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Arundhati Roy

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Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? 

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science? 

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept  over a million . More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the  New York governor ’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is  America !”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered. 

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? 

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim  citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier  Jair Bolsonaro , had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of  physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. 

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”. 

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. 

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under  lockdown . Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. 

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. 

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. 

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a  long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. 

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray. 

A few days later, worried that the  fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. 

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India  (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear. 

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week,  supply chains have broken , medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. 

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place. 

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now. 

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Arundhati Roy ’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ 

Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020

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February 26, 2021.

Arundhati Roy: “We Live in an Age of Mini-Massacres”

The man booker prize-winning author of “the god of small things” on the state of india’s democracy, violence against women and minorities, the role of the media, and more.

Internationally acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy speaks during a press conference, where the panel condemned the criminalization of the right to peaceful public protest in a democracy, in New Delhi in October 2020 Mayank Makhija/NurPhoto via AP

Arundhati Roy’s first novel, “The God of Small Things,” won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. Her second, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” was shortlisted for it. These books, written two decades apart, capture how India has changed. In addition to her fiction, though, Roy’s political essays taught a generation of young Indian writers to think incendiary thoughts. Her recent New Yorker profile says her essays on India ’ s nuclear policies are not so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire.

Years of increasing repression towards journalists from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have come to a head in recent weeks , as the country is roiled by the ongoing farmers’ protest against three farm bills passed in September 2020. Numerous journalists reporting on the protests have faced criminal charges and, in early February, some 100 journalists, publications, and activists were temporarily blocked by Twitter at the request of India’s Ministry and Electronics and Information Technology.   

Related Reading

In India, Journalists “Are Fighting For Whether Truth is Meaningful or Not” By Madeleine Schwartz

At a time when democratic values are under siege in her home country of India, as they are elsewhere around the world, including in the U.S., Roy’s analysis of issues like nuclear weapons, industrialization, nationalism, and more is essential to this moment. She is unapologetic about the stakes. Once, when a historian criticized her for passionate rhetoric, she responded, “I am hysterical. I’m screaming from the bloody rooftops … I want to wake the neighbors. That ’ s my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes.”

Roy’s work has been translated into more than 45 languages and, in 2019, her nonfiction was collected in a single volume, “ My Seditious Heart .” A new collection of essays, “ Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. ” was published last year. Roy spoke with the Nieman Foundation and shared her thoughts with Nieman Reports in February. Edited excerpts:

On whether India can still be called a democracy

Of course not. Apart from the laws that exist, like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [1967 anti-terrorism legislation to prevent unlawful activities and associations and “maintain the sovereignty and integrity of India”], under which you have hundreds of people now just being picked up and put into jail every day, apart from that fact, every institution that is meant to work as a check against unaccountable power is seriously compromised.

Also, the elections are compromised. I don’t think we have free and fair elections because you have a system now of secret electoral bonds, which allows business corporations to secretly fund political parties. We have today a party that is the richest political party in the world, the BJP. Elections in India have become a spectator sport — it’s like watching a Ferrari racing a few old bicycles.

In any case, a democracy doesn’t mean just elections. First of all, India hasn’t been a democracy in Kashmir. It hasn’t been a democracy in Bastar [a district in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India]. It hasn’t been a democracy for the poorest of the poor who have no access to institutions of justice, who live completely under the boot of police and the justice system that crushes them with violence and indifference.

Now the oxygen is being taken away, sucked out of the lungs of even the middle class and even the big farmers, the agricultural elite.

On violence against women and Dalit and Muslim citizens, including lynchings of minorities by Hindu nationalist mobs

The thing is that when it comes to women, the fact that the caste system exists has meant that dominant castes in many many villages in India still feel that they have the right to oppressed caste woman’s body. That is how it has been traditionally.

This is why in India only certain rapes create outrage, whereas others are accepted as part of how things go. Look at what has happens to women in the northeastern states—Manipur for example, or women in Kashmir. Places that are literally administered by the security forces. You can imagine what goes on with that kind of imbalance of power. But the outrage doesn’t manifest itself on India’s streets. So you ’ re left wondering which rapes are considered outrageous in a society like this, and which are not.

When people feel that they have a license to lynch — permission from the top, then the reasons for lynching are not just to keep a community in fear. A whole ecosystem of fear kicks in, and not just fear, bullying, avarice — how one set of people can gain advantage over another — by frightening them , chasing them away from their land, from their villages. There’s a kind of lynching economy also that establishes itself through all this. We live in an age of mini-massacres. Very atomized, localized. You don’t need the old-style mega massacres like Gujarat 2002 or Mumbai 1993 any more.

The most dangerous thing that has happened is that, [as] the last few elections have shown, the BJP has proved that it can win elections without the Muslim vote. That creates a situation, where you have a minority which actually is made up of millions of people who are virtually disenfranchised. That’s a very, very dangerous situation.

On the role the media has played in the decline of India’s democracy

None of this could have happened if it wasn’t the media. Here you see the confluence of corporate money, corporate advertisement, and this vicious nationalism. You can’t even call them media or journalists anymore. It would be wrong.

The only [legitimate] media that there is now is a few people who are online who are managing very bravely to carry on and a few magazines like Caravan. I was recently listening to a very moving talk by this young journalist called Mandeep Punia who had just been arrested and beaten up. He was talking about how so many of his fellow journalists cannot be called journalists any more.

They’re just people who act out a script every day. If you look at the media, the police — I’m sorry to say this, but it’s almost diseased. I keep joking that I can’t put on the TV in my house because it feels like that girl in “The Exorcist,” this green bile pouring forth from the TV screen and spilling onto the floor. I feel like I need to clean it up. I don’t put it on anymore.

On the role of the writer or the artist in democracies in crisis

I often think that writers are no different from plumbers or carpenters. Some service the fascists. Some service the others. It’s not that writers are in any way politically better people. You see plenty of writers completely being part of this Hindu fascist project.

It’s been a question that’s very interesting to me for as long as I’ve ever been a writer. During the Freedom struggle against the British it was easy to delineate the battle., “The colonizer’s bad and they’re white. The freedom fighters are local, and they’re brown.” There’s a way in which passions could be comparatively at least, clear. Now, it’s all so murky. The river’s full of mud and silt.

To me, it’s always been the case that I feel like you need to have eyes around your head. For example, if you look at what’s happening with the farm protests now, how do you understand it, as a writer or as a human being? The government is under pressure because it’s the first time they’re faced with people who have not necessarily always been their ideological opponent. It’s hard to portray farmers as terrorists and anti-nationals, though God knows they’ve tried.

The agriculture crisis is a real crisis. It wasn’t created by Hindu fundamentalism. It was created by the Green Revolution when capital-intensive farming was introduced. It was created by the over‑mining of water, by the over-use of pesticides, by hybrid seeds, by putting in massive irrigation projects and not thinking about how to drain the water. So how do I make literature out of irrigation problems, or drainage, or electricity?

It’s been something that I’ve been pretty obsessed with, understanding things which are not normally considered a fiction writer’s business. To me, I can’t write fiction unless I make it my business.You have to know how all these things intersect with each other. How does caste, or race, or class, or irrigation, or bore-wells affect what might seem like a clash between two communities?  How does the harnessing of rivers in Kashmir affect that conflict?

On the writing process

I am a structure nerd myself. A lot of it does have to do with the fact that I studied architecture, the fact that I am very and always have been very interested in cities and how they are structured and how they work, and how institutions in the city are built for citizens, and the non‑citizens live in the cracks.

To me, if you look at my fiction or the non‑fiction, even almost every non‑fiction essay, it is a story. It seems to be the only way I can explain things to myself. There is a mathematics to the way the structure works. In fiction, to me, the structure and the language is as important as the story or the characters.

I don’t think I’m capable of writing something from A to B. It has to take a walk around the park, and then come back to certain places, and then have these reference points. Whether it’s “The God of Small Things” or “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” structure’s everything.

On the dangers to journalists, intellectuals, and activists in India

The thing is, what we first have to understand is how ordinary people — ordinary villagers, indigenous people, women guerillas who’ve been fighting mining corporations, people whose names we don’t know — have been dragged into prison, have been humiliated, even sexually humiliated. Those who have humiliated them have been given bravery awards. Look at the number who have been imprisoned, executed, buried in mass graves in Kashmir. All that violence that many Indians have accepted quite comfortably, even approved of, has now arrived at their doorsteps.

When you’re a journalist, a writer, anybody whose head is above the water, you’re already privileged in terms of someone’s looking out for you. You have a lawyer. Meanwhile, we have thousands of people who are in prison who don’t have any access to legal help, nothing.

Then you have a situation where, I’d say, the best of the best — I mean journalists, trade unionists, lawyers who defend them — are in jail. We know a lot of them are in jail for entirely made‑up reasons. There are students in jail. The latest police trick is to make a charge-sheet that is 17,000 pages, 30,000 pages. You’d need a whole bloody library shelf in your prison cell to accommodate your own charge-sheet.

A lawyer or a judge can’t even read it, let alone adjudicate upon it, for years maybe. They are continuously arresting people, or threatening people with arrest. The harassment, even if you are not actually in prison is unbelievable. Your life comes to a standstill. And once people are jailed then the ones who aren’t spend all their time running to lawyers, attending court hearings…The other trick is to have non-internet trolls file cases against you in many cities and towns. Then you spend your time running around. Who can afford it? Who can hold a job if they have to worry about court appearances?

This kinds of harassment flourishes because  institutions in India are dominated by Hindutva apparatchiks, it’s really, really worrying. Of course, now, there seems to be a pretty focused attack on women, young women, women activists.

The Chief Justice recently said, “Why are women being kept in the protests?” He’s talking about women who are the backbone of the farming world. Why are they being “kept” in protests?

On the role of tech platforms

Initially, when the 2002 Gujarat pogrom [in which a Godhra train burning that killed nearly 60 Hindu pilgrims incited three days of inter-communal violence in the western state of Gujarat, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths] happened, in fact, for a whole set of reasons, Narendra Modi was banned from travelling to the U.S. A lot of activist groups had successfully campaigned to have him banned. When he became prime minister, that ban was removed.

As I said, at that time, India was at the time a very attractive finance destination. Today, that’s less true but then India is seen as the region that is going to be the bulwark against China and Chinese expansionism. So it’s going to be given a broad pass for these strategic reasons.

The role of big tech is interesting because from 2014 and pre‑2014, let’s say a few years before that, right up to now, the Hindu nationalists had figured out how to use social media to their advantage. You have these things called WhatsApp farms. You have trolls. You have disinformation and lies. All of it spreading like a bushfire.

But recently, you see that the other side has begun to gear up and fight back. Now, there’s a lot of tension on social media and the fact is that, in Kashmir, when 370 was abrogated [revoking the limited autonomy, or “special status,” of the Jammu and Kashmir region], you had an Internet ban that lasted for months and months. The Internet has been banned on the borders of Delhi. The Internet has been banned all over the place.

It should be considered a human rights violation, legally and properly. A crime against humanity actually — if you look closely at the consequences of an almost year-long ban. You cannot, on the one hand, push the entire country into digital transactions, unique IDs, Aadhar cards, iris scans, and then ban the Internet.

You have that situation right now where all of us are being pushed into some form of radical digital transparency, while the only thing that’s opaque is how elections are funded and how political parties make their money and keep their money secret.

On what gives hope

I’m not that  fairy princess who’s going to hold out this false hope. I have days of utter desolation and hopelessness, of course I do, like millions of others here. But the fact is that when we develop a way of thinking and a way of seeing, we end up, many of us, certainly me, being people who know that we’ve got to do what we have to do. Whether we win or lose, we’re going to do it because we’re never going to go over to the other side.

You’ve got to keep holding on to that,  because that is what puts the oxygen in our lungs, that way of thinking, that way of writing, that way of not aggrandizing yourself to an extent where you think you can solve all the world’s problems. You can’t, but you can do something. And so you just keep doing that something.

In the most stressful situations, whether it’s in the forest where I spent some time with the armed guerrillas in Bastar, or whether it’s friends in Kashmir, or whether it’s in the deepest, darkest places, there’s always humanity. There’s always humor. There’s always literature. There’s always music. There’s always something beautiful.

That’s life. There isn’t ever going to be an end to the chaos. Everything is never going to work out just fine. It’s not going to happen. But we have to be able to accommodate that chaos in our minds and be part of it, swim with it, absorb it, influence it, turn it to our purpose. The wind will change direction at some point, won’t it?

Further Reading

In india, journalists “are fighting for whether truth is meaningful or not”, by madeleine schwartz, international reporting must distinguish hindu nationalism from hinduism, by kalpana jain, amidst crackdowns, kashmiri journalists struggle to report, by toufiq rashid.

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Arundhati Roy: How a novel symbolises freedom and essay ‘a form of combat’

To arundhati roy, winner of the 2023 european essay prize, a novel is ‘real, unfettered azadi’. and essay a tool to fight against fascism and injustice..

When Arundhati Roy was thinking of the title of her 2020 collection of essays, AZADI: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (Penguin India), which recently earned her the 2023 European Essay Prize, her publisher in the UK, Simon Prosser, asked her what she thought of when she thought of azadi (freedom). “I surprised myself by answering, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘A novel.’ Because a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants — to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics,” she writes in the introduction to the book, a compilation of her lectures and essays written between 2018 and 2020, described by the publisher as “a pressing dispatch from the heart of the crowd and the solitude of a writer’s desk.”

In analysing the essence of a novel, Roy (61) posits that its complexity and intricacy should not be confused with it being ‘loose, baggy, or random’. “A novel, to me, is freedom with responsibility. Real, unfettered azadi” , she writes, pointing out how azadi , the slogan of the ‘freedom struggle’ in Kashmir, has also become a chant of millions against the project of Hindu nationalism. While some essays in the volume have been written through the lens of a novelist delving into the very universe of her novels, others explore the symbiotic relationship between fiction and reality, shining light on how fiction seamlessly integrates into the world and, in many ways, becomes the world itself. Like it does in her two novels: the lyrical and exquisitely written The God of Small Things (1997), for which she received the Booker Prize, and her long-awaited second work of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) .

Charles Veillon Foundation, the instituting body that confers the prize, said in a statement, ‘Roy uses the essay as a form of combat.’ The publication of The God of Small Things coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence from British colonialism. This period marked India’s pivot toward the global stage, during which the country aligned itself with the United States, embracing corporate capitalism, privatisation, and structural adjustments. However, a shift occurred the Indian political landscape in 1998 with the ascent of a BJP-led Hindu nationalist government, which conducted nuclear tests, altering the public discourse dramatically.

Roy, who had just won the Booker Prize, found herself thrust into the role of a cultural ambassador for the emerging New India. She began her journey of speaking out through her writing lest her silence was seen as complicity. Her powerful essay, ‘The End of Imagination’, which rails against the nuclear weapons as an affirmation of statehood, identity and defence, led to her being labelled ‘a traitor and anti-national’. However, she took these insults as badges of honour, realising well that speaking out was a political act in itself. In her subsequent essays, she wrote about dams, rivers, displacement, caste, mining, and civil war.

Literature and freedom

In her acceptance speech, Roy articulated her perspective on the notion of freedom. She made it clear that her happiness, as a writer, stems from the world of literature and the craft of writing. Over the past 25 years, she has penned essays that serve as a warning about the direction the country has been headed. Yet, these warnings have often fell on deaf ears, with liberals and self-proclaimed progressives often dismissing her writing. “But now the time for warning is over. We are in a different phase of history. As a writer, I can only hope that my writing will bear witness to this very dark chapter that is unfolding in my country’s life. And hopefully, the work of others like myself lives on, it will be known that not all of us agreed with what was happening,” she said.

Ahead of the 2024 General elections, Roy fears that if Narendra Modi comes back to power, there might be a new Constitution which will only curtail her ability to speak candidly. The irony lies in the fact that she receives the prize for her work, which essentially forewarned the country about its current trajectory. Much of her first essay, written for the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation which she delivered in the British Library in London in June 2018, is about the divisive partitioning of Hindustani into Hindi and Urdu, a schism that eerily foreshadowed the rise of Hindu Nationalism in India by more than a century. She delves into the historical roots of a project that would later reshape India’s political landscape. Scathing and incisive and trenchant and courageous and piercing and perspicacious — words that have come to define her style — these essays reflect the collective hopes, fears and despair of the people of India, minus the saffron brigade.

The early essays reflect the hope that many of us had in 2018: that Modi's reign would come to an end. “As the 2019 general election approached, polls showed Modi and his party’s popularity dropping dramatically. We knew this was a dangerous moment. Many of us anticipated a false-flag attack or even a war that would be sure to change the mood of the country,” she writes. In one of the essays, “Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy” (2018) she also underscores this fear: “We held our collective breath. In February 2019, weeks before the general election, the attack came. A suicide bomber blew himself up in Kashmir, killing forty security personnel. False flag or not, the timing was perfect. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back to power.”

As she was writing the introduction to the book in February 2020, then US President Donald Trump was on an official visit to India, and the first case of COVID-19 had been reported. It was a time when India was grappling with the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, widespread protests against an anti-Muslim citizenship law, and the horrifying communal violence in Delhi. “In a public speech to a crowd wearing Modi and Trump masks, Donald Trump informed Indians that they play cricket, celebrate Diwali, and make Bollywood films. We were grateful to learn that about ourselves. Between the lines he sold us MH-60 helicopters worth $3 billion. Rarely has India publicly humiliated herself thus,” she writes.

