In the bill there's a small section which says budget, and the budget is 0.25 per cent of the Government of India's revenues, that works out to something like Rs 2000 crore. There's no break up, nobody is saying how many people will be employed, how are they going to be chosen so that they are not corrupt, you know, it's a sketch, it's a pretty terrifying sketch. It's not even a realised piece of legislation. I think that, in a way the best thing that could have happened has happened that you have the bill and you have other versions of the bill and you have the time to now look at it and see whatever, I just want to keep saying that I'm not, my position in all this is not to say we need policing and better law. I'm a person who's asking and has asked for many years for fundamental questions about injustice, which is why I keep saying let's talk about what we mean by corruption.

Sagarika Ghose: And you believe that the reason why this movement is misconceived is because it's centered around this Jan Lokpal Bill?

Arundhati Roy: Yes, not just that, I think centrally, that I was saying earlier, can we discuss what we mean by corruption. Is it just financial irregularity or is it the currency of social transaction in a very unequal society? So if you can give me 2 minutes, I'll tell you what I mean. For example, corruption, some people, poor people in villages have to pay bribes to get their ration cards, to get their NREGA dues from very powerful vested interests. Then you a middleclass, you have honest businessmen who cannot run an honest business because of all sorts of reasons, they are out there angry. You have a middleclass which actually bribes to buy itself scarce favours and on the top you have the corporations, the politicians looting millions and mines and so on. But you also have a huge number of people who are outside the legal framework because they don't have pattas, they live in slums, they don't have legal housing, they are selling their wares on redis, so they are illegal and in an anti-corruption law, an anti-corruption law is naturally sort of pinned to an accepted legality. So you can talk about the rule of law when all your laws are designed to perpetuate the inequality that exists in Indian society. If you're not going to question that, I'm really not someone who is that interested in the debate then.

Sagarika Ghose: So fundamentally it's about service delivery to the poorest of the poor, it's about ensuring justice to the poorest of the poor, without that a whole bureaucratic infrastructure is meaningless?

Arundhati Roy: Well Yes, but you know as I said in my article, supposing you're selling your samosas on a 'rehdi' (cart) in a city where only malls are legal, then you pay the local policemen, are you going to have to now pay to the Lokpal too? You know corruption is a very complicated issue.

Sagarika Ghose: But what about the provisions for the lower bureaucracy. The lower bureaucracy is going to be brought into the Lokpal, they're going to have a state level Lokayukta, so there is an attempt within the Lokpal Bill to go right down to the level of the poorest of the poor and then you can police even those functionaries who deal with the very poor. So don't you have hope that there, at least, it could be regularised because of this bill?

Arundhati Roy: I think that part of the bill will be interesting, I think it's very complicated because the troubles that are besetting our country today are not going to be solved by policing and by complaint booths alone. But, at the lower level, I think we have to come up with something where you can assure people that you're not going to set up another bureaucracy which is going to be equally corrupt. When you have one brother in BJP, one brother in Congress, one brother in police, one brother in Lokpal, I would like to see how that's going to be managed, this law is very sketchy about that.

Sagarika Ghose: But just to come back to the movement again, don't you think that the political class has become corrupt and has become venal and you have a movement like this it does function as a wake up call?

Arundhati Roy: To some extent yes, but I think by focusing on the political class and leaving out the corporations, the media that they own, the NGOs that are taking over, governmental functions like health, you know corporates are now dealing with what government used to deal with. Why are they left out? So I think a much more comprehensive view would have made me comfortable even though I keep saying that for me the real issue is what is it that has created a society in which 830 million people live on less than Rs 20 a day and you have more people and all of the poor countries of Africa put together.

Sagarika Ghose: So basically what you're saying is that laws are not the way to tackle corruption and to tackle injustice. It's not through laws, it's not through legal means, we have to do it through much more decentralisation of power, much more outreach at the lowest level?

Arundhati Roy: I think first you have to question the structure. You see if there is a structural inequality happening, and you are not questioning that, and you're in fact fighting for laws that make that structural inequality more official, we have a problem. To give an example, I was just on the Chhattisgarh-Andhra Pradesh border where the refugees from Operation Greenhunt have come out and underneath. So for them the issue is not whether Tata gave a bribe on his mining or Vedanta didn't give a bribe in his mining. The problem is that there is a huge problem in terms of how the mineral and water and forest wealth of India is being privatised, is being looted, even if it were non corrupt, there is a problem. So that's why we're just not coolly talking about Dantewada, there are many a places I mean what's happening in Posco, in Kalinganagar . So this is not battles against corruption. There's something very, very serious going on. None of these issues were raised or even alluded to somehow.

