The Darkness
Has Passed But Is There a New Dawn for India?
By
Arundhati Roy
NEW
DELHI: For many of us who feel estranged from mainstream politics,
there are rare, ephemeral moments of celebration. Today is one
of them.
When
India went to the polls, we were negotiating the dangerous cross-currents
of neo-liberalism and neo-fascism - an assault on the poor and
minority communities. None of the pundits and psephologists predicted
the results.
The
right wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party)-led coalition has not
just been voted out of power, it has been humiliated. It cannot
but be seen as a decisive vote against communalism, and neo-liberalism's
economic "reforms''. The Congress has become the largest
party. The left parties, the only parties to be overtly (but ineffectively)
critical of the reforms, have been given an unprecedented mandate.
But
even as we celebrate, we know that on every major issue besides
overt Hindu nationalism (nuclear bombs, big dams and privatization),
the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences.
We know the legacy of the Congress led us to the horror of the
BJP. Still, we celebrate because surely a darkness has passed.
Or has it?
Recently,
a young friend was talking to me about Kashmir. About the morass
of political venality, the brutality of the security forces, the
inchoate edges of a society saturated in violence, where militants,
police ,intelligence officers, government servants, businessmen
and even journalists encounter each other, and gradually, over
time, become each other.
About
having to live with the endless killing, the mounting "disappearances'',
the whispering, the fear, the rumors, the insane disconnection
between what Kashmiris know is happening and what the rest of
us are told is happening in Kashmir. He said: "Kashmir used
to be a business. Now it's a mental asylum.''
Admittedly,
the conflicts in Kashmir and the north-eastern states make them
separate wings that house the more perilous wards in the asylum.
But in the heartland too, the schism between knowledge and information,
between fact and conjecture, between the "real'' world and
the virtual world, has become a place of endless speculation and
potential insanity.
Each
time there is a so-called terrorist strike, the BJP government
has rushed in, eager to assign culpability with little or no investigation.
The attack on the parliament building, on December 13, 2001, and
the burning of the Sabarmati Express, in Godhra, the following
year are fine examples. In both cases, the evidence that surfaced
raised disturbing questions and so was put into cold storage.
Everybody believed what they wanted to, but the incidents were
used to whip up communal bigotry in a haze of heightened Hindu
nationalism.
Many
governments - state as well as center; Congress, BJP, as well
as regional parties - have used this climate of manufactured frenzy
to mount an assault on human rights on a scale that would shame
the world's better known despotic regimes.
In
recent years, the number of people killed by the police and security
forces runs into tens of thousands. Andhra Pradesh (neo-liberalism's
poster state) chalks up an average of about 200 deaths of "extremists''
in "encounters'' every year. In Kashmir an estimated 80,000
people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply "disappeared''.
According
to the Association of Parents of Disappeared People in Kashmir,
more than 2,500 people were killed in 2003. In the last 18 months
there have been 54 deaths in custody. The Indian state's proclivity
to harass and terrorize has been institutionalized by the draconian
Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota). In Tamil Nadu, the act has
been used to stifle criticism of the state government.
In
Jharkhand, 3,200 people, mostly pooradivasis (indigenous
people) accused of being Maoists, have been named in Pota cases.
In eastern Uttar Pradesh, the act is used to clamp down on those
who protest about the dispossession of their land. In Gujarat
and Mumbai, it is used almost exclusively against Muslims. In
Gujarat, after the 2002 pogrom in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims
were killed, 287 people were accused under Pota: 286 were Muslim
and one a Sikh. Pota allows confessions extracted in police custody
to be admitted as evidence.
Under
the Pota regime, torture tends to replace investigation in our
police stations: that's everything from people being forced to
drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks,
burned with cigarette butts and having iron rods put up their
anuses, to being beaten to death.
Under
Pota you cannot get bail unless you can prove that you are innocent
- of a crime that you have not been formally charged with. It
would be naive to imagine that Pota is being "misused''.
It is being used for precisely the reasons it was enacted. This
year in the United Nations, 181 countries voted for increased
protection of human rights. Even the US voted in favor. India
abstained.
Meanwhile,
economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform
us that the Gross Domestic Product growth rate is phenomenal,
unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods. Government
storehouses are overflowing with grain. Outside this circle of
light, the past five years have seen the most violent increase
in rural-urban income inequalities since independence. Farmers
steeped in debt are committing suicide in hundreds; 40% of the
rural population in India has the same foor grain absorption level
as sub-Saharan Africa, and 47% of Indian children under three
suffer from malnutrition.
But
in urban India, shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports,
gymnasiums, hospitals have TV monitors in which India is Shining,
Feeling Good. You only have to close your ears to the sickening
crunch of the policeman's boot on someone's ribs, you only have
to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged broken
people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor, and you
will be in that other beautiful world. The singing, dancing world
of Bollywood's permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged,
happy Indians waving the tricolor and Feeling Good.
Laws
like Pota are like buttons on a TV. You can use it to switch off
the poor, the troublesome, the unwanted. When Pota was passed,
the Congress staged a noisy opposition in Parliament. However,
repealing Pota never figured in its election campaign. Even before
it has formed a government, there have been overt reassurances
that "reforms'' will continue. Exactly what kind of reforms,
we'll have to wait and see. Fortunately the Congress will be hobbled
by the fact that it needs the support of left parties to form
a government. Hopefully, things will change. A little. It's been
a pretty hellish six years.
The
writer is the author of The God of Small Things
and The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. This
article was circulated by the Guardian News Service