Literature in the Dark Times

Roy uses her words as both a shield and a sword in the face of an increasingly polarised world. In an essay titled ‘The Language of Literature,’ she grapples with the state of the world, dissecting the impact of capitalism, war, and government policies on our planet and its people. She doesn’t mince words when pointing out that much of the blame for the global chaos rests on the shoulders of the United States. She writes how after 17 years of the US invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict led to negotiations with the very Taliban they sought to overthrow. In the interim, Iraq, Libya, and Syria fell victim to the chaos of war, causing countless casualties and turning ancient cities into ruins. The rise of groups like Daesh (ISIS) further added to the turmoil. In her characteristic candour, she describes the US as ‘a rogue state’ that flouts international treaties and engages in aggressive rhetoric.

Roy believes that the place for literature is not predefined but rather built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile yet indestructible sanctuary that provides shelter in the face of chaos. She values the idea of literature that is necessary, literature that offers refuge: “It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.” Her own journey as a writer has seen her straddle the worlds of fiction and nonfiction, with no clear boundary between the two.

She rejects the notion that fiction and nonfiction are at odds, stating that both are equally true, equally real, and equally significant: “I have never felt that my fiction and nonfiction were warring factions battling for suzerainty. They aren’t the same certainly, but trying to pin down the difference between them is actually harder than I imagined. Fact and fiction are not converse. One is not necessarily truer than the other, more factual than the other, or more real than the other. Or even, in my case, more widely read than the other. All I can say is that I feel the difference in my body when I’m writing.”

Acknowledging the risks that writers face today, she speaks of the perilous position of journalists in India, where threats to free expression have led to the country’s ranking just below conflict zones like Afghanistan and Syria. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , she navigates a complex map of languages, reflecting the linguistic diversity and complexity of India. She delves into the stories of characters who speak different tongues, showing how language can be both a bridge and a barrier. Her characters’ experiences demonstrate the challenges of living in a multilingual society, where slogans and chants may be in languages that people neither speak nor understand. Yet, they become tools of both resistance and assimilation.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , she writes, can be read as a conversation between two graveyards: “One is a graveyard where a hijra, Anjum — raised as a boy by a Muslim family in the walled city of Delhi — makes her home and gradually builds a guest house, the Jannat (Paradise) Guest House, and where a range of people come to seek shelter. The other is the ethereally beautiful valley of Kashmir, which is now, after thirty years of war, covered with graveyards, and in this way has become, literally, almost a graveyard itself. So, a graveyard covered by the Jannat Guest House, and a Jannat covered with graveyards. This conversation, this chatter between two graveyards, is and always has been strictly prohibited in India. In the real world, all conversation about Kashmir with the exception of Indian Government propaganda, is considered a high crime — treasonous even. Fortunately, in fiction, different rules apply.”

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The end of imagination

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The Ministress of the Political Essay — A Review of Arundhati Roy’s "Azadi"

by Sam Dapanas

In her 2020 collection of essays, Indian novelist, activist and essayist Arundhati Roy takes up questions of language, cultural belonging, literature and politics, up to the 2020 COVID pandemic. While taking the form of political essays, a form of writing with a long tradition in the English language, Roy’s pieces weave in and out of genres, chasing hard questions and suggesting provocative answers, in a never-ending confrontation between the colonial legacy of the Empire and the rich and multi-faceted identities of post-colonial countries.

I first read Arundhati Roy in a postcolonial literature class as an undergraduate English major, thanks to my Asianist professor back then who is a dramaturgist, theater director, and cultural studies scholar. Despite the grueling experience of reading  The God of Small Things ’ first 100 pages (god, yes it was!), I loved it so much that I wrote a lengthy book review — one of the class’s final requirements — about it. Years later, her second novel would come out. I bought one of the first copies that arrived at the local bookstore. Reading Arundhati Roy’s nonfiction and essays in  Azadi  (which means ‘freedom’ in several Persian languages) and in  My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction  (2019), I must say it made me understand further where the characters from her fiction, some nitpicked from real people in her life, are coming from. “In What Language Does Rain Fall In Tormented Cities?” the essay, a homage to a line from Pablo Neruda’s  Libro de Preguntas  (or  The Book of Questions ), which serves as the first chapter of  Azadi: Fascism, Freedom, Fiction , Roy gives us a glimpse of her creative process, pre- and post-writing, behind  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , her second novel, which was published in 2017. 

Said piece was possibly the essay that stroke the strongest chord in me and that had resonance in me as a reader. Coming from a multilingual, if not translingual, community — outside the capital Manila, a typical Filipino child would learn English and (Tagalog-based) Filipino in school and the media, the native tongue at home, and because of the well-intentioned, poorly executed Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) policy, possibly another non-Tagalog language taught in school if one’s mother language is not the same dominant one in the region where one lives in — I know exactly the ‘slow violence’ of linguistic genocide. Perhaps as a rumination on her case, Roy wrote: 

I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was. What was — is — the politically correct, culturally apposite, and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write? It occurred to me that my mother was actually an alien, with fewer arms than Kali perhaps but many more tongues. English is certainly one of them. My English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues. I say alien because there’s not much that is organic about her. Her nation-shaped body was first violently assimilated and then violently dismembered by an imperial British quill. I also say alien because the violence unleashed in her name on those who do not wish to belong to her (Kashmiris, for example), as well as on those who do (Indian Muslims and Dalits, for example), makes her an extremely unmotherly mother.

In  A Brief History of the Political Essay ,  David Bromwich, himself a scholar of Western literary and philosophical canon, locates the political essay within the Euro-American tradition, from Jonathan Swift’s satires to Virginia Woolf’s memoirs, as having “never been a clearly defined genre.”  Never been . A body of writings across cultures and eras exists but there is no strict definition of what works are confined within it and what works on the outside are not. But in  Azadi,  Arundhati Roy shows us, in the words of another novelist from the Indian subcontinent, Salman Rushdie, how “the empire writes back.” Her essays are incisive and at the same time, insightful and provocative, dissecting through the heart of the issue, asking the right questions with precision. In “The Language of Literature,” for instance, Roy asks, “What’s the place of literature?” Or what is its role in our current times which is heavily fraught with religious fundamentalism, the strengthening of the alt Far Right, socioeconomic inequalities and unrest, and even state-funded online disinformation which is prevalent in India and in my country, and possibly everywhere? Come 2020, all these have become layered with the Covid-19 pandemic, i.e. the hoarding of vaccine supply by the Global North, corruption in the midst of pandemic response, racism as evidenced by selective travel bans, as Roy has written in “The Pandemic Is A Portal,” the last essay in the collection. True to her introduction, “Some of the essays in this volume have been written through the eyes of a novelist and the universe of her novels.” 

In the larger context of “self against fact” in contemporary nonfiction writing particularly in its subgenres of literary journalism and political essays, Roy shapes and reshapes her position as a witnessing “writer-activist” (which she says people label her) foregrounded by, quoting Nicole Walker in her  Creative Nonfiction  magazine article  The Braided Essay as a Social Justice Action , “new facts, and the facts of your personal story cut into the hard statistics of your paragraph” about political upheavals and ethnoreligious violence in India. I cite Walker because to me, the essays here, a few of them reworked versions of speeches and lectures she gave for the British Library and PEN America, to me, are in the braided form, the “most effective [form] when the political and the personal are trying to explain and understand each other … to [pull] together two disparate ideas … [a] form … of resistance … a form that expands the conversation, presses upon the hard lines of ideology.” In  Azadi , Roy critiques across the political spectrum, from the fascist Right (the Hindi ultranationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) to the “casteist” Left (the Maoist Communist Party of India). 

Despite, however, the bleakness of the textual realities of the essays and the lived experiences they portray, Roy, as in her novels  The God of Small Things  and  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,  gives us a glimpse of hope, some sort of light at the end of a pitch-dark tunnel. “What lies ahead?” Roy asks and to which she answers, “Reimagining the world. Only that.”

Sam Dapanas

Nationality: Filipinx

First Language(s): Cebuano Binisaya Second Language(s): English, Tagalog-based Filipino

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The End of Imagination: A Critical Review of Arundhati Roy’s Essays from 2016

• Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is a renowned Indian author and political activist whose essays have been widely read and debated. In this article, we critically review her essays from 2016 and analyze their impact and relevance in today’s world. We examine her views on issues such as nationalism, democracy, and social justice, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of her arguments. Through this analysis, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of Roy’s work and its significance in contemporary discourse.

Background Information

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author, political activist, and a recipient of the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel “The God of Small Things.” She is known for her outspoken views on social and political issues, particularly those related to India and its government. In 2016, she published a collection of essays titled “The End of Imagination,” which delves into topics such as the Kashmir conflict, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the impact of globalization on India’s economy and society. The essays have been widely discussed and debated, with some praising Roy’s boldness and others criticizing her for being too radical. This critical review aims to examine the arguments presented in “The End of Imagination” and evaluate their validity and relevance in today’s world.

Arundhati Roy’s Essays in 2016

Arundhati Roy, the acclaimed Indian author and activist, has been known for her powerful and thought-provoking essays on a range of social and political issues. In 2016, she continued to make waves with her writing, publishing several essays that tackled some of the most pressing issues of our time. From the rise of Hindu nationalism in India to the refugee crisis in Europe, Roy’s essays were a sharp critique of the status quo and a call to action for those who seek a more just and equitable world. In this article, we will take a closer look at some of Roy’s most notable essays from 2016 and explore the themes and ideas that she presented.

The Themes Explored in Roy’s Essays

In her essays, Arundhati Roy explores a wide range of themes, from political corruption and social inequality to environmental degradation and the impact of globalization on local communities. One of the recurring themes in her work is the struggle for justice and human rights, particularly in the face of oppressive regimes and systems of power. Roy is a vocal critic of the Indian government and its policies, and she has been outspoken in her support for marginalized communities and their struggles for autonomy and self-determination. Another important theme in her essays is the need for environmental sustainability and the protection of natural resources. Roy is a passionate advocate for the preservation of India’s forests and rivers, and she has written extensively about the devastating impact of industrialization and urbanization on the country’s ecosystems. Overall, Roy’s essays are a powerful call to action, urging readers to confront the injustices and inequalities that exist in our world and to work towards a more just and sustainable future.

The Writing Style of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is known for her unique writing style that blends fiction and non-fiction seamlessly. Her essays are often poetic and lyrical, with vivid descriptions that transport the reader to the heart of the issue she is discussing. She is unafraid to use strong language and imagery to convey her message, and her writing is often deeply emotional and passionate. At the same time, she is a master of research and analysis, and her essays are always well-researched and backed up by facts and figures. Overall, Roy’s writing style is both powerful and beautiful, making her essays a joy to read even as they tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time.

The Impact of Roy’s Essays on Indian Society

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on Indian society, particularly in terms of raising awareness about issues such as caste discrimination, environmental degradation, and government corruption. Her writing has been praised for its boldness and honesty, as well as its ability to challenge the status quo and inspire social change. Many readers have been moved by Roy’s passionate advocacy for the marginalized and oppressed, and her willingness to speak truth to power. However, her work has also been criticized by some for being too radical or divisive, and for promoting a negative view of India and its people. Despite these criticisms, it is clear that Roy’s essays have had a profound impact on Indian society, and will continue to shape public discourse and debate for years to come.

The Role of Activism in Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays are known for their strong political and social commentary, and activism plays a crucial role in her writing. Throughout her essays, Roy advocates for marginalized communities and speaks out against injustices such as corporate greed, government corruption, and environmental destruction. She uses her platform to raise awareness and inspire action, encouraging readers to become involved in activism themselves. Roy’s writing is a call to action, urging readers to take a stand and fight for a better world. Her activism is not just a theme in her essays, but a driving force behind her writing.

The Criticism of Roy’s Essays

Despite the acclaim that Arundhati Roy’s essays have received, there has been criticism of her work. Some have accused her of oversimplifying complex issues and presenting a one-sided view of events. Others have argued that her writing is too polemical and lacks nuance. In particular, some critics have taken issue with her portrayal of India as a country plagued by corruption and inequality, arguing that she ignores the progress that has been made in recent years. Despite these criticisms, however, Roy’s essays continue to be widely read and discussed, and her voice remains an important one in contemporary political discourse.

The Reception of Roy’s Essays

The reception of Roy’s essays has been mixed, with some praising her bold and unapologetic critiques of the Indian government and its policies, while others have criticized her for being too radical and divisive. Many have also questioned her credentials as a political commentator, arguing that her background as a novelist does not qualify her to speak on complex political issues. Despite these criticisms, Roy’s essays have sparked important conversations about the state of democracy and human rights in India, and have inspired many to take action and speak out against injustice.

The Influence of Roy’s Essays on Contemporary Indian Literature

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on contemporary Indian literature. Her writing style, which is both poetic and political, has inspired many writers to explore similar themes in their own work. Roy’s essays have also challenged the dominant narratives of Indian society, particularly with regards to issues of caste, gender, and environmental justice. Many writers have been influenced by Roy’s commitment to social justice and her willingness to speak truth to power. In this way, Roy’s essays have helped to shape the direction of contemporary Indian literature, encouraging writers to engage with the pressing issues of our time.

The Significance of Roy’s Essays for the Global Community

Arundhati Roy’s essays have been a significant contribution to the global community, especially in the context of social and political issues. Her writings have been a voice for the marginalized and oppressed, and have brought attention to the injustices and inequalities that exist in our world. Roy’s essays have also been a call to action, urging readers to take a stand and fight for a more just and equitable society. Her work has inspired many to become more engaged in social and political activism, and has helped to create a more informed and aware global community. Overall, Roy’s essays have been a powerful force for change, and will continue to be an important resource for those seeking to create a better world.

The Future of Roy’s Essays in Indian Literature

As Arundhati Roy’s essays continue to spark controversy and debate in Indian literature, it is clear that her work will have a lasting impact on the literary landscape. While some may criticize her for being too political or too radical, others see her as a necessary voice in a society that often silences dissenting opinions. As India continues to grapple with issues of social justice, inequality, and political corruption, Roy’s essays will undoubtedly remain relevant and important. Whether or not her ideas are embraced by the mainstream, her work will continue to inspire and challenge readers for years to come.

The Political Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have always been politically charged, and her latest collection, The End of Imagination, is no exception. In fact, the political implications of her essays are perhaps more significant now than ever before. Roy’s writing is a powerful critique of the current political climate in India, and her essays offer a scathing indictment of the ruling party and its policies. She is unafraid to speak truth to power, and her words have the potential to inspire change. However, her essays are not just relevant to India; they have global implications as well. Roy’s writing is a reminder that the fight for justice and equality is ongoing, and that we must remain vigilant in the face of oppression. Her essays are a call to action, urging readers to take a stand against injustice and to fight for a better world.

The Societal Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays from 2016 have significant societal implications that cannot be ignored. Her critiques of the Indian government’s policies towards Kashmir and the Narmada dam project shed light on the human rights violations and environmental destruction that have been perpetuated in the name of development. Roy’s essays also challenge the dominant narratives of nationalism and patriotism, urging readers to question the legitimacy of the state and its actions. These ideas have the potential to inspire social movements and activism, as well as provoke important conversations about the role of the state in society. However, they also face resistance from those who are invested in maintaining the status quo. The societal implications of Roy’s essays are complex and multifaceted, but they cannot be ignored in the current political climate.

The Cultural Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on the cultural landscape of India. Her critiques of the government’s policies and actions have sparked important conversations about democracy, human rights, and social justice. Roy’s writing has also challenged traditional notions of gender and sexuality, and has given voice to marginalized communities. Her work has been both celebrated and criticized for its political and cultural implications, but there is no denying that it has had a profound effect on the way we think about India and its place in the world.

The Ethical Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have always been a source of controversy and debate. While some praise her for her bold and unapologetic stance on issues such as human rights, environmentalism, and social justice, others criticize her for being too radical and divisive. However, beyond the political and ideological debates, there are also ethical implications to consider when reading Roy’s essays.

One of the main ethical concerns is the way Roy portrays her opponents. In many of her essays, she uses strong language and harsh criticism to denounce those who disagree with her views. While it is understandable that she feels passionate about her causes, some argue that her tone can be dismissive and disrespectful towards those who hold different opinions. This raises questions about the ethics of public discourse and the importance of respecting diversity of thought and opinion.

Another ethical issue that arises from Roy’s essays is the way she uses her platform to promote her own agenda. While it is admirable that she uses her voice to raise awareness about important issues, some argue that she can be too self-promoting and self-righteous in her writing. This raises questions about the ethics of activism and the importance of humility and collaboration in social movements.

Overall, while Roy’s essays are thought-provoking and challenging, they also raise important ethical questions about the way we engage in public discourse and activism. As readers, it is important to critically examine not only the content of her essays but also the ethical implications of her writing.

The Historical Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on the historical and political discourse in India. Her writings have challenged the dominant narratives of the Indian state and its policies, particularly in relation to issues of caste, gender, and environmental justice. Roy’s work has also been instrumental in highlighting the struggles of marginalized communities and bringing their voices to the forefront of public discourse. Her critiques of neoliberalism and globalization have been particularly influential in shaping the political consciousness of a generation of activists and intellectuals. Overall, Roy’s essays have played a crucial role in shaping the historical and political landscape of contemporary India.