Sagarika Ghose: So basically what you're saying is that it is not the battle against corruption which is the primary battle, it's the battle for justice that has to be the primary battle in India. Just to come back to the point about the law, many have said that this is a process of pre-legislative consultation, that all over the world now civil society groups, I know you don't like that word, are co-operating with the government in law making and a movement like this institutionalises that, institutionalises civil society groups coming into the law making process. Doesn't that make you hopeful about this movement?

Arundhati Roy: In principal, yes, but when a movement like this which has been constructed in the way that it has, you can talk about, sort of calls itself the people or civil society and says that it's representing all of civil society. I would say there's a problem there and it depends on the law. So right now I think the good thing that has happened is that the Jan Lokpal Bill which probably has some provisions that will make it into the final law, is one of the many bills that will be debated. So, yes, that's a good thing. But if it had just gone through in this way, I wouldn't be saying yes, that's a good thing.

Sagarika Ghose: Let's talk about the media. You've been very critical about the media and the way the media, particularly broadcast media has covered this movement, do you believe that if the media had not given it this kind of time, this movement simply wouldn't have taken off? Do you believe that it's a media manufactured movement?

Arundhati Roy: Well, I'm not going to say that's entirely media manufactured. I think that was one of the big factors in it. There was also mobilisation from the BJP and the RSS, which they've admitted to. I think the media, I don't know when before campaigned for something in this way where every other kind of news was pushed out and for ten days, you had only this news. In this nation of one billion people, the media didn't find anything else to report and it campaigned, not everybody, but certainly certain major television channels campaigned and said they were campaigning, they said, 'We're the channel through whom Anna speaks to the people and so on. Now firstly to me that's a form of corruption in the first place where presumably, a broadcast licence as a news channel has to do with reporting news, not campaigning. But even if you are campaigning and the only reason that everybody was reporting it was TRP ratings, then why not just settle for pornography or sadomasochism or whatever gives good TRP ratings. How can news channels just abandon every other piece of news and just concentrate on this for 10 days? You know how much of spot ad costs on TV, what kind of a price would you put on this? Why was it doing this? Per se if media campaigns had to do with social justice, if the media spent 10 days campaigning on why more than a lakh farmers have committed suicide in this country, I'd be glad because I would say okay, this is the job of the media. It is like the old saying - to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Sagarika Ghose: But don't you think one man taking on the might of the government is a big story and don't you think that that deserves to be covered?

Arundhati Roy: No, I don't. For all the sorts of reasons that I've said, it was one man trying to push through a regressive piece of legislation.

Sagarika Ghose: Let's come to the role of the RSS which you have also eluded to. You've spoken about the role of aggressive nationalism or Vande Mataram being chanted, of the RSS saying that we're involved in this particular movement, but then your old associates Prashant Bhushan and Medha Patkar are in this movement as well. Is it fair to completely dub this movement as an RSS Hindu right wing movement?

Arundhati Roy: I haven't done that though some people have. But I think it's an interesting question to talk about symbolism and this movement. For example, what is the history of Vande Mataram? Vande Mataram first occurred in this book by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1882, it became a part of a sort of war cry at the time of partition of Bengal and since then, since in 1937 Tagore said it's a very unsuitable national anthem, very divisive, it's got a long communal history. So what does it mean when huge crowds are chanting that? When you take up the national flag, when you're fighting colonialism, it means one thing. When you're a supposedly free nation that national flag is always about exclusion and not inclusion. You took up that flag and the state was paralysed. A state which is not scared of slaughtering people in the dark, suddenly was paralysed. You talk about the fact that it was a non violent movement, yes, because the police were disarmed. They just were too scared to do anything. You had Bharat Mata's photo first and then it was replaced by Gandhi. You had people who were openly part of the Manovadi Krantikari Aandolan there. So you have this cocktail of very dangerous things going on, you had other kinds of symbolism. Imagine Gandhi going to a private hospital after his fast. A private hospital that symbolises the withdrawal of the state from healthcare for the poor. A private hospital where the doctors charge a lakh every time they inhale and exhale. The symbolisms were dangerous and if this movement had not ended in this way, it could have turned extremely dangerous. What you had was a lot of people, I'm not going to say they were only RSS, I'm not going to say they were only middle-class, I'm not going to say they were only urban. But yes, they were largely more well off than most people who have been struggling on the streets and facing bullets in this country for a long time. But in some odd way the victims and the perpetrators of corruption of the recipients of the fruits of modern development, they were all there together. There were contradictions that could not have been held together for much longer without them just tearing apart.

