The End of Imagination (44 page)

In response, the PWG campaigned actively, and, let it be said, violently, against Naidu. In May the Congress won the state elections. The Naidu government didn’t just lose, it was humiliated in the polls.

When the PWG called a public meeting, it was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA, all of them are considered terrorists.

Are they all going to be detained in some Indian equivalent of Guantánamo Bay?

The whole of the northeast and the Kashmir valley is in ferment. What will the government do with these millions of people?

One does not endorse the violence of these militant groups. Neither morally nor strategically. But to condemn it without first denouncing the much greater violence perpetrated by the State would be to deny the people of these regions not just their basic human rights but even the right to a fair hearing. People who have lived in situations of conflict are in no doubt that militancy and armed struggle provokes a massive escalation of violence from the State. But living as they do, in situations of unbearable injustice, can they remain silent forever?

There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the
public
. It is also in the hands of
sarkar
.

After all, when the US invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has done, with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be expected to be a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it
were
conventional, it would still be called terrorist.) In a strange sense, the US government’s arsenal of weapons and unrivaled air and fire power makes terrorism an all-but-inescapable response. What people lack in wealth and power, they will make up for with stealth and strategy.

In the twenty-first century, the connection between corporate globalization, religious fundamentalism, nuclear nationalism, and the pauperization of whole populations is becoming impossible to ignore. The unrest has myriad manifestations: terrorism, armed struggle, nonviolent mass resistance, and common crime.

In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to violence. No government’s condemnation of terrorism is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by nonviolent dissent. But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any kind of mass political mobilization or organization is being bought off, broken, or simply ignored.

Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let’s not forget the film industry, lavish their time, attention, funds, technology, research, and admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified.

The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: if you seek to air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.

As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to appropriate and control the world’s resources to feed the great capitalist machine becomes more urgent, the unrest will only escalate.

For those of us who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation is becoming unbearable.

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated.

The US soldiers fighting in Iraq—mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods—are victims, just as much as the Iraqis, of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.

The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals, look down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly. “There’s no alternative,” they say, and let slip the dogs of war.

Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, comes the chilling reply: “There’s no alternative but terrorism.” Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the State has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Human society is journeying to a terrible place.

Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice.

It’s time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons, or full-spectrum dominance, or daisy cutters, or spurious governing councils and
loya jirgas
, can buy peace at the cost of justice.

The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others.

Exactly what form that battle takes, whether it’s beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends on us.

Notes

My Seditious Heart: An Unfinished Diary of Nowadays

1.  Dr. Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba s/o G. Satayanarayana Murthy v. State of Maharashtra, Criminal Application No. 785 (2015).

2.  B. R. Ambedkar,
The Annihilation of Caste
, ed. S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 241–42.

3.  Mohd Haroon & Ors. v. Union of India & Anr., Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 155 (2013), 2.

4.  Sruthisagar Yamunan, “IIT-Madras Derecognises Student Group,”
Hindu
, May 28, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/iitmadras
-derecognises-student-group/article7256712.ece.

5.  “My Birth Is My Fatal Accident: Full Text of Dalit Student Rohith's Suicide Letter,
Indian Express
, January 19, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/india
/india-news-india/dalit-student-suicide-full-text-of-suicide-letter-hyderabad/.

6.  Dalit Panthers, “Dalit Panthers Manifesto” (Bombay, 1973), quoted in Barbara R. Joshi, ed.,
Untouchable!: Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement
(London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 145. For further discussion, see Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint,” in
Annihilation of Caste
, p. 116.

7.  “The Case against Afza,”
Hindu
, February 10, 2013, http://www.thehindu.com
/news/national/the-case-against-afzal/article4397845.ece.

8.  Mohammad Ali, “BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj Courts Controversy over JNU Unrest,”
Hindu
, February 15, 2016, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national
/other-states/bjp-mp-sakshi-maharaj-courts-controversy-over-jnu-unrest
/article8237932.ece; Abhinav Malhotra, “Sakshi Maharaj Demands Strict Action against Those behind JNU Incident,” February 14, 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kanpur/Sakshi-Maharaj-demands-strict-action-against
-those-behind-JNU-incident/articleshow/50979831.cms.

9.  Samreena Mushtaq, Essar Batool, Natasha Rather, Munaza Rashid, and Ifrah Butt,
Do You Remember Kunan Poshpura? The Story of a Mass Rape
(New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2016).