The Literary Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays from 2016 are not only politically charged but also have significant literary implications. Roy’s writing style is poetic and evocative, and she often uses metaphors and imagery to convey her message. Her essays are not just political commentary but also works of art that challenge the reader’s imagination. Roy’s use of language is powerful and emotive, and she has a unique ability to capture the essence of a moment or an idea in a few well-chosen words. Her essays are a testament to the power of literature to inspire and provoke change. Roy’s work is a reminder that literature can be a tool for social and political transformation, and that writers have a responsibility to use their craft to speak truth to power.

The Philosophical Implications of Roy’s Essays

Roy’s essays from 2016 have significant philosophical implications that are worth exploring. One of the most prominent themes in her writing is the idea of power and its corrupting influence. She argues that those in positions of power often abuse their authority and exploit the less privileged for their own gain. This raises important questions about the nature of power and its relationship to morality. Is power inherently corrupting, or can it be wielded in a just and ethical manner? Roy’s essays suggest that the answer is not clear-cut and that we must be vigilant in holding those in power accountable for their actions. Another philosophical implication of Roy’s writing is the importance of empathy and compassion. She frequently highlights the suffering of marginalized communities and calls for greater empathy and understanding towards their struggles. This raises questions about the nature of morality and our obligations to others. Should we prioritize the well-being of others over our own self-interest, or is it possible to strike a balance between the two? Roy’s essays suggest that empathy and compassion are essential for creating a more just and equitable society. Overall, Roy’s essays offer important insights into some of the most pressing philosophical questions of our time.

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The Prescient Anger of Arundhati Roy

By Samanth Subramanian

Nine months can make a person, or remake her. In October, 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “ The God of Small Things .” India had just turned fifty, and the country needed symbols to celebrate itself. Roy became one of them. Then, in July of 1998, she published an essay about another such symbol: a series of five nuclear-bomb tests conducted by the government in the sands of Rajasthan. The essay, which eviscerated India’s nuclear policy for placing the lives of millions in danger, wasn’t so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire. Roy’s fall from darling to dissident was swift, and her landing rough. In India, she never attained the heights of adulation again.

Not that she sought them. Through the decades since, Roy has continued to produce incendiary essays, and a new book, “ My Seditious Heart ,” collects them in a volume that spans nearly nine hundred pages. The book opens with her piece from 1998, “The End of Imagination,” but India’s nuclear tests were not Roy’s first infuriation. In fact, in 1994—after she had graduated from architecture school, and around the time that she was acting in indie films, teaching aerobics, and working on her novel—she wrote two livid articles about a Bollywood movie’s unscrupulous depiction of the rape of a real, living woman. That tone has never faltered. Every one of the essays in “My Seditious Heart” was composed in the key of rage.

Roy is often asked why she turned her back on fiction. (Her second novel, “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ,” wasn’t published until 2017.) “Another book? Right now?” she once told a journalist. “This talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature and everything else that defines civilization. So what kind of book should I write?” The more interesting question, of course, is why Roy clung to nonfiction, and how she engages within it—the timbre of her reaction to demagoguery, inequality, corporate malfeasance, and the spoliation of the environment. The West’s liberal citizens are beginning to think afresh about how they ought to respond to such provocations: about whether there is virtue in cool balance, or dishonor in uninhibited anger, or utility in mustering a radical Left to counter a hostile Right. They could look to Roy for some answers. She has been ploughing this field for twenty-five years.

In “My Seditious Heart,” Roy rides to battle against a host of troubles. Most frequently, she criticizes India’s fondness for big dams, and its cruelty to the people displaced by them. She lambasts the American imperium and its souped-up capitalism, multinational institutions like the World Bank, and corporate greed. She flays the Hindu supremacists in India , who have sparked pogroms, divided communities, and tightened their hold on power, and she writes with sympathy about Maoists, the militant insurgents in central India who are fighting a state that is plundering the earth of ore and coal. Roy’s preoccupation with these topics has been so absolute that her second novel, when she finally produced it, was stocked with characters personifying her causes. One has a name, Azad Bhartiya, that translates as “Free Indian.” Bhartiya has been fasting for eleven years against assorted evils, and at the site of his protest he lists some of them on a laminated cardboard sign:

I am against the Capitalist Empire, plus against US Capitalism, Indian and American State Terrorism / All Kinds of Nuclear Weapons and Crime, plus against the Bad Education System / Corruption / Violence / Environmental Degradation and All Other Evils. Also I am against Unemployment. I am also fasting for the complete obliteration of the entire Bourgeois class.

If Roy ever begins a hunger strike, one feels that she will place herself behind just such a placard.

When Roy’s essays appeared individually, in magazines or newspapers, they functioned as little jabs of electricity, shocking us into reaction. Collectively, in “My Seditious Heart,” they remind us that many of the flaws in her nonfiction recur and persist. Her instinct to condemn becomes wearisome, and she gives us only the vaguest prescriptions for the systems she wishes would replace market-driven democracy, or dams, or globalization. She is prone to romanticizing the pre-modern, prompting us to wonder if she speaks too glibly for others. (“In their old villages,” she writes of displaced tribes, “they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit.”) In stretches, the text is burdened by rhetorical questions and metaphors. (An essay titled “Democracy: Who is She When She’s at Home?” features three images in two successive sentences to describe how political parties treat Indian democracy: they till its marrow, mine it for electoral advantage, and tunnel under it like “termites excavating a mound.”) And her presentation of data can be self-serving. Repeatedly, she writes that around eight hundred million Indians live on less than twenty rupees (about thirty cents) a day. That statistic, from a 2005 government report, changed with time; by 2011 , when she was still using the figure, the government estimated that nearly two hundred and seventy million people lived on less than thirty rupees a day. Admitting to that reduction would have complicated her arguments, which may explain why she never updated her numbers.

When the dial isn’t tuned to high fulmination, Roy is easier and more moving to read. To form her opinions, or perhaps to confirm them, she travels widely across India. Her narrations of her encounters with people are tender, and her prose becomes marked by rare stillness. In Kashmir, in 2010, it was apple-packing season: “I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake.” In Undava, a village pauperized by a dam and canal project, Roy meets Bhaiji Bhai, from whom the government had snatched seventeen of his nineteen acres. She recalls his story from an old documentary. “It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it,” she writes. “I could tell he had told it over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck.” Of the town of Harsud, in 2004, soon to be drowned by a reservoir: “A town turned inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed. Personal belongings, beds, cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on the street. . . . The people of Harsud are razing their town to the ground. Themselves.” That final word conveys the absurd tragedy of it all—of the poor hurrying to dismantle their lives, preferring that to having their lives dismantled for them.

The prototypical Roy essay is “Walking with the Comrades,” which holds both a fluid sense of discovery and a stubbornness of moral purpose. When it was first published, in 2010, it occupied most of an issue of Outlook , an Indian newsweekly. In it, Roy is invited to travel for a few weeks with a squad of Maoists through the forests of central India. The Prime Minister has called Maoists the greatest internal threat to the country’s security, but Roy finds men and women who have been repeatedly dispossessed, and who are trying to organize villagers and local tribes into some form of struggle. The government, for its part, has assembled a militia that wounds or kills those it suspects of supporting the Maoists, so that corporations may better mow down their forests and mine their land.

These are real, grievous cruelties. But, when Roy considers the Maoists’ own use of force, she adopts a gentler perspective. She describes the People’s Courts, where insurgents stage show trials before executing police officers. “How can we accept them? Or approve this form of rude justice?” she writes. Then she does approve it, by invoking the state’s own shoddy trials and executions. At least, in the case of a People’s Court, she writes, “the collective was physically present to make its own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, presuming to speak on behalf of an absent collective.” This is a strange way to regard the judiciary, a pillar of the representative democracy she wants so much to restore to health.

Many of Roy’s positions have this kind of hard moral clarity. She declares that the free market undermines democracy, allowing for no complexity in the relationship between them. Grant-making institutions funded by companies are automatically suspect, their agendas serving only as tools to pry open markets and convert people into consumers. She has harsh words for the Ford Foundation—and then, through guilt by association, for any Indian nonprofit that has accepted a Ford grant, without weighing for us, on the page, the work that nonprofit may have done. (She did not, it should be noted, turn down her Booker purse, when it was still being sponsored by a British company that grew rich by using indentured labor in its Guyanese sugarcane plantations.) All big dams are ruinous, she insists, before comparing them to nukes: “They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people.”

Her essays tend to close on a call to action. “The borders are open. Come on in,” she writes, summoning us to protest at the site of India’s most controversial dam. In a piece titled “Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?,” she writes, “Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq.” Go after the companies that benefit from the occupation; refuse to fight this immoral fight. She finds herself almost bewildered that those who suffer most stay silent. It strikes her—as it has struck me and no doubt many others who have lived in India—as something of a wonder that the country, ridden with injustices, has not witnessed a revolution. “Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry?” she writes. “When will you stop waiting? When will you say ‘That’s enough!’ and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be?”

In their bare-knuckle approach, these essays descend directly from those of William Hazlitt, who advised his fellow-progressives to pull no punches. Like Roy, Hazlitt reflexively distrusted power, “the grim idol that the world adore.” In a polemic titled “On the Connexion between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants,” published in 1817, he offered a template for writerly resistance. First, “be a good hater.” Keep your memory long and your will strong. For the true lover of liberty, a hatred of wrongdoing “deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues.” (“Aspic,” as he used it, was another word for “asp.”) All his life, Hazlitt railed against the formal dullness of political prose. The language of progressives must be inflamed, he thought, and their imaginations whipped by anger. “Abstract reason, unassisted by passion,” he wrote, “is no match for power and prejudice.”

These qualities, though, have earned Roy the disapproval of her own teammates. She was always certain to rile the nationalists, corporate India, and the state. (In 2002, she paid a fine and spent a day in prison after India’s Supreme Court classified her criticisms of the judiciary as criminal contempt.) But within the Indian left, too, you could detect a lack of warmth for her methods, and doubts that are now familiar. Roy’s brush was too broad, some said. She made convenient moral elisions, as with the Maoists’ violence. Her equation of big dams and nuclear bombs—couldn’t she have been more nuanced about that? Her habit of decrying capitalism, even as some market reforms lifted Indian people out of poverty—didn’t that paint the left as unempirical? Roy spared very few people, and very few institutions, at a time when the left needed everyone it could attract.

Then, while these worries were being nursed, the world made itself more deserving of Roy’s anger. Large companies, particularly in finance and technology, were exposed to be so corrupt that they deformed the nature of democracy. States placed their citizens under surveillance. Economic inequality grew, and the environmental crisis spiked. Nativists and right-wing ideologues lied their way into office, exploiting and widening the divisions of class and race. Reading “My Seditious Heart,” you feel as if Roy has been hollering as extravagantly as possible for years, trying to grab our attention, and we’ve kept motoring on toward the edge of the cliff.

The book emerges into an especially disheartening time in India. In its titular essay, published in 2016, Roy permitted herself a faint glow of hope about the resistance to the “manifesto of hate” enacted by the Hindu right. “Little by little, people have begun to stand up to it,” she wrote. But, in May, the Bharatiya Janata Party returned to power with an even greater mandate, its campaign a multibillion-dollar production of minority-baiting and sabre-rattling. This triumph doesn’t redeem Roy’s elisions and reductions, but it does make her anger the most indispensable part of her writing. Her fury is suited to these horrible and therefore simpler times; it’s more tuned to the reality on the ground than restraint and statistics. Roy started writing nonfiction when the world felt better. “My Seditious Heart” arrives to tell us not that the world has deteriorated but that it was never as fine as we once believed.

Books & Fiction

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By Joan Acocella

By Pankaj Mishra

By James Wood

Arundhati Roy: ‘The point of the writer is to be unpopular’

The acclaimed author and activist answers questions from our readers and famous fans on the state of modern India, the threat of AI, and why sometimes only fiction can fully address the world

A rundhati Roy does not believe in rushing things. With her novels, she prefers to wait for her characters to introduce themselves to her, and slowly develop a trust and a friendship with them. Sometimes, however, external events force her hand. One of these was the election of the divisive Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi as Indian prime minister in May 2014.

At the time, Roy had been working for about seven years on her second novel , the successor to her stunning, 1997 Booker prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things . But Modi’s victory forced her to “really put down the tent pegs” on what would eventually become The Ministry of Utmost Happiness .

“It was just a moment of shock for people like me,” says Roy, twirling an elegant, checked scarf around her neck like spaghetti around a fork. “For so many years, I’d been trying to yell from the rooftops about it and it was absolutely a sense of abject defeat and abject despair. And the choice was to get into bed and sleep for five years, or to really concentrate on this book. I didn’t feel like writing any more essays, although I did write one, but I felt like everything I had to say had been said. It was time to accept defeat.”

It may have felt like defeat to Roy, but the arrival of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness last year was a cause of celebration for nearly everybody else. The novel, now out in paperback, opens in Delhi, in what appears to be the 1950s, and introduces us to Anjum, a Muslim hijra or transgender woman. In the second part of the book, the story moves to Kashmir and we follow a new protagonist, Tilo, an architect who becomes involved with a group of Kashmiri independence fighters. The strands eventually converge, but along the way dozens of odd characters dip in and out of proceedings. It’s not always immediately clear what purpose they are serving; it’s only at the end of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that you realise what an extraordinary and visceral state‑of‑the-nation book Roy has created.

“What I wanted to know was: can a novel be a city?” says Roy. “Can you stop it being baby food, which can be easily consumed? So the reader also has to deal with complexities that they are being trained not to deal with.”

Much of Roy’s own experience feeds into The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , not least the fact that she studied to be an architect and has campaigned for Kashmiri independence . For herself, she realised very quickly that architecture was not for her. “I graduated but I didn’t actually build anything, because I wasn’t really cut out to be making beautiful homes for wealthy people or whatever,” she says, smiling. “I had too many arguments with my bosses. Kept getting sacked for bad behaviour. For insolence!”

So finding her way to writing was probably for the best then? “It started with knowing very early that I couldn’t have a boss!”

Even now, at the age 56, Roy manages to retain a healthy rebellious streak. We meet in London, at the offices of her publisher, Penguin Random House, a couple of days after the end of the Hay festival. I notice she hadn’t appeared at the festival and wondered if there was a reason. There was: Tata, the Indian conglomerate that owns everything from steel plants to tea company Tetley, sponsored various events at Hay under the banner “Pioneering with Purpose”. Roy has in the past been critical of it as one of the “mega-corporations” that run modern India . She didn’t want to be a hypocrite.

“There are so many of these corporate sponsors and mining companies,” Roy explains. “For example, Vedanta, which sponsored the Jaipur literary festival in 2016 . I’ve been writing about them for the last 10 years. Recently, there were 13 people killed [by police] on the streets of Tamil Nadu protesting against one of their projects. It’s a big conflict for me, because so much of my writing is about what these people are up to and then they have these free-speech tents. So I just avoid them.”

Roy, who lives in Delhi, instead wanted to use her time in London to confirm the publication of her collected nonfiction work. In the 20 years between her two novels, these projects have occupied most of her time. She has written powerfully about government dams, the 2002 Gujarat massacre, and spent almost three weeks walking through the forests of central India with Naxalites, a Maoist group that seeks to defend the rights of the tribes whose land, abundant in minerals, is being developed. It is a considerable body of work: so much so that when the essays are released next year – with the title My Seditious Heart – the book will run to more than 1,000 pages.

Her political writing often lands Roy in hot water in India. In early 2016 she even felt it necessary to leave Delhi for London, after student protests broke out in universities across the country following the hanging of a Kashmiri separatist whom Roy had praised. “I didn’t fear for my welfare as much as I feared for my book,” she says. “I was very vulnerable at the time because I was just a few months away from finishing The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , and because there were students being put into jail, mobs were on the street. The main TV news channel was saying: ‘Who’s the person behind this?’ And it was me. But I came [to London] and I went straight back in nine days or 10 days, because I knew this was not my thing to run away.”

Roy describes her nonfiction as “urgent interventions”, but ever since Modi came to power she is mostly drawn to writing fiction. It seems unlikely, then, that we’ll have to wait another 20 years for a new novel. “Who knows, but I hope not!” she says. “Because I really have so enjoyed writing fiction again. But I must say that, the times are so uncertain, there’s going to be a very, very hard year in India and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can’t ever say in advance what I’ll be doing …”

She shakes her head and laughs, “It’s a highly unplanned life.”

Famous fans’ questions…

Lionel Shriver Author Do you ever worry that your work as an activist detracts – or at least distracts – from your fiction, and are you concerned that sticking your neck out politically changes the way readers and critics respond to that fiction?

I have always quarrelled with this word “activist”. I think it’s a very new word and I don’t know when it was born, but it was recently. I don’t want to have a second profession added to writing. Writing covers it. In the old days, writers were political creatures also, not all, but many. It was seen as our business to be writing about the world around us in different ways. So I don’t feel threatened or worried about that. For me, my fiction and my nonfiction are both political. The fiction is a universe, the nonfiction is an argument.

What I do worry about is the fact that writers have become so frightened of being political. The idea that writers are being reduced to creators of a product that is acceptable, that slips down your throat, which readers love and therefore can be bestsellers, that’s so dangerous. Today, for example in India, where majoritarianism is taking root – and by majoritarianism, I don’t just mean the government, I mean that individuals are being turned into micro-fascists by so many means. It is the mobs and vigilantes going and lynching people. So more than ever, the point of the writer is to be unpopular. The point of the writer is to say: “I denounce you even if I’m not in the majority.”

Nina Stibbe Author Which Beatle is your favourite and why?