Sagarika Ghose: But weren't you impressed by the sheer size of the crowd? Weren't you impressed by the spontaneity of the crowd? The fact that people came out, they voiced their anger, they voiced their protest, surely it can't just all be boxed into one shade of opinion.

Arundhati Roy: Should I tell you something Sagarika? I have seen much larger crowds in Kashmir. I have seen much larger crowds even in Delhi. Nobody reported them. They were then only called 'traffic jam bana diya inhone'. I was not impressed by the size of the crowds apart from the fact that I'm not that kind of a person. I'm sure there were larger crowds chanting for the demolition of the Babri Masjid, would that be fine by us? It's not about numbers.

Sagarika Ghose: Is that how you see this movement? You see it as a kind of Ram Janmabhoomi Part 2?

Arundhati Roy: No, not at all. I've said what I feel. That would be stupid for me to say. But I see it as something potentially quite worrying, quite dangerous. So I think we all need to go back and think a lot about what was going on there and not come to easy conclusions and easy condemnations, I think we really need to think about what was going on there, how it was caused, how it happened, what are the good things, what are the bad things, some serious thinking. But certainly I'm not the kind of person who just goes and gets impressed by a crowd regardless of what it's saying, regardless of what it's chanting, regardless of what it's asking for.

Sagarika Ghose: But what about the persona of Anna Hazare? Many would say that he evoked a certain different era, he evoked the era of the freedom struggle, he is a simple Gandhian, he does lead a very austere life, he lives in a small room behind a temple and his persona of what he is evokes a certain moral power perhaps which is needed in an India which is facing a moral crisis.

Arundhati Roy: I think Anna Hazare was a sort of empty vessel in which you could pour whatever meaning you wanted to pour in, unlike someone like Gandhi who was very much his own man on the stage of the world. Anna Hazare certainly is his own man in his village, but here he was not in charge of what was going on. That was very evident. As for who he is and what his affiliations and antecedents have been, again I'm worried.

Sagarika Ghose: Why are you worried?

Arundhati Roy: Some of things that one has read and found out about, his attitude towards Harijans, that every village must have one 'chamaar' and one 'sunaar' and one 'kumhaar', that's gandhian in some ways, you know Gandhi had this very complicated and very problematic attitude to the caste system, anyone who knows about the debates between Gandhi and Ambedkar will tell you that. But what I'm saying is eventually we live in a very complicated society. You have a strong left edition which doesn't know what to do with the caste system. You have the Gandhians who are also very odd about the caste system. You have our deeply frightening communal politics, you have this whole new era of new liberalism and the penetration of international capital. This movement just did not know the beginning of its morals. It could have ended badly because nobody really, you know, you choose something like corruption, it's a pot into which everyone can piss, anti-left, pro-left, right, I mean, I was in Hyderabad, Jagan Mohan Reddy who was at that time being raided by the CBI was one of his great supporters. Naveen Patnaik…

Sagarika Ghose: But isn't that its strength? It's an inclusive agenda. Anti-corruption movement brings people in.

Arundhati Roy: It's a meaningless thing when you have highly corrupt corporations funding an anti-corruption movement, what does this mean? And trying to set up an oligarchy which actually neatens the messy business of democracy and representative democracy however bad it is. Certainly it's a comment on the fact that our country suffering from a failure of representative democracy, people don't believe that their politicians really represent them anymore, there isn't a single democratic institution that is accessible to ordinary people. So what you have is a solution which isn't going to address the problem.

Sagarika Ghose: So a corporate funded movement which seeks to lessen the power of the democratic state and seeks to reduce the power of the democratic state?

Arundhati Roy: I would say that this bill would increase the possibilities of the penetration of international capital which has led to a huge crisis in the first place in this country.

Sagarika Ghose: Just on a different note, what do you think of the fast-unto-death? Many have criticised it as a 'Brahamastra' which shouldn't be easily deployed in political agitations, Gandhi used it only as a last resort. What is your view of the hunger strike or the fast-unto-death?

Arundhati Roy: Look the whole world is full of people who are killing themselves, who are threatening to kill themselves in different ways. From a suicide bomber to the people who are immolating themselves on Telangana and all that. Frankly, I'm not one of those people who's going to stand and give a lecture about the constitutionality of resistance because I'm not that person. For me it's about what are you doing it for. That's my real question - what are you doing it for? Who are you doing it for? And why are you doing it? Other than that I think I personally believe that there are things going on in this world that you really need to stand up and resist in whatever way you can. But I'm not interested in a fast-unto-death for the Jan Lokpal Bill frankly.

Sagarika Ghose: So what is your solution then. How would you fight corruption?

