The Loneliness Of Noam Chomsky
By Arundhati Roy
The Hindu
24 August, 2003
Sitting in my home in New Delhi, watching an American TV news channel promote itself ("We report. You decide."), I imagine Noam Chomsky's amused, chipped-tooth smile.
Everybody knows that authoritarian regimes, regardless of their ideology, use the mass media for propaganda. But what about democratically elected regimes in the "free world"?
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.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. "[T]he prime minister in effect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership," reports the Financial Times. What price free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. In other democracies — the United States in particular — media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in a more elaborate, but less obvious, manner. (George Bush Jr.'s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and Enron's infiltration of U.S. government institutions and the mass media — all this is public knowledge now.)
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S. government's mouthpiece, its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and its explicit censorship of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humour in the rest of the world.
Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to the government for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare (much more important, and urgent of course, than the production of generics to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem as though the twin myths of Free Speech and the Free Market might come crashing down alongside the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
But of course that never happened. The myths live on.
There is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the establishment pours into the business of "managing" public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not always reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guarded against reality, reared in a controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen.
Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in the backyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV. We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story, the mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace underwear.
We don't always remember, and many don't even know, that this way of thinking, this easy acuity, this instinctive mistrust of the mass media, would at best be a political hunch and at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world's greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live. Or should I say, our understanding of the elaborate rules of the lunatic asylum in which we are all voluntary inmates?
Speaking about the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, President George W. Bush called the enemies of the United States "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he said. "They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
If people in the United States want a real answer to that question (as opposed to the ones in the Idiot's Guide to Anti-Americanism, that is: "Because they're jealous of us," "Because they hate freedom," "Because they're losers," "Because we're good and they're evil"), I'd say, read Chomsky. Read Chomsky on U.S. military interventions in Indochina, Latin America, Iraq, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary people in the United States read Chomsky, perhaps their questions would be framed a little differently. Perhaps it would be: "Why don't they hate us more than they do?" or "Isn't it surprising that September 11 didn't happen earlier?"
Unfortunately, in these nationalistic times, words like "us" and "them" are used loosely. The line between citizens and the state is being deliberately and successfully blurred, not just by governments, but also by terrorists. The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as "retaliatory" wars against governments that "support terrorism", is the same: both punish citizens for the actions of their governments.
(A brief digression: I realise that for Noam Chomsky, a U.S. citizen, to criticise his own government is better manners than for someone like myself, an Indian citizen, to criticise the U.S. government. I'm no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king.)
If I were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky's major contributions to the world, it would be the fact that he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless universe that exists behind that beautiful, sunny word "freedom". He has done this rationally and empirically. The mass of evidence he has marshalled to construct his case is formidable. Terrifying, actually. The starting premise of Chomsky's method is not ideological, but it is intensely political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with an anarchist's instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through the bog of the U.S. establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze of corridors that connects the government, big business, and the business of managing public opinion.
Chomsky shows us how phrases like "free speech", the "free market", and the "free world" have little, if anything, to do with freedom. He shows us that, among the myriad freedoms claimed by the U.S. government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and dominate other people. The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators across the world. The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple democratically elected governments. The freedom to amass and use weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, and nuclear. The freedom to go to war against any country whose government it disagrees with. And, most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the name of "justice", in the name of "righteousness", in the name of "freedom".
Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but... our endowment from God". So, basically, we're confronted with a country armed with a mandate from heaven. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others. (Any attempt to do this is shouted down as "moral equivalence".) Its technique is to position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it's trying to free, whose societies it's trying to modernise, whose women it's trying to liberate, whose souls it's trying to save.
Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains why the U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people "for their own good".
When he announced the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan, President Bush Jr. said, "We're a peaceful nation." He went on to say, "This is the calling of the United States of America, the most free nation in the world, a nation built on fundamental values, that rejects hate, rejects violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil. And we will not tire."
The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought to America" — Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness. It tells of the loss of dignity, the loss of wilderness, the loss of freedom, the shattered pride of a people. Genocide and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning of the nation whose fundamental values reject hate, murderers, and evil.
Here is Chomsky, writing in the essay "The Manufacture of Consent," on the founding of the United States of America:
During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a national park. We came across a gravestone, which had on it the following inscription: "Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow."
Of course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous population gave of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather, they were slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of the greatest exercises in genocide in human history... which we celebrate each October when we honour Columbus — a notable mass murderer himself — on Columbus Day.
Hundreds of American citizens, well-meaning and decent people, troop by that gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without reaction; except, perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are giving some due recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples.... They might react differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau and find a gravestone reading: "Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family and people gave of themselves and their possessions that this great nation might grow and prosper."
How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologising to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it way ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood.
In the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S. "goodness" peaked during World War II (aka America's War Against Fascism). Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually looked away. When Hitler was carrying out his genocidal pogrom against Jews, U.S. officials refused entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The United States entered the war only after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Drowned out by the noisy hosannas is its most barbaric act, in fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was nearly over. The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come, were not a threat to world peace. They were civilians. Just as the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were civilians. Just as the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Iraq because of the U.S.-led sanctions were civilians. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a cold, calculated experiment carried out to demonstrate America's power. At the time, President Truman described it as "the greatest thing in history".
The Second World War, we're told, was a "war for peace". The atomic bomb was a "weapon of peace". We're invited to believe that nuclear deterrence prevented World War III. (That was before President George Bush Jr. came up with the "pre-emptive strike doctrine". Was there an outbreak of peace after the Second World War? Certainly there was (relative) peace in Europe and America — but does that count as world peace? Not unless savage, proxy wars fought in lands where the coloured races live (chinks, niggers, dinks, wogs, gooks) don't count as wars at all.
Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also include the U.S. government's covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel's U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed. It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include America's role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which more than one million people were killed. It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led directly, and indirectly, to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq.
Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists.
Most of the essays in Chomsky's For Reasons of State are about U.S. aggression in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a war that lasted more than 12 years. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and approximately two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. The U.S. deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more than six million tons of bombs. And yet, though you wouldn't believe it if you watched most Hollywood movies, America lost the war.
The war began in South Vietnam and then spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After putting in place a client regime in Saigon, the U.S. government invited itself in to fight a communist insurgency — Vietcong guerillas who had infiltrated rural regions of South Vietnam where villagers were sheltering them. This was exactly the model that Russia replicated when, in 1979, it invited itself into Afghanistan. Nobody in the "free world" is in any doubt about the fact that Russia invaded Afghanistan. After glasnost, even a Soviet foreign minister called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan "illegal and immoral". But there has been no such introspection in the United States. In 1984, in a stunning revelation, Chomsky wrote:
For the past 22 years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina — without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defence of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam).
There is no such event in history!
In 1962, the U.S. Air Force began to bomb rural South Vietnam, where 80 per cent of the population lived. The bombing lasted for more than a decade. Thousands of people were killed. The idea was to bomb on a scale colossal enough to induce panic migration from villages into cities, where people could be held in refugee camps. Samuel Huntington referred to this as a process of "urbanisation". (I learned about urbanisation when I was in architecture school in India. Somehow I don't remember aerial bombing being part of the syllabus.) Huntington — famous today for his essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"— was at the time Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Chomsky quotes him describing the Vietcong as "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist". Huntington went on to advise "direct application of mechanical and conventional power"— in other words, to crush a people's war, eliminate the people. (Or, perhaps, to update the thesis — in order to prevent a clash of civilizations, annihilate a civilisation.)
Here's one observer from the time on the limitations of America's mechanical power: "The problem is that American machines are not equal to the task of killing communist soldiers except as part of a scorched-earth policy that destroys everything else as well." That problem has been solved now. Not with less destructive bombs, but with more imaginative language. There's a more elegant way of saying "that destroys everything else as well". The phrase is "collateral damage".
And here's a firsthand account of what America's "machines" (Huntington called them "modernising instruments" and staff officers in the Pentagon called them "bomb-o-grams") can do. This is T.D. Allman flying over the Plain of Jars in Laos.
Even if the war in Laos ended tomorrow, the restoration of its ecological balance might take several years. The reconstruction of the Plain's totally destroyed towns and villages might take just as long. Even if this was done, the Plain might long prove perilous to human habitation because of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs, mines and booby traps.
A recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what less than three years of intensive American bombing can do to a rural area, even after its civilian population has been evacuated. In large areas, the primary tropical colour — bright green — has been replaced by an abstract pattern of black, and bright metallic colours. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by defoliants.
Today, black is the dominant colour of the northern and eastern reaches of the Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the grass and undergrowth that covers the Plains and fills its many narrow ravines. The fires seem to burn constantly, creating rectangles of black. During the flight, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from freshly bombed areas.
The main routes, coming into the Plain from communist-held territory, are bombed mercilessly, apparently on a non-stop basis. There, and along the rim of the Plain, the dominant colour is yellow. All vegetation has been destroyed. The craters are countless.... [T]he area has been bombed so repeatedly that the land resembles the pocked, churned desert in storm-hit areas of the North African desert.
Further to the southeast, Xieng Khouangville — once the most populous town in communist Laos — lies empty, destroyed. To the north of the Plain, the little resort of Khang Khay also has been destroyed.
Around the landing field at the base of King Kong, the main colours are yellow (from upturned soil) and black (from napalm), relieved by patches of bright red and blue: parachutes used to drop supplies.
[T]he last local inhabitants were being carted into air transports. Abandoned vegetable gardens that would never be harvested grew near abandoned houses with plates still on the tables and calendars on the walls.
(Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race towards other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.)
The centrepiece of For Reasons of State is an essay called "The Mentality of the Backroom Boys", in which Chomsky offers an extraordinarily supple, exhaustive analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which he says "provide documentary evidence of a conspiracy to use force in international affairs in violation of law". Here, too, Chomsky makes note of the fact that while the bombing of North Vietnam is discussed at some length in the Pentagon Papers, the invasion of South Vietnam barely merits a mention.
The Pentagon Papers are mesmerising, not as documentation of the history of the U.S. war in Indochina, but as insight into the minds of the men who planned and executed it. It's fascinating to be privy to the ideas that were being tossed around, the suggestions that were made, the proposals that were put forward. In a section called "The Asian Mind — the American Mind", Chomsky examines the discussion of the mentality of the enemy that "stoically accept[s] the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives", whereas "We want life, happiness, wealth, power", and, for us, "death and suffering are irrational choices when alternatives exist". So, we learn that the Asian poor, presumably because they cannot comprehend the meaning of happiness, wealth, and power, invite America to carry this "strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide". But, then "we" balk because "genocide is a terrible burden to bear". (Eventually, of course, "we" went ahead and committed genocide any way, and then pretended that it never really happened.)
Of course, the Pentagon Papers contain some moderate proposals, as well.
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however — if handled right — might... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided — which we could offer to do "at the conference table".
Layer by layer, Chomsky strips down the process of decision-making by U.S. government officials, to reveal at its core the pitiless heart of the American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of war, blinded by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings, civilians, soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems — with scientifically honed methods of brutality.
Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:
We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.
So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.
Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America's mass media, all these years later, the world views the war as an American story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonised over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props. Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks.
The only real lesson the U.S. government learned from its invasion of Indochina is how to go to war without committing American troops and risking American lives. So now we have wars waged with long-range cruise missiles, Black Hawks, "bunker busters". Wars in which the "Allies" lose more journalists than soldiers.
As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India — where the first democratically elected Communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born — I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.
As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralised each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshalling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little — how shall I put it? — insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky's work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he's up against. He's like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It's as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him Chompsky.
Being an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point of view must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.
Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was 16 years old:
I remember that I literally couldn't talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone's reaction. I felt completely isolated.
That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive.
It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)
As a could've been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day goes by when I don't find myself thinking — for one reason or another — "Chomsky Zindabad".
Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things.
(http://www.countercurrents.org/us-roy240803.htm)
Monday, July 31, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
FW: ‘Honor’ killings shock Pakistan
‘Honor’ killings shock Pakistan
By The Associated Press - 12/29/05
MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) — Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family’s ‘‘honor’’ — a crime that shocked Pakistan.
The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret — that he didn’t murder the stepsister’s alleged lover too.
Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such ‘‘honor killings’’ will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.
The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims’ families, although under a law passed last year, the minimum penalty is 10 years, the maximum death by hanging.
Ahmed’s killing spree — witnessed by his wife Rehmat Bibi as she cradled their 3 month-old baby son — happened Friday night at their home in the cotton-growing village of Gago Mandi in eastern Punjab province.
It is the latest of more than 260 such honor killings documented by the rights commission, mostly from media reports, during the first 11 months of 2005.
Bibi recounted how she was woken by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter Muqadas and cut her throat with a machete. Bibi looked helplessly on from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls — Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 — pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm.
‘‘I was shivering with fear. I did not know how to save my daughters,’’ Bibi, sobbing, told AP by phone from the village. ‘‘I begged my husband to spare my daughters but he said, ’If you make a noise, I will kill you.’’’
‘‘The whole night the bodies of my daughters lay in front of me,’’ she said.
The next morning, Ahmed was arrested.
Speaking to AP in the back of police pickup truck late Tuesday as he was shifted to a prison in the city of Multan, Ahmed showed no contrition. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn’t want them to do the same when they grew up.
He said he bought a butcher’s knife and a machete after midday prayers on Friday and hid them in the house where he carried out the killings.
‘‘I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated,’’ he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. ‘‘We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor.’’
Despite Ahmed’s contention that Muqadas had committed adultery — a claim made by her husband — the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory.
Police have said they do not know the identity or whereabouts of Muqadas’ alleged lover.
Muqadas was Bibi’s daughter by her first marriage to Ahmed’s brother, who died 14 years ago. Ahmed married his brother’s widow, as is customary under Islamic tradition.
‘‘Women are treated as property and those committing crimes against them do not get punished,’’ said the rights commission’s director, Kamla Hyat. ‘‘The steps taken by our government have made no real difference.’’
Activists accuse President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a self-styled moderate Muslim, of reluctance to reform outdated Islamized laws that make it difficult to secure convictions in rape, acid attacks and other cases of violence against women. They say police are often reluctant to prosecute, regarding such crimes as family disputes.