John Lennon. I can say that in my sleep! Why? Because I always felt that there was a sadness that was wrapped with brilliance. And, this is not the reason that I love him – I also love the way he looks. This morning I woke up and felt a little jealous of seeing Yoko Ono and him together. I was like, “Fuck!” Although it was really before my time, but still…

George Monbiot Writer and environmentalist In a world racked by climate breakdown, ecological collapse and the marginalisation of billions, what gives you hope?

One of my books of essays is dedicated to “those who have learned to divorce hope from reason”. So being unreasonable is the only way that we can have hope. I am often among people who battle every day, but when you’re in there with them it’s not all grim. These are people who have their backs to the wall and are fighting for survival, but so much of the time they spend laughing at stupid things.

For example, when I was inside the forests of central India with the comrades, one night everyone was asleep and I saw this guy typing something on his solar-powered computer. So I said: “What are you doing?” And he said: “Oh, I’m issuing a denial. You know, if all our denials were published, they would run into several volumes.” So I said: “What’s the most ridiculous denial you’ve ever had to issue?” And he said in Hindi: “No brother, we didn’t hammer the cows to death.”

The story was that the current sitting chief minister had promised in his election campaign that, if he won the elections, every rural household would get a cow. So once he won, to pretend to deliver on his promise, they rounded up all these elderly cows and then they were subcontracted to people who were expected to deliver them to these far-flung households in the forests of indigenous peoples. Some of them just killed the cows halfway through and then said the Maoists did it. It served so many purposes: they didn’t have to bother delivering them, and the Maoists come out of it as anti-Hindu.

So there’s often a graveyard humour and a steely resilience, and I believe that the only way – if at all – the machine can be pushed back is through these resistances. And I’m on the side of the line with them.

Eve Ensler Playwright What reader’s response to The Ministry of Utmost Happiness surprised you the most?

Ha-ha, there are several. One is that it’s a book that doesn’t pretend to universalise anything or conceptualise anything. It’s a book of great detail about a place. So the first thing that surprised me was that it has been translated into 46 languages – that it is being read in Vietnam, in Georgia. It was never designed to be that kind of an easy read. I got a letter from someone in Palestine the other day who said: “Thank you for making space for the poetics of other languages in your book.” That was amazing because the book is imagined in more than one language. And given the climate we have in India right now, I’m happy to say that it’s been pirated and even being sold to me at the traffic lights. For half-price!

Wendy Doniger US Indologist whose book The Hindus: An Alternative History was recalled by its publisher, Penguin India, in 2014 Do you think it is possible for writers and publishers to join forces to find ways to oppose prosecutions for blasphemy (or “offending” religious feelings) under laws like Indian penal code section 295A ? Or at least to change the charge from a criminal to a civil offence?

If we’re talking India in particular, I feel that it is possible. I know Wendy Doniger’s publishers let her down very badly. It was very wrong what they did, because they were not even taken to court. It was just this crazy man who makes a business out of going after people in this way. This is the way the criminal justice system is used in India, as harassment. So they could have backed her, but they didn’t.

At the moment what is happening in India is that censorship is being outsourced to the mob. Some person comes out and says: “Oh you’re not showing rajput in a good light,” or any community starts feeling that they can burn down cinema halls, they can stop a film release, and it’s all being allowed. In the same way, writers have been killed and shot and threatened. The government can try to act as if it’s not involved, but its involvement is in protecting the mobs. It’s a question that leads to many questions and Wendy Doniger has suffered.

Shobha Rao Author When did you know your childhood was over?

It’s not over yet! It should never be over for writers. The people I fear most are the people who I look at and I can’t imagine what kind of a child they were. Because of the circumstances in which I was born and how I lived, I had to be in some ways a pretty adult child and I would like at least some part of me to be a pretty childish adult.

Kate Hudson General secretary of CND It’s 20 years since India’s Pokharan nuclear weapons tests. At the time, you powerfully and convincingly demolished the claims that such weapons were deterrents to war. Now the narrative from the White House is one of “usable” nukes. How can we defeat this drive towards global self-destruction, and how can a new movement be built?

I don’t know what the answer to this question is. But one thing that’s truly on my mind now, and I know it will sound paranoid – but I think we do need to be paranoid – is artificial intelligence. Perhaps AI can do better surgery than surgeons, write better poetry than poets and better novels than novelists. But what it does is make the human population almost surplus: it makes it unnecessary. One argument is that it will be the end of work and the beginning of play; that people can be looked after. But people could be looked after now, as we know there’s enough surplus to do that, and it doesn’t happen.

When human beings become surplus, that’s where these smart nukes and chemical and biological warfare – these things that are genocidal – begin to really worry me. Because I do see a time when the masters of the universe will decide that the universe is a better place without most of the population. Artificial intelligence is a way of becoming the perfect human being, which fascists have always thought about: the supreme human being. If you can think of that, if that is your goal, then certainly you can think of the other. I worry about it.

Ali Smith Author I am a fan of all your writing in all its forms, but what is it that the novel makes possible for us that no other form of writing does?

When photography came, there was a certain kind of art that it put out of business. When film came, there was a certain kind of theatre that it put out of business. So what the novel has to do, what I felt when I wrote The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is [ask] what can it do that nothing else can?

And there are things it can do. There’s a quote from James Baldwin in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness : “And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.” So if you were to take out the political milestones in this book and just do nonfiction about them, they would not be what they are. Only a novel can tell you how caste, communalisation, sexism, love, music, poetry, the rise of the right all combine in a society. And the depths in which they combine. We have been trained to “silo-ise”: our brains specialise in one thing. But the radical understanding is if you can understand it all, and I think only a novel can.

Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell Directors of Grafton Architects You have said that literature is not about issues, that it is about the world, about everybody, that literature is a monumental, profound, beautiful and complicated thing. Would you apply the same values in your contemplation of architecture?

Yes, of course. I’m a student of architecture, and if I had to choose a profession again I would choose architecture, because I do believe it’s about everything. One of the people who made me want to become an architect was Laurie Baker ; he was British but had lived in India all his life. He used to do what was called no-cost architecture, where you pay a lot of attention to material and where it came from: he was so against the idea of his buildings living for ever. I learned from him that beautiful architecture is not directly proportional to how much it costs or how much money you put into it. So for me, it’s a very fundamental and beautiful art, certainly extremely profound in terms of how you should be thinking about it.

Readers’ questions…

With regards to your fiction, would you be able to describe the balance between research, autobiography and imagined worlds? How important is it to you? James Corcut

I don’t do research. What generally happens is I begin to get curious about something for no reason and then I just find it impossible to contain and I’ve written nonfiction. But especially in the novel, these things just settle in you and you become like a sedimentary rock. The characters come by and it’s almost like you’re walking down the street and someone catches your eye and you meet them again and then you become friends. It’s a bit like that. One of the ways in which I write, especially when I write fiction, is just that I wait. And something just comes knocking at your door. You have to be open to it. You have to allow it in, more than pursue it.

I’m very much part of those worlds that I describe. So sometimes it might be really autobiographical and I don’t know. When you’re open to allowing these characters in, everything is autobiographical, no? Esthappen in The God of Small Things says: “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” For me, those worlds are all very osmotic: experience, autobiography, imagination, understanding. And that’s why it all needs to mix and settle and it’s not segmented.

My friends and I often debate “the best Bookers”. Mine happen to be, in no particular order: Disgrace , The God of Small Things and Midnight’s Children . I’d like to think that you, too, have these “pub conversations” – so, what’s your favourite Booker novel, and why? Viren Mistry

I don’t have these conversations, because I don’t feel like thinking about books in this way. Books are unique and so I don’t think of them hierarchically. I understand that people need to give prizes, but it’s so particular to you and I don’t even think of “Booker books” to begin with.

You have been fiercely expressing your disagreements with the state, irrespective of political parties in office. Have you ever wished to go into electoral politics? If yes, why haven’t you yet? If no, why? Anand Aani

No. It’s such an important place and time in which to be a writer, where you’re not burdened by the idea of soliciting people’s support. Where often it’s so important to stand alone, to be a person who expresses themselves very clearly on certain things. So I can only see it as a great defeat if I really wanted to come into politics or stand for elections or ask people to like me or vote for me. It’s just not in my DNA to do that. I cannot even conceive of becoming a person who needed to change something about the way they were dressing or thinking or speaking to get someone to vote for me. To suddenly start going to a temple and pretending I’m really religious because I want to win the Hindu vote, I can’t do it! I’d be terrible at it!

You once said: ‘Each time I write an essay I get into so much trouble I promise never to do it again.’ What was the last essay you wrote and did you get into any trouble? Cate Lobo

Well, the last essay I wrote was actually about the trouble, it was called My Seditious Heart. But previous to that, I wrote a piece called Professor, POW about GN Saibaba. He is a professor of literature, paralysed in his lower body, and he was thrown in prison and sentenced to life for… I don’t know what all the reasons are, but he’s accused of being a Maoist and working against the state. He’s still in prison now and is in a bad state.

I’ve known him for a long time and when I wrote Professor, POW I was charged with criminal contempt of court. I have a long history of contempt of court, being accused of contempt of court – I’ve also gone to prison for it. So I had to appeal to the supreme court to quash it, which they have not done, but they have put it in cold storage. It’s so tiring, but it’s OK for me. Because of the work I do, I have lawyers who are friends. I have the money to fly to the other city where the appeal is being heard and hire a hotel and stay there. But let’s say you’re a young journalist or a young writer who doesn’t have that – what do you do? You’re finished! So the idea is: “Let’s make this an example, let’s break up the stride, then the mobs will come there and will shout at you.” It just goes on and on.

How do you write the parts that make us cry? And do you cry when you read them back? Brendan Ross

Writing and crying are things that people do differently. For me, I’m always writing: when I’m walking, when I’m shopping, when I’m thinking. There’s a processing that’s going on – and the heartbreak is close to the surface all the time. But there’s a difference between the retelling of a tragedy and when you sometimes don’t actually tell it, but what it reflects is even more tragic. So often when I think about things, yes, I do cry, but I shift between laughter and tears and anger. That’s what I meant about never stopping to be a child: you have to always be in touch with those feelings.

What female writers have inspired and influenced you? Sofía Guerrero

Oh, so many. Of course, I have read Jane Austen in the past but long ago. I don’t know if I’m inspired by her, but I’m maybe interested in her. There’s Toni Morrison, whose Beloved was a great inspiration. The memoir of [Russian poet] Osip Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam [ Hope Against Hope ] – oh God, what a book, just incredible. And recently I read this book called Barracoon , it’s just come out. Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and she transcribed a first-person account of the last slave, who was captured 50 years after slavery was abolished. He has a memory of the whole thing, of how he was kidnapped from his village in Africa – not kidnapped by white people, but by another tribe – and then sold into slavery to American slave traders. So it complicates the way you think about things.

It seems that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness suggests it’s possible to live in a world that is carved out of, yet also away from, the degradations of a class- and caste-ridden (also ableist, homophobic etc) society. Is such a world possible only in novels, or do you think it’s possible in real life? Alpana Sharma

I don’t think that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness should be viewed as a manifesto, that it’s proposing an alternative way of living. It’s a story about certain particular and unique people who find their way in a unique way. By having these people, you are shining a light on what society is really like and the fact that you can’t ignore caste and gender and all of that. It’s really about that.

What moments in your life give you solace? Sylvie Millard

The moment when I just put my cheek on my dog’s tummy. I have two of them, and one has a considerable tummy, but the other is slightly more delicate. Both of them used to be strays. I found them. One of them, her mother was killed by a car on the road outside my house. Her eyes were closed and she was so small and I had to feed her with a dropper and now she’s huge. The other one I stole. I’d see her tied to a lamppost night and day on this road, and I just took her. Later, I told the people that I’d taken her, and they said: “OK, we didn’t want her.”

• You ask the questions
• Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy

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Flashback: arundhati roy’s classic essay on the narmada resistance.

Archival photo of a boat rally in protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam

25th August 2016

The Narmada Bachao Andolan began 31 years ago as a protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, and went on to raise questions about the very development model India has embraced. Today, with the NBA reviving their landmark struggle for justice, we are re-publishing author Arundhati Roy ’s landmark 1999 essay on the topic.

Arundhati Roy, Outlook Magazine

“If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country.” – Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking to villagers who were to be displaced by the Hirakud Dam, 1948.

I stood on a hill and laughed out loud.

I had crossed the Narmada by boat from Jalsindhi and climbed the headland on the opposite bank from where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the tribal hamlets of Sikka, Surung, Neemgavan and Domkhedi. I could see their airy, fragile, homes. I could see their fields and the forests behind them. I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorised peanuts. I knew I was looking at a civilisation older than Hinduism, slated – sanctioned (by the highest court in the land) – to be drowned this monsoon when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir will rise to submerge it.

Why did I laugh?

Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam) had enquired whether tribal children in the resettlement colonies would have children’s parks to play in. The lawyers representing the Government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and, what’s more, that there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river rushing past and for a brief, brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect.

Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don DeLillo’s big book and substitute it with reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they’re built and what they do.

My first tentative questions revealed that few people know what is really going on in the Narmada Valley. Those who know, know a lot. Most know nothing at all. And yet, almost everyone has a passionate opinion. Nobody’s neutral. I realised very quickly that I was straying into mined territory.

In India over the last ten years the fight against the Sardar Sarovar Dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. This has been its strength as well as its weakness. Some years ago, it became a debate that captured the popular imagination. That’s what raised the stakes and changed the complexion of the battle. From being a fight over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish? These are huge questions. They are being taken hugely seriously by the State. They are being answered in one voice by every institution at its command – the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the courts. And not just answered, but answered unambiguously, in bitter, brutal ways.

For the people of the valley, the fact that the stakes were raised to this degree has meant that their most effective weapon – specific facts about specific issues in this specific valley – has been blunted by the debate on the big issues. The basic premise of the argument has been inflated until it has burst into bits that have, over time, bobbed away. Occasionally a disconnected piece of the puzzle floats by – an emotionally charged account of the Government’s callous treatment of displaced people; an outburst at how the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), ‘a handful of activists’, is holding the nation to ransom; a legal correspondent reporting on the progress of the NBA’s writ petition in the Supreme Court.

Though there has been a fair amount of writing on the subject, most of it is for a ‘special interest’ readership. News reports tend to be about isolated aspects of the project. Government documents are classified as ‘Secret’. I think it’s fair to say that public perception of the issue is pretty crude and is divided crudely, into two categories:

On the one hand, it is seen as a war between modern, rational, progressive forces of ‘Development’ versus a sort of neo-Luddite impulse – an irrational, emotional ‘Anti-Development’ resistance, fuelled by an arcadian, pre-industrial dream.

On the other, as a Nehru vs Gandhi contest. This lifts the whole sorry business out of the bog of deceit, lies, false promises and increasingly successful propaganda (which is what it’s really about) and confers on it a false legitimacy. It makes out that both sides have the Greater Good of the Nation in mind – but merely disagree about the means by which to achieve it.

Both interpretations put a tired spin on the dispute. Both stir up emotions that cloud the particular facts of this particular story. Both are indications of how urgently we need new heroes, new kinds of heroes, and how we’ve overused our old ones (like we overbowl our bowlers).

The Nehru vs Gandhi argument pushes this very contemporary issue back into an old bottle. Nehru and Gandhi were generous men. Their paradigms for development are based on assumptions of inherent morality. Nehru’s on the paternal, protective morality of the Soviet-style Centralised State. Gandhi’s on the nurturing, maternal morality of romanticised village Republics. Both would work perfectly, if only we were better human beings. If only we all wore khadi and suppressed our base urges – sex, shopping, dodging spinning lessons and being unkind to the less fortunate. Fifty years down the line, it’s safe to say that we haven’t made the grade. We haven’t even come close. We need an updated insurance plan against our own basic natures.

It’s possible that as a nation we’ve exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that’s what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me.

I was drawn to the valley because I sensed that the fight for the Narmada had entered a newer, sadder phase. I went because writers are drawn to stories the way vultures are drawn to kills. My motive was not compassion. It was sheer greed. I was right. I found a story there.

And what a story it is.

“People say that the Sardar Sarovar Dam is an expensive project. But it is bringing drinking water to millions. This is our lifeline. Can you put a price on this? Does the air we breathe have a price? We will live. We will drink. We will bring glory to the state of Gujarat.”

– Urmilaben Patel, wife of Gujarat Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel, speaking at a public rally in Delhi in 1993.

“We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all.”

– Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong Dam in 1961.

“Why didn’t they just poison us? Then we wouldn’t have to live in this shit-hole and the Government could have survived alone with its precious dam all to itself.”

– Ram Bai, whose village was submerged when the Bargi Dam was built on the Narmada. She now lives in a slum in Jabalpur.

In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru’s famous “Dams are the Temples of Modern India” speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime), his footsoldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with Nation-building. Their enthusiasm alone should have been reason enough to make one suspicious. Not only did they build new dams and new irrigation systems, they took control of small, traditional systems that had been managed by village communities for thousands of years, and allowed them to atrophy. To compensate the loss, the Government built more and more dams. Big ones, little ones, tall ones, short ones. The result of its exertions is that India now boasts of being the world’s third largest dam builder. According to the Central Water Commission, we have three thousand six hundred dams that qualify as Big Dams, three thousand three hundred of them built after Independence. One thousand more are under construction. Yet one-fifth of our population – 200 million people – does not have safe drinking water and two-thirds – 600 million – lack basic sanitation.

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

Big Dams haven’t really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man’s ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It’s common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do – the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.

