Arundhati Roy: Sentimentalism oozing from every pore

This is an extract of a chapter from Ravi Kapoor‘s book, “How India‘s Intellectuals Spread Lies (Vision Books, 2007)” on Arundhati Roy. The recent self glorification activity by Arundhati is well visualised in her pursuit of glory through controversial speech making. The chapter is being reproduced in two parts with the consent of the author.

If you want to know what chic is, just have a look at the recent writings of Arundhati Roy’s. The latest intellectual fads, fashionable phraseology, high-sounding rhetoric, sexy philanthropy, magnificent gibberish, high humbug¾you will find everything there. It all adds up to great style, but with little substance.

Nietzsche once wrote, “I want to say in ten sentences what others say in ten volumes¾and what they do not say.” In this respect, Roy is the antithesis of Nietzsche: her sentimentalism drives her to write rambling, long-winded essays on almost everything under the sun¾from nuclear bombs to hydroelectric projects, from the pathos of tribals to the alleged perspicacity of Chomsky; write, without the necessary wherewithal, without the backing of any scholarship, without even proper understanding of any of the subjects. Borrowing heavily from Leftist clichés and trendy shibboleths, adding a bit of Gandhi-like love-for-pristine-things, and embellishing her arguments with a liberal dose of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism, she produces essays which Outlook magazine¾that platform for political correctness and cretinism¾loves to publish. And since she has been acknowledged in the West, as a winner of Booker Prize, her verbose denunciations pass off as eloquence, and half-baked analysis as expertise.

After winning the Booker, she entered the arena of public discourse with a bang¾even literally. She wrote ‘The End of Imagination’ for the August 3, 1998, issue of Outlook in which she fumed against the nuclear explosion carried out in May 1998 by the newly-elected Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. She wrote:

There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently and knowledgeably.

I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes and speak our second-hand lines in this sad second-hand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.

She began honestly, admitting that nothing original should be expected of her: what followed was an almost 7,800-word account of how the world would come to an end! (I wonder how many million words she would produce if she had anything “new or original” to say). She wrote:

If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements¾the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water¾will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.

Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night…

Terrible future. Actually, the nuclear bomb can wreak a great deal of havoc even without a war:

Not only can the Government use it [the bomb] to threaten the Enemy, they can use it to declare war on their own people. Us.

In 1975, one year after India first dipped her toe into the nuclear sea, Mrs Gandhi declared the Emergency. What will 1999 bring? There’s talk of cells being set up to monitor anti-national activity. Talk of amending cable laws to ban networks ‘harming national culture’ (The Indian Express, July 3). Of churches being struck off the list of religious places because ‘wine is served’ (announced and retracted, The Indian Express, July 3, The Times of India, July 4). Artists, writers, actors, and singers are being harassed, threatened (and succumbing to the threats). Not just by goon squads, but by instruments of the government. And in courts of law…

All this because we have nuclear tests! A number of political analysts have written on the reasons that compelled Indira Gandhi to declare Emergency; but none of them have come up with an explanation as fantastic as Roy’s: Pokhran I caused Emergency. At the time of writing these lines, more than eight years have elapsed since Pokhran II; yet, unfortunately for the liberal Nostradamus, Ms Roy, the country has not witnessed another spell of dictatorship.

Now, it is another matter that she might see in the activities of the lunatic fringe of the Sangh Parivar an undeclared dictatorship. But such activities were there even before the BJP-led government assumed office or when India crossed the nuclear Rubicon. In fact, there is no cause and effect relationship between possessing a nuclear bomb and being a dictatorship. The US, the UK, and France are nuclear but they are democracies (though Roy does not believe they are, especially the US, as we shall see later). In her analysis, causality is the first casualty. But Roy does not pause to ponder over the any causality or casualty, or the lack of it, she alludes to; she moves on to the maze of development economics. According to her,

We are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development terms we rank No. 138 out of the 175 countries listed in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over 600 million lack even basic sanitation and over 200 million have no safe drinking water.

It is true that in terms of human development India is a laggard; but this is not linked with the expenditure incurred on nuclear tests or with defence expenditure. It is infantile to assume that India would have made dramatic progress in human development had there been no nuclear tests. In the aftermath of the Cold War, there was considerable decline in defence expenditures in many important countries, but this did not cause any great increase in human development in the concerned countries; there was no “peace dividend,” as hoped for by peaceniks.

Before you could make any sense of the grandiloquent baloney she is uttering without any stop, she has moved on to the rarefied realms of Indology and political philosophy:

Whether or not there has ever been a single civilization that could call itself ‘Indian Civilization,’ whether or not India was, is, or ever will become a cohesive cultural entity, depends on whether you dwell on the differences or the similarities in the cultures of the people who have inhabited the subcontinent for centuries. India, as a modern nation state, was marked out with precise geographical boundaries, in their precise geographical way, by a British Act of Parliament in 1899. Our country, as we know it, was forged on the anvil of the British Empire for the entirely unsentimental reasons of commerce and administration. But even as she was born, she began her struggle against her creators. So is India Indian? It’s a tough question. Let’s just say that we’re an ancient people learning to live in a recent nation.