Statistics on honor killings are confused and imprecise, but figures from the rights commission’s Web site and its officials show a marked reduction in cases this year: 267 in the first 11 months of 2005, compared with 579 during all of 2004. The Ministry of Women’s Development said it had no reliable figures.
Ijaz Elahi, the ministry’s joint secretary, said the violence was decreasing and that increasing numbers of victims were reporting incidents to police or the media. Laws, including one passed last year to beef up penalties for honor killings, had been toughened, she said.
Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed’s case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.
Ahmed, who did not resist arrest, was unrepentant.
‘‘I told the police that I am an honorable father and I slaughtered my dishonored daughter and the three other girls,’’ he said. ‘‘I wish that I get a chance to eliminate the boy she ran away with and set his home on fire.’’
By The Associated Press - 12/29/05
MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) — Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family’s ‘‘honor’’ — a crime that shocked Pakistan.
The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret — that he didn’t murder the stepsister’s alleged lover too.
Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such ‘‘honor killings’’ will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.
The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims’ families, although under a law passed last year, the minimum penalty is 10 years, the maximum death by hanging.
Ahmed’s killing spree — witnessed by his wife Rehmat Bibi as she cradled their 3 month-old baby son — happened Friday night at their home in the cotton-growing village of Gago Mandi in eastern Punjab province.
It is the latest of more than 260 such honor killings documented by the rights commission, mostly from media reports, during the first 11 months of 2005.
Bibi recounted how she was woken by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter Muqadas and cut her throat with a machete. Bibi looked helplessly on from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls — Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 — pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm.
‘‘I was shivering with fear. I did not know how to save my daughters,’’ Bibi, sobbing, told AP by phone from the village. ‘‘I begged my husband to spare my daughters but he said, ’If you make a noise, I will kill you.’’’
‘‘The whole night the bodies of my daughters lay in front of me,’’ she said.
The next morning, Ahmed was arrested.
Speaking to AP in the back of police pickup truck late Tuesday as he was shifted to a prison in the city of Multan, Ahmed showed no contrition. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn’t want them to do the same when they grew up.
He said he bought a butcher’s knife and a machete after midday prayers on Friday and hid them in the house where he carried out the killings.
‘‘I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated,’’ he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. ‘‘We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor.’’
Despite Ahmed’s contention that Muqadas had committed adultery — a claim made by her husband — the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory.
Police have said they do not know the identity or whereabouts of Muqadas’ alleged lover.
Muqadas was Bibi’s daughter by her first marriage to Ahmed’s brother, who died 14 years ago. Ahmed married his brother’s widow, as is customary under Islamic tradition.
‘‘Women are treated as property and those committing crimes against them do not get punished,’’ said the rights commission’s director, Kamla Hyat. ‘‘The steps taken by our government have made no real difference.’’
Activists accuse President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a self-styled moderate Muslim, of reluctance to reform outdated Islamized laws that make it difficult to secure convictions in rape, acid attacks and other cases of violence against women. They say police are often reluctant to prosecute, regarding such crimes as family disputes.
Statistics on honor killings are confused and imprecise, but figures from the rights commission’s Web site and its officials show a marked reduction in cases this year: 267 in the first 11 months of 2005, compared with 579 during all of 2004. The Ministry of Women’s Development said it had no reliable figures.
Ijaz Elahi, the ministry’s joint secretary, said the violence was decreasing and that increasing numbers of victims were reporting incidents to police or the media. Laws, including one passed last year to beef up penalties for honor killings, had been toughened, she said.
Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed’s case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.
Ahmed, who did not resist arrest, was unrepentant.
‘‘I told the police that I am an honorable father and I slaughtered my dishonored daughter and the three other girls,’’ he said. ‘‘I wish that I get a chance to eliminate the boy she ran away with and set his home on fire.’’
FW: A star is shorn (GLOBE EDITORIAL on Kaavya Viswanathan)
(http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/
editorials/articles/2006/04/29/a_star_is_shorn/)
GLOBE EDITORIAL
A star is shorn
April 29, 2006
KAAVYA VISWANATHAN is a teenager who was tossed into the star-maker machinery.
Back in February, that machine -- an agent, a book packager, and a publisher -- presented her as a wunderkind. She was a Harvard student with a $500,000 book deal. Her first novel, ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life," was widely hyped.
Today, Viswanathan faces plagiarism charges. Sections of ''Opal" were apparently taken from novels written by Megan McCafferty. And, as suddenly imploding stars do, Viswanathan apologized on television, telling Katie Couric that she never meant to steal. Viswanathan said she loves McCafferty's books, so much so that Viswanathan ''internalized" the other writer's words and used them unconsciously.
The explanation was tough to watch and tougher to believe. McCafferty's publisher says there are 40 examples of Viswanathan using McCafferty's words.
There is no excuse for plagiarism. But like Opal, the main character in her novel, Viswanathan is a kid who has been overhandled. Her parents hired a private counselor to help her apply to college. That counselor showed Viswanathan's writing to a literary agency. The agency brought in the book packager. And the packager steered Viswanathan away from her initial, darker idea for a novel. Viswanathan said she was encouraged to find her own voice. Instead she found someone else's. The result was teenage chick-lit.
Now the machine has churned into reverse. The book packager's president says the company only helped with the novel's concept, not the writing. And on Thursday, Viswanathan's publisher, Little, Brown & Co., announced that it would withdraw all unsold copies of ''Opal."
What first novel would Viswanathan have written on her own? What words might she have used if she hadn't been helped to find what was, allegedly, her own voice? She'll never know.
What remains is the scandal. The customer comment section on ''Opal's" Amazon.com page is a public wailing wall crowded with both forgiveness and scolding.
The twisted moral: Whoever one is, one isn't good enough -- get a packager who knows that what sells is what has already sold. Original ideas and people face resistance.
Joni Mitchell sang of the problem in ''Free Man in Paris," said to be about her agent. ''You know I'd go back there tomorrow / But for the work I've taken on / Stoking the star maker machinery /Behind the popular song."
This is America, so Viswanathan will no doubt have a second act, in which she sheds the current scandal. As she moves on, she should take the advice of her novel's title: Get a life -- and make sure it is entirely her own.
editorials/articles/2006/04/29/a_star_is_shorn/)
GLOBE EDITORIAL
A star is shorn
April 29, 2006
KAAVYA VISWANATHAN is a teenager who was tossed into the star-maker machinery.
Back in February, that machine -- an agent, a book packager, and a publisher -- presented her as a wunderkind. She was a Harvard student with a $500,000 book deal. Her first novel, ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life," was widely hyped.
Today, Viswanathan faces plagiarism charges. Sections of ''Opal" were apparently taken from novels written by Megan McCafferty. And, as suddenly imploding stars do, Viswanathan apologized on television, telling Katie Couric that she never meant to steal. Viswanathan said she loves McCafferty's books, so much so that Viswanathan ''internalized" the other writer's words and used them unconsciously.
The explanation was tough to watch and tougher to believe. McCafferty's publisher says there are 40 examples of Viswanathan using McCafferty's words.
There is no excuse for plagiarism. But like Opal, the main character in her novel, Viswanathan is a kid who has been overhandled. Her parents hired a private counselor to help her apply to college. That counselor showed Viswanathan's writing to a literary agency. The agency brought in the book packager. And the packager steered Viswanathan away from her initial, darker idea for a novel. Viswanathan said she was encouraged to find her own voice. Instead she found someone else's. The result was teenage chick-lit.
Now the machine has churned into reverse. The book packager's president says the company only helped with the novel's concept, not the writing. And on Thursday, Viswanathan's publisher, Little, Brown & Co., announced that it would withdraw all unsold copies of ''Opal."
What first novel would Viswanathan have written on her own? What words might she have used if she hadn't been helped to find what was, allegedly, her own voice? She'll never know.
What remains is the scandal. The customer comment section on ''Opal's" Amazon.com page is a public wailing wall crowded with both forgiveness and scolding.
The twisted moral: Whoever one is, one isn't good enough -- get a packager who knows that what sells is what has already sold. Original ideas and people face resistance.
Joni Mitchell sang of the problem in ''Free Man in Paris," said to be about her agent. ''You know I'd go back there tomorrow / But for the work I've taken on / Stoking the star maker machinery /Behind the popular song."
This is America, so Viswanathan will no doubt have a second act, in which she sheds the current scandal. As she moves on, she should take the advice of her novel's title: Get a life -- and make sure it is entirely her own.
FW: Philip Bowring: The puzzle of Bangladesh
(http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/06/news/edbow.php)
Philip Bowring: The puzzle of Bangladesh
Philip Bowring International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2005
DHAKA, Bangladesh Bangladesh is a paradox. It lacks natural resources and good governance and is beset by natural calamities, corruption and self-destructive political infighting. Yet its gross national product persistently maintains a growth rate of 5 percent, well above average for developing countries, it has overtaken India on several social indicators Its aid dependence has fallen from 6 percent to 1.8 percent of gross domestic product.
The answer to the puzzle seems to lie in the triumph of individual and local group initiative over both the elements and institutional failings. The frustration for many Bangladeshis is that their nation could be doing so much better. Bangladesh's attractions for foreign investors - low labor costs and stable fiscal and macro-economic policies - are countered by politically motivated strikes that paralyze the urban economy, vested trade union interests that choke its main port, inefficient textile business interests that impede its dynamic garment industry, and corrupt politicians and officials who hold up infrastructure development.
As it is, over the past year the nation has weathered two crises. Last summer, the worst floods in decades put more than half the country under water. But no one died, relief was effective, farmers adjusted and the economy still grew at nearly 5 percent. And this year, according to many a foreign forecast, Bangladesh's garment industry, which employs hundreds of thousands, was supposed to have been devastated by the end of textile quotas and China's export juggernaut. It is too early to make a final judgment, but so far at least the local industry appears to have maintained its share of the global market, albeit with lower profits.
Of course this is still a desperately poor, overpopulated country, where 50 percent of children are underweight. But India is no better on that score; Bangladesh has made much more progress than its neighbors over the past 10 years, becoming self-sufficient in food. There are doubts about how much longer the farmers can continue to get additional output from their tiny plots of land of 3 percent a year. But do not be surprised if they do.
Social progress has been even more marked. Educational standards may be poor, but primary school enrollment is on a par with India, and completions even higher. Gender equality in education is even more striking: There are now more girls than boys at secondary level. Gender equality also seems reflected in the fall in the fertility rate, which has halved from 6.0 to 3.0 in two decades - the steepest fall almost anywhere other than China. It is now below India's and far below Pakistan's.
The lower birth rate is linked to a steep fall in child mortality, and to the enhanced economic role of women as small-scale village entrepreneurs and as garment workers. The conservative religious reaction to the advance of women seems unlikely to succeed in the face of educational and employment progress.
Economic advance has been underpinned by the individual initiative of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis working overseas. Their remittances exceed the net earnings of the garment industry, amounting to more than $3.5 billion a year, mostly from Britain, the United States and the Middle East. The military earns another $2 billion from UN peacekeeping missions. Bangladesh is likely to remain an exporter of people for years to come.
But further economic progress - including effective use of the billions earned overseas - now requires more effective governance and a freer rein for the private sector. The economy has become much more integrated with the world over the past decade but needs to move further to attract investment and exploit its only abundant resource - labor.
The issue now is whether Bangladesh can combine social progress with a higher level of economic growth while combating the problems of rapid urbanization and pollution in an already overcrowded land. India and Sri Lanka both suggest that in South Asia, social and economic progress do not always go hand in hand. Will Bangladesh continue as a paradox, or can it combine enterprise and a homogenous population to overcome natural adversity and set its sights on a standard of living akin to its neighbors in Southeast Asia?
Philip Bowring: The puzzle of Bangladesh
Philip Bowring International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2005
DHAKA, Bangladesh Bangladesh is a paradox. It lacks natural resources and good governance and is beset by natural calamities, corruption and self-destructive political infighting. Yet its gross national product persistently maintains a growth rate of 5 percent, well above average for developing countries, it has overtaken India on several social indicators Its aid dependence has fallen from 6 percent to 1.8 percent of gross domestic product.
The answer to the puzzle seems to lie in the triumph of individual and local group initiative over both the elements and institutional failings. The frustration for many Bangladeshis is that their nation could be doing so much better. Bangladesh's attractions for foreign investors - low labor costs and stable fiscal and macro-economic policies - are countered by politically motivated strikes that paralyze the urban economy, vested trade union interests that choke its main port, inefficient textile business interests that impede its dynamic garment industry, and corrupt politicians and officials who hold up infrastructure development.
As it is, over the past year the nation has weathered two crises. Last summer, the worst floods in decades put more than half the country under water. But no one died, relief was effective, farmers adjusted and the economy still grew at nearly 5 percent. And this year, according to many a foreign forecast, Bangladesh's garment industry, which employs hundreds of thousands, was supposed to have been devastated by the end of textile quotas and China's export juggernaut. It is too early to make a final judgment, but so far at least the local industry appears to have maintained its share of the global market, albeit with lower profits.
Of course this is still a desperately poor, overpopulated country, where 50 percent of children are underweight. But India is no better on that score; Bangladesh has made much more progress than its neighbors over the past 10 years, becoming self-sufficient in food. There are doubts about how much longer the farmers can continue to get additional output from their tiny plots of land of 3 percent a year. But do not be surprised if they do.
Social progress has been even more marked. Educational standards may be poor, but primary school enrollment is on a par with India, and completions even higher. Gender equality in education is even more striking: There are now more girls than boys at secondary level. Gender equality also seems reflected in the fall in the fertility rate, which has halved from 6.0 to 3.0 in two decades - the steepest fall almost anywhere other than China. It is now below India's and far below Pakistan's.
The lower birth rate is linked to a steep fall in child mortality, and to the enhanced economic role of women as small-scale village entrepreneurs and as garment workers. The conservative religious reaction to the advance of women seems unlikely to succeed in the face of educational and employment progress.
Economic advance has been underpinned by the individual initiative of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis working overseas. Their remittances exceed the net earnings of the garment industry, amounting to more than $3.5 billion a year, mostly from Britain, the United States and the Middle East. The military earns another $2 billion from UN peacekeeping missions. Bangladesh is likely to remain an exporter of people for years to come.
But further economic progress - including effective use of the billions earned overseas - now requires more effective governance and a freer rein for the private sector. The economy has become much more integrated with the world over the past decade but needs to move further to attract investment and exploit its only abundant resource - labor.