For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it’s exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides.

On the one hand, the Indian Government, every Indian Government, rails self-righteously against the First World, and on the other, actually pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like Colonialism was. It has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our leaders welcome it with slavish smiles (and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging self-esteem).

Over the last fifty years India has spent Rs.80,000 crores on the irrigation sector alone. Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods and rapid disenchantment with the Green Revolution (declining yields, degraded land), the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the (always phenomenal) costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were.

The Government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of foodgrain or edible oils the country produces and how much more we produce now than we did in 1947. It can tell you how much bauxite is mined in a year or what the total surface area of the National Highways adds up to. It’s possible to access minute-to-minute information about the stock exchange or the value of the rupee in the world market. We know how many cricket matches we’ve lost on a Friday in Sharjah. It’s not hard to find out how many graduates India produced, or how many men had vasectomies in any given year. But the Government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of ‘National Progress’. Isn’t this astounding ? How can you measure Progress if you don’t know what it costs and who paid for it? How can the ‘market’ put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when it doesn’t take into account the real cost of production?

According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it’s all we have, let’s try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let’s halve the number of people. Or, let’s err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It’s an improbably low figure, I know, but …never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 =

33 million. That’s what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren’t say so, because it isn’t official. It isn’t official because we daren’t say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can’t be , I’ve been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can’t be true . I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a ‘sixties hippie dropping acid (“It’s the System, man!”), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?

Fifty million people.

Go on, Government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something .

I feel like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.

Fifty million is more than the population of Gujarat. Almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number of refugees that Partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The Western world today is convulsed over the future of one million people who have fled from Kosovo.

A huge percentage of the displaced are tribal people (57.6 per cent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam). Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it’s about 60 per cent. If you consider that tribal people account for only eight per cent, and Dalits fifteen per cent, of India’s population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic ‘otherness’ of their victims takes some of the pressure off the Nation Builders. It’s like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India’s poorest people are subsidising the lifestyles of her richest.

Did I hear someone say something about the world’s biggest democracy?

What has happened to all these millions of people? Where are they now? How do they earn a living? Nobody really knows. (Last month’s papers had an account of how tribal people displaced by the Nagarjunasagar Dam Project are selling their babies to foreign adoption agencies. The Government intervened and put the babies in two public hospitals where six babies died of neglect.) When it comes to Rehabilitation, the Government’s priorities are clear. India does not have a National Rehabilitation Policy. According to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended in 1984), the Government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person anything but a cash compensation. Imagine that. A cash compensation, to be paid by an Indian government official to an illiterate tribal man (the women get nothing) in a land where even the postman demands a tip for a delivery! Most tribal people have no formal title to their land and therefore cannot claim compensation anyway. Most tribal people, or let’s say most small farmers, have as much use for money as a Supreme Court judge has for a bag of fertilizer.

The millions of displaced people don’t exist anymore. When history is written they won’t be in it. Not even as statistics. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times – a dam, an artillery proof range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. Once they start rolling, there’s no resting place. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labour (that builds more projects that displace more people). True, they’re not being annihilated or taken to gas chambers, but I can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than in any concentration camp of the Third Reich. They’re not captive, but they re-define the meaning of liberty.

And still the nightmare doesn’t end. They continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovels by government bulldozers that fan out on clean-up missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi, they run the risk of being shot by the police for shitting in public places – like three slum-dwellers were, not more than two years ago.

In the French Canadian wars of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada’s Native Indians by offering them blankets infested with the small-pox virus. Two centuries on, we of the Real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends.

The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White America and French Canada and Hitler’s Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we’re told that it’s being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. That it’s being done in the name of Progress, in the name of National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we’re told. We believe that it benefits us to believe.

Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this, because it’s important that you understand. If you find reason to disagree, by all means take the other side. But please don’t ignore it, don’t look away.

It isn’t an easy tale to tell. It’s full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not any more. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point.

Trust me. There’s a story here.

It’s true that India has progressed. It’s true that in 1947, when Colonialism formally ended, India was food-deficit. In 1950 we produced 51 million tonnes of foodgrain. Today we produce close to 200 million tonnes.

It’s true that in 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30 million tonnes of unsold grain. It’s also true that at the same time, 40 per cent of India’s population – more than 350 million people – were living below the poverty line. That’s more than the country’s population in 1947.

Indians are too poor to buy the food their country produces. Indians are being forced to grow the kinds of food they can’t afford to eat themselves. Look at what happened in Kalahandi District in Western Orissa, best known for its starvation deaths. In the drought of ’96, people died of starvation (16 according to the Government, over a 100 according to the press). Yet that same year rice production in Kalahandi was higher than the national average! Rice was exported from Kalahandi District to the Centre.

Certainly India has progressed but most of its people haven’t.

Our leaders say that we must have nuclear missiles to protect us from the threat of China and Pakistan. But who will protect us from ourselves?

What kind of country is this? Who owns it? Who runs it? What’s going on?

It’s time to spill a few State Secrets. To puncture the myth about the inefficient, bumbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial, essentially democratic, Indian State. Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people. Nor can Karma. Let’s not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless and one hundred per cent man-made.

The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India’s resources – its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air – and re-distributed it to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite. Consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling nice. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people, in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame – Ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defence strategists. Of course, we make it easy for them, we, its beneficiaries. We take care not to dig too deep. We don’t really want to know the grisly details.

Thanks to us, Independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the Rulers, won’t pause to look up from our heaving table. We don’t seem to know that the resources we’re feasting on are finite and rapidly depleting. There’s cash in the bank, but soon there’ll be nothing left to buy with it. The food’s running out in the kitchen. And the servants haven’t eaten yet. Actually, the servants stopped eating a long time ago.

India lives in her villages, we’re told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That’s bullshit. It’s just another fig leaf from the Government’s bulging wardrobe. India doesn’t live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India’s villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens’ vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

This impression we have of an overstretched State, struggling to cope with the sheer weight and scale of its problems, is a dangerous one. The fact is that it’s creating the problem. It’s a giant poverty-producing machine, masterful in its methods of pitting the poor against the very poor, of flinging crumbs to the wretched, so that they dissipate their energies fighting each other, while peace (and advertising) reigns in the Master’s Lodgings.

Until this process is recognised for what it is, until it is addressed and attacked, elections – however fiercely they’re contested – will continue to be mock battles that serve only to further entrench unspeakable inequity. Democracy (our version of it) will continue to be the benevolent mask behind which a pestilence flourishes unchallenged. On a scale that will make old wars and past misfortunes look like controlled laboratory experiments. Already fifty million people have been fed into the Development Mill and have emerged as air-conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits – subsidised air-conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits (if we must have these nice things, and they are nice, at least we should be made to pay for them).

There’s a hole in the flag that needs mending.

It’s a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith – we have no hope. To hope, we have to break the faith. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways and we have to fight to win.

Listen then, to the story of the Narmada Valley. Understand it. And, if you wish, enlist. Who knows, it may lead to magic.

The Narmada wells up on the plateau of Amarkantak in the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh, then winds its way through 1,300 kilometres of beautiful broad-leaved forest and perhaps the most fertile agricultural land in India. Twenty-five million people live in the river valley, linked to the ecosystem and to each other by an ancient, intricate web of interdependence (and, no doubt, exploitation). Though the Narmada has been targeted for “water resource development” for more than fifty years now, the reason it has, until recently, evaded being captured and dismembered is because it flows through three states – Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. (Ninety per cent of the river flows through Madhya Pradesh; it merely skirts the northern border of Maharashtra, then flows through Gujarat for about 180 km before emptying into the Arabian sea at Bharuch.)

As early as 1946, plans had been afoot to dam the river at Gora in Gujarat. In 1961, Nehru laid the foundation stone for a 49.8-metre-high dam – the midget progenitor of the Sardar Sarovar. Around the same time, the Survey of India drew up new, modernised topographical maps of the river basin. The dam planners in Gujarat studied the new maps and decided that it would be more profitable to build a much bigger dam. But this meant hammering out an agreement first with neighbouring states.

The three states bickered and balked but failed to agree on a water-sharing formula. Eventually, in 1969, the Central Government set up the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. It took the Tribunal ten years to announce its Award. The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard .

To apportion shares in the waters, the first, most basic thing the Tribunal had to do was to find out how much water there was in the river. Usually this can only be estimated accurately if there is at least forty years of recorded data on the volume of actual flow in the river. Since this was not available, they decided to extrapolate from rainfall data. They arrived at a figure of 27.22 MAF (million acre feet). This figure is the statistical bedrock of the Narmada Valley Projects. We are still living with its legacy. It more or less determines the overall design of the Projects – the height, location and number of dams. By inference, it determines the cost of the Projects, how much area will be submerged, how many people will be displaced and what the benefits will be. In 1992 actual observed flow data for the Narmada which was now available for 44 years (1948 -1992) showed that the yield from the river was only 22.69 MAF – eighteen per cent less! The Central Water Commission admits that there is less water in the Narmada than had previously been assumed. The Government of India says: It may be noted that clause II (of the Decision of the Tribunal) relating to determination of dependable flow as 28 MAF is non-reviewable.(!)

In other words, the Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the Government of India commands it to produce.

Its proponents boast that the Narmada Valley Project is the most ambitious river valley project ever conceived in human history. They plan to build 3,200 dams that will reconstitute the Narmada and her 41 tributaries into a series of step reservoirs – an immense staircase of amenable water. Of these, 30 will be major dams, 135 medium and the rest small. Two of the major dams will be multi-purpose mega dams. The Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in Madhya Pradesh will, between them, hold more water than any other reservoir on the Indian sub-continent.

Whichever way you look at it, the Narmada Valley Development Project is Big. It will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India’s biggest rivers. For better or for worse, it will affect the lives of twenty-five million people who live in the valley. Yet, even before the Ministry of Environment cleared the project, the World Bank offered to finance the lynch-pin of the project – the Sardar Sarovar Dam (whose reservoir displaces people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, but whose benefits go to Gujarat). The Bank was ready with its cheque-book before any costs were computed, before any studies had been done, before anybody had any idea of what the human cost or the environmental impact of the dam would be!

The 450-million-dollar loan for the Sardar Sarovar Projects was sanctioned and in place in 1985. Ministry of Environment clearance for the project came only in 1987! Talk about enthusiasm. It fairly borders on evangelism. Can anybody care so much?

Why were they so keen?

Between 1947 and 1994 the Bank received 6,000 applications for loans from around the world. They didn’t turn down a single one. Not a single one . Terms like ‘Moving money’ and ‘Meeting loan targets’ suddenly begin to make sense.

Today, India is in a situation where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayments of principal than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), after the arithmetic, India paid the Bank 478 million dollars more than it received. Over the last five years (’93 to ’98) India paid the Bank 1.475 billion dollars more than it received. The relationship between us is exactly like the relationship between a landless labourer steeped in debt and the local Bania – it is an affectionate relationship, the poor man loves his Bania because he’s always there when he’s needed. It’s not for nothing that we call the world a Global Village. The only difference between the landless labourer and the Government of India is that one uses the money to survive. The other just funnels it into the private coffers of its officers and agents, pushing the country into an economic bondage that it may never overcome.

The international Dam Industry is worth 20 billion dollars a year. If you follow the trails of big dams the world over, wherever you go – China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala – you’ll rub up against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam-jargon for the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental Consultants (who are usually directly employed by or subsidiaries of dam-builders), and, more often than not, the friendly, neighbourhood World Bank. You’ll grow to recognise the same inflated rhetoric, the same noble ‘Peoples’ Dam’ slogans, the same swift, brutal repression that follows the first sign of civil insubordination. (Of late, especially after its experience in the Narmada Valley, The Bank is more cautious about choosing the countries in which it finances projects that involve mass displacement. At present, China is their Most Favoured client. It’s the great irony of our times – American citizens protest the massacre in Tiananmen Square, but the Bank will use their money to fund the Three Gorges Dam in China which is going to displace 1.3 million people.)

It’s a skilful circus and the acrobats know each other well. Occasionally they’ll swap parts – a bureaucrat will join The Bank, a Banker will surface as a Project Consultant. At the end of play, a huge percentage of what’s called ‘Development Aid’ is re-channelled back to the countries it came from, masquerading as equipment cost or consultants’ fees or salaries to the agencies’ own staff. Often ‘Aid’ is openly ‘tied’. (As in the case of the Japanese loan for the Sardar Sarovar Dam, tied to a contract for purchasing turbines from Sumitomo Corporation.) Sometimes the connections are more sleazy. In 1993 Britain financed the Pergau Dam in Malaysia with a subsidised loan of 234 million pounds, despite an Overseas Development Administration report that said that the dam would be a ‘bad buy’ for Malaysia. It later emerged that the loan was offered to ‘encourage’ Malaysia to sign a 1.3- billion -pound contract to buy British Arms.

In 1994, U.K. consultants earned 2.5 billion dollars on overseas contracts. The second biggest sector of the market after Project Management was writing what are called EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments). In the Development racket, the rules are pretty simple. If you get invited by a Government to write an EIA for a big dam project and you point out a problem (say, for instance, you quibble about the amount of water available in a river, or, God forbid, you suggest that perhaps the human costs are too high), then you’re history. You’re an OOWC. An Out Of Work Consultant. And Oops! There goes your Range Rover. There goes your holiday in Tuscany. There goes your children’s private boarding school. There’s good money in poverty. Plus Perks.

In keeping with Big Dam tradition, concurrent with the construction of the 138.68-metre-high Sardar Sarovar Dam began the elaborate Government pantomime of conducting studies to estimate the actual project costs and the impact it would have on people and the environment. The World Bank participated whole-heartedly in the charade – occasionally they knitted their brows and raised feeble requests for more information on issues like the resettlement and rehabilitation of what they call PAPs – Project Affected Persons. (They help, these acronyms, they manage to mutate muscle and blood into cold statistics. PAPs soon cease to be people.)

The merest crumbs of information satisfied The Bank and they proceeded with the project. The implicit, unwritten but fairly obvious understanding between the concerned agencies was that whatever the costs – economic, environmental or human – the project would go ahead. They would justify it as they went along. They knew full well that eventually, in a courtroom or to a committee, no argument works as well as a Fait Accompli. ( Mi’ lord, the country is losing two crores a day due to the delay .) The Government refers to the Sardar Sarovar Projects as the ‘Most Studied Project in India’, yet the game goes something like this:

When the Tribunal first announced its Award, and the Gujarat Government announced its plan of how it was going to use its share of water, there was no mention of drinking water for villages in Kutch and Saurashtra , the arid areas of Gujarat. When the project ran into political trouble, the Government suddenly discovered the emotive power of Thirst. Suddenly, quenching the thirst of parched throats in Kutch and Saurashtra became the whole point of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Never mind that water from two rivers – the Sabarmati and the Mahi, both of which are miles closer to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada, have been dammed and diverted to Ahmedabad, Mehsana and Kheda. Neither Kutch nor Saurashtra has seen a drop of it.) Officially the number of people who will be provided drinking water by the Sardar Sarovar Canal fluctuates from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million (1989) – nice touch, the decimal point! – to 40 million (1992) and down to 25 million (1993).

The number of villages that would receive drinking water was zero in 1979, 4,719 in the early eighties, 7,234 in 1990 and 8,215 in 1991. When challenged, the Government admitted that these figures for 1991 included 236 uninhabited villages!

Every aspect of the project is approached in this almost cavalier manner, as if it’s a family board game. Even when it concerns the lives and futures of vast numbers of people.

In 1979 the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir was estimated to be a little over 6,000. In 1987 it grew to 12,000. In 1991 it surged to 27,000. In 1992 the Government declared that 40,000 families would be affected. Today, it hovers between 40,000 and 41,500. (Of course, even this is an absurd figure, because the reservoir isn’t the only thing that displaces people. According to the NBA the actual figure is 85,000 families – about half a million people.)

The estimated cost of the project bounced up from Rs.6,000 crores to Rs.20,000 crores (officially). The NBA says that it will cost Rs.40,000 crores. ( Half the entire irrigation budget of the whole country over the last fifty years .)

The Government claims the Sardar Sarovar Projects will produce 1450 Mega Watts of power. The thing about multi-purpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is that their ‘purposes’ (irrigation, power production and flood-control) conflict with each other. Irrigation uses up the water you need to produce power. Flood control requires you to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an anticipated surfeit of water. And if there’s no surfeit, you’re left with an empty dam. And this defeats the purpose of irrigation, which is to store the monsoon water. It’s like the riddle of trying to ford a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. The result of these mutually conflicting aims, studies say, is that when the Sardar Sarovar Projects are completed, and the scheme is fully functional, it will end up producing only 3 per cent of the power that its planners say it will. 50 Mega Watts.

In an old war, everybody has an axe to grind. So how do you pick your way through these claims and counter-claims? How do you decide whose estimate is more reliable? One way is to take a look at the track record of Indian Dams.

The Bargi Dam near Jabalpur was the first dam on the Narmada to be completed (1990). It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About 70,000 people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but when they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the Government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could, and watched their houses being washed away. 114,000 people were displaced. There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were given meagre cash compensations. Many got absolutely nothing. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to Government publicity, an ‘ideal village’. Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir, or moved to slums in Jabalpur. The Bargi Dam irrigates only as much land as it submerged in the first place – and only 5 per cent of the area that its planners claimed it would irrigate . Even that is water-logged.

