Saturday, January 04, 2020

Arundhati Roy On India



The Silence Is the Loudest Sound The Indian government has confined about seven million Kashmiris to their homes and imposed a complete communications blackout. ........... Amid these vulgar celebrations the loudest sound, however, is the deathly silence from Kashmir’s patrolled, barricaded streets and its approximately seven million caged, humiliated people, stitched down by razor wire, spied on by drones, living under a complete communications blackout. That in this age of information, a government can so easily cut off a whole population from the rest of the world for days at a time, says something serious about the times we are heading toward. ....... there has not been a single year since 1947 when the Indian Army has not been deployed within India’s borders against its “own people.” The list is long — Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Hyderabad, Assam. ...... What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years is unforgivable. An estimated 70,000 people, civilians, militants and security forces have been killed in the conflict. Thousands have been “disappeared,” and tens of thousands have passed through torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs. ...... The approximately 200,000 Indian migrant day laborers in Kashmir were clearly not a concern to those supervising the evacuation. Too poor to matter ...... He didn’t explain why the decision that supposedly benefited them so hugely was taken without consulting them. He didn’t say how the great gifts of Indian democracy could be enjoyed by a people who live under a military occupation. .... Like true colonials, many in India who are so alert to infringements of their own rights and liberties, have a completely different standard for Kashmiris. ....... The most powerful organization in India, the far-right Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the R.S.S., with more than 600,000 members including Narendra Modi and many of his ministers, has a trained “volunteer” militia, inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts. With each passing day, the R.S.S. tightens its grip on every institution of the Indian state. In truth, it has reached a point when it more or less is the state.....

As the world looks on, the architecture of Indian fascism is quickly being put into place.

..... If Kashmir is occupied by security forces, India is occupied by the mob.

India: Intimations of an Ending The rise of Modi and the Hindu far right.

Arundhati Roy on India’s Elections: “A Mockery of What Democracy Is Supposed to Be” the “world’s largest democracy” .. exists in several centuries at once, caught between tradition, the caste system, and the chaos of turbo-charged capitalism ...... the mythical child chaiwala who now wears $16,000 suits. ..... In June, she publishes her collected non-fiction, My Seditious Heart, a book that runs to over a thousand pages. ......

In a country where nine people own the combined wealth of the bottom 500 million—the rich are missionaries. This is a terrifying view.

...... The RSS has about 600,000 disciplined, highly trained cadres it can deploy. The others have almost none. This time around the BJP had 20 times more money than all of them put together. Next time that will probably become 50 times more money. ...... That kind of money can sell anything it decides to sell—in this case a product so toxic, it created an epidemic. Not a single thing of importance, not climate change, not the looming economic crisis, not health, not education was a part of the campaign. Nothing except toxic, medieval stupidity on an epic scale. How can we treat this as a fair election? .......

this formidable, money-filled hate-filled machine

..... “Elite” is the stand-in word for anybody of above-average intelligence who harbors non-servile instincts. ....... Ram Madhav, in a newspaper column the next day called “The Leader is the Truth,” in which he said that the “remnants” of the “pseudo-secular/liberal cartels that held a disproportionate sway and stranglehold over the intellectual and policy establishment of the country” needed to be “discarded” from the country’s “cultural and intellectual landscape.” Age-old, straight-up, fascist-speak. ....... the Hindutva doctrine of “one nation, one language, one religion” ....... The funniest part of the Hindu Nationalists’ “one language, one religion, one nation” doctrine— known here as “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”—is that all those three words are actually Persian words.



There is a great sense of dread in me, and that doesn’t have to do with this election, which is a minor thing in the scale of what I see going on. There are so many people and so few resources. Whether it’s water, whether it’s land – you see the joblessness, the desperation. What appears on the surface to be a clash of two castes, or two religions, or two communities – underneath that you can see a crisis looming.
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