The issue now is whether Bangladesh can combine social progress with a higher level of economic growth while combating the problems of rapid urbanization and pollution in an already overcrowded land. India and Sri Lanka both suggest that in South Asia, social and economic progress do not always go hand in hand. Will Bangladesh continue as a paradox, or can it combine enterprise and a homogenous population to overcome natural adversity and set its sights on a standard of living akin to its neighbors in Southeast Asia?
FW: The World Can't Afford To Ignore Bangladesh
(http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/
in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=293339)
The World Can't Afford To Ignore Bangladesh
The Wall Street Journal (Asia Edition)
August 24, 2005
Last week an estimated 300 bombs went off in less than an hour in an Islamic country the size of Wisconsin, but with a population of 150 million. Although the attacks in Bangladesh were apparently not specifically targeted to kill civilians this time, two people died and more than 120 were injured. A banned Islamist group, the Jamatul Mujahideen, claimed credit for the attacks. Their message was clear: they just wanted to let the nation know that their terrorist network has been established.
Often presented as a success story in combining Islamic and democratic principles, Bangladesh has been quietly trying to make inroads against intractable problems like poverty and perennial floods. But it has also become a major target for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. All too often, this is ignored by the Western media, which barely reported last week's massive attack.
A case in point of how Bangladesh's interests can be ignored came recently when the world allowed the Multifiber Agreement, a guarantor of steady employment in this impoverished land, to end on Jan. 1. The MFA provided a favorable quota regime that enabled Bangladesh to expand its export of apparels to $5.7 billion in 2004 from $620 million in 1990.
Under the system, garments took the lion's share of Bangladesh's sales overseas, representing today 80% of exports. Millions of families depend on the sector. Now that the quotas have ended, there will be consequences. It is instructive to first consider what these could be, and then what could be done about it.
We can start with the fact that al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist groups prey on socioeconomic deterioration to find recruits. Anything that increases Bangladesh's already burgeoning unemployed population -- estimated at around 40% when underemployment is considered -- can have a direct effect on the war on terror.
Given its high population density, unemployment and percentage living under the poverty line (some 45%), Bangladesh's other export is cheap manual labor. Bangladeshi men have long looked abroad for employment, usually within nations where Islamism is strong. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the population of workers from South Asian countries to the Middle East is as high as 10 million.
Saudi Arabia has been one of the largest importers of Bangladeshi laborers, where over a million reside. Many of the towering high-rises of Dubai and Kuwait were built by Bangladeshi hands. But if this is a source of employment and wealth, it is also a source of something more negative. Bangladeshi men come back from their Gulf "tour of duty" radicalized and ready to promote intransigent interpretations of Islam at odds with traditional Bengali practices. These returning workers have been a natural pool of recruitment for al Qaeda.
We can only expect that the end of the MFA will mean that women may follow this well-worn path too. Nearly 80% of garments workers in Bangladesh are women. Their loss of income could well force many into economic exile as domestic helpers in the Middle East or East Asia. From Kuala Lumpur to Riyadh, Bangladeshi officials are already discussing means of "strengthening economic ties" and preparing to increase the number of work visas issued. Bangladeshi entrepreneurs have lined up to train women in Arabic language skills.
Many of these women will return equally influenced by radical interpretations of Islam, but their absence will also have another significant -- and more immediate -- impact. Women are leaders in Bangladesh's economy and political life. The country has been governed by active women leaders for the last 15 years. The freedom that women enjoy has been crucial to democracy taking root. Their sudden, new unemployed status and need to work abroad will weaken the glue that binds democracy and Islam in Bangladesh, a weakness that al Qaeda and the Islamists will certainly try to exploit.
The textile quotas are over and done with, and there is no use crying over spilt milk. The question now is, what can be done to make sure that this already impoverished land does not become even more dire, and a recruiting center for al Qaeda? In the wake of the passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by the U.S. Congress last month, one solution becomes obvious, why doesn't the U.S. do the same for Bangladesh? And not just the U.S., but Europe and Japan, too.
Nearly two-thirds of Bangladeshis are employed in the agricultural sector, and free-trade agreements would allow them to sell their produce in these markets. The rapid growth of the textile industry under the quota system shows that Bangladeshis respond to economic incentives. The problem with the quota regime was that it was artificial, and many of those jobs are lost overnight once the quota regime ends. Having trade free of tariffs and other impediments would guide Bangladeshis into longer-lasting industries, as they would have to build a comparative advantage based on economic strengths.
A failure by the international community to take drastic action would not only spell misery for millions of Bangladeshis, but also translate into a serious security threat for the entire world. Unless more attention is paid to Bangladesh, the al Qaedas and Jamatul Mujahideens of this world are sure to take advantage of the situation, and Bangladesh's major export will become not cheap T-shirts, but suicide bombers.
Ms. Hossain is manager of Democracy Programs at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=293339)
The World Can't Afford To Ignore Bangladesh
The Wall Street Journal (Asia Edition)
August 24, 2005
Last week an estimated 300 bombs went off in less than an hour in an Islamic country the size of Wisconsin, but with a population of 150 million. Although the attacks in Bangladesh were apparently not specifically targeted to kill civilians this time, two people died and more than 120 were injured. A banned Islamist group, the Jamatul Mujahideen, claimed credit for the attacks. Their message was clear: they just wanted to let the nation know that their terrorist network has been established.
Often presented as a success story in combining Islamic and democratic principles, Bangladesh has been quietly trying to make inroads against intractable problems like poverty and perennial floods. But it has also become a major target for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. All too often, this is ignored by the Western media, which barely reported last week's massive attack.
A case in point of how Bangladesh's interests can be ignored came recently when the world allowed the Multifiber Agreement, a guarantor of steady employment in this impoverished land, to end on Jan. 1. The MFA provided a favorable quota regime that enabled Bangladesh to expand its export of apparels to $5.7 billion in 2004 from $620 million in 1990.
Under the system, garments took the lion's share of Bangladesh's sales overseas, representing today 80% of exports. Millions of families depend on the sector. Now that the quotas have ended, there will be consequences. It is instructive to first consider what these could be, and then what could be done about it.
We can start with the fact that al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist groups prey on socioeconomic deterioration to find recruits. Anything that increases Bangladesh's already burgeoning unemployed population -- estimated at around 40% when underemployment is considered -- can have a direct effect on the war on terror.
Given its high population density, unemployment and percentage living under the poverty line (some 45%), Bangladesh's other export is cheap manual labor. Bangladeshi men have long looked abroad for employment, usually within nations where Islamism is strong. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the population of workers from South Asian countries to the Middle East is as high as 10 million.
Saudi Arabia has been one of the largest importers of Bangladeshi laborers, where over a million reside. Many of the towering high-rises of Dubai and Kuwait were built by Bangladeshi hands. But if this is a source of employment and wealth, it is also a source of something more negative. Bangladeshi men come back from their Gulf "tour of duty" radicalized and ready to promote intransigent interpretations of Islam at odds with traditional Bengali practices. These returning workers have been a natural pool of recruitment for al Qaeda.
We can only expect that the end of the MFA will mean that women may follow this well-worn path too. Nearly 80% of garments workers in Bangladesh are women. Their loss of income could well force many into economic exile as domestic helpers in the Middle East or East Asia. From Kuala Lumpur to Riyadh, Bangladeshi officials are already discussing means of "strengthening economic ties" and preparing to increase the number of work visas issued. Bangladeshi entrepreneurs have lined up to train women in Arabic language skills.
Many of these women will return equally influenced by radical interpretations of Islam, but their absence will also have another significant -- and more immediate -- impact. Women are leaders in Bangladesh's economy and political life. The country has been governed by active women leaders for the last 15 years. The freedom that women enjoy has been crucial to democracy taking root. Their sudden, new unemployed status and need to work abroad will weaken the glue that binds democracy and Islam in Bangladesh, a weakness that al Qaeda and the Islamists will certainly try to exploit.
The textile quotas are over and done with, and there is no use crying over spilt milk. The question now is, what can be done to make sure that this already impoverished land does not become even more dire, and a recruiting center for al Qaeda? In the wake of the passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by the U.S. Congress last month, one solution becomes obvious, why doesn't the U.S. do the same for Bangladesh? And not just the U.S., but Europe and Japan, too.
Nearly two-thirds of Bangladeshis are employed in the agricultural sector, and free-trade agreements would allow them to sell their produce in these markets. The rapid growth of the textile industry under the quota system shows that Bangladeshis respond to economic incentives. The problem with the quota regime was that it was artificial, and many of those jobs are lost overnight once the quota regime ends. Having trade free of tariffs and other impediments would guide Bangladeshis into longer-lasting industries, as they would have to build a comparative advantage based on economic strengths.
A failure by the international community to take drastic action would not only spell misery for millions of Bangladeshis, but also translate into a serious security threat for the entire world. Unless more attention is paid to Bangladesh, the al Qaedas and Jamatul Mujahideens of this world are sure to take advantage of the situation, and Bangladesh's major export will become not cheap T-shirts, but suicide bombers.
Ms. Hossain is manager of Democracy Programs at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
FW: The mystery of the letter to Dr. Rice (The Daily Star, Sep 23, 2005)
(http://www.thedailystar.net/2005/09/23/d509231501109.htm)
Letter From America
The mystery of the letter to Dr. Rice
Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed writes from Princeton
I was intrigued by the US lawmakers' letter to the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, published in the front page of The Daily Star on September 15, recommending that President Bush raise the issue of political violence in Bangladesh at the United Nations World Summit. (President Bush did not raise it.) First of all, I wanted to congratulate The Daily Star on the scoop, because I could not find the statement printed anywhere in the US press.
Then I tried to contact the various US Senators and Congressmen for a copy of the letter they were signatories to. Then an extraordinary picture began to emerge. Except for Senators Barack Obama (Illinois) and Senator Barbara Boxer (California), seven of the nine Senators listed were either from Massachusetts (Edward Kennedy and John Kerry) or the New England states bordering Massachusetts: Senator Lincoln Chafee and Senator Jack Reed are from Rhode Island, Senator Patrick Leahy is from Vermont, Senator Olympia Snowe is from Maine, and Senator John Sununu is from New Hampshire.
The Congressmen named are also predominantly from Massachusetts. Except for Congressman Gary Ackerman (New York) and Alcee Hastings (Florida), five of the seven Congressmen listed -- Barney Frank, John Olver, John Tierney, James McGovern and Martin Meehan -- are from Massachusetts! The conclusion is bizarre: only the Massachusetts area (Boston is the largest city and the state capital of Massachusetts) Senators and Congressmen are selectively outraged by what is happening in Bangladesh, and the Senators and Congressmen from the rest of America are not! The only other possibility is more disturbing: someone or some groups from the Boston area are orchestrating an anti-Bangladeshi smear campaign. I know from personal experience that to secure a constituent's vote, Senators and Congressmen from one's own state are too eager to oblige the constituent, if the request is of a minor nature and of little political significance. Such services to the constituents are routine.
It is inconceivable that Senators of the calibre of Ted Kennedy (who was a staunch supporter of Bangladesh during our war of liberation), John Kerry, and Barbara Boxer, and Congressmen of the stature of Barney Frank, John Tierney, and Gary Ackerman would ask President Bush to implement initiatives to prevent "catastrophic terrorism" in Bangladesh. By now it is clear that only those who stand to gain by Bangladesh becoming a "failed state" promote and perpetuate the myth that Bangladesh is well on its way towards national suicide. I do not believe for a moment that these stalwart legislators, all well-known friends of Bangladesh, would knowingly succumb to such malicious propaganda.
As in neighbouring countries, indeed many parts of the world, political and religious violence are facts of life in Bangladesh. For the sake of Bangladesh and not to please Bangladesh's detractors, the government must tackle and defeat religious and political violence, starting with the extremist elements within the ruling party itself. There is no question of negotiations with the terrorists. Terrorists like Bangla Bhai must be hunted down and brought to justice. However, to suggest, as the letter does, "if these alarming trends continue, there could be serious consequences for regional peace and security as well as international terrorist activity in the region" is a stretch. American newspapers are full of reports of terrorism in the Indian states, such as Assam, that border Bangladesh. Yet, the US legislators do not seem to be worried about terrorism there. Have any of these US legislators condemned Narendra Modi's Gujarat-state sponsored terrorism that was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Muslims in India in February 2002? I wonder why not.
It is disgraceful that the terrorists who assassinated the former Bangladesh Finance Minister SAMS Kibria earlier this year have not yet been brought to justice. I have not met a single Bangladeshi who is not appalled and angry at the assassination of Mr. Kibria, a brilliant intellectual who was not even a career politician. Every day the perpetrators of Mr. Kibria's murder go unpunished, is a shameful day for Bangladesh. Bangladeshi government should and must do better to administer justice and sooth the raw wounds of the bereaved families. As The Daily Star columnist Brig. Gen. Shahedul Anam Khan pointed out in his September 22 column, why are the US legislators so obsessed with Mr. Kibria's murder only? Why not ask for justice for all victims of political and religious violence in Bangladesh and elsewhere? No one aggrieved family's grief is superior to another's. And it is imperative upon the aggrieved family members not to take out their frustration over government inaction by attempting to destroy the reputation of the whole nation. Our former Prime Minister and the current leader of the opposition, Shaikh Hasina, was almost assassinated last August. Why have the US legislators not asked about sending "UN special envoy" to the trial of Shaikh Hasina's would-be killers?
Talking about the UN, let us not forget that the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq without the backing of the UN Security Council. It is amusing, then, for the legislators to now ask the UN to run errands for them in Bangladesh. Starting with the US Supreme Court, most judges in the US are strictly political appointees. At a time of political bickering over senatorial hearings to confirm President Bush's nominee for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John Roberts, it is comical for the US legislators to comment, "The lower courts (in Bangladesh) are under the authority of the executive and they lack independence." The degree of political independence of the judiciary varies from country to country. And it is fascinating that the US legislators would take such keen interest in the working of Bangladesh's lower courts! Let us recall that in 2000, it was not the American voters, but the US Supreme Court which in a 5 to 4 decision installed George W. Bush as the President of the United States.