Time and again, it’s the same story – the Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II scheme claimed it would displace 63,000 people. When completed, it displaced 150,000 people. The Gujarat Medium Irrigation II scheme displaced 140,000 people instead of 63,600. The revised estimate of the number of people to be displaced by the Upper Krishna irrigation project in Karnataka is 240,000 against its initial claims of displacing only 20,000.

These are World Bank figures. Not the NBA’s. Imagine what this does to our conservative estimate of thirty-three million.

Construction work on the Sardar Sarovar Dam site, which had continued sporadically since 1961, began in earnest in 1988. At the time, nobody, not the Government, nor the World Bank were aware that a woman called Medha Patkar had been wandering through the villages slated to be submerged, asking people whether they had any idea of the plans the Government had in store for them. When she arrived in the valley all those years ago, opposing the construction of the dam was the furthest thing from her mind. Her chief concern was that displaced villagers should be resettled in an equitable, humane way. It gradually became clear to her that the Government’s intentions towards them were far from honourable. By 1986 word had spread and each state had a peoples’ organisation that questioned the promises about resettlement and rehabilitation that were being bandied about by Government officials. It was only some years later that the full extent of the horror – the impact that the dams would have, both on the people who were to be displaced and the people who were supposed to benefit – began to surface. The Narmada Valley Development Project came to be known as India’s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. The various peoples’ organisations massed into a single organisation and the Narmada Bachao Andolan – the extraordinary NBA – was born.

In 1988 the NBA formally called for all work on the Narmada Valley Development Projects to be stopped. People declared that they would drown if they had to, but would not move from their homes. Within two years, the struggle had burgeoned and had support from other resistance movements. In September 1989, some 50,000 people gathered in the Valley at Harsud from all over India to pledge to fight Destructive Development. The dam site and its adjacent areas, already under the Indian Official Secrets Act, was clamped under Section 144 which prohibits the gathering of groups of more than five people. The whole area was turned into a police camp. Despite the barricades, one year later, on the 28 th of September 1990, thousands of villagers made their way on foot and by boat to a little town called Badwani, in Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their pledge to drown rather than agree to move from their homes. News of the people’s opposition to the Projects spread to other countries. The Japanese arm of Friends of the Earth mounted a campaign in Japan that succeeded in getting the Government of Japan to withdraw its 27-billion-yen loan to finance the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (The contract for the turbines still holds.) Once the Japanese withdrew, international pressure from various Environmental Activist groups who supported the struggle began to mount on the World Bank.

This, of course, led to an escalation of repression in the valley. Government policy, described by a particularly articulate Minister, was to ‘flood the valley with khakhi’.

On Christmas Day in 1990, some 6,000 men and women walked over a hundred kilometres, carrying their provisions and their bedding, accompanying a seven-member sacrificial squad who had resolved to lay down their lives for the river. They were stopped at Ferkuwa on the Gujarat border by battalions of armed police and crowds of people from the city of Baroda, many of whom were hired, some of whom perhaps genuinely believed that the Sardar Sarovar was ‘Gujarat’s lifeline’. It was an interesting confrontation. Middle Class Urban India versus a Rural, predominantly Tribal Army. The marching people demanded they be allowed to cross the border and walk to the dam site. The police refused them passage. To stress their commitment to non-violence, each villager had his or her hands bound together. One by one, they defied the battalions of police. They were beaten, arrested and dragged into waiting trucks in which they were driven off and dumped some miles away, in the wilderness. They just walked back and began all over again.

The confrontation continued for almost two weeks. Finally, on the 7th of January 1991, the seven members of the sacrificial squad announced that they were going on an indefinite hunger strike. Tension rose to dangerous levels. The Indian and International Press, TV camera crews and documentary film-makers, were present in force. Reports appeared in the papers almost every day. Environmental Activists stepped up the pressure in Washington. Eventually, acutely embarrassed by the glare of unfavourable media coverage, the World Bank announced that it would institute an Independent Review of the Sardar Sarovar Projects – unprecedented in the history of Bank Behaviour.

When the news reached the valley, it was received with distrust and uncertainty. The people had no reason to trust the World Bank. But still, it was a victory of sorts. The villagers, understandably upset by the frightening deterioration in the condition of their comrades who had not eaten for 22 days, pleaded with them to call off the fast. On the 28th of January, the fast at Ferkuwa was called off, and the brave, ragged army returned to their homes shouting “ Hamara Gaon Mein Hamara Raj !” (Our Rule in Our Villages).

There has been no army quite like this one, anywhere else in the world. In other countries – China (Chairman Mao got a Big Dam for his 77 th birthday), Brazil, Malaysia, Guatemala, Paraguay – every sign of revolt has been snuffed out almost before it began. Here in India, it goes on and on. Of course, the State would like to take credit for this too. It would like us to be grateful to it for not crushing the movement completely, for allowing it to exist. After all what is all this, if not a sign of a healthy functioning democracy in which the State has to intervene when its people have differences of opinion?

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. (Is this my cue to cringe and say ‘Thankyou, thankyou, for allowing me to write the things I write?’)

We don’t need to be grateful to the State for permitting us to protest. We can thank ourselves for that. It is we who have insisted on these rights. It is we who have refused to surrender them. If we have anything to be truly proud of as a people, it is this.

The struggle in the Narmada Valley lives, despite the State.

The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence, its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To wear out the opposition. The State never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay.

But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old. Even the young age prematurely. For twenty years now, since the Tribunal’s award, the ragged army in the valley has lived with the fear of eviction. For twenty years, in most areas there has been no sign of ‘development’ – no roads, no schools, no wells, no medical help. For twenty years, it has borne the stigma ‘slated for submergence’ – so it’s isolated from the rest of society (no marriage proposals, no land transactions). They’re a bit like the Hibakushas in Japan (the victims and their descendants of the bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The ‘fruits of modern development’, when they finally came, brought only horror. Roads brought surveyors. Surveyors brought trucks. Trucks brought policemen. Policemen brought bullets and beatings and rape and arrest and, in one case, murder. The only genuine ‘fruit’ of modern development that reached them, reached them inadvertently – the right to raise their voices, the right to be heard. But they have fought for twenty years now. How much longer will they last?

The struggle in the valley is tiring. It’s no longer as fashionable as it used to be. The international camera crews and the radical reporters have moved (like the World Bank) to newer pastures. The documentary films have been screened and appreciated. Everybody’s sympathy is all used up. But the dam goes on. It’s getting higher and higher…

Now, more than ever before, the ragged army needs reinforcements. If we let it die, if we allow the struggle to be crushed, if we allow the people to be punished, we will lose the most precious thing we have: Our spirit, or what’s left of it.

“India will go on,” they’ll tell you, the sage philosophers who don’t want to be troubled by piddling Current Affairs. As though ‘India’ is somehow more valuable than her people.

Old Nazis probably soothe themselves in similar ways.

The war for the Narmada Valley is not just some exotic tribal war or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It’s a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honoured and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers… The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

Anyway, back to the story.

In June 1991, the World Bank appointed Bradford Morse, a former head of the United Nations Development Program, as Chairman of the Independent Review. His brief was to make a thorough assessment of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. He was guaranteed free access to all secret Bank documents relating to the Projects.

In September 1991, Bradford Morse and his team arrived in India. The NBA, convinced that this was yet another set-up, at first refused to meet them. The Gujarat Government welcomed the team with a red carpet (and a nod and a wink) as covert allies.

A year later, in June 1992, the historic Independent Review (known also as the Morse Report) was published.

It unpeels the project delicately, layer by layer, like an onion. Nothing was too big, and nothing too small for them to enquire into. They met Ministers and bureaucrats, they met NGOs working in the area, went from village to village, from resettlement site to resettlement site. They visited the good ones. The bad ones. The temporary ones, the permanent ones. They spoke to hundreds of people. They travelled extensively in the submergence area and the command area. They went to Kutch and other drought-hit areas in Gujarat. They commissioned their own studies. They examined every aspect of the project: hydrology and water management, the upstream environment, sedimentation, catchment area treatment, the downstream environment, the anticipation of likely problems in the command area – water-logging, salinity, drainage, health, the impact on wildlife.

What the Morse Report reveals, in temperate, measured tones (which I admire, but cannot achieve) is scandalous. It is the most balanced, un-biased, yet damning indictment of the relationship between the Indian State and the World Bank. Without appearing to, perhaps even without intending to, the report cuts through to the cosy core, to the space where they live together and love each other (somewhere between what they say and what they do).

The core recommendation of the 357-page Independent Review was unequivocal and wholly unexpected:

“We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed… it seems clear that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the Projects to the exclusion of human and environmental concerns… India and the states involved… have spent a great deal of money. No one wants to see this money wasted. But we caution that it may be more wasteful to proceed without full knowledge of the human and environmental costs. We have decided that it would be irresponsible for us to patch together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the Projects are as obvious as they seem to us. As a result, we think that the wisest course would be for the Bank to step back from the Projects and consider them afresh. The failure of the bank’s incremental strategy should be acknowledged.”

Four committed, knowledgeable, truly independent men – they do a lot to make up for faith eroded by hundreds of other venal ones who are paid to do similar jobs.

The Bank, however, was still not prepared to give up. It continued to fund the project. Two months after the Independent Review, it sent out the Pamela Cox Committee which did exactly what the Morse Review had cautioned the Bank against. It suggested a sort of patchwork remedy to try and salvage the operation. In October 1992, on the recommendation of the Pamela Cox Committee, the Bank asked the Indian Government to meet some minimum, primary conditions within a period of six months. Even that much the Government couldn’t do. Finally, on the 30 th of March 1993, the World Bank pulled out of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Actually, technically, on the 29 th of March, one day before the deadline they’d been given, the Indian Government asked the World Bank to withdraw.) Details. Details.

No one has ever managed to make the World Bank step back from a project before. Least of all a rag-tag army of the poorest people in one of the world’s poorest countries. A group of people whom Lewis Preston, then President of The Bank, never managed to fit into his busy schedule when he visited India. Sacking The Bank was and is a huge moral victory for the people in the valley.

The euphoria didn’t last. The Government of Gujarat announced that it was going to raise the 200-million-dollar shortfall on its own and continue with the project. During the period of the Review, and after it was published, confrontation between people and the Authorities continued unabated in the valley – humiliation, arrests, lathi charges. Indefinite fasts terminated by temporary promises and permanent betrayals. People who had agreed to leave the valley and be resettled had begun returning to their villages from their resettlement sites. In Manibeli, a village in Maharashtra and one of the nerve-centres of the resistance, hundreds of villagers participated in a Monsoon Satyagraha. In 1993, families in Manibeli remained in their homes as the waters rose. They clung to wooden posts with their children in their arms and refused to move. Eventually policemen prised them loose and dragged them away. The NBA declared that if the Government did not agree to review the project, on the 6th of August 1993 a band of activists would drown themselves in the rising waters of the reservoir. On the 5th of August, the Union Government constituted yet another committee called the Five Member Group (FMG) to review the Sardar Sarovar Projects.

The Government of Gujarat refused them entry into Gujarat. The FMG report (a “desk report”) was submitted the following year. It tacitly endorsed the grave concerns of the Independent Review. But it made no difference. Nothing changed. This is another of the State’s tested strategies. It kills you with committees.

In February 1994, the Government of Gujarat ordered the permanent closure of the sluice gates of the dam.

In May 1994, the NBA filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court questioning the whole basis of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and seeking a stay on the construction.

That monsoon, when the water level in the reservoir rose and smashed down on the other side of the dam, 65,000 cubic metres of concrete and 35,000 cubic metres of rock were torn out of a stilling basin, leaving a 65-metre crater. The riverbed powerhouse was flooded. The damage was kept secret for months. Reports started appearing about it in the press only in January of 1995.

In early 1995, on the grounds that the rehabilitation of displaced people had not been adequate, the Supreme Court ordered work on the dam to be suspended until further notice. The height of the dam was 80 metres above Mean Sea Level.

Meanwhile, work had begun on two more dams in Madhya Pradesh: the Narmada Sagar (without which the Sardar Sarovar loses 17-30 per cent of its efficiency) and the Maheshwar Dam. The Maheshwar Dam is next in line, upstream from the Sardar Sarovar. The Government of Madhya Pradesh has signed a Power Purchase Agreement with a private company – S.Kumars – one of India’s leading textile magnates.

Tension in the Sardar Sarovar area abated temporarily and the battle moved upstream, to Maheshwar, in the fertile plains of Nimad.

The case pending in the Supreme Court led to a palpable easing of repression in the valley. Construction work had stopped on the dam, but the rehabilitation charade continued. Forests (slated for submergence) continued to be cut and carted away in trucks, forcing people who depended on them for a livelihood to move out.

Even though the dam is nowhere near its eventual, projected height, its impact on the environment and the people living along the river is already severe.

Around the dam site and the nearby villages, the number of cases of malaria has increased six-fold.

Several kilometres upstream from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, huge deposits of silt, hip-deep and over two hundred metres wide, have cut off access to the river. Women carrying water pots now have to walk miles, literally miles , to find a negotiable entry point. Cows and goats get stranded in it and die. The little single-log boats that tribal people use have become unsafe on the irrational circular currents caused by the barricade downstream.

Further upstream, where the silt deposits have not yet become a problem, there’s another problem. Landless people (predominantly tribal people and Dalits) have traditionally cultivated rice, fruit and vegetables on the rich, shallow silt banks the river leaves when it recedes in the dry months. Every now and then, the engineers manning the Bargi Dam (way upstream, near Jabalpur) release water from the reservoir without warning. Downstream, the water level in the river suddenly rises. Hundreds of families have had their crops washed away several times, leaving them with no livelihood.

Suddenly they can’t trust their river anymore. It’s like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I’ll be rapped on the knuckles if I continue in this vein. When we’re discussing the Greater Common Good there’s no place for sentiment. One must stick to facts. Forgive me for letting my heart wander.

The State Governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra continue to be completely cavalier in their dealings with displaced people. The Government of Gujarat has a rehabilitation policy (on paper) that makes the other two states look medieval. It boasts of being the best rehabilitation package in the world. It offers land for land to displaced people from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and recognises the claims of ‘encroachers’ (usually tribal people with no papers). The deception, however, lies in its definition of who qualifies as ‘Project Affected’.

In point of fact, the Government of Gujarat hasn’t even managed to rehabilitate people from its own 19 villages slated for submergence, let alone the rest of the 226 in the other two states. The inhabitants of these 19 villages have been scattered to 175 separate rehabilitation sites. Social links have been smashed, communities broken up.

In practice, the resettlement story (with a few ‘ideal village’ exceptions) continues to be one of callousness and broken promises. Some people have been given land, others haven’t. Some have land that is stony and uncultivable. Some have land that is irredeemably water-logged. Some have been driven out by landowners who sold land to the Government but haven’t been paid yet.

Some who were resettled on the peripheries of other villages have been robbed, beaten and chased away by their host villagers. There have been occasions when displaced people from two different dam projects have been allotted contiguous lands. In one case, displaced people from three dams – the Ukai Dam, the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the Karjan Dam – were resettled in the same area. In addition to fighting amongst themselves for resources – water, grazing land, jobs – they had to fight a group of landless labourers who had been sharecropping the land for absentee landlords who had subsequently sold it to the Government.

There’s another category of displaced people – people whose lands have been acquired by the Government for Resettlement Sites. There’s a pecking order even amongst the wretched – Sardar Sarovar ‘oustees’ are more glamorous than other ‘oustees’ because they’re occasionally in the news and have a case in court. (In other Development Projects where there’s no press, no NBA, no court case, there are no records. The displaced leave no trail at all.)

In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds which are furnaces in summer and ‘fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry river beds which, during the monsoon, turn into fast-flowing drifts. I’ve been to some of these ‘sites’. I’ve seen film footage of others: shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of charpais, while swirling waters enter their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them to retrieve what they can.

When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush. The ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes, carefully stacked away like postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten and unusable.

Forty households were moved from Manibeli to a resettlement site in Maharashtra. In the first year, thirty-eight children died.

In today’s papers ( The Indian Express , 26 th April ’99) there’s a report about nine deaths in a single rehabilitation site in Gujarat. In the course of a week. That’s 1.2875 PAPs a day, if you’re counting.

Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world. Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometres to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and women), offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale.

Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed – food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing material – they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day with which to feed and keep their families. Instead of a river, they have a hand pump. In their old villages, they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they’re a heartbeat away from destitution.

In Vadaj, a resettlement site I visited near Baroda, the man who was talking to me rocked his sick baby in his arms, clumps of flies gathered on its sleeping eyelids. Children collected around us, taking care not to burn their bare skin on the scorching tin walls of the shed they call a home. The man’s mind was far away from the troubles of his sick baby. He was making me a list of the fruit he used to pick in the forest. He counted forty-eight kinds. He told me that he didn’t think he or his children would ever be able to afford to eat any fruit again. Not unless he stole it. I asked him what was wrong with his baby. He said it would be better for the baby to die than to have to live like this. I asked what the baby’s mother thought about that. She didn’t reply. She just stared.

For the people who’ve been resettled, everything has to be re-learned. Every little thing, every big thing: from shitting and pissing (where d’you do it when there’s no jungle to hide you?) to buying a bus ticket, to learning a new language, to understanding money. And worst of all, learning to be supplicants. Learning to take orders. Learning to have Masters. Learning to answer only when you’re addressed.