10.  “From the Delhi HC Order Granting Bail to Kanhaiya: ‘Those Shouting Anti-
national Slogans May Not Be Able to Withstand Siachen for an Hour,'”
Indian Express
, March 3, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india
/jnu-row-from-the-high-court-order-granting-bail-to-kanhaiya-those-shouting-
anti-national-slogans-may-not-be-able-to-withstand-siachen-for-an-hour/.

2. Democracy: Who Is She When She's at Home?

1. Her name has been changed.
   
2. Violence was directed especially at women. See, for
   example, the following report by Laxmi Murthy: “A doctor in rural Vadodara said that the wounded who started pouring in from February 28 had injuries of a kind he had never witnessed before even in earlier situations of communal violence. In a grave challenge to the Hippocratic oath, doctors have been threatened for treating Muslim patients, and pressurised to use the blood donated by RSS volunteers only to treat Hindu patients. Sword injuries, mutilated breasts and burns of varying intensity characterised the early days of the massacre. Doctors conducted post-mortems on a number of women who had been gang raped, many of whom had been burnt subsequently. A woman from Kheda district who was gang raped had her head shaved and ‘Om' cut into her head with a knife by the rapists. She died after a few days in the hospital. There were other instances of ‘Om' engraved with a knife on women's backs and buttocks.” From Laxmi Murthy, “In the Name of Honour,” CorpWatch India, April 23, 2002.
   
3. See “Stray Incidents Take Gujarat Toll to 544,”
   Times of India
   , March 5, 2002.
   
4. Edna Fernandes, “India Pushes Through Anti-terror Law,”
   Financial Times
   (London), March 27, 2002, 11; “Terror Law Gets President's Nod,”
   Times of India
   , April 3, 2002; Scott Baldauf, “As Spring Arrives, Kashmir Braces for Fresh Fighting,”
   Christian Science Monitor
   , April 9, 2002, 7; Howard W. French and Raymond Bonner, “At Tense Time, Pakistan Starts to Test Missiles,”
   New York Times
   , May 25, 2002, A1; Edward Luce, “The Saffron Revolution,”
   Financial Times
   (London), May 4, 2002, 1; Martin Regg Cohn, “India's ‘Saffron' Curriculum,”
   Toronto Star
   , April 14, 2002, B4; and Pankaj Mishra, “Holy Lies,”
   Guardian
   (London), April 6, 2002, 24.
   
5. See Edward Luce, “Battle over Ayodhya Temple Looms,”
   Financial Times
   (London), February 2, 2002, 7.
   
6. “Gujarat's Tale of Sorrow: 846 Dead,”
   Economic Times
   ,
   April 18, 2002; see also Celia W. Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,”
   New York Times
   ,
   July 27, 2002, A1; Edna Fernandes, “Gujarat Violence Backed by State, Says EU Report,”
   Financial Times
   (London), April 30, 2002, 12; and Human Rights Watch, “‘We Have No Orders to Save You': State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat,” vol. 14, no. 3(C), April 2002, www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/ (hereafter HRW Report). See also Human Rights Watch, “India: Gujarat Officials Took Part in Anti-Muslim Violence,” press release, New York, April 30, 2002.
   

1. “A Tainted Election,”
   Indian Express
   ,
   April 17, 2002; Meena Menon, “A Divided Gujarat Not Ready for Snap Poll,” Inter Press Service, July 21, 2002.
   
2. See HRW Report, 27–31. Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,” A1; “Women Relive the Horrors of Gujarat,”
   Hindu
   ,
   May 18, 2002; Harbaksh Singh Nanda, “Muslim Survivors Speak in India,” United Press International, April 27, 2002; and “Gujarat Carnage: The Aftermath—Impact of Violence on Women,” 2002, www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/women/index.htm.
   
3. HRW Report, 15–16, 31; Justice A. P. Ravani, Submission to the National Human Rights Commission, New Delhi, March 21, 2002, appendix 4. See also Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,” A1.
   
4. HRW Report, 31; and “Artists Protest Destruction of Cultural Landmarks,” Press Trust of India, April 13, 2002.
   
5. HRW Report, 7, 45. Rama Lakshmi, “Sectarian Violence Haunts Indian City: Hindu Militants Bar Muslims from Work,”
   Washington Post
   ,
   April 8, 2002, A12.
   