According to The Daily Star Staff Reporter, the letter of the US legislators also said: "They said that the Transparency International (TI) has given Bangladesh one of the worst ratings in the world of corruption, emphasising that "corruption has assumed serious proportions and it has infected every nook and corner of the country. Among the 145 countries surveyed for the TI rating, Bangladesh is tied with Haiti as the country most widely perceived as corrupt." I cannot believe that the US legislators would quote TI and would be so mean-spirited to take such a swipe at Bangladesh. They are far too decent and classy to be so crass.
Instead of attempting to parry questions raised in the letter, the foreign office of the government of Bangladesh should request the US government, and the Senators and the Congressmen, for a copy of the original letter that bears the legislators' signatures. If the Staff Correspondent of the Daily Star could procure a copy of the original letter, the government of Bangladesh should be able to do the same. The government should then carefully study the letter and respond fully to the criticism leveled against Bangladesh. The government of Bangladesh should also inquire of the Senators and Congressmen about the origin of the letter and whether all those listed did actually sign the letter. (I have my doubts on both). If the Senators and the Congressmen did not compose the letter, the government of Bangladesh has the right to ask them who did.
Letter From America
The mystery of the letter to Dr. Rice
Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed writes from Princeton
I was intrigued by the US lawmakers' letter to the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, published in the front page of The Daily Star on September 15, recommending that President Bush raise the issue of political violence in Bangladesh at the United Nations World Summit. (President Bush did not raise it.) First of all, I wanted to congratulate The Daily Star on the scoop, because I could not find the statement printed anywhere in the US press.
Then I tried to contact the various US Senators and Congressmen for a copy of the letter they were signatories to. Then an extraordinary picture began to emerge. Except for Senators Barack Obama (Illinois) and Senator Barbara Boxer (California), seven of the nine Senators listed were either from Massachusetts (Edward Kennedy and John Kerry) or the New England states bordering Massachusetts: Senator Lincoln Chafee and Senator Jack Reed are from Rhode Island, Senator Patrick Leahy is from Vermont, Senator Olympia Snowe is from Maine, and Senator John Sununu is from New Hampshire.
The Congressmen named are also predominantly from Massachusetts. Except for Congressman Gary Ackerman (New York) and Alcee Hastings (Florida), five of the seven Congressmen listed -- Barney Frank, John Olver, John Tierney, James McGovern and Martin Meehan -- are from Massachusetts! The conclusion is bizarre: only the Massachusetts area (Boston is the largest city and the state capital of Massachusetts) Senators and Congressmen are selectively outraged by what is happening in Bangladesh, and the Senators and Congressmen from the rest of America are not! The only other possibility is more disturbing: someone or some groups from the Boston area are orchestrating an anti-Bangladeshi smear campaign. I know from personal experience that to secure a constituent's vote, Senators and Congressmen from one's own state are too eager to oblige the constituent, if the request is of a minor nature and of little political significance. Such services to the constituents are routine.
It is inconceivable that Senators of the calibre of Ted Kennedy (who was a staunch supporter of Bangladesh during our war of liberation), John Kerry, and Barbara Boxer, and Congressmen of the stature of Barney Frank, John Tierney, and Gary Ackerman would ask President Bush to implement initiatives to prevent "catastrophic terrorism" in Bangladesh. By now it is clear that only those who stand to gain by Bangladesh becoming a "failed state" promote and perpetuate the myth that Bangladesh is well on its way towards national suicide. I do not believe for a moment that these stalwart legislators, all well-known friends of Bangladesh, would knowingly succumb to such malicious propaganda.
As in neighbouring countries, indeed many parts of the world, political and religious violence are facts of life in Bangladesh. For the sake of Bangladesh and not to please Bangladesh's detractors, the government must tackle and defeat religious and political violence, starting with the extremist elements within the ruling party itself. There is no question of negotiations with the terrorists. Terrorists like Bangla Bhai must be hunted down and brought to justice. However, to suggest, as the letter does, "if these alarming trends continue, there could be serious consequences for regional peace and security as well as international terrorist activity in the region" is a stretch. American newspapers are full of reports of terrorism in the Indian states, such as Assam, that border Bangladesh. Yet, the US legislators do not seem to be worried about terrorism there. Have any of these US legislators condemned Narendra Modi's Gujarat-state sponsored terrorism that was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Muslims in India in February 2002? I wonder why not.
It is disgraceful that the terrorists who assassinated the former Bangladesh Finance Minister SAMS Kibria earlier this year have not yet been brought to justice. I have not met a single Bangladeshi who is not appalled and angry at the assassination of Mr. Kibria, a brilliant intellectual who was not even a career politician. Every day the perpetrators of Mr. Kibria's murder go unpunished, is a shameful day for Bangladesh. Bangladeshi government should and must do better to administer justice and sooth the raw wounds of the bereaved families. As The Daily Star columnist Brig. Gen. Shahedul Anam Khan pointed out in his September 22 column, why are the US legislators so obsessed with Mr. Kibria's murder only? Why not ask for justice for all victims of political and religious violence in Bangladesh and elsewhere? No one aggrieved family's grief is superior to another's. And it is imperative upon the aggrieved family members not to take out their frustration over government inaction by attempting to destroy the reputation of the whole nation. Our former Prime Minister and the current leader of the opposition, Shaikh Hasina, was almost assassinated last August. Why have the US legislators not asked about sending "UN special envoy" to the trial of Shaikh Hasina's would-be killers?
Talking about the UN, let us not forget that the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq without the backing of the UN Security Council. It is amusing, then, for the legislators to now ask the UN to run errands for them in Bangladesh. Starting with the US Supreme Court, most judges in the US are strictly political appointees. At a time of political bickering over senatorial hearings to confirm President Bush's nominee for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John Roberts, it is comical for the US legislators to comment, "The lower courts (in Bangladesh) are under the authority of the executive and they lack independence." The degree of political independence of the judiciary varies from country to country. And it is fascinating that the US legislators would take such keen interest in the working of Bangladesh's lower courts! Let us recall that in 2000, it was not the American voters, but the US Supreme Court which in a 5 to 4 decision installed George W. Bush as the President of the United States.
According to The Daily Star Staff Reporter, the letter of the US legislators also said: "They said that the Transparency International (TI) has given Bangladesh one of the worst ratings in the world of corruption, emphasising that "corruption has assumed serious proportions and it has infected every nook and corner of the country. Among the 145 countries surveyed for the TI rating, Bangladesh is tied with Haiti as the country most widely perceived as corrupt." I cannot believe that the US legislators would quote TI and would be so mean-spirited to take such a swipe at Bangladesh. They are far too decent and classy to be so crass.
Instead of attempting to parry questions raised in the letter, the foreign office of the government of Bangladesh should request the US government, and the Senators and the Congressmen, for a copy of the original letter that bears the legislators' signatures. If the Staff Correspondent of the Daily Star could procure a copy of the original letter, the government of Bangladesh should be able to do the same. The government should then carefully study the letter and respond fully to the criticism leveled against Bangladesh. The government of Bangladesh should also inquire of the Senators and Congressmen about the origin of the letter and whether all those listed did actually sign the letter. (I have my doubts on both). If the Senators and the Congressmen did not compose the letter, the government of Bangladesh has the right to ask them who did.
FW: LEFT BEHIND -- BY BANGLADESH
(http://www.telegraphindia.com/1051002/asp/
opinion/story_5294523.asp#)
LEFT BEHIND -- BY BANGLADESH
- ‘Bangladeshi girls have higher rates of school attendance than Indian girls’
Bangladesh is outperforming India — and fellow Bengalis across the border — in key indicators in health, education and gender parity. If it stays on this path, in another decade Bangladeshi society will be transformed, reports Sarmila Bose
Revolution may have finally arrived at Bengal’s door — the achievement of nearly universal primary school enrolment, with the elimination of gender disparity, not only in primary school enrolment but secondary enrolment as well. The Millennium Development Goals with regard to gender equality in schooling opportunity is already attained by this impressive performance. After decades of disappointing development, the surge in progress has happened in a dozen years since 1990, driven by effective public policy interventions despite the rough and tumble of democratic politics.
This extraordinary achievement in mass education has happened not in the Red bastion of West Bengal but in the lush green of Bangladesh next door.
The story of Bangladesh’s development is paradoxical in many ways. Created after a bloody struggle waged in the name of democracy, it slipped into authoritarianism within a mere couple of years and then reverted to military rule, this time a home-grown variety, for another decade and a half. It was the 1990s before democratic politics established itself in Bangladesh. However, its electoral politics has been dominated by bitter rivalry between the two main parties, with the losing side crippling the business of government with non-cooperation in Parliament or paralysing strikes on the streets. To make matters worse, there has been a spate of violence in recent times by radical religious groups, causing alarm in the international community.
Yet a quiet revolution seems to have been happening in development in Bangladesh. It became recognised as a world leader in micro-finance a quarter of a century ago, due to the successes of Grameen Bank. In the 1980s Grameen Bank was being discussed in classes at Harvard University, and the youthful Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, sought a meeting with its founder, Muhammad Yunus, to see if its principles might be used to address problems of poverty in his state. In his autobiography My Life, President Clinton writes, “Muhammad Yunus should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics years ago.” This American President had the common sense and humility to learn from the accomplishments of one of the poorest countries in the world.
Bangladesh’s imperious neighbour has been slower to take notice, distracted perhaps by its grander ambitions on the world stage. Besides, India’s interest in Bangladesh seemed dominated by alleged Islamist terrorists or illegal migrants, and it busied itself with fencing out unwelcome ‘infiltration’ from all directions. Meanwhile, as the UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR 2005) points out, Bangladesh now beats India in a whole range of social indicators in health, education and gender equality.
For instance, Bangladesh’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is now 46 per 1000 live births according to the Human Development Report (HDR) 2005, while India’s is 63. Bangladesh’s Under-Five mortality rate is 69 per 1000 live births, while India’s is 87. In both of these statistics, Bangladesh used to be far worse off than India. In 1970, its IMR was 145 (to India’s 127) and Under-Five mortality rate was 239 (to India’s 202). In 1990, as Bangladesh entered the era of multi-party democracy, its IMR was 94 per 1000, while India’s was 80. In the last 15 years, India started economic reforms and enjoyed unprecedented economic growth. It is still a poor country — with a per capita income of US$ 564 — but Bangladesh is much poorer, with a per capita income of only US$ 376. Yet in the same period Bangladesh has made far more progress in crucial social indicators.
Bangladesh has reduced fertility rates at a much faster rate than India. The numbers on public spending on health are confusing however. In last year’s HDR (2004) Bangladesh was shown to be spending 1.6 per cent of its GDP on health, nearly twice as much as India (0.9 per cent). This year, Bangladesh’s public spending on health is shown — implausibly — as half of last year’s (0.8 per cent), while India’s is 1.3 per cent.
Gender parity
While Bangladesh’s literacy rate (41 per cent) is much lower than India’s (61 per cent), the future looks to be quite different. Bangladesh has achieved close to 100 per cent gross primary school enrolment rates with a net primary enrolment rate in the same league as India’s (84 per cent or 86 per cent, as per HDR 2005 and World Bank 2005 estimates, to India’s 87 per cent). In addition, it has eliminated the gender gap in both primary and secondary school enrolment — an achievement nothing short of spectacular in a poor, traditional society in a region plagued with gender discrimination.
Bangladesh’s female to male ratio in primary enrolment is 1.04 according to HDR 2005, to India’s 0.94. Bangladesh’s female to male ratio in secondary enrolment is 1.11.
A World Bank report on Bangladesh’s progress towards Millennium Development Goals notes, “At virtually every age, Bangladeshi girls have higher rates of school attendance than Indian girls.” The report states that Bangladesh is the only country in South Asia other than Sri Lanka to have achieved parity in male and female enrolments at both the primary and the secondary levels. (Anil Deolalikar, Attaining the Millennium Development Goals in Bangladesh, World Bank, June 2005). While India spends a greater proportion of its GDP on public spending on education (4.1 per cent in 1999-2001) than Bangladesh (2.3 per cent), since 1990 Bangladesh has registered a more than 50 per cent rise in public spending on education (up from 1.5 per cent in 1990). During the same period, India’s public spending on education rose by a mere five per cent, from 3.9 per cent of GDP to 4.1 per cent. Bangladesh also spends 45.1 per cent of its public expenditure on education on pre-primary and primary levels. The equivalent share is 38.4 per cent for India, which spends nearly twice as much as Bangladesh on the tertiary level.
That Bangladesh beats India in crucial social indicators is significant enough. However, a truly fascinating comparison emerges with West Bengal — ruled by the Left Front since 1977 — to the extent possible with figures from the West Bengal Human Development Report (2004).
West Bengal’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is 51 per 1000 live births, to Bangladesh’s 46. However, in 1990, West Bengal’s IMR was 63 per 1000 live births, while Bangladesh’s was 94. In just over a decade, Bangladesh has overtaken West Bengal. In Bangladesh, 95 per cent of children are vaccinated against TB and 77 per cent against measles, while in West Bengal the figures are 87.8 per cent and 60.8 per cent respectively. The West Bengal HDR found it “disturbing” that the state ranked low among Indian states in coverage of vaccines and suffered a high ‘drop-out’ rate of successive vaccines.
As with the all-India literacy rate, Bangladesh (41.1 per cent) seems far behind West Bengal (68.2 per cent) in literacy. However, literacy rates are of dubious quality — the West Bengal HDR points out that 17 per cent of ‘literates’ were “below primary” level. Universal education for children is a more important indicator. The Gross Enrolment Rate at the primary level in Bangladesh is 96 per cent by World Bank estimates. The net enrolment rate is 84 to 86 per cent (UNDP, World Bank), up from 71 per cent in 1990. West Bengal’s official enrolment rate is 92 per cent, but the West Bengal HDR rejected this as an over-estimate and used a 67 per cent “attendance rate” for six to 10-year-olds as a better measure (1995). Government of India statistics cited by UNESCO show West Bengal’s net enrolment ratio as 55.6 per cent in 1997-98.
The West Bengal HDR states that “gender gaps remain substantial” in literacy in West Bengal and women of rural labour households are the worst off. Based on Government of India statistics cited by UNESCO, female to male ratio in net primary enrolment was 0.875 in West Bengal (1997-98). Gross Enrolment statistics reported by the Government of India (2001-02) show West Bengal’s female to male ratio for 6-11 years as 0.95 and for 11-14 years as 0.78. Bangladesh, of course, has achieved gender parity at both primary and secondary levels (with female to male ratios of 1.04 and 1.11 respectively).