In addition to all this, they have to learn how to make written representations (in triplicate) to the Grievance Redressal Committee or the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for any particular problems they might have. Recently, 3,000 people came to Delhi to protest their situation – travelling overnight by train, living on the blazing streets. The President wouldn’t meet them because he had an eye infection. Maneka Gandhi, the Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, wouldn’t meet them but asked for a written representation ( Dear Maneka, Please don’t build the dam, Love, The People ). When the representation was handed to her, she scolded the little delegation for not having written it in English.

From being self-sufficient and free, to being impoverished and yoked to the whims of a world you know nothing, nothing about – what d’you suppose it must feel like? Would you like to trade your beach house in Goa for a hovel in Paharganj? No? Not even for the sake of the Nation?

Truly, it is just not possible for a State Administration, any State Administration, to carry out the rehabilitation of a people as fragile as this, on such an immense scale. It’s like using a pair of hedge-shears to trim an infant’s finger nails. You can’t do it without shearing its fingers off. Land for land sounds like a reasonable swap, but how do you implement it? How do you uproot 200,000 people (the official blinkered estimate) of which 117,000 are tribal people, and relocate them in a humane fashion? How do you keep their communities intact, in a country where every inch of land is fought over, where almost all litigation pending in courts has to do with land disputes?

Where is all this fine, unoccupied but arable land that is waiting to receive these intact communities?

The simple answer is that there isn’t any. Not even for the ‘officially’ displaced of this one dam.

What about the rest of the three thousand two hundred and ninety-nine dams?

What about the remaining thousands of ‘PAPs’ earmarked for annihilation? Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it over with?

Jalud, in the Nimad plains of Madhya Pradesh, is the first of sixty villages that will be submerged by the reservoir of the Maheshwar Dam. Jalud is not a tribal village, and is therefore riven with the shameful caste divisions that are the scourge of every ordinary Hindu village. A majority of the land-owning farmers (the ones who qualify as PAPs) are Rajputs. They farm some of the most fertile soil in India. Their houses are piled with sacks of wheat and daal and rice. They boast so much about the things they grow on their land that if it weren’t so tragic, it could get on your nerves. Their houses have already begun to crack with the impact of the dynamiting on the dam site.

Twelve families, mostly Dalits, who had small holdings in the vicinity of the dam site had their land acquired. They told me how when they objected, cement was poured into their water pipes, their standing crops were bulldozed, and the police occupied the land by force. All 12 families are now landless and work as wage labour.

The area that the people of Jalud are going to be moved to is a few kilometres inland, away from the river, adjoining a predominantly Dalit and tribal village called Samraj. I saw the huge tract of land that had been marked off for them. It was a hard, stony hillock with stubbly grass and scrub, on which truckloads of silt were being unloaded and spread out in a thin layer to make it look like rich, black cotton soil. The story goes like this: at the instance of the S. Kumars (Textile Tycoons turned Nation Builders), the District Magistrate acquired the hillock, which was actually village common grazing land that belonged to the people of Samraj. In addition to this, the land of 10 Dalit villagers was acquired. No compensation was paid.

The villagers, whose main source of income was their livestock, had to sell their goats and buffaloes because they no longer had anywhere to graze them. Their only remaining source of income lies (lay) on the banks of a small lake on the edge of the village. In summer, when the water level recedes, it leaves a shallow ring of rich silt on which the villagers grow (grew) rice, melons and cucumber.

The S. Kumars have excavated this silt to cosmetically cover the stony grazing ground (that the people of Jalud don’t want). The banks of the lake are now steep and uncultivable.

The already impoverished people of Samraj have been left to starve, while this photo-opportunity is being readied for German funders and Indian courts and anybody else who cares to pass that way.

This is how India works. This is the genesis of the Maheshwar Dam. The story of the first village. What will happen to the other fifty-nine? May bad luck pursue this dam. May bulldozers turn upon the Textile Tycoons.

Nothing can justify this kind of behaviour.

In circumstances like these, even to entertain a debate about Rehabilitation is to take the first step towards setting aside the Principles of Justice. Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water to 40 million – there’s something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is Fascist Maths. It strangles stories. Bludgeons detail. And manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.

When I arrived on the banks of the Narmada in late March (1999), it was a month after the Supreme Court suddenly vacated the stay on construction work of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. I had read pretty much everything I could lay my hands on (all those ‘secret’ Government documents). I had a clear idea of the lay of the land – of what had happened where and when and to whom. The story played itself out before my eyes like a tragic film whose actors I’d already met. Had I not known its history, nothing would have made sense. Because in the valley there are stories within stories and it’s easy to lose the clarity of rage in the sludge of other peoples’ sorrow.

I ended my journey in Kevadia Colony, where it all began. Thirty-eight years ago, this is where the Government of Gujarat decided to locate the infrastructure it would need for starting work on the dam: guest houses, office blocks, accommodation for engineers and their staff, roads leading to the dam site, warehouses for construction material.

It is located on the cusp of what is now the Sardar Sarovar reservoir and the Wonder Canal, Gujarat’s ‘lifeline’ , which is going to quench the thirst of millions.

Nobody knows this, but Kevadia Colony is the key to the World. Go there, and secrets will be revealed to you.

In the winter of 1961, a government officer arrived in a village called Kothie and informed the villagers that some of their land would be needed to construct a helipad. In a few days a bulldozer arrived and flattened standing crops. The villagers were made to sign papers and were paid a sum of money, which they assumed was payment for their destroyed crops. When the helipad was ready, a helicopter landed on it, and out came Prime Minister Nehru. Most of the villagers couldn’t see him because he was surrounded by policemen. Nehru made a speech. Then he pressed a button and there was an explosion on the other side of the river. After the explosion he flew away. That was the inauguration of the earliest avatar of the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

Could Nehru have known when he pressed that button that he had unleashed an incubus?

After Nehru left, the Government of Gujarat arrived in strength. It acquired 1,600 acres of land from 950 families from six villages. The people were Tadvi tribals, but because of their proximity to the city of Baroda, not entirely unversed in the ways of a market economy. They were sent notices and told that they would be paid cash compensation and given jobs on the dam site. Then the nightmare began. Trucks and bulldozers rolled in. Forests were felled, standing crops destroyed. Everything turned into a whirl of jeeps and engineers and cement and steel. Mohan Bhai Tadvi watched eight acres of his land with standing crops of jowar, toovar and cotton being levelled. Overnight he became a landless labourer. Three years later he received his cash compensation of 250 rupees an acre in three instalments.

Dersukh Bhai Vesa Bhai’s father was given 3,500 rupees for his house and five acres of land with its standing crops and all the trees on it. He remembers walking all the way to Rajpipla (the district headquarters) as a little boy, holding his father’s hand. He remembers how terrified they were when they were called in to the Tehsildar’s office. They were made to surrender their compensation notices and sign a receipt. They were illiterate, so they didn’t know how much the receipt was made out for.

Everybody had to go to Rajpipla but they were always summoned on different days, one by one. So they couldn’t exchange information or compare amounts.

Gradually, out of the dust and bulldozers, an offensive, diffuse configuration emerged. Kevadia Colony. Row upon row of ugly cement flats, offices, guest houses, roads. All the graceless infrastructure of Big Dam construction. The villagers’ houses were dismantled and moved to the periphery of the colony, where they remain today, squatters on their own land. Those that created trouble were intimidated by the police and the construction company. The villagers told me that in the contractor’s headquarters they have a ‘lock-up’ like a police lock-up, where recalcitrant villagers are incarcerated and beaten.

The people who were evicted to build Kevadia Colony do not qualify as ‘Project-Affected’ in Gujarat’s Rehabilitation package.

Some of them work as servants in the officers’ bungalows and waiters in the guest house built on the land where their own houses once stood. Can there be anything more poignant?

Those who had some land left tried to cultivate it, but the Kevadia municipality introduced a scheme in which they brought in pigs to eat uncollected refuse on the streets. The pigs stray into the villagers’ fields and destroy their crops.

In 1992, after thirty years, each family has been offered a sum of 12,000 rupees per hectare, up to a maximum of 36,000 rupees, provided they agree to leave their homes and go away! Yet 40 per cent of the land that was acquired is lying unused. The government refuses to return it. Eleven acres acquired from Deviben, who is a widow now, have been given over to the Swami Narayan Trust (a big religious sect). On a small portion of it, the Trust runs a little school. The rest it cultivates, while Deviben watches through the barbed wire fence. On the 200 acres acquired in the village of Gora, villagers were evicted and blocks of flats were built. They lay empty for years. Eventually the Government hired it for a nominal fee to Jai Prakash Associates, the dam contractors, who, the villagers say, sub-let it privately for 32,000 rupees a month. (Jai Prakash Associates, the biggest dam contractors in the country, the real nation-builders, own the Siddharth Continental and the Vasant Continental in Delhi.)

On an area of about 30 acres there is an absurd cement PWD ‘replica’ of the ancient Shoolpaneshwar temple that was submerged in the reservoir. The same political formation that plunged a whole nation into a bloody, medieval nightmare because it insisted on destroying an old mosque to dig up a non-existent temple thinks nothing of submerging a hallowed pilgrimage route and hundreds of temples that have been worshipped in for centuries.

It thinks nothing of destroying the sacred hills and groves, the places of worship, the ancient homes of the gods and demons of tribal people.

It thinks nothing of submerging a valley that has yielded fossils, microliths and rock paintings, the only valley in India, according to archaeologists, that contains an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Old Stone Age.

What can one say?

In Kevadia Colony, the most barbaric joke of all is the wildlife museum. The Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Centre gives you a quick, comprehensive picture of the Government’s commitment to Conservation.

The Sardar Sarovar reservoir, when the dam is at its full height, is going to submerge about 13,000 hectares of prime forest land. (In anticipation of submergence, the forest began to be felled many greedy years ago.) Environmentalists and conservationists were quite rightly alarmed at the extent of loss of biodiversity and wildlife habitat that the submergence would cause. To mitigate this loss, the Government decided to expand the Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary that straddles the dam on the south side of the river. There is a hare-brained scheme that envisages drowning animals from the submerged forests swimming their way to ‘wild-life corridors’ that will be created for them, and setting up home in the New! Improved! Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary. Presumably wildlife and biodiversity can be protected and maintained only if human activity is restricted and traditional rights to use forest resources curtailed. Forty thousand tribal people from 101 villages within the boundaries of the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary depend on the forest for a livelihood. They will be ‘persuaded’ to leave. They are not included in the definition of Project Affected.

Where will they go? I imagine you know by now.

Whatever their troubles in the real world, in the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Centre (where an old stuffed leopard and a mouldy sloth bear have to make do with a shared corner) the tribal people have a whole room to themselves. On the walls there are clumsy wooden carvings – Government-approved tribal art, with signs that say ‘Tribal Art’. In the centre, there is a life-sized thatched hut with the door open. The pot’s on the fire, the dog is asleep on the floor and all’s well with the world. Outside, to welcome you, are Mr. and Mrs. Tribal. A lumpy, papier mache couple, smiling.

Smiling . They’re not even permitted the grace of rage. That’s what I can’t get over.

Oh, but have I got it wrong? What if they’re smiling voluntarily, bursting with National Pride? Brimming with the joy of having sacrificed their lives to bring drinking water to thirsty millions in Gujarat?

For twenty years now, the people of Gujarat have waited for the water they believe the Wonder Canal will bring them. For years the Government of Gujarat has invested 85 per cent of the State’s irrigation budget into the Sardar Sarovar Projects. Every smaller, quicker, local, more feasible scheme has been set aside for the sake of this. Election after election has been contested and won on the ‘water ticket’. Everyone’s hopes are pinned to the Wonder Canal. Will she fulfil Gujarat’s dreams?

From the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the Narmada flows through 180 km of rich lowland into the Arabian Sea in Bharuch. What the Wonder Canal does, more or less, is to re-route most of the river, turning it almost 90 degrees northward. It’s a pretty drastic thing to do to a river. The Narmada estuary in Bharuch is one of the last known breeding places of the Hilsa, probably the hottest contender for India’s favourite fish. The Stanley Dam wiped out Hilsa from the Cauvery River in South India, and Pakistan’s Ghulam Mohammed Dam destroyed its spawning area on the Indus. Hilsa, like the salmon, is an anadromous fish – born in freshwater, migrating to the ocean as a smolt and returning to the river to spawn. The drastic reduction in water flow, the change in the chemistry of the water because of all the sediment trapped behind the dam, will radically alter the ecology of the estuary and modify the delicate balance of fresh water and sea water which is bound to affect the spawning. At present, the Narmada estuary produces 13,000 tonnes of Hilsa and freshwater prawn (which also breed in brackish water). Ten thousand fisher families depend on it for a living.

The Morse Committee was appalled to discover that no studies had been done of the downstream environment – no documentation of the riverine ecosystem, its seasonal changes, biological species or the pattern of how its resources are used. The dam-builders had no idea what the impact of the dam would be on the people and the environment downstream, let alone any ideas on what steps to take to mitigate it.

The government simply says that it will alleviate the loss of Hilsa fisheries by stocking the reservoir with hatchery-bred fish. (Who’ll control the reservoir? Who’ll grant the commercial fishing to its favourite paying customers?) The only hitch is that so far, scientists have not managed to breed Hilsa artificially. The rearing of Hilsa depends on getting spawn from wild adults, which will, in all likelihood be eliminated by the dam. Dams have either eliminated or endangered one-fifth of the world’s freshwater fish.

So! Quiz question – where will the 40,000 fisher folk go?

E-mail your answers to the government_that_cares.com

At the risk of losing readers (I’ve been warned several times – ‘How can you write about irrigation ? Who the hell is interested?’), let me tell you what the Wonder Canal is – and what she’s meant to achieve. Be interested, if you want to snatch your future back from the sweaty palms of the Iron Triangle.

Most rivers in India are monsoon-fed. About 80-85 per cent of the flow takes place during the rainy months – usually between June and September. The purpose of a dam, an irrigation dam, is to store monsoon water in its reservoir and then use it judiciously for the rest of the year, distributing it across dry land through a system of canals. The area of land irrigated by the canal network is called the command area. How will the command area, accustomed only to seasonal irrigation, its entire ecology designed for that single pulse of monsoon rain, react to being irrigated the whole year round? Perennial canal irrigation does to soil roughly what anabolic steroids do to the human body. Steroids can turn an ordinary athlete into an Olympic medal-winner, perennial irrigation can convert soil which produced only a single crop a year into soil that yields several crops a year. Lands on which farmers traditionally grew crops that don’t need a great deal of water (maize, millet, barley, and a whole range of pulses) suddenly yield water-guzzling cash crops – cotton, rice, soya bean, and the biggest guzzler of all (like those finned ‘fifties cars), sugar-cane. This completely alters traditional crop-patterns in the command area. People stop growing things that they can afford to eat, and start growing things that they can only afford to sell. By linking themselves to the ‘market’ they lose control over their lives.

Unfortunately, ecologically, this is a poisonous payoff. Even if the markets hold out, the soil doesn’t. Over time it becomes too poor to support the extra demands made on it. Gradually, in the way the steroid-using athlete becomes an invalid, the soil becomes depleted and degraded, the agricultural yields begin to wind down. In India, land irrigated by well water is now almost twice as productive as land irrigated by canals. Certain kinds of soil are less suitable for perennial irrigation than others. Perennial canal irrigation raises the level of the water-table. As the water moves up through the soil, it absorbs salts. Saline water is drawn to the surface by capillary action, and the land becomes water-logged. The ‘logged’ water (to coin a phrase) is then breathed into the atmosphere by plants, causing an even greater concentration of salts in the soil. When the concentration of salts in the soil reaches one per cent, that soil becomes toxic to plant life. This is what’s called salinization.

A study by the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University says that one-fifth of the world’s irrigated land is salt-affected.

By the mid-80s, 25 million of the 37 million hectares under irrigation in Pakistan were estimated to be either salinized or water-logged or both. In India the estimates vary between 6 and 10 million hectares. According to ‘secret’ government studies, more than 52 per cent of the Sardar Sarovar command area is prone to water-logging and salinization.

And that’s not the end of the bad news.

The 460-kilometre-long, concrete-lined Sardar Sarovar Wonder Canal and its 75,000-kilometre network of branch canals and sub-branch canals is designed to irrigate a total of two million hectares of land spread over 12 districts. The districts of Kutch and Saurashtra (the billboards of Gujarat’s Thirst campaign) are at the very tail end of this network.

The system of canals superimposes an arbitrary concrete grid on the existing pattern of natural drainage in the command area. It’s a little like re-organising the pattern of reticulate veins on the surface of a leaf. When a canal cuts across the path of a natural drain, it blocks the natural flow of the seasonal water and leads to water-logging. The engineering solution to this is to map the pattern of natural drainage in the area and replace it with an alternate, artificial drainage system that is built in conjunction with the canals. The problem, as you can imagine, is that doing this is enormously expensive. The cost of drainage is not included as part of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. It usually isn’t, in most irrigation projects.

David Hopper, the World Bank’s vice-president for South Asia, has admitted that the Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation projects in South Asia because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are not economically viable. It costs five times as much to provide adequate drainage as it does to irrigate the same amount of land . The Bank’s solution to the problem is to put in the irrigation system and wait for salinity and water-logging to set in. When all the money’s spent, and the land is devastated, and the people are in despair, who should pop by? Why, the friendly neighbourhood Banker! And what’s that bulge in his pocket? Could it be a loan for a Drainage Project?

In Pakistan the World Bank financed the Tarbela (1977) and Mangla Dam (1967) Projects on the Indus. The command areas are water-logged. Now The Bank has given Pakistan a 785-million-dollar loan for a drainage project. In India, in Punjab and Haryana it’s doing the same.