What is true is that India is an artificial State¾a State that was created by a government, not a people. A State created from the top down, not the bottom up. The majority of India’s citizens will not (to this day) be able to identify her boundaries on a map, or say which language is spoken where or which god is worshipped in what region. Most are too poor and too uneducated to have even an elementary idea of the extent and complexity of their own country. The impoverished, illiterate agrarian majority have no stake in the State. And indeed, why should they, how can they, when they don’t even know what the State is? To them, India is, at best, a noisy slogan that comes around during the elections. Or a montage of people on Government TV programmes wearing regional costumes and saying Mera Bharat Mahan.

So, India does not exist. At any rate, not as a nation, not as a civilization; merely an administrative convenience, and that too of the erstwhile colonial masters. This is in tune with the official philosophy of British imperialists that India was merely a “geographical expression”¾a thought not much different from that of communists. If India never existed, where did Columbus want to reach? Why is the arrival of Vasco de Gama at Calicut considered a major event of world history? What did Megasthenes refer to by his treatise Indica? Why did Shankaracharya set up four seats of learning in four different parts of the country, and not merely his native Kerala? Why did every Hindu king want to become a Chakravarti Samrat, ruling the entire nation (even though few succeeded in it)? And why did even Muslim kings of north India want to reach the natural boundaries of the Himalayas, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal? Why did A.L. Basham write his monumental, The Wonder That Was India?

Arundhati Roy does not like to answer any of these questions. In any case, she is in a hurry. Quickly paying her homage to Mahatma Gandhi (a necessary ritual these days, as he is very popular among the Left and cool intellectuals), she makes a whirlwind visit to Babri Masjid and says all the good things about communal harmony, etc. And then she moves to the grand finale:

Who the hell is the Prime Minister to decide whose finger will be on the nuclear button that could turn everything we love—our earth, our skies, our mountains, our plains, our rivers, our cities and villages—to ash in an instant? Who the hell is he to reassure us that there will be no accidents? How does he know? Why should we trust him? What has he ever done to make us trust him? What have any of them ever done to make us trust them?

The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made.

If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man’s challenge to God.

It’s worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created.

If you’re not (religious), then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old.

It could end in an afternoon.

Quite apart from the impertinent language (“Who the hell is the Prime Minister”), the outburst is so puerile that nobody would have noticed it had it not come from the pen of a Booker winner. The Prime Minister is the lawfully elected chief executive of the largest democracy in the world. Trust him or don’t trust him, he remains the leader because the country has elected him to rule.

When it is not puerility, it is excessive sentimentalism:

If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. I’m female, but have nothing against eunuchs. My policies are simple. I’m willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that’s going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag.

And all along we thought that it is subnational territories that seek secession! But here is the megalomania of an individual that is seeking secession! We are already aware of a “mobile republic”—Osama bin Laden. He has also seceded from civilization; and he is waging a war against civilization. Arundhati Roy is not a terrorist, but she is definitely an anarchist; she does not know what is good, but she knows what is bad: whatever exists is bad; the entire world—human civilization, as it exists—is bad, unjust, iniquitous. She does not know what this world should be replaced with; but she knows that it should be replaced. Replaced, perhaps, by a New World.

But haven’t we heard all this before? Hitler wanted to create a New World, so did Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot. And what did we get? Gas chambers, slave camps, mass murder; killings on a scale mankind had not known earlier. She is obviously oblivious of the fact that any negation of the world, anarchist or otherwise, is the surest recipe for disaster.

From her political philosophy, we move on to her economics. Her understanding of economics is as sentimental as is her political philosophy. In an essay, ‘Power Politics: Comeback of Rumpelstiltskin?,’ in Outlook (November 27, 2000), she writes:

Let’s begin at the beginning. What does privatization really mean? Essentially, it is the transfer of public productive assets from the State to private companies. Productive assets include natural resources. Earth, forest, water, air. These are assets that the State holds in trust for the people it represents. In a country like India, 70 per cent of the population lives in rural areas. That’s 700 million people. Their lives depend directly on access to natural resources. To snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is a process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has no parallel in history.

What happens when you ‘privatise’ something as essential to human survival as water? What happens when you commodify water and say that only those who can come up with the cash to pay the ‘market price’ can have it? In 1999, the government of Bolivia privatized the public water supply system in the city of Cochacomba, and signed a 40-year lease with Bechtel, a giant US engineering firm. The first thing Bechtel did was to triple the price of water. Hundreds of thousands of people simply couldn’t afford it any more. Citizens came out on the streets to protest. A transport strike brought the entire city to a standstill. Hugo Banzer, the former Bolivian dictator (now the President) ordered the police to fire at the crowds. Six people were killed, 175 injured and two children blinded. The protest continued because people had no options—what’s the option to thirst? In April 2000, Banzer declared Martial Law. The protest continued. Eventually Bechtel was forced to flee its offices. Now it’s trying to extort a $12-million exit payment from the Bolivian government.