Winds of change
Some of these statistics may not be precisely accurate or strictly comparable. Concerns remain regarding the quality of education and dropout rates in Bangladesh. However, successive UNDP Human Development Reports, assessments by the World Bank [Hossain (2004), Deolalikar (2005)], or scholars such as Jean Dreze, do not doubt the general trend that Bangladesh is outperforming India — and, as evident from the above, fellow Bengalis across the border — in key indicators in health, education and gender parity. If it stays on this path, in another decade Bangladeshi society will be transformed.
Bangladesh’s success is due to targeted policies and effective implementation. It increased public spending on education by more than 50 per cent since 1990 and spends 45.1 per cent of it on primary levels. Though the education system is centralised, the provision of education is highly pluralistic, with NGOs playing a significant part in service delivery. Bangladesh used innovative, targeted interventions to attract the poor and girl students to school. The Food for Education programme provided grain (later changed to cash subsidies, with payments made to mothers) to poor families if they sent their children to school. The Female Secondary Stipends programme provided stipends for girls. Subsidies were linked to attendance and performance. They have additional benefits such as delaying the marriage age for girls.
While donors play a role and service delivery is pluralistic, effective policy intervention would not have happened without government leadership. After a poor record of development during the 1970s and 1980s, rapid progress started from 1990, which coincides with the era of multi-party democracy. However, bitter political rivalry led to what seemed like governance paralysis a lot of the time. It is a mystery how, despite its politics, Bangladesh has mustered the cross-party political will to craft effective public policy to make such remarkable progress in crucial social indicators. It has demolished the excuse of “democracy” trotted out by India to explain its lack of progress. It has also exposed the bankruptcy of the comrades of Calcutta.
opinion/story_5294523.asp#)
LEFT BEHIND -- BY BANGLADESH
- ‘Bangladeshi girls have higher rates of school attendance than Indian girls’
Bangladesh is outperforming India — and fellow Bengalis across the border — in key indicators in health, education and gender parity. If it stays on this path, in another decade Bangladeshi society will be transformed, reports Sarmila Bose
Revolution may have finally arrived at Bengal’s door — the achievement of nearly universal primary school enrolment, with the elimination of gender disparity, not only in primary school enrolment but secondary enrolment as well. The Millennium Development Goals with regard to gender equality in schooling opportunity is already attained by this impressive performance. After decades of disappointing development, the surge in progress has happened in a dozen years since 1990, driven by effective public policy interventions despite the rough and tumble of democratic politics.
This extraordinary achievement in mass education has happened not in the Red bastion of West Bengal but in the lush green of Bangladesh next door.
The story of Bangladesh’s development is paradoxical in many ways. Created after a bloody struggle waged in the name of democracy, it slipped into authoritarianism within a mere couple of years and then reverted to military rule, this time a home-grown variety, for another decade and a half. It was the 1990s before democratic politics established itself in Bangladesh. However, its electoral politics has been dominated by bitter rivalry between the two main parties, with the losing side crippling the business of government with non-cooperation in Parliament or paralysing strikes on the streets. To make matters worse, there has been a spate of violence in recent times by radical religious groups, causing alarm in the international community.
Yet a quiet revolution seems to have been happening in development in Bangladesh. It became recognised as a world leader in micro-finance a quarter of a century ago, due to the successes of Grameen Bank. In the 1980s Grameen Bank was being discussed in classes at Harvard University, and the youthful Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, sought a meeting with its founder, Muhammad Yunus, to see if its principles might be used to address problems of poverty in his state. In his autobiography My Life, President Clinton writes, “Muhammad Yunus should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics years ago.” This American President had the common sense and humility to learn from the accomplishments of one of the poorest countries in the world.
Bangladesh’s imperious neighbour has been slower to take notice, distracted perhaps by its grander ambitions on the world stage. Besides, India’s interest in Bangladesh seemed dominated by alleged Islamist terrorists or illegal migrants, and it busied itself with fencing out unwelcome ‘infiltration’ from all directions. Meanwhile, as the UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR 2005) points out, Bangladesh now beats India in a whole range of social indicators in health, education and gender equality.
For instance, Bangladesh’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is now 46 per 1000 live births according to the Human Development Report (HDR) 2005, while India’s is 63. Bangladesh’s Under-Five mortality rate is 69 per 1000 live births, while India’s is 87. In both of these statistics, Bangladesh used to be far worse off than India. In 1970, its IMR was 145 (to India’s 127) and Under-Five mortality rate was 239 (to India’s 202). In 1990, as Bangladesh entered the era of multi-party democracy, its IMR was 94 per 1000, while India’s was 80. In the last 15 years, India started economic reforms and enjoyed unprecedented economic growth. It is still a poor country — with a per capita income of US$ 564 — but Bangladesh is much poorer, with a per capita income of only US$ 376. Yet in the same period Bangladesh has made far more progress in crucial social indicators.
Bangladesh has reduced fertility rates at a much faster rate than India. The numbers on public spending on health are confusing however. In last year’s HDR (2004) Bangladesh was shown to be spending 1.6 per cent of its GDP on health, nearly twice as much as India (0.9 per cent). This year, Bangladesh’s public spending on health is shown — implausibly — as half of last year’s (0.8 per cent), while India’s is 1.3 per cent.
Gender parity
While Bangladesh’s literacy rate (41 per cent) is much lower than India’s (61 per cent), the future looks to be quite different. Bangladesh has achieved close to 100 per cent gross primary school enrolment rates with a net primary enrolment rate in the same league as India’s (84 per cent or 86 per cent, as per HDR 2005 and World Bank 2005 estimates, to India’s 87 per cent). In addition, it has eliminated the gender gap in both primary and secondary school enrolment — an achievement nothing short of spectacular in a poor, traditional society in a region plagued with gender discrimination.
Bangladesh’s female to male ratio in primary enrolment is 1.04 according to HDR 2005, to India’s 0.94. Bangladesh’s female to male ratio in secondary enrolment is 1.11.
A World Bank report on Bangladesh’s progress towards Millennium Development Goals notes, “At virtually every age, Bangladeshi girls have higher rates of school attendance than Indian girls.” The report states that Bangladesh is the only country in South Asia other than Sri Lanka to have achieved parity in male and female enrolments at both the primary and the secondary levels. (Anil Deolalikar, Attaining the Millennium Development Goals in Bangladesh, World Bank, June 2005). While India spends a greater proportion of its GDP on public spending on education (4.1 per cent in 1999-2001) than Bangladesh (2.3 per cent), since 1990 Bangladesh has registered a more than 50 per cent rise in public spending on education (up from 1.5 per cent in 1990). During the same period, India’s public spending on education rose by a mere five per cent, from 3.9 per cent of GDP to 4.1 per cent. Bangladesh also spends 45.1 per cent of its public expenditure on education on pre-primary and primary levels. The equivalent share is 38.4 per cent for India, which spends nearly twice as much as Bangladesh on the tertiary level.
That Bangladesh beats India in crucial social indicators is significant enough. However, a truly fascinating comparison emerges with West Bengal — ruled by the Left Front since 1977 — to the extent possible with figures from the West Bengal Human Development Report (2004).
West Bengal’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is 51 per 1000 live births, to Bangladesh’s 46. However, in 1990, West Bengal’s IMR was 63 per 1000 live births, while Bangladesh’s was 94. In just over a decade, Bangladesh has overtaken West Bengal. In Bangladesh, 95 per cent of children are vaccinated against TB and 77 per cent against measles, while in West Bengal the figures are 87.8 per cent and 60.8 per cent respectively. The West Bengal HDR found it “disturbing” that the state ranked low among Indian states in coverage of vaccines and suffered a high ‘drop-out’ rate of successive vaccines.
As with the all-India literacy rate, Bangladesh (41.1 per cent) seems far behind West Bengal (68.2 per cent) in literacy. However, literacy rates are of dubious quality — the West Bengal HDR points out that 17 per cent of ‘literates’ were “below primary” level. Universal education for children is a more important indicator. The Gross Enrolment Rate at the primary level in Bangladesh is 96 per cent by World Bank estimates. The net enrolment rate is 84 to 86 per cent (UNDP, World Bank), up from 71 per cent in 1990. West Bengal’s official enrolment rate is 92 per cent, but the West Bengal HDR rejected this as an over-estimate and used a 67 per cent “attendance rate” for six to 10-year-olds as a better measure (1995). Government of India statistics cited by UNESCO show West Bengal’s net enrolment ratio as 55.6 per cent in 1997-98.
The West Bengal HDR states that “gender gaps remain substantial” in literacy in West Bengal and women of rural labour households are the worst off. Based on Government of India statistics cited by UNESCO, female to male ratio in net primary enrolment was 0.875 in West Bengal (1997-98). Gross Enrolment statistics reported by the Government of India (2001-02) show West Bengal’s female to male ratio for 6-11 years as 0.95 and for 11-14 years as 0.78. Bangladesh, of course, has achieved gender parity at both primary and secondary levels (with female to male ratios of 1.04 and 1.11 respectively).
Winds of change
Some of these statistics may not be precisely accurate or strictly comparable. Concerns remain regarding the quality of education and dropout rates in Bangladesh. However, successive UNDP Human Development Reports, assessments by the World Bank [Hossain (2004), Deolalikar (2005)], or scholars such as Jean Dreze, do not doubt the general trend that Bangladesh is outperforming India — and, as evident from the above, fellow Bengalis across the border — in key indicators in health, education and gender parity. If it stays on this path, in another decade Bangladeshi society will be transformed.
Bangladesh’s success is due to targeted policies and effective implementation. It increased public spending on education by more than 50 per cent since 1990 and spends 45.1 per cent of it on primary levels. Though the education system is centralised, the provision of education is highly pluralistic, with NGOs playing a significant part in service delivery. Bangladesh used innovative, targeted interventions to attract the poor and girl students to school. The Food for Education programme provided grain (later changed to cash subsidies, with payments made to mothers) to poor families if they sent their children to school. The Female Secondary Stipends programme provided stipends for girls. Subsidies were linked to attendance and performance. They have additional benefits such as delaying the marriage age for girls.
While donors play a role and service delivery is pluralistic, effective policy intervention would not have happened without government leadership. After a poor record of development during the 1970s and 1980s, rapid progress started from 1990, which coincides with the era of multi-party democracy. However, bitter political rivalry led to what seemed like governance paralysis a lot of the time. It is a mystery how, despite its politics, Bangladesh has mustered the cross-party political will to craft effective public policy to make such remarkable progress in crucial social indicators. It has demolished the excuse of “democracy” trotted out by India to explain its lack of progress. It has also exposed the bankruptcy of the comrades of Calcutta.
FW: 'The Army Has To Come Out' (Democracy Now! interview Arundhati Roy)
'The Army Has To Come Out'
'The Indians are teaching the Americans, too, how to occupy a place ... The occupation of Kashmir
has taken place over years. ... In Iraq, you have 125,000 or so American troops in a situation of
war, controlling 25 million Iraqis. In Kashmir, you have 700,000 Indian troops fully armed there
.. and creating a situation, making it worse and worse and worse.'
Arundhati Roy on India, Iraq, U.S. Empire and Dissent
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/1358250
Today we spend the hour with acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy. Her first novel,
"The God of Small Things," was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. It has sold over six millions
copies and has been translated into over 20 languages worldwide.
Since then, Arundhati Roy has devoted herself to political writing and activism. In India, she’s
involved in the movement opposing hydroelectric dam projects that have displaced thousands of
people. In 2002, she was convicted of contempt of court in New Delhi for accusing the court of
attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam project. She received a symbolic one-day
prison sentence. She has also been a vocal opponent of the Indian government’s nuclear weapons
program as she is of all nuclear programs worldwide. [includes rush transcript]
Arundhati Roy has also become known across the globe for her powerful political essays in books
like "Power Politics," "War Talk," "The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile" and her latest, "An
Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire."
In June of 2005, she served as a Chair of Jury of Conscience at the World Tribunal on Iraq. She
joins us today in the firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now!
Arundhati Roy, author and activist.
In June 2005, a World Tribunal on Iraq was held in Istanbul, Turkey. A 17-member Jury of
Conscience at the Tribunal heard testimonies from a panel of advocates and witnesses who came from
across the world. You were selected as the chair of the jury. This is an excerpt of your address.
Arundhati Roy, speaking at the World Tribunal on Iraq. (Courtesy: Deep Dish TV from the DVD "The
World Tribunal on Iraq: The Final Session")
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning
for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy. Her first
novel, The God of Small Things, was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. It’s sold over six million
copies, has been translated in over 20 languages around the world. Since then, Roy has devoted
herself to political writing and activism. In India, she is involved in the movement opposing
hydroelectric dam projects that have displaced thousands of people. In 2002, she was convicted of
contempt of court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protest against the
Narmada Dam project. She received a symbolic one-day prison sentence. She has also been a vocal
opponent of the Indian government's nuclear weapons program, as she is of all nuclear programs
around the world. Arundhati Roy has also become known across the globe for her powerful political
essays in books like Power Politics, War Talk, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, and her
latest, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. In June of 2005, she served as chair of the Jury of
Conscience at the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul. She joins us today in our Firehouse studio
for the hour here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. What does it feel to be back in the United States? A
different perspective on the world from here.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the last time I was here was just before the elections, you know,
when we were hoping that Bush wouldn't come back. But the point was that whoever came back seemed
to have been supporting the war in Iraq in some way, so there was a crisis of democracy here, as
much as anywhere else in the world. It's, I think, you know, when you don't come to the United
States often, from the outside, the most important thing is that it's easy to forget. It's easy
for us to forget that there is dissent within this country against the system that its government
stands for. And it's important and heartening for me to remind myself of that, because outside
there is so much anger against America, and obviously, you know, that confusion between people and
governments exists, and it was enhanced when Bush was voted back to power. People started saying,
“Is there a difference?”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, the way you see America and Americans outside the United States is
through the media, as projected through. Which channels do you access in India? What do you get to
see? And what do you think of how the media deals with these issues?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, in India, I think you get FOX News and CNN and, of course, the BBC. But also
a lot of newspapers in India do publish American columnists, famously Thomas Friedman. And, of
course, recently George Bush visited India, which was a humiliating and very funny episode at the
same time, you know, what happened to him there and how he came and how the media reacted.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your reaction to that visit, and actually first, though, play a clip of
President Bush when he went to India in March. He promised to increase economic integration with
the U.S. and signed an agreement to foster nuclear cooperation between the two countries.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We concluded an historic agreement today on nuclear power. It's not an
easy job for the Prime Minister to achieve this agreement. I understand. It's not easy for the
American president to achieve this agreement, but it's a necessary agreement. It's one that will
help both our peoples.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in India.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the strange thing was that before he came, they wanted him to address a joint
house of Parliament, but some members of Parliament said that they would heckle him and that it
would be embarrassing for him to come there. So then they thought they would ask him to address a
public meeting at the Red Fort, which is in Old Delhi, which is where the Prime Minister of India
always gives his independence day speech from, but that was considered unsafe, because Old Delhi
is full of Muslims, and you know how they think of all Muslims as terrorists. So then they
thought, “Okay, we’ll do it in Vigyan Bhawan, which is a sort of state auditorium, but that was
considered too much of a comedown for the U.S. President. So funnily enough, they eventually
settled on him speaking in Purana Qila, which is the Old Fort, which houses the Delhi zoo. And it
was really from there that -- and, of course, it wasn't a public meeting. It was the caged animals
and some caged CEOs that he addressed. And then he went to Hyderabad, and I think he met a buffalo
there, some special kind of buffalo, because there is a picture of Bush and the buffalo in all the
papers, but the point is that, insulated from the public.