Arundhati Roy: Sagarika, I'm telling you that corruption is not my big issue right now. I'm not a reformist person who will tell you how to cleanse the Indian state. I'm going on and on in all the 10 years that I've written about nuclear powers, about nuclear bombs, about big dams, about this particular model of development, about displacement, about land acquisition, about mining, about privatisation, these are the things I want to talk about. I'm not the doctor to tell the Indian state how to improve itself.

Sagarika Ghose: So corruption really does not concern you in that sense?

Arundhati Roy: No, it does, but not in this narrow way. I'm concerned about the absolutely disgusting inequality in the society that we live in.

Sagarika Ghose: And this movement has done nothing to touch that. What precedents has it set for protest movements in the future? Do you think this movement has set a precedent for protest movements in the future?

Arundhati Roy: For protest movements of the powerful, protests movements where the media is on your side, protests movements where the government is scared of you, protest movements where the police disarm themselves, how many movements are there going to be like that? I don't know. While you're talking about this, the army is getting ready to move into Central India to fight the poorest people in this country, and I can tell you they are not disarmed. So, I don't know what lessons you can draw from a protest movement that has privileges that no other protest movement I've ever known has had.

Sagarika Ghose: Just to re-emphasise the point about Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, these are old time associates of yours in activism. They are deeply involved in this particular movement. How do you react to them being involved in this movement of which, you're so critical?

Arundhati Roy: With some dismay because Prashant is a very close friend of mine and I respect Medha a lot, but I think that their credibility has been cashed in on in some ways, but I feel bad that they are part of it.

Sagarika Ghose: You have voiced fears in your article as well that in some ways, this movement and this bill is an attempt to diminish the powers of the democratic government and to reduce the discretionary powers of the democratic government. So you feel that this is a corporate funded exercise to reduce the powers of the democratically elected government?

Arundhati Roy: Well not corporate funded, but there's a sort of IMF World Bank way of looking at it, fuelling this whole path because if you remember in the early 90s when they began on this path of liberalisation and privatisation. The government itself kept saying, 'Oh, we're so corrupt. We need a systemic change, we can't not be corrupt,' and that systemic change was privatisation. When privatisation has shown itself to be more corrupt than, I mean the levels of corruption have jumped so high, the solution is not systemic. It's either moral or it's more privatisation, more reforms. People are calling for the second round of reforms for the removal of the discretionary powers of the government. So I think that's a very interesting that you're not looking at it structurally, you're looking at it morally and you're trying to push whatever few controls there are or took the way once again for the penetration of international capital.

Sagarika Ghose: But people like Nandan Nilekani have argued this movement and this bill could stop reforms actually. It could actually put an end to the reforms process by instituting this big bureaucratic infrastructure - this inspector raj. But you don't go along with that. You believe that this is a way of taking the reforms agenda forward.

Arundhati Roy: I think it depends on who captures that bureaucracy. That's why I'm worried about this combination of sort of Ford funded NGO world and the RSS and that sort of world coming together in a kind of crossroads. Those two things are very frightening because you create a bureaucracy which can then be controlled, which has Rs 2000 crore or whatever, 0.25 per cent of the revenues of the Government of India at its disposal, policing powers, all of this. So it's a way of side-stepping the messy business of democracy.

Sagarika Ghose: That's interesting the combination of Ford funded NGOs, rich NGOs and the Hindu mass organisations. That's the combination that you see here and that's what makes you uneasy.

Arundhati Roy: yes, and when you look at the World Bank agenda, it's 600 anti-corruption plans and projects and what it says, what it believes, then it just becomes as clear as day what's going on here.

Sagarika Ghose: And what is going on, just to push you on that one?

Arundhati Roy: What I said, that you stop concentrating on the corruption of government officers when you know of governments, politicians, and leaving out the huge corporate world, the media, the NGOs who have taken over traditional government functions of electricity, water, mining, health, all of that. Why concentrate on this and not on that? I think that's a very, very big problem.

Sagarika Ghose: So it was a protest movement of the entitled and the protest movement of the privileged. Arundhati Roy thanks very much indeed for joining us.

Arundhati Roy on India's fight against Corruption

We are here, all of us, because like many others in this country we are concerned about the rampant corruption that is hollowing out the institutions of our democracy. Twenty years ago, when the era of “liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation” descended on us, we were told that public sector units and public infrastructure needed to be privatised because they were corrupt and inefficient.

