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July 18, 2004
Review: Speaking with conviction
MY disappointment that this book was not actually written by Arundhati Roy, as I initially thought while looking at its cover, but was an account of her conversations and interviews conducted by David Barsamian, began to be replaced by excitement as I went through the first dozen pages. The powerful, radical and unconventional “out of the box” views of Roy about India, the world and the ‘establishment’ in its widest sense, offer a refreshing outlook with a revolutionary intensity.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile is a compelling read. It is almost shocking at times to read such defiant views coming from a petite, pretty young Indian woman I saw and heard engaging a large audience in Karachi two years ago.
Born to a Keralite mother and Bengali father Arundhati Roy was brought up by a single mother who was less famous, but probably as controversial and rabblerousing as the world famous author of the novel God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. Trained as an architect, Roy has become international social activist courageously equating Bush and bin Laden; condemning Muslim, Hindu and Christian “mullahs”; global exploitation by big business, war, international media, “bar coding” of human beings in the West and general marginalizing of ordinary people by freedom robbing governments in the developed and the underdeveloped countries.
Roy is one of the most outstanding voices representing the ordinary citizen of the world, an anti-establishment figure who has the sharpness of mind and gift for reflecting sentiments of a commoner.
“In Delhi, the city I live in, the cars are getting bigger and sleeker, the hotels are getting posher, the gates higher, the guards outside houses are no longer the old chowkidars, they are young fellows with uniforms. And yet everywhere the poor are packed like lice into every crevice in the city. People don’t see that any more. It’s as if you shine a light very brightly in one place, the darkness deepens around it. They don’t want to know what’s happening. The people who benefit from this situation can’t imagine that the world is not a better place.”
Answering questions about the US war against terrorism, she says, “The US government’s response to September 11 has actually privileged terrorism. It has given it a huge impetus, and made it look like terrorism is the only effective way to be heard. Over the years, every kind of nonviolent resistance movement has been crushed, ignored, kicked aside. But if you are a terrorist, you have a great chance of being negotiated with, of being on TV, of getting all the attention you couldn’t have dreamt of earlier.”
“If they [other leaders] can borrow the rhetoric, they can borrow the logic. If George Bush can stamp his foot and insist on being allowed to play out his insane fantasies, then why shouldn’t India’s A.B. Vajpayee or Pakistan’s General Musharraf? In any case India does behave like the United States of the Indian Subcontinent.”
“Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected bin Laden. Bush was elected (in a manner of speaking), so US citizens are more responsible for his actions than Iraqis are for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans are for the Taliban. And yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed, either by economic sanctions or cruise missiles, and we are told that these deaths are the result of “just wars’. If there is such a thing as a just war, who is to decide what is just and what is not? Whose God is going to decide that?”
About Kashmir she believes, “it is the rabbit that the governments of both India and Pakistan pull out of their hats whenever they are in trouble. They don’t want to resolve the conflict. For them, Kashmir is not a problem; it is a solution. Let’s never make the mistake of thinking that India and Pakistan are searching for a solution and haven’t managed to find one. They are not searching for a solution...”
Commenting on the western media, she says, “Every success of Fox News is a failure for us. Every success for major corporate propaganda is our failure.”
How do you develop the ability to discern fact from fiction in approaching news from mainstream outlets?
“I think the only way to do it is to follow the money. Who owns which newspaper? Who owns the television network? What are their interests? Assume that corporate media has an agenda. And so the least you can do is to crosscheck a particular story with other sources of information that are independent. If you can do that you can see the discrepancies. Compare, for example the way the US media and the British media covers the same war, the same event. How does this differ from how Al-Jazeera covers it? It’s not that these other media don’t have an agenda. But if you look at the two, at least your head is not being messed with completely.”
Offering her solution in the form of non-violent resistance, Roy recommends, “We need to pick our targets and hit them, one by one. It is not possible to take on empire in some huge, epic sense. For instance, a great starting point would be to target a few companies that have been given these reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and shut them down” also target their offices around the world, their other projects around the world, their CEOs and members of board, shareholders, partners and let them know we will not allow them to profit off the occupation of Iraq.”
Is that a lonely voice of an idealist, or an articulation of a global storm brewing in slow motion?
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile — Conversations with Arundhati Roy
Interviews by David Barsamian
South End Press, 7 Brookline Street, #1, Cambridge, MA 02139-4146.
Website: www.southendpress.org
ISBN 0-89608-710-7
180pp. $16.00
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