There were massive demonstrations, where hundreds of thousands of people showed up. But it didn't
seem to matter either to Bush or to the Indian government, which went ahead and signed, you know,
deals where this kind of embrace between a poorer country or a developing country and America. We
have such a litany of the history of incineration when you embrace the government of the United
States. And that's what happened, that the Indian government, in full servile mode, has entered
into this embrace, has negotiated itself into a corner, and now continues to do this deadly sort
of dance.
But I must say that while Bush was in Delhi, at the same time on the streets were -- I mean apart
from the protests, there were 60 widows that had come from Kerala, which is the south of India,
which is where I come from, and they had come to Delhi because they were 60 out of the tens of
thousands of widows of farmers who have committed suicide, because they have been encircled by
debt. And this is a fact that is simply not reported, partly because there are no official
figures, partly because the Indian government quibbles about what constitutes suicide and what is
a farmer. If a man commits suicide, but the land is in his old father's name, he doesn't count. If
it's a woman, she doesn't count, because women can't be farmers.
AMY GOODMAN: So she counts as someone who committed suicide, but not as a farmer who committed
suicide.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: Tens of thousands?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Tens of thousands. And then, anyway, so these 60 women were there on the street
asking the Indian government to write off the debts of their husbands, right? Across the street
from them, in a five-star hotel were Bush's 16 sniffer dogs who were staying in this five-star
hotel, and we were all told that you can't call them dogs, because they are actually officers of
the American Army, you know. I don't know what the names were. Sergeant Pepper and Corporal
Whatever. So, it wasn't even possible to be satirical or write black comedy, because it was all
real.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn't President Bush visit Gandhi's grave?
ARUNDHATI ROY: He visited Gandhi's grave, and first his dogs visited Gandhi’s grave. Then, you
know, Gandhians were, like, wanting to purify it. And I said, “Look, I don't mind the dogs. I mind
Bush much than the dogs.” But Gandhi’s -- you know, obviously one can have all kinds of opinions
about Gandhi. It's not universal that everybody adores and loves him, but still he stood for
nonviolence, and here it was really the equivalent of a butcher coming and tipping a pot of blood
on that memorial and going away. It was -- you know, there was no room left, as I said, for satire
or for anything, because it was so vulgar, the whole of it. But I have to say the Indian
mainstream media was so servile. You know, you had a newspaper like the Indian Express saying, “He
is here, and he has spoken.” I'm sure he doesn't get worshipped that much even by the American
mainstream press, you know. It was extraordinary.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play another clip of President Bush. I think in this one he’s talking about
trade in India.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The markets are open, and the poor are given a chance to develop their
talents and abilities. They can create a better life for their families. They add to the wealth of
the world, and they could begin to afford goods and services from other nations. Free and fair
trade is good for India. It’s good for America. And it is good for the world.
In my country, some focus only on one aspect of our trade relationship with India: outsourcing.
It's true that some Americans have lost jobs when their companies move operations overseas. It's
also important to remember that when someone loses a job, it's an incredibly difficult period for
the worker and their families. Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our
economy from the world through protectionist policies. I strongly disagree.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush speaking in India. Arundhati Roy, your response?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, look, let's not forget that this whole call to the free market started in the
late 19th century in India. You know, that was what colonialism was all about. They kept using the
words “free market.” And we know how free the free market is. Today, India has -- I mean, after 15
years of economic liberalization, we have more than half of the world's malnutritioned children.
We have an economy where the differences between the rich and the poor, which have always been
huge, has increased enormously. We have a feudal society whose feudalism has just been reinforced
by all of this.
And, you know, it's amazing. Just in the wake of Bush's visit, you can't imagine what's happening,
say, in a city like Delhi. You can't imagine the open aggression of institutions of our democracy.
It's really like courts, for instance, who are an old enemy of mine, are rolling up their sleeves
and coming after us. You have in Delhi, for example -- I have just come from being on the streets
for six weeks, where all kinds of protest are taking place. But you have a city that's been just
-- it's just turned into a city of bulldozers and policemen. Overnight, notices go up saying
tomorrow or day after tomorrow you're going to be evicted from here. The Supreme Court judges have
come out saying things like, “If the poor can't afford to live in the city, why do they come
here?”
And basically, behind it all, there are two facades. One is that in 2008, Delhi is going to host
the Commonwealth Games. For this, hundreds of thousands of people are being driven out of the
city. But the real agenda came in the wake of Bush's visit, which is that the city is being
prepared for foreign direct investment in retail, which means Wal-Mart and Kmart and all these
people are going to come in, which means that this city of millions of pavement dwellers, hawkers,
fruit sellers, people who have -- it's a city that's grown up over centuries and centuries. It's
just being cleaned out under the guise of sort of legal action. And at the same time, people from
villages are being driven out of their villages, because of the corporatization of agriculture,
because of these big development projects.
So you have an institution like -- you know, I mean, how do you subvert democracy? We have a
parliament, sure. We have elections, sure. But we have a supreme court now that micromanages our
lives. It takes every decision: What should be in history books? Should this lamb be cured? Should
this road be widened? What gas should we use? Every single decision is now taken by a court. You
can't criticize the court. If you do, you will go to jail, like I did. So, you have judges who are
-- you have to read those judgments to believe it, you know? Public interest litigation has become
a weapon that judges use against us.
So, for example, a former chief justice of India, he gave a decision allowing the Narmada Dam to
be built, where 400,000 people will be displaced. The same judge gave a judgment saying slum
dwellers are pickpockets of urban land. So you displace people from the villages; they come into
the cities; you call them pickpockets. He gave a judgment shutting down all kinds of informal
industry in Delhi. Than he gave a judgment asking for all India's rivers to be linked, which is a
Stalinist scheme beyond imagination, where millions of people will be displaced. And when he
retired, he joined Coca-Cola. You know, it's incredible.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy is our guest for the hour. We’ll be back with her in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today for the hour is Arundhati Roy. She just recently flew in from New
Delhi, India. She is the author of a number of books, her Booker Prize award-winning book, The God
of Small Things, and then her books of essays, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, The
Checkbook and the Cruise Missile among them. Arundhati, you were just talking about what is
happening in India. Thomas Friedman, the well-known, much-read New York Times columnist and
author, talks about the call center being a perfect symbol of globalization in a very positive
sense.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, it is the perfect symbol, I think, in many ways. I wish Friedman would spend
some time working in one. But I think it's a very interesting issue, the call center, because, you
know, let's not get into the psychosis that takes place inside a call center, the fact that you
have people working, you know, according to a different body clock and all that and the languages
and the fact that you have to de-identify yourself.
AMY GOODMAN: And just for people who aren't familiar with what we're talking about, the call
center being places where, well, you might make a call to information or to some corporation, you
actually are making that call to India, and someone in a call center is picking it up.
ARUNDHATI ROY: But, you know, the thing is that it's a good example of what's going on. The call
center is surely creating jobs for a whole lot of people in India. But it comes as part of a
package, and that package, while it gives sort of an English-speaking middle or lower middle class
young person a job for a while, they can never last, because it's such a hard job. It actually is
also part of the corporate culture, which is taking away land and resources and water from
millions of rural people. But you're giving the more vocal and the better off anyway -- the people
who speak even a little bit of English are the better off among the millions of people in India.
So, to give these people jobs, you're taking away the livelihoods of millions of others, and this
is what globalization does.
It creates -- obviously it creates a very vocal constituency that supports it, among the elite of
poor countries. And so you have in India an elite, an upper caste, upper class wealthy elite who
are fiercely loyal to the neoliberal program. And that's exactly, obviously, what colonialism has
always done, and it's exactly what happened in countries in Latin America. But now it's happening
in India, and the rhetoric of democracies in place, because they have learned how to hollow out
democracy and make it lose meaning. All it means, it seems, is elections, where whoever you vote
for, they are going to do the same thing.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the dams, and a judge just in the last week has ruled that one of the
major dam projects is allowed to continue. Just physically on the ground, what does it mean, and
who are the people who are resisting, and what do they do?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I mean, that actually is something that reached fever pitch in the last few weeks
in India, because, you know, the movement against dams is actually a very beautiful political
argument, because it combines environmental issues, issues of water, of resources and of
displacement, with a political vision for a new kind of society. No political ideology, classic
political ideology has really done that properly. Either it's only environmental or it's only
about people. Here somehow, that's why I got so drawn into it. But this struggle was against the
notion of big dams, and it's been a nonviolent struggle for 25 years.
But now, the dams are still being built, and the argument has been reduced merely to displacement.
And even there, the courts are now saying you build a dam and just give people cash and send them
off. But the fact is that these are indigenous people. You know, you can't just give -- lots of
them are indigenous people. The others are farmers. But you can't -- the levels of displacement
are so huge. This dam, the Sardar Sarovar dam displaces 400,000, but just in the Narmada Valley
you're talking about millions of people. All over India, you’re talking about many millions who
are being displaced. So where are they going to go? Well, the court came out with a judgment with
marked a different era in India, where they even stopped pretending that they were interested in
resettlement or rehabilitation. They just said, “Build the dam.” So it's very interesting that
people were watching this nonviolent movement unfold its weapons on the streets, which is the
activists who went on indefinite hunger strike. People paid attention, but then they got kicked in
the teeth.
Meanwhile, across India, from West Bengal to Orissa, to Jharkhand, to Chhattisgarh, to Andhra
Pradesh, the Maoist movement has become very, very strong. It's an armed struggle. It's taking
over district after district. The administration cannot get in there. And the government's
response to that is to do what was done in Peru with the Shining Path, which is to set up armed
defense committees, which is really creating a situation of civil war. You know, hundreds of
villages are being emptied by the government, and the people are being moved into police camps.
People are being armed. The Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh says, “You’re either with the Maoists
and Naxalites or you’re with the Salva Judum,” which is this government-sponsored resistance, and
there’s no third choice. So it’s you’re with us or against us.
And what has happened, which is something I have been saying for a long time, that this whole war
on terror and the legislation that has come up around it is going to conflate terrorists with poor
people. And that's what's happened. In India, in January -- I don't know if you’ve read about it,
but it was a terrible thing that happened -- in Orissa, which is a state where all these
corporations have their greedy eyes fixed, because they have just discovered huge deposits of
bauxite, which you need to make aluminum, which you need to make weapons and planes.
AMY GOODMAN: And where is Orissa in India?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Orissa is sort of east, southeast. And it's got a huge indigenous population. If
you go there, it's like a police state. You know, the police have surrounded villages. You can't
move from one -- villagers are not allowed to move from one village to another to organize,
because, of course, there’s a lot of resistance. The Maoists have come in. And in Orissa in a
place called Kalinganagar, where the Tata, which used to be a sort of respected industrialist, but
now I can't say, are setting up a steel factory. So they, the government, took over the lands of
indigenous people. The trick is that you only say about 20% of them are project-affected. The rest
are all encroachers. Even these 20% are given -- their land is taken from them at, say, 35,000
rupees an acre, given to the Tatas for three-and-a-half lakhs, you know, which is ten times that
amount. And the actual market price is four times that amount. So you steal from the poor; you
subsidize the rich; then you call it the “free market.”
And when they protested, there was dynamite, you know, in the ground. Some of them were blown up,
killed. Six of them, I think, were injured, taken to hospital, and their bodies were returned with
their hands and breasts and things cut off. And those people have been blocking the highway now
for six months, the indigenous people, because it became a big issue in India. But it’s been
happening everywhere, and they are all called terrorists. You know, people with bows and arrows
are called terrorists.
So, in India, the poor are the terrorists, and even states like Andhra Pradesh, we have thousands
of people being held as political prisoners, called Maoists, held as political prisoners in
unknown places without charges or with false charges. We have the highest number of custodial
deaths in the world. And we have Thomas Friedman going on and on about how this is an idealistic
-- ideal society, a tolerant society. Hundreds -- I mean, tens of thousands of people killed in
Kashmir. All over the northeast, you have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, where a junior
noncommissioned officer can shoot at sight. And that is the democracy in which we live.
AMY GOODMAN: And the Maoists, what are their demands?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the Maoists are fighting on two fronts. One is that they are fighting a
feudal society, their feudal landlords. You have, you know, the whole caste system which is
arranged against the indigenous people and the Dalits, who are the untouchable caste. And they are
fighting against this whole corporatization. But they are also very poor people, you know,
barefoot with old rusty weapons. And, you know, what we -- say someone like myself, watching what
is happening in Kashmir, where -- or in the northeast, where exactly what America is doing in
Iraq, you know, where you're fostering a kind of civil war and then saying, “Oh, if we pull out,
these people just will massacre each other.”