6. Communalism Combat
   (March–April 2002) recounted Jaffri's final moments: “Ehsan Jaffri is pulled out of his house, brutally treated for 45 minutes, stripped, paraded naked, and asked to say, ‘Vande Maataram!' and ‘Jai Shri Ram!' He refuses. His fingers are chopped off, he is paraded around in the locality, badly injured. Next, his hands and feet are chopped off. He is then dragged, a fork-like instrument clutching his neck, down the road before being thrown into the fire.” See also “50 Killed in Communal Violence in Gujarat, 30 of Them Burnt,” Press Trust of India, February 28, 2002.
   
7. HRW Report, 5. See also Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,” A1.
   
8. “ML Launches Frontal Attack on Sangh Parivar,”
   Times of India
   ,
   May 8, 2002.
   
9. HRW Report, 21–27. See also the remarks of Kamal Mitra Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who led an independent fact-finding mission to Gujarat, “Can India End Religious Revenge?” CNN International, “Q&A with Zain Verjee,” April 4, 2002.
   
10. See Tavleen Sigh, “Out of Tune,”
    India Today
    ,
    April 15, 2002, 21. See also Sharad Gupta, “BJP: His Excellency,”
    India Today
    ,
    January 28, 2002, 18.
    
11. Khozem Merchant, “Gujarat: Vajpayee Visits Scene of Communal Clashes,”
    Financial Times
    (London), April 5, 2002, 10. See also Pushpesh Pant, “Atal at the Helm, or Running on Auto?”
    Times of India
    ,
    April 8, 2002.
    
12. See Bharat Desai, “Will Vajpayee See through All the Window Dressing?”
    Economic Times
    ,
    April 5, 2002.
    
13. Agence France-Press, “Singapore, India to Explore Closer Economic Ties,” April 8, 2002.
    
14. See “Medha Files Charges against BJP Leaders,”
    Economic Times
    ,
    April 13, 2002.
    
15. HRW Report, 30. See also Burhan Wazir, “Militants Seek Muslim-Free India,”
    Observer
    (London), July 21, 2002, 20.
    
16. See Mishra, “Holy Lies,” 24.
    
17. The Home Minister, L. K Advani, made a public statement claiming that the burning of the train was a plot by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Months later, the police have not found a shred of evidence to support that claim. The Gujarat government's forensic report says that sixty liters of petrol were poured onto the floor by someone who was inside the carriage. The doors were locked, possibly from the inside. The burned bodies of the passengers were found in a heap in the middle of the carriage. So far, nobody knows who started the fire. There are theories to suit every political position: It was a Pakistani plot. It was Muslim extremists who managed to get into the train. It was the angry mob. It was a VHP / Bajrang Dal plot staged to set off the horror that followed. No one really knows. See HRW Report, 13–14; Siddharth Srivastava, “No Proof Yet on ISI Link with Sabarmati Attack: Officials,”
    Times of India
    ,
    March 6, 2002; “ISI behind Godhra Killings, Says BJP,”
    Times of India
    ,
    March 18, 2002; Uday Mahurkar, “Gujarat: Fuelling the Fire,”
    India Today
    ,
    July 22, 2002, 38; “Bloodstained Memories,”
    Indian Express
    , April 12, 2002; and Celia W. Dugger, “After Deadly Firestorm, India Officials Ask Why,”
    New York Times
    ,
    March 6, 2002, A3.
    

1. “Blame It on Newton's Law: Modi,”
   Times of India
   ,
   March 3, 2002. See also Fernandes, “Gujarat Violence Backed by State,” 12.
   
2. “RSS Cautions Muslims,” Press Trust of India, March 17, 2002. See also Sanghamitra Chakraborty, “Minority Guide to Good Behaviour,”
   Times of India
   ,
   March 25, 2002.
   
3. P. R. Ramesh, “Modi Offers to Quit as Gujarat CM,”
   Economic Times
   , April 13, 2002; “Modi Asked to Seek Mandate,”
   Statesman
   (India), April 13, 2002.
   
4. See M. S. Golwalkar,
   We, or Our Nationhood Defined
   (Nagpur: Bharat, 1939); Vinayak Damodar Savarkar,
   Hindutva
   (New Delhi: Bharti Sadan, 1989). See also “Saffron Is Thicker Than . . . ,” editorial,
   Hindu
   ,
   October 22, 2000; David Gardner, “Hindu Revivalists Raise the Question of Who Governs India,”
   Financial Times
   (London), July 13, 2000, 12.
   
5. See Arundhati Roy,
   Power Politics
   , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 57 and notes (p. 159).
   
6. See Noam Chomsky, “Militarizing Space ‘to Protect U.S. Interests and Investment,'”
   International Socialist Review
   19 (July–August 2001), www.isreview.org/issues/19/NoamChomsky.shtml.
   