So, privatization in India means “a process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has no parallel in history,” as 70 per cent of the population lives in villages and is directly dependent on “natural resources.” As a correspondent of The Financial Express, I have covered privatization as a beat since privatization really started. And I have come across a variety of arguments against it, but few so bizarre; only uneducated kind of people can argue in such a fashion. Uneducated, because there is hardly any public sector undertaking (PSU) that is engaged in agriculture; in other words, the rural areas have little to do with PSUs. The public sector and privatization are primarily urban issues; I don’t remember any of the leaders of farmers, from Mahindra Singh Tikait to Sharad Joshi, saying anything about privatization; it is not their concern.

Her knowledge base on the public sector and privatization is really narrow. Otherwise, she would not have written:

The Indian public sector company, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (Bhel), manufactured and even exported world-class power equipment. All that’s changed now. Over the years, our own government has starved it of orders, cut off funds for research and development and more or less edged it out of a dignified existence. Today Bhel is no more than a sweatshop. It is being forced into ‘joint ventures’ (one with GE and one with Siemens) where its only role is to provide cheap, unskilled labor while they provide the equipment and the technology.

To set the record straight, Bhel is not a “sweatshop”; it can boast of a highly skilled workforce. An efficiently run service-sector PSU, Bhel has thrived in the post-liberalization era. As per the unaudited results for the quarter ended December 31, 2005, Bhel posted a net profit of Rs 423.19 crore as compared to Rs 237.4 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2004. In the same quarter, total income (net of excise) stood at Rs 3,445.45 crore, up from Rs 2,386.47 crore in the corresponding quarter previous financial year. It is for this reason that MNCs like Siemens and GE want to tie up with Bhel¾and there is no great conspiracy involved in such arrangements. Nor such arrangements have anything to do with privatization.

Essentially, privatization means the rollback of the state; the state makes a bow, so that the entrepreneurial spirits of society could do properly what the state is unable to do efficiently: privatization is the most visible and poignant feature of the transition from socialism to capitalism. Now, let’s extend Roy’s who-the-hell-is-the-prime-minister argument. Do the prime minister, his ministers, and the myriad bureaucrats know how to hold “earth, forest, water, air” which are, in her words, the “assets that the State holds in trust for the people it represents”? Roy has herself written reams and reams about the incompetence and corruption of the government, the system, etc; so why is she opposed to a loosening of the state’s hold over natural assets?

Shorn of all rhetoric, her stance is clearly that of the Leftists when not in power: she is opposed to a state that is politically powerful; yet, she wants it to be economically powerful, so she favors a state to “hold” all the natural assets. All communist parties in India railed against Pokhran II; but they celebrated when the Stalinist Russia and Moaist China went nuclear.

Roy’s examples are also typically Leftist: citing exceptions as the rule. She cites one instance of failed privatization in a town nobody knew existed, Cochacomba; she refuses to see the wonders done by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, how privatization played a key role in the revival of the British economy which had become a basket case before the Thatcherite revolution, how this inspired countries all over the world to follow suit, including communist China (and the Left Front government of West Bengal, which is also privatizing state PSUs). It is like asking the police force to be dismantled because one cop was involved in some robbery on the ground that if cops and robbers do the same thing, why do you need a police department!

Privatization irks Arundhati Roy because she can’t stand the market economy or capitalism. This becomes evident from her reverence for Noam Chomsky, a professional rebel from the US. He is a favorite of India’s liberals and Leftists. Roy writes in another essay, ‘The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky’ (Outlook, September 2, 2003):

Today, thanks to Noam Chomsky and his fellow media analysts, it is almost axiomatic for thousands, possibly millions, of us that public opinion in “free market” democracies is manufactured just like any other mass market product — soap, switches, or sliced bread. We know that while, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidders. Neoliberal capitalism isn’t just about the accumulation of capital (for some). It’s also about the accumulation of power (for some), the accumulation of freedom (for some). Conversely, for the rest of the world, the people who are excluded from neoliberalism’s governing body, it’s about the erosion of capital, the erosion of power, the erosion of freedom. In the “free” market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else—justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It’s available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how they do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky’s political writing.

Notice “free market,” where “justice, human rights” are mere commodities, “available only to those who can afford” them. But why are such commodities not available in Castro’s Cuba, communist China, and theocratic Saudi Arabia? And why were they not available in the erstwhile Soviet Union? Chomsky lives in the US, and writes against the US government; Roy lives in India, and writes against the Indian government. How many Noam Chomskys and Arundhaty Roys have written against the system in non-capitalist societies and lived?

As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman wrote in his magnum opus, Capitalism and Freedom, “Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means towards the achievement of political freedom.”

Further, “the kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.”

Ayn Rand, another major political thinker of the twentieth century, is even more emphatic. She writes, “Is man free? In mankind’s history, capitalism is the only system that answers: Yes.”

According to Rand, “Capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”

Continued in Part 2

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• India Drops Charges Against Award Winning Author Arundhati Roy (huffingtonpost.com)
• Arundhati Roy called a traitor for Kashmiri rights plea (3quarksdaily.com)
• Arundhati Roy: The debater of big things (guardian.co.uk)