But the longer you stay, the more you're enforcing these tribal differences and creating a
resistance, which obviously, on the one hand, someone like me does support; on the other hand, you
support the resistance, but you may not support the vision that they are fighting for. And I keep
saying, you know, I'm doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their
social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won. But
the point is that they are the ones that are resisting on the ground, and they have to be
supported, because what is happening is unbelievable.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of Iraq, let me play a clip of President Bush in Chicago Monday, where he
addressed a gathering organized by the National Restaurant Association. In his remarks, the
President talked about Iraq, which has just formed a new unity government.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: For most Iraqis, a free democratic and constitutional government will be
a new experience. For the people across the broader Middle East, a free Iraq will be an
inspiration. Iraqis have done more than form a government. They have proved that the desire for
liberty in the heart of the Middle East is for real. They have shown diverse people can come
together and work out their differences and find a way forward, and they have demonstrated that
democracy is the hope of the Middle East and the destiny of all mankind.
The triumph of liberty in Iraq is part of a long and familiar story. The great biographer of
American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote, “Freedom is ordinarily born in the midst of
storms. It is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know its
benefits.” Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as
a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the
Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in Chicago. Arundhati Roy from India here in New York, your response?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, how can one respond? I just keep wishing there would be a laugh
track, you know, on the side of these speeches. But obviously, you know, the elections in
Palestine, where you had a democratic government, now Palestine is being starved because they have
a democracy, under siege because they have a democracy. But in Iraq, this fake business is called
democracy. Forget about what's happening in Saudi Arabia.
So it's just -- you know, I think the issue is that people like President Bush and his advisors,
or what's happening in India, the Indian government, they have understood that you can use the
media to say anything from minute to minute. It doesn't matter what's really going on. It doesn't
matter what happened in the past. There are a few people who make the connections and fall about
laughing at the nonsense that is being spoken. But for everybody else, I think the media itself,
this mass media has become a means of telling the most unbelievable lies or making the most
unbelievable statements. And everybody sort of just imbibes it. It's like a drug, you know, that
you put straight into your veins. It doesn't matter. And it keeps going. But what can you say?
What kind of democracy is this in Iraq?
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen in Iraq?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I think that the first thing that has to happen is that the American army should
leave. That has to happen. I have no doubt about that. Similarly, I mean, I keep saying this, but,
you know, America, Israel and India, and China in Tibet, are now becoming experts in occupation,
and India is one of the leading experts. It's not that the American army in its training exercise
is teaching the Indian army. The Indians are teaching the Americans, too, how to occupy a place.
What do you do with the media? How do you deal with it? The occupation of Kashmir has taken place
over years. And I keep saying that in Iraq, you have 125,000 or so American troops in a situation
of war, controlling 25 million Iraqis. In Kashmir, you have 700,000 Indian troops fully armed
there -- you know? -- and creating a situation, making it worse and worse and worse. So the first
thing that has to happen is that the army has to come out, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: We're speaking to Arundhati Roy, who has spent time in Kashmir, lives in Delhi, the
acclaimed author and activist. We'll continue with her after this break.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: In June of 2005, World Tribunal on Iraq was held in Istanbul, Turkey. A 17-member
Jury of Conscience at the tribunal heard testimonies from a panel of advocates and witnesses who
came from across the world. Arundhati Roy was selected as the chair of that jury. She is in our
studio today. But let's watch her in Istanbul. Hear what she has to say.
ARUNDHATI ROY: To ask us why we are doing this, you know, why is there a World Tribunal on Iraq,
is like asking, you know, someone who stops at the site of an accident where people are dying on
the road, “Why did you stop? Why didn't you keep walking like everybody else?”
While I listened to the testimonies yesterday, especially, I must say that I didn't know -- I
mean, not that one has to choose, but still, you know, I didn't know what was more chilling, you
know, the testimonies of those who came from Iraq with the stories of the blood and the
destruction and the brutality and the darkness of what was happening there or the stories of that
cold, calculated world where the business contracts are being made, where the laws are being
rewritten, where a country occupies another with no idea of how it's going to provide protection
to people, but with such a sophisticated idea of how it's going to loot it of its resources. You
know, the brutality or the contrast of those two things was so chilling.
There were times when I felt, I wish I wasn't on the jury, because I want to say things. You know?
I mean, I think that is the nature of this tribunal, that, in a way, one wants to be everything.
You want to be on the jury, you want to be on the other side, you want to say things. And I
particularly wanted to talk a lot about -- which I won't do now, so don't worry, but I wanted to
talk a lot about my own, you know, now several years of experience with issues of resistance,
strategies of resistance, the fact that we actually tend to reach for easy justifications of
violence and non-violence, easy and not really very accurate historical examples. These are things
we should worry about.
But at the end of it, today we do seem to live in a world where the United States of America has
defined an enemy combatant, someone whom they can kidnap from any country, from anyplace in the
world and take for trial to America. An enemy combatant seems to be anybody who harbors thoughts
of resistance. Well, if this is the definition, then I, for one, am an enemy combatant.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy speaking at the World Tribunal on Iraq, head of the jury there, the
Jury of Conscience in June of 2005. Your thoughts almost a year later right now, Arundhati Roy, as
enemy combatant?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, I guess, you know, I think one of the things that I worry about is that there
is a way in which, say, somebody like me can also be used by the other side. You know, I know --
I'm very aware of the fact that in India, you know, they kind of leak the political meaning out of
things, and they say, “Oh, we have this great batsman, cricket batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, and we
have Miss Universe, Aishwarya Rai, and we have this writer Arundhati Roy.” And, you know,
everything is telescoped as a kind of “Look at all the things that we have on display,” and “We
are a democracy, so we allow her to say these things, you know, and go on with it.” And yet these
democracies have learned to just stare things down, you know? So even in America, eventually all
of us who are protesting or writing or whatever, we can be commodified. You know, it can just turn
into something that we're doing, and yet they carry on what they're doing. We carry on doing what
we’re doing. But ultimately, people are being displaced. Countries are being occupied. People are
being killed. Laws are being changed. And the status quo is on their side, not on our side. You
know, so I worry about that a lot, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: I remember when you were last here, you were headed off to an interview with Charlie
Rose. And so I looked to see you on Charlie Rose, and I waited and I waited, and I never saw you.
What happened?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was interesting. He -- well, when the interview began, I realized that the
plan was to do this really aggressive interview with me, and so the first question he asked was,
“Tell me, Arundhati, do you think that India should have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don't
think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I
don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.
It's something that I have written a lot about.” He said, “I asked you whether India should have
nuclear weapons.” So I said, “Well, I don't think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think
the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons.” Then he
said, “Will you answer my question? Should India have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don't think
India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't
think Israel should have nuclear weapons.” And I asked him, I said, “What is this about? Why are
you being so aggressive? I have answered the question, you know, clearly. And I think I made my
position extremely clear. I'm not some strategic thinker. I'm telling you what I believe.” So
after that it just sort of collapsed into vague questions about world poverty and so on, and it
was never shown. I mean, I wouldn’t have shown it if I were him either, but -- because it was, you
know, I don't know, treating me like I'm some kind of politician or something.
AMY GOODMAN: Has he invited you back on in this new trip that you have had?
ARUNDHATI ROY: No more, no, no. I don't think.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you found that through your celebrity, through your writing, that you’re invited
into forums, into various places where when you talk about what you think, you're then shut down?
ARUNDHATI ROY: No. I think what happens is that -- well, I don't come to, you know, the U.S. that
often, and like, for instance, this time I came to do an event with Eduardo Galeano, but I really
wasn’t -- I didn't want to do any -- except for this, I made it clear that I didn't want to be
working on this trip, because I want to think about some things. But I think it's the opposite
problem that I have. I think that there are many ways of shutting people down, and one is to
increase the burners on this celebrity thing until you become so celebrity that all you are is
celebrity.
For example, I’ll give you a wonderful example of how it works, say, in India. I was at a meeting
in Delhi a few months ago, the Association of Parents for Disappeared People. Now, women had come
down from Kashmir. There are 10,000 or so disappeared people in Kashmir, which nobody talks about
in the mainstream media at all. Here were these women whose mothers or brothers or sons or
husbands had -- I'm sorry, not mothers, but whatever -- all these people who were speaking of
their personal experiences, and there were other speakers, and there was me. And the next day in
this more-or-less rightwing paper called Indian Express, there was a big picture of me, really
close so that you couldn't see the context. You couldn’t see who had organized the meeting or what
it was about, nothing. And underneath it said, "Arundhati Roy at the International Day of the
Disappeared." So, you have the news, but it says nothing, you know? That's the kind of thing that
can happen.
Actually, I'm somebody who is invited to mainstream forums, and I'm not shunned out. You know, I
can say what I have to say. But the point is, Amy, that there is a delicate line between just
being so far -- you know, just being so isolated that you become the spokesperson for everything,
and this kind of person that it suits them to have one person who’s saying something and listen to
it and ignore what is being said, and I don't want to move so far away from everybody else, that
if you want to listen to me, then why don't you listen to so and so? Why don't you speak to so and
so? Why don't you get some other voices, because otherwise it sounds like you're this lone brave,
amazing person, which is unpolitical.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, I'm just looking at a KMS newswire story -- that’s Kashmir Media
Service -- May 23, just after you spoke here in New York. It says, “A human rights activist and
prominent Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, has said India is not a democratic state. The 1997 Booker
winner, Arundhati Roy, addressing a book-reading function in New York, said India is not a
democratic society.” Can you talk about that idea?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I do think that we are really suffering a crisis of democracy, you know? And
the simplest way I can explain it is that in 2004, when the general elections took place in India,
we were reeling from five years of rightwing communal BJP politics, the rightwing Hindu party.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you make any parallels to political parties in the United States?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Very, very much so. I mean, it was very similar to the Republicans versus the
Democrats, and in fact --
AMY GOODMAN: The Congress Party being the Democrats.
ARUNDHATI ROY: The Congress Party being the Democrats, and the Republicans being the rightwing
Hindu BJP. And, of course, in a country -- like in America, their politics, apart from affecting
Americans to a great deal, also affects the rest of the world. But in India, India not being a
world power, however much it wants to claim it is, turns those energies on its own people. So in
Gujarat, you had in 2002 this mass killing of Muslims on the streets, a bloodbath where people
were burnt alive, women were raped on the streets, dismembered, killed in full public view.
What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the
elections. So you're thinking, “Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist Democrat who
has the approbation of all these people?” Continues to be in power in Gujarat. Nothing has
happened. It's a Nazi type of society, where hundreds of thousands of people are still
economically boycotted Muslims, something like 100,000 driven from their homes. Police won't
register cases. One or two important cases are looked at by the Supreme Court, but the mass of it
is still completely unresolved. That's the situation, anyway, and while you're orchestrating this
communal killing, you're also selling off to Enron and to all these private companies, and so on
the one hand you’re talking about Indian-ness and all this, and this nationalism in this absurd
way, and on the other, you're just selling it off in bulk.
But during the elections, all of us were waiting with bated breath to see what would happen. And
when the Congress came to power, supported by the left parties from the outside, obviously we
allowed ourselves a huge gasp of relief, you know, walked on our hands in front of the TV for a
bit. But the Congress campaigned against the neoliberal policies that it had brought in, actually.
But before even we knew whether Sonia Gandhi was going to be the prime minister or what was going
to happen, there was an orchestrated drop in the stock market. The media's own stocks began to
drop. The cameras that had been in all these villages, saying look at this wonderful democracy,
and the camels and the bullock carts and everyone that's coming to vote was outside the stock
market now. And before the government was formed, both from the left and from the Congress,
spokesmen had to come out and say, “We will not dismantle this neoliberal regime.” And today we
have a prime minister who has not been elected. He is a technocrat who has been nominated. He is
part of the Washington Consensus.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of
war?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and
some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the
artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight,
you know? But in a country like India, I'm not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers
or poets or artists, you know? It's all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a
good medieval beheading never could.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think artists should do?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Exactly what anyone else should do, which is to pick your side, take your position,
and then go for it, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Arundhati Roy, author
of The God of Small Things, as well as a number of books of political essays, like An Ordinary
Person’s Guide to Empire.
www.democracynow.org
'The Indians are teaching the Americans, too, how to occupy a place ... The occupation of Kashmir
has taken place over years. ... In Iraq, you have 125,000 or so American troops in a situation of
war, controlling 25 million Iraqis. In Kashmir, you have 700,000 Indian troops fully armed there
.. and creating a situation, making it worse and worse and worse.'
Arundhati Roy on India, Iraq, U.S. Empire and Dissent
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/1358250
Today we spend the hour with acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy. Her first novel,
"The God of Small Things," was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. It has sold over six millions
copies and has been translated into over 20 languages worldwide.
Since then, Arundhati Roy has devoted herself to political writing and activism. In India, she’s
involved in the movement opposing hydroelectric dam projects that have displaced thousands of
people. In 2002, she was convicted of contempt of court in New Delhi for accusing the court of
attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam project. She received a symbolic one-day
prison sentence. She has also been a vocal opponent of the Indian government’s nuclear weapons
program as she is of all nuclear programs worldwide. [includes rush transcript]
Arundhati Roy has also become known across the globe for her powerful political essays in books
like "Power Politics," "War Talk," "The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile" and her latest, "An
Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire."
In June of 2005, she served as a Chair of Jury of Conscience at the World Tribunal on Iraq. She
joins us today in the firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now!
Arundhati Roy, author and activist.
In June 2005, a World Tribunal on Iraq was held in Istanbul, Turkey. A 17-member Jury of
Conscience at the Tribunal heard testimonies from a panel of advocates and witnesses who came from
across the world. You were selected as the chair of the jury. This is an excerpt of your address.