7. Pankaj Mishra, “A Mediocre Goddess,”
   New Statesman
   ,
   April 9, 2001, a review of Katherine Frank,
   Indira: A Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
   (London: HarperCollins, 2001).
   
8. William Claiborne, “Gandhi Urges Indians to Strengthen Union,”
   Washington Post
   ,
   November 20, 1984, A9. See also Tavleen Singh, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,”
   India Today
   ,
   March 30, 1998, 24.
   
9. HRW Report, 39–44.
   
10. President George W. Bush, “September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks on the United States,” address to Joint Session of Congress, Federal News Service, September 20, 2001.
    
11. John Pilger, “Pakistan and India on Brink,”
    Mirror
    (London), May 27, 2002, 4.
    
12. Alison Leigh Cowan, Kurt Eichenwald, and Michael Moss, “Bin Laden Family, with Deep Western Ties, Strives to Re-establish a Name,”
    New York Times
    ,
    October 28, 2001, 1, 9.
    
13. Sanjeev Miglani, “Opposition Keeps Up Heat on Government over Riots,” Reuters, April 16, 2002.
    

1. “Either Govern or Just Go,”
   Indian Express
   ,
   April 1, 2002. Parekh is CEO of HDFC, the Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited.
   
2. “It's War in Drawing Rooms,”
   Indian Express
   ,
   May 19, 2002.
   
3. Ranjit Devraj, “Pro-Hindu Ruling Party Back to
   Hardline Politics,” Inter Press Service, July 1, 2002; “An Unholy Alliance,”
   Indian Express
   ,
   May 6, 2002.
   
4. Nilanjana Bhaduri Jha, “Congress [Party] Begins Oust-Modi Campaign,”
   Economic Times
   , April 12, 2002.
   
5. Richard Benedetto, “Confidence in War on Terror Wanes,”
   USA Today
   ,
   June 25, 2002, 19A; David Lamb, “Israel's Invasions, 20 Years Apart, Look Eerily Alike,”
   Los Angeles Times
   ,
   April 20, 2002, A5.
   
6. See “The End of Imagination,” above.
   
7. “I would say it is a weapon of peace guarantee, a peace guarantor,” said Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. See Imtiaz Gul, “Father of Pakistani Bomb Says Nuclear Weapons Guarantee Peace,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, May 29, 1998. See also Raj Chengappa,
   Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India's Quest to Be a Nuclear Power
   (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2000).
   
8. The 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan claimed hundreds of lives. See Edward Luce, “Fernandes Hit by India's Coffin Scandal,”
   Financial Times
   (London), December 13, 2001, 12.
   
9. See “Arrested Growth,”
   Times of India
   ,
   February 2, 2000.
   
10. Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,” A1.
    
11. Edna Fernandes, “EU Tells India of Concern over Violence in Gujarat,”
    Financial Times
    (London), May 3, 2002, 12; Alex Spillius, “‘Please Don't Say This Was a Riot. It Was Genocide, Pure and Simple,'”
    Daily Telegraph
    (London), June 18, 2002, 13.
    
12. “Gujarat is an internal matter and the situation is under control,” said Jaswant Singh, India's foreign affairs minister. See Shishir Gupta, “The Foreign Hand,”
    India Today
    ,
    May 6, 2002, 42 and sidebar.
    
13. “Laloo Wants Use of POTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] against VHP, RSS,”
    Times of India
    ,
    March 7, 2002.
    

3. When the Saints Go Marching Out:
The Strange Fate of Martin, Mohandas, and Mandela

1. See “Democracy: Who Is She When She's at Home?” in
   War Talk
   , 65–79, above.
   
2. “Cong[ress Party] Ploy Fails, Modi Steals the Show in Pain,”
   Indian Express
   ,
   August 16, 2003.
   
3. Agence France-Presse, “Indian Activists Urge Mandela to Snub Gujarat Government Invite,” August 4, 2003; “Guj[arat]–Mandela,” Press Trust of India, August 5, 2003; and “Battle for Gujarat's Image Now on Foreign Soil,”
   Times of India
   ,
   August 7, 2003.
   
4. Agence France-Presse, “Relax, Mandela Isn't Coming, He's Working on a Book,” August 5, 2003.
   
5. Michael Dynes, “Mbeki Can Seize White Farms under New Law,”
   Times
   (London), January 31, 2004, 26.