We were told the problem was systemic. Now that nearly everything has been privatised, when our rivers, mountains, forests, minerals, water supply, electricity and communications systems have been sold to private corporations, we find that corruption has grown exponentially, the growth rate of corruption has surpassed everything we could possibly imagine. In scam after scam, the figures that are being siphoned away are completely off the charts. It is not surprising that this has enraged the people of this country. But that anger does not always show signs of being accompanied by clear thinking.

Among the millions of understandably furious people who thronged to Jantar Mantar to support Anna Hazare and his team, corruption was presented as a moral issue, not a political one, or a systemic one — not as a symptom of the disease but the disease itself. There were no calls to change or dismantle a system that was causing the corruption. Perhaps this was not surprising because many of those middle-class people who flocked to Jantar Mantar and much of the corporate-sponsored media who broadcast the gathering, calling it a “revolution” — India’s Tahrir Square — had benefited greatly from the economic reforms that have led to corruption on this scale. (The same media has in the past ignored rallies of hundreds of thousands of poor people who have gathered in Delhi in the past because their demands did not suit the corporate agenda). It was not surprising then, that several corporate CEOs generously donated lakhs of rupees to support the campaign, cellphone companies weighed in with free SMS messages — here was their chance to undo the beating the public image of the corporate sector and corporate media had taken when the 2G scam hit the news.

When corruption is viewed fuzzily, as just a touchy-feely “moral” problem then everybody can happily rally to the cause — fascists, democrats, anarchists, god-squadders, day-trippers, the right, the left and even the deeply corrupt, who are usually the most enthusiastic demonstrators. It’s a pot that is easy to make but much easier to break. Anna Hazare threw the first stone at his own pot when he shocked his supporters from the left by rolling Narendra Modi onto centre-stage, in his “Development Chief Minister” clothes. Leaving aside the debate on Modi’s extremely dubious achievements in the field of “development” — many of us were left to wonder whether we were being offered a supposedly incorruptible fascist as an alternative to hopelessly corrupt supposed democrats.

I am not against having a strong anti-corruption body, though I would like to be reassured that it in itself does not become an unaccountable, undemocratic institution accruing great powers to itself. However I do not believe that we can fight communal fascism or economic totalitarianism (that has led to us having more than 800 million people in this country living on less than 20 rupees a day) with only legal measures.

As long as we have these economic policies in place, the National Employment Guarantee Act will never be able to do away with hunger and malnutrition, anti-corruption laws will not do away with injustice, and criminal laws will not do away with communal fascism, the twin sibling of economic totalitarianism. They will, at best, be mitigating measures. As the historian Howard Zinn said “the rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and power in such complicated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.”

Will the Right to Information Bill or the Jan Lokpal Bill force the government to disclose the secret MoUs with private corporations it has signed in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand for which it is prepared to wage war against its poorest citizens? If they do, then these MoUs will disclose the fact that the government is selling the country’s minerals to private corporations for a pittance, a small royalty. It’s not corruption. It’s completely above board, it’s legal plunder which is more scandalous, and has economic, environmental and human costs that will outstrip the 2G scam several times over. If we do get the information, what will we do with it? I do believe that if anyone present at the “revolution” at Jantar Mantar had raised the question of the secret MoUs, the adoring TV coverage and a good proportion of the crowd would have disappeared very quickly.

The lawyer Prashant Bhushan who is on the drafting committee for the Jan Lokpal Bill understands all of this very clearly. In his years as a public interest litigation lawyer he has consistently represented mass movements as well as individuals who have been fighting these policies with their backs to the wall. He is the counsel in the PIL in the 2G scam in which Tata and Reliance, the biggest corporations in the country, along with their allies in the government and the media, have been badly exposed. Yesterday in court he asked why only the paid employees of these corporations were being arrested and not their proprietors. Such a man must be targeted, taken down, right?

The viciousness of the smear campaign against him is proof of the threat he poses to vested interests. I have known Prashant Bhushan for years. First as a comrade and now as a close friend. We may disagree about some things, but I would vouch for his integrity anytime, anywhere. He is acutely aware of his family’s social and economic privilege. Even more so of the fact that that most of that privilege is derived from his father to whom is he is very close, but with whom he has major ideological differences. Like many of us who are privileged compared to the majority of the people in this country (some of us by birth, caste, race, gender, and/or by virtue of writing a best-selling novel), Prashant had to decide what to do with that privilege. He chose to use his training as a lawyer to create as much space as possible for those against whom the Powers are arraigned. This is why he has been at the barricades of almost every issue of social justice that is being fought in this country. This is what has been turned against him. And this is why he is being hunted down.

In a filthy battle such as this one, in which facts are made up, none of us can ever be pure enough or righteous enough. None of us can hope to emerge untainted. However, the fight will continue. Retreat is not an option.