Irrigation without drainage is like having a system of arteries and no veins. Pretty damn pointless.

Since the World Bank stepped back from the Sardar Sarovar Projects, it’s a little unclear where the money for the drainage is going to come from. This hasn’t deterred the Government from going ahead with the Canal work. The result is that even before the dam is ready, before the Wonder Canal has been commissioned, before a single drop of irrigation water has been delivered, water-logging has set in. Among the worst affected areas are the resettlement colonies.

There is a difference between the planners of the Sardar Sarovar irrigation scheme and the planners of previous projects. At least they acknowledge that water-logging and salinization are real problems and need to be addressed.

Their solutions, however, are corny enough to send a Hoolock Gibbon to a hooting hospital.

They plan to have a series of electronic groundwater sensors placed in every 100 square kilometres of the command area. (That works out to about 1,800 ground sensors.) These will be linked to a central computer which will analyse the data and send out commands to the canal heads to stop water flowing into areas that show signs of water-logging. A network of ‘Only-irrigation’, ‘Only-drainage’ and ‘Irrigation-cum drainage’ tube-wells will be sunk, and electronically synchronised by the central computer. The saline water will be pumped out, mixed with mathematically computed quantities of freshwater and re-circulated into a network of surface and sub-surface drains (for which more land will be acquired). To achieve the irrigation efficiency that they claim they’ll achieve, according to a study done by Dr. Rahul Ram for Kalpavriksh, 82 per cent of the water that goes into the Wonder Canal network will have to be pumped out again!

They’ve never implemented an electronic irrigation scheme before, not even as a pilot project. It hasn’t occurred to them to experiment with some already degraded land, just to see if it works. No, they’ll use our money to install it over the whole of the two million hectares and then see if it works. What if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, it won’t matter to the planners. They’ll still draw the same salaries. They’ll still get their pension and their gratuity and whatever else you get when you retire from a career of inflicting mayhem on a people.

How can it possibly work? It’s like sending in a rocket scientist to milk a troublesome cow. How can they manage a gigantic electronic irrigation system when they can’t even line the walls of the canals without having them collapse and cause untold damage to crops and people?

When they can’t even prevent the Big Dam itself from breaking off in bits when it rains?

To quote from one of their own studies, “ The design, the implementation and management of the integration of groundwater and surface water in the above circumstance is complex .”

Agreed. To say the least. Their recommendation of how to deal with the complexity:

“It will only be possible to implement such a system if all groundwater and surface water supplies are managed by a single authority.”

It’s beginning to make sense now. Who will own the water? The Single Authority. Who will sell the water? The Single Authority. Who will profit from the sales? The Single Authority. The Single Authority has a scheme whereby it will sell water by the litre, not to individuals but to farmers’ co-operatives (which don’t exist just yet, but no doubt the Single Authority can create co-operatives and force farmers to co-operate?) Computer water, unlike ordinary river water, is expensive. Only those who can afford it will get it.

Gradually, small farmers will get edged out by big farmers, and the whole cycle of uprootment will begin all over again.

The Single Authority, because it owns the computer water, will also decide who will grow what. It says that farmers getting computer water will not be allowed to grow sugarcane because they’ll use up the share of the thirsty millions at the tail end of the canal. But the Single Authority has already given licences to ten large sugar mills right near the head of the canal. On an earlier occasion, the Single Authority said that only 30 per cent of the command area of the Ukai Dam would be used for sugarcane. But sugarcane grows on 75 per cent of it (and 30 per cent is water-logged). In Maharashtra, thanks to a different branch of the Single Authority, the politically powerful sugar-lobby that occupies one-tenth of the state’s irrigated land uses half the state’s irrigation water.

In addition to the sugar growers, the Single Authority has recently announced a scheme that envisages a series of five-star hotels, golf-courses and water parks that will come up along the Wonder Canal. What earthly reason could possibly justify this?

The Single Authority says it’s the only way to raise money to complete the project!

I really worry about those millions of good people in Kutch and Saurashtra.

Will the water ever reach them?

First of all, we know that there’s a lot less water in the river than the Single Authority claims there is.

Second of all, in the absence of the Narmada Sagar Dam, the irrigation benefits of the Sardar Sarovar drop by a further 17-30 per cent.

Third of all, the irrigation efficiency of the Wonder Canal (the actual amount of water delivered by the system) has been arbitrarily fixed at 60 per cent. The highest irrigation efficiency in India, taking into account system leaks and surface evaporation, is 35 per cent. This means it’s likely that only half of the Command Area will be irrigated. Which half? The first half.

Fourth, to get to Kutch and Saurashtra, the Wonder Canal has to negotiate its way past the ten sugar mills, the golf-courses, the five-star hotels, the water parks and the cash-crop growing, politically powerful, Patel-rich districts of Baroda, Kheda, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Mehsana. (Already, in complete contravention of its own directives, the Single Authority has allotted the city of Baroda a sizeable quantity of water. When Baroda gets, can Ahmedabad be left behind? The political clout of powerful urban centres in Gujarat will ensure that they get their share.)

Fifth, even in the (one hundred per cent) unlikely event that water gets there, it has to be piped and distributed to those eight thousand waiting villages.

It’s worth knowing that of the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas. This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometres of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps and treatment plants that would be needed to provide drinking water to scattered rural populations is prohibitive. Nobody builds Big Dams to provide drinking water to rural people. Nobody can afford to.

When the Morse Committee first arrived in Gujarat they were impressed by the Gujarat Government’s commitment to taking drinking water to such distant, rural outposts. They asked to see the detailed drinking water plans.

There weren’t any. (There still aren’t any.)

They asked if any costs had been worked out. “A few thousand crores,” was the breezy answer. A billion dollars is an expert’s calculated guess. It’s not included as part of the project cost. So where is the money going to come from?

Never mind. Jus’ askin’.

It’s interesting that the Farakka Barrage that diverts water from the Ganga to Calcutta Port has reduced the drinking water availability for 40 million people who live downstream in Bangladesh.

At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take water away from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to bring water to 40 million people.

Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?

The last person I met in the valley was Bhaiji Bhai. He is a Tadvi tribal from Undava, one of the first villages where the government began to acquire land for the Wonder Canal and its 75,000 kilometre network. Bhaiji Bhai lost seventeen of his nineteen acres to the Wonder Canal. It crashes through his land, 700 feet wide including its walkways and steep, sloping embankments, like a velodrome for giant bicyclists.

The Canal network affects more than two hundred thousand families. People have lost wells and trees, people have had their houses separated from their farms by the canal, forcing them to walk two or three kilometres to the nearest bridge and then two or three kilometres back along the other side. Twenty-three thousand families, let’s say a hundred thousand people, will be, like Bhaiji Bhai, seriously affected. They don’t count as ‘Project-affected’ and are not entitled to rehabilitation.

Like his neighbours in Kevadia Colony, Bhaiji Bhai became a pauper overnight.

Bhaiji Bhai and his people, forced to smile for photographs on government calendars. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, denied the grace of rage. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, squashed like bugs by this country they’re supposed to call their own.

It was late evening when I arrived at his house. We sat down on the floor and drank over-sweet tea in the dying light. As he spoke, a memory stirred in me, a sense of deja vu . I couldn’t imagine why. I knew I hadn’t met him before. Then I realised what it was. I didn’t recognise him, but I remembered his story. I’d seen him in an old documentary film, shot more than ten years ago, in the valley. He was frailer now, his beard softened with age. But his story hadn’t aged. It was still young and full of passion. It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it. I could tell he had told it over and over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck. Or God.

Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry? When will you stop waiting? When will you say `That’s enough!’ and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be> When will you show us the whole of your resonant, terrifying, invincible strength?

When will you break the faith? Will you break the faith? Or will you let it break you?

* * * To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easliy you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewher else. You use caprice to fracture a people’s faith in the ancient things – earth, forest, water, air. Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God. Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And Powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.

This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic-sounding constitutions. It’s wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, no despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilisation has had access to weapons like these.

Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb – almost without our knowing it, we are being broken.

Big Dams are to a Nation’s ‘Development’ what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

Can we unscramble it?

Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada Valley.

This July will bring the last monsoon of the Twentieth Century. The ragged army in the Narmada Valley has declared that it will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir rise to claim its lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, whether you want it or you don’t, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that’s being paid for it. That you have the courage to watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.

Our dues. Our books. Not theirs.

ARUNDHATI ROY April 1999

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The Algebra of Infinite Justice Essay Summary by Arundhati Roy

Table of Contents

“The Algebra of Infinite Justice” is a thought-provoking essay written by Arundhati Roy , an Indian author, and activist. Published in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks in the United States, Roy’s essay challenges the prevalent narratives surrounding terrorism, nationalism, and the pursuit of justice.

Roy begins by discussing the nature of terrorism and its causes. She argues that while the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were horrific and unjustifiable, they were not entirely unprovoked. She highlights the long history of U.S. interference and intervention in the Middle East, which has often supported repressive regimes, caused civilian casualties, and fostered resentment among the local population. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy According to Roy, these actions have contributed to a cycle of violence and terrorism.

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The author criticizes the simplistic rhetoric of labeling individuals or groups as “terrorists.” She argues that such labels serve to dehumanize and delegitimize the grievances and struggles of those who resort to violence. Roy suggests that the term “terrorism” is often used selectively, conveniently excluding state-sponsored violence and focusing only on non-state actors.

Roy also examines the language used in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, particularly by the U.S. government. She critiques the notion of a “war on terror,” asserting that it has been used as a pretext to justify military interventions and curtail civil liberties. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy She argues that the idea of a perpetual war against an elusive enemy allows governments to consolidate power and suppress dissent.

Furthermore, Roy questions the concept of “just war” and the pursuit of justice through military means. She argues that violence begets violence, and that the cycle of vengeance and retribution only perpetuates suffering. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy Instead, she calls for a deeper understanding of the root causes of conflicts and the need to address them through non-violent means.

The author also explores the impact of globalization and capitalism on the world order. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy She criticizes the widening economic inequality, exploitation of resources, and marginalization of vulnerable populations caused by neoliberal policies. Roy asserts that these socio-economic injustices create fertile ground for violence and radicalization.

Throughout the essay, Roy advocates for a more nuanced and empathetic approach to understanding the complexities of terrorism and conflict. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy She emphasizes the importance of listening to the voices of the marginalized and oppressed, seeking alternative solutions, and challenging the dominant narratives perpetuated by governments and the media.

Themes and Symbols

• Terrorism and Violence: The essay explores the complex nature of terrorism and violence, questioning the simplistic labels and narratives often associated with these issues. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy It emphasizes the need to understand the root causes of violence and challenges the idea that military solutions alone can bring about justice.
• Justice and Injustice: Arundhati Roy critically examines the concept of justice. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy She highlights the injustices perpetuated by state-sponsored violence, economic inequality, and globalization, calling for a more inclusive and compassionate approach to achieving justice.
• Power and Resistance: The essay explores power dynamics and the ways in which power is wielded by governments and dominant institutions. Roy advocates for listening to marginalized voices and challenging the dominant narratives that perpetuate violence and inequality. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy She calls for resistance against oppressive systems and a reevaluation of power structures.
• “Algebra of Infinite Justice”: The title of the essay itself serves as a symbol, representing the complexities and interconnectedness of justice and the challenges of achieving it in a world marred by violence and inequality. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy It suggests that justice cannot be reduced to a simple equation or a one-size-fits-all approach.
• War on Terror: The rhetoric of the “war on terror” is a symbol of the militaristic and retributive approach adopted by governments in response to acts of terrorism. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy It represents the perpetuation of violence and the erosion of civil liberties under the pretext of security.
• Marginalized Voices: Throughout the essay, the voices of marginalized individuals and communities serve as symbols of resistance and alternative perspectives. Roy emphasizes the importance of listening to these voices and amplifying their narratives as a means of challenging dominant power structures and fostering understanding.
• Globalization: Globalization symbolizes the interconnectedness of the world and the uneven distribution of power and resources. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy It represents the economic forces that contribute to socio-economic inequality, exploitation, and the marginalization of vulnerable populations.

“The Algebra of Infinite Justice” by Arundhati Roy is a thought-provoking essay that challenges prevailing narratives on terrorism, nationalism, and justice. Roy argues for a more nuanced understanding of the causes of terrorism, critiquing the selective labeling of individuals as “terrorists” and highlighting the role of state-sponsored violence.

She questions the language of a “war on terror” and the pursuit of justice through military means, advocating for non-violent solutions and a deeper examination of the root causes of conflicts. Roy also critiques the impact of globalization and capitalism on socio-economic inequality, which she sees as contributing to violence and radicalization. The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy The essay calls for empathy, listening to marginalized voices, and challenging dominant narratives to foster a more just and inclusive world.

Q. Who is the author of “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”?

Ans. The essay “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” is written by Arundhati Roy, an Indian author, and activist.

Q. What is the main argument of the essay?

Ans. The main argument of the essay is that terrorism cannot be understood in isolation from its causes, such as historical grievances, state-sponsored violence, and socio-economic inequality. Roy calls for a more nuanced and empathetic approach to addressing terrorism, challenging the rhetoric of a “war on terror” and advocating for non-violent solutions.

Q. What does Roy criticize in the essay?

Ans. Roy criticizes the simplistic labeling of individuals as “terrorists” and argues that this overlooks the complexities of conflicts. She also critiques the language and actions of governments in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, questioning the concept of a perpetual war on terror and the pursuit of justice through military means. Additionally, she criticizes the impact of globalization and capitalism on socio-economic inequality.

Q. What does Roy propose as an alternative to military solutions?

Ans. Roy proposes a deeper understanding of the root causes of conflicts and the need for non-violent solutions. She emphasizes the importance of listening to marginalized voices, addressing socio-economic inequality, and challenging dominant narratives to achieve lasting justice.

Q. When was the essay published?

Ans. “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” was published in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks in the United States.

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India's case against Arundhati Roy is a big red flag for free speech

It has been 13 years since the Indian government first considered charges against the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy for sedition, incitement and hate speech for remarks she made about Kashmir in 2010 , including her belief that “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this.” This week, Indian officials cleared the case to proceed for “offenses related to provocative speech and the promotion of enmity,” according to The New York Times.

In 1997, readers around the world celebrated the arrival of Roy’s debut novel, “ The God of Small Things .” At the same time, traditionalists in India railed against her for addressing topics they considered taboo, like the discrimination of India’s caste system, politics and sexuality. 

If this is the case and charges against Roy proceed, it should be seen as a five-alarm alert for the future of democracy in India.

Over the following years, in a  stream of wide-ranging essays , Roy has written critically on themes such as imperialism, capitalist economic development and the right-wing Hindutva movement of which, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government is a part. She found herself accumulating court cases almost as quickly as honors, yet she has only once been sentenced to prison , and that was for one day. Her works have faced bans in India, including in 2020, when Tamil Nadu University excluded “ Walking With the Comrades ” because of pressure from a BJP-affiliated student group.

Why, then, did the Indian government wait until this week to  advance the charges — which could result in as much as seven years in prison — against her and Kashmiri law professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain?

There is speculation that the move is part of an escalating crackdown on free speech, possibly linked to  a police raid last week in New Delhi  that targeted multiple journalists associated with an online news site known for criticizing the Indian government. If this is the case and charges against Roy proceed, it should be seen as a five-alarm alert for the future of democracy in India. 

Countries that are not yet as far along the path to autocracy as India is have little problem condemning famous citizens and have even encouraged violence against them (as was the case recently in Poland with vicious verbal attacks on filmmaker Agnieszka Holland ). But governments have typically stopped short of actions that are likely to attract international condemnation. What is alarming is that Roy’s international prominence no longer seems to concern the Indian government; the legal case demonstrates the confidence of a government that is growing indifferent, if not impervious, to international opinion and brazen enough to advance its autocratic practices flagrantly.

Autocrats invariably target not only human rights defenders and journalists but also writers and artists. They instinctively recognize the power of words and, by extension, free and creative expression to spark imagination, kindle hope and allow people to imagine different and better worlds built on equality, freedom and human rights. In the absence of free expression, other freedoms are quick to die , paving the way for autocrats to write their own rules. 

India has been steadily taking more aggressive steps to quash free expression, censor artistic expression and punish independent discourse. Legal charges, court cases and preventive detention have led to the imprisonment of writers and journalists — among them the 82-year-old Telugu poet Varavara Rao , who was held in preventive detention for almost three years as part of the larger Bhima Koregaon case before he was released on bail, and Fahad Shah , a Kashmiri editor who has been detained since his arrest in February 2022 on spurious charges in multiple jurisdictions. And these prosecutions have chilled speech for many others, as dozens, including Roy, have  faced lesser forms of harassment, intimidation and online abuse . India ranked ninth in PEN America’s 2022  Freedom to Write Index , a count of jailed writers worldwide. 

Last month, Roy received the  European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement . At the conclusion of her acceptance speech, she said: “I loved the part in the prize citation in which it says, ‘Arundhati Roy uses the essay as a form of combat.’ It would be presumptuous, arrogant and even a little stupid of a writer to believe that she could change the world with her writing. But it would be pitiful if she didn’t even try.”

The irony is that while international pressure might not prevent the Indian government from locking up Roy, it could very well draw further attention to where she would be likely to want it most: her words.

Karin Deutsch Karlekar is the director of Writers at Risk at PEN America, the free expression and literary organization.