Arundhati Roy, speaking at the World Tribunal on Iraq. (Courtesy: Deep Dish TV from the DVD "The
World Tribunal on Iraq: The Final Session")
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning
for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy. Her first
novel, The God of Small Things, was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. It’s sold over six million
copies, has been translated in over 20 languages around the world. Since then, Roy has devoted
herself to political writing and activism. In India, she is involved in the movement opposing
hydroelectric dam projects that have displaced thousands of people. In 2002, she was convicted of
contempt of court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protest against the
Narmada Dam project. She received a symbolic one-day prison sentence. She has also been a vocal
opponent of the Indian government's nuclear weapons program, as she is of all nuclear programs
around the world. Arundhati Roy has also become known across the globe for her powerful political
essays in books like Power Politics, War Talk, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, and her
latest, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. In June of 2005, she served as chair of the Jury of
Conscience at the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul. She joins us today in our Firehouse studio
for the hour here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. What does it feel to be back in the United States? A
different perspective on the world from here.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the last time I was here was just before the elections, you know,
when we were hoping that Bush wouldn't come back. But the point was that whoever came back seemed
to have been supporting the war in Iraq in some way, so there was a crisis of democracy here, as
much as anywhere else in the world. It's, I think, you know, when you don't come to the United
States often, from the outside, the most important thing is that it's easy to forget. It's easy
for us to forget that there is dissent within this country against the system that its government
stands for. And it's important and heartening for me to remind myself of that, because outside
there is so much anger against America, and obviously, you know, that confusion between people and
governments exists, and it was enhanced when Bush was voted back to power. People started saying,
“Is there a difference?”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, the way you see America and Americans outside the United States is
through the media, as projected through. Which channels do you access in India? What do you get to
see? And what do you think of how the media deals with these issues?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, in India, I think you get FOX News and CNN and, of course, the BBC. But also
a lot of newspapers in India do publish American columnists, famously Thomas Friedman. And, of
course, recently George Bush visited India, which was a humiliating and very funny episode at the
same time, you know, what happened to him there and how he came and how the media reacted.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your reaction to that visit, and actually first, though, play a clip of
President Bush when he went to India in March. He promised to increase economic integration with
the U.S. and signed an agreement to foster nuclear cooperation between the two countries.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We concluded an historic agreement today on nuclear power. It's not an
easy job for the Prime Minister to achieve this agreement. I understand. It's not easy for the
American president to achieve this agreement, but it's a necessary agreement. It's one that will
help both our peoples.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in India.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the strange thing was that before he came, they wanted him to address a joint
house of Parliament, but some members of Parliament said that they would heckle him and that it
would be embarrassing for him to come there. So then they thought they would ask him to address a
public meeting at the Red Fort, which is in Old Delhi, which is where the Prime Minister of India
always gives his independence day speech from, but that was considered unsafe, because Old Delhi
is full of Muslims, and you know how they think of all Muslims as terrorists. So then they
thought, “Okay, we’ll do it in Vigyan Bhawan, which is a sort of state auditorium, but that was
considered too much of a comedown for the U.S. President. So funnily enough, they eventually
settled on him speaking in Purana Qila, which is the Old Fort, which houses the Delhi zoo. And it
was really from there that -- and, of course, it wasn't a public meeting. It was the caged animals
and some caged CEOs that he addressed. And then he went to Hyderabad, and I think he met a buffalo
there, some special kind of buffalo, because there is a picture of Bush and the buffalo in all the
papers, but the point is that, insulated from the public.
There were massive demonstrations, where hundreds of thousands of people showed up. But it didn't
seem to matter either to Bush or to the Indian government, which went ahead and signed, you know,
deals where this kind of embrace between a poorer country or a developing country and America. We
have such a litany of the history of incineration when you embrace the government of the United
States. And that's what happened, that the Indian government, in full servile mode, has entered
into this embrace, has negotiated itself into a corner, and now continues to do this deadly sort
of dance.
But I must say that while Bush was in Delhi, at the same time on the streets were -- I mean apart
from the protests, there were 60 widows that had come from Kerala, which is the south of India,
which is where I come from, and they had come to Delhi because they were 60 out of the tens of
thousands of widows of farmers who have committed suicide, because they have been encircled by
debt. And this is a fact that is simply not reported, partly because there are no official
figures, partly because the Indian government quibbles about what constitutes suicide and what is
a farmer. If a man commits suicide, but the land is in his old father's name, he doesn't count. If
it's a woman, she doesn't count, because women can't be farmers.
AMY GOODMAN: So she counts as someone who committed suicide, but not as a farmer who committed
suicide.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: Tens of thousands?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Tens of thousands. And then, anyway, so these 60 women were there on the street
asking the Indian government to write off the debts of their husbands, right? Across the street
from them, in a five-star hotel were Bush's 16 sniffer dogs who were staying in this five-star
hotel, and we were all told that you can't call them dogs, because they are actually officers of
the American Army, you know. I don't know what the names were. Sergeant Pepper and Corporal
Whatever. So, it wasn't even possible to be satirical or write black comedy, because it was all
real.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn't President Bush visit Gandhi's grave?
ARUNDHATI ROY: He visited Gandhi's grave, and first his dogs visited Gandhi’s grave. Then, you
know, Gandhians were, like, wanting to purify it. And I said, “Look, I don't mind the dogs. I mind
Bush much than the dogs.” But Gandhi’s -- you know, obviously one can have all kinds of opinions
about Gandhi. It's not universal that everybody adores and loves him, but still he stood for
nonviolence, and here it was really the equivalent of a butcher coming and tipping a pot of blood
on that memorial and going away. It was -- you know, there was no room left, as I said, for satire
or for anything, because it was so vulgar, the whole of it. But I have to say the Indian
mainstream media was so servile. You know, you had a newspaper like the Indian Express saying, “He
is here, and he has spoken.” I'm sure he doesn't get worshipped that much even by the American
mainstream press, you know. It was extraordinary.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play another clip of President Bush. I think in this one he’s talking about
trade in India.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The markets are open, and the poor are given a chance to develop their
talents and abilities. They can create a better life for their families. They add to the wealth of
the world, and they could begin to afford goods and services from other nations. Free and fair
trade is good for India. It’s good for America. And it is good for the world.
In my country, some focus only on one aspect of our trade relationship with India: outsourcing.
It's true that some Americans have lost jobs when their companies move operations overseas. It's
also important to remember that when someone loses a job, it's an incredibly difficult period for
the worker and their families. Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our
economy from the world through protectionist policies. I strongly disagree.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush speaking in India. Arundhati Roy, your response?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, look, let's not forget that this whole call to the free market started in the
late 19th century in India. You know, that was what colonialism was all about. They kept using the
words “free market.” And we know how free the free market is. Today, India has -- I mean, after 15
years of economic liberalization, we have more than half of the world's malnutritioned children.
We have an economy where the differences between the rich and the poor, which have always been
huge, has increased enormously. We have a feudal society whose feudalism has just been reinforced
by all of this.
And, you know, it's amazing. Just in the wake of Bush's visit, you can't imagine what's happening,
say, in a city like Delhi. You can't imagine the open aggression of institutions of our democracy.
It's really like courts, for instance, who are an old enemy of mine, are rolling up their sleeves
and coming after us. You have in Delhi, for example -- I have just come from being on the streets
for six weeks, where all kinds of protest are taking place. But you have a city that's been just
-- it's just turned into a city of bulldozers and policemen. Overnight, notices go up saying
tomorrow or day after tomorrow you're going to be evicted from here. The Supreme Court judges have
come out saying things like, “If the poor can't afford to live in the city, why do they come
here?”
And basically, behind it all, there are two facades. One is that in 2008, Delhi is going to host
the Commonwealth Games. For this, hundreds of thousands of people are being driven out of the
city. But the real agenda came in the wake of Bush's visit, which is that the city is being
prepared for foreign direct investment in retail, which means Wal-Mart and Kmart and all these
people are going to come in, which means that this city of millions of pavement dwellers, hawkers,
fruit sellers, people who have -- it's a city that's grown up over centuries and centuries. It's
just being cleaned out under the guise of sort of legal action. And at the same time, people from
villages are being driven out of their villages, because of the corporatization of agriculture,
because of these big development projects.
So you have an institution like -- you know, I mean, how do you subvert democracy? We have a
parliament, sure. We have elections, sure. But we have a supreme court now that micromanages our
lives. It takes every decision: What should be in history books? Should this lamb be cured? Should
this road be widened? What gas should we use? Every single decision is now taken by a court. You
can't criticize the court. If you do, you will go to jail, like I did. So, you have judges who are
-- you have to read those judgments to believe it, you know? Public interest litigation has become
a weapon that judges use against us.
So, for example, a former chief justice of India, he gave a decision allowing the Narmada Dam to
be built, where 400,000 people will be displaced. The same judge gave a judgment saying slum
dwellers are pickpockets of urban land. So you displace people from the villages; they come into
the cities; you call them pickpockets. He gave a judgment shutting down all kinds of informal
industry in Delhi. Than he gave a judgment asking for all India's rivers to be linked, which is a
Stalinist scheme beyond imagination, where millions of people will be displaced. And when he
retired, he joined Coca-Cola. You know, it's incredible.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy is our guest for the hour. We’ll be back with her in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today for the hour is Arundhati Roy. She just recently flew in from New
Delhi, India. She is the author of a number of books, her Booker Prize award-winning book, The God
of Small Things, and then her books of essays, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, The
Checkbook and the Cruise Missile among them. Arundhati, you were just talking about what is
happening in India. Thomas Friedman, the well-known, much-read New York Times columnist and
author, talks about the call center being a perfect symbol of globalization in a very positive
sense.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, it is the perfect symbol, I think, in many ways. I wish Friedman would spend
some time working in one. But I think it's a very interesting issue, the call center, because, you
know, let's not get into the psychosis that takes place inside a call center, the fact that you
have people working, you know, according to a different body clock and all that and the languages
and the fact that you have to de-identify yourself.
AMY GOODMAN: And just for people who aren't familiar with what we're talking about, the call
center being places where, well, you might make a call to information or to some corporation, you
actually are making that call to India, and someone in a call center is picking it up.
ARUNDHATI ROY: But, you know, the thing is that it's a good example of what's going on. The call
center is surely creating jobs for a whole lot of people in India. But it comes as part of a
package, and that package, while it gives sort of an English-speaking middle or lower middle class
young person a job for a while, they can never last, because it's such a hard job. It actually is
also part of the corporate culture, which is taking away land and resources and water from
millions of rural people. But you're giving the more vocal and the better off anyway -- the people
who speak even a little bit of English are the better off among the millions of people in India.
So, to give these people jobs, you're taking away the livelihoods of millions of others, and this
is what globalization does.
It creates -- obviously it creates a very vocal constituency that supports it, among the elite of
poor countries. And so you have in India an elite, an upper caste, upper class wealthy elite who
are fiercely loyal to the neoliberal program. And that's exactly, obviously, what colonialism has
always done, and it's exactly what happened in countries in Latin America. But now it's happening
in India, and the rhetoric of democracies in place, because they have learned how to hollow out
democracy and make it lose meaning. All it means, it seems, is elections, where whoever you vote
for, they are going to do the same thing.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the dams, and a judge just in the last week has ruled that one of the
major dam projects is allowed to continue. Just physically on the ground, what does it mean, and
who are the people who are resisting, and what do they do?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I mean, that actually is something that reached fever pitch in the last few weeks
in India, because, you know, the movement against dams is actually a very beautiful political
argument, because it combines environmental issues, issues of water, of resources and of
displacement, with a political vision for a new kind of society. No political ideology, classic
political ideology has really done that properly. Either it's only environmental or it's only
about people. Here somehow, that's why I got so drawn into it. But this struggle was against the
notion of big dams, and it's been a nonviolent struggle for 25 years.
But now, the dams are still being built, and the argument has been reduced merely to displacement.
And even there, the courts are now saying you build a dam and just give people cash and send them
off. But the fact is that these are indigenous people. You know, you can't just give -- lots of
them are indigenous people. The others are farmers. But you can't -- the levels of displacement
are so huge. This dam, the Sardar Sarovar dam displaces 400,000, but just in the Narmada Valley
you're talking about millions of people. All over India, you’re talking about many millions who
are being displaced. So where are they going to go? Well, the court came out with a judgment with
marked a different era in India, where they even stopped pretending that they were interested in
resettlement or rehabilitation. They just said, “Build the dam.” So it's very interesting that
people were watching this nonviolent movement unfold its weapons on the streets, which is the
activists who went on indefinite hunger strike. People paid attention, but then they got kicked in
the teeth.
Meanwhile, across India, from West Bengal to Orissa, to Jharkhand, to Chhattisgarh, to Andhra
Pradesh, the Maoist movement has become very, very strong. It's an armed struggle. It's taking
over district after district. The administration cannot get in there. And the government's
response to that is to do what was done in Peru with the Shining Path, which is to set up armed
defense committees, which is really creating a situation of civil war. You know, hundreds of
villages are being emptied by the government, and the people are being moved into police camps.
People are being armed. The Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh says, “You’re either with the Maoists
and Naxalites or you’re with the Salva Judum,” which is this government-sponsored resistance, and
there’s no third choice. So it’s you’re with us or against us.
And what has happened, which is something I have been saying for a long time, that this whole war
on terror and the legislation that has come up around it is going to conflate terrorists with poor
people. And that's what's happened. In India, in January -- I don't know if you’ve read about it,
but it was a terrible thing that happened -- in Orissa, which is a state where all these
corporations have their greedy eyes fixed, because they have just discovered huge deposits of
bauxite, which you need to make aluminum, which you need to make weapons and planes.
AMY GOODMAN: And where is Orissa in India?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Orissa is sort of east, southeast. And it's got a huge indigenous population. If
you go there, it's like a police state. You know, the police have surrounded villages. You can't
move from one -- villagers are not allowed to move from one village to another to organize,
because, of course, there’s a lot of resistance. The Maoists have come in. And in Orissa in a
place called Kalinganagar, where the Tata, which used to be a sort of respected industrialist, but
now I can't say, are setting up a steel factory. So they, the government, took over the lands of
indigenous people. The trick is that you only say about 20% of them are project-affected. The rest
are all encroachers. Even these 20% are given -- their land is taken from them at, say, 35,000
rupees an acre, given to the Tatas for three-and-a-half lakhs, you know, which is ten times that
amount. And the actual market price is four times that amount. So you steal from the poor; you
subsidize the rich; then you call it the “free market.”
And when they protested, there was dynamite, you know, in the ground. Some of them were blown up,
killed. Six of them, I think, were injured, taken to hospital, and their bodies were returned with
their hands and breasts and things cut off. And those people have been blocking the highway now
for six months, the indigenous people, because it became a big issue in India. But it’s been
happening everywhere, and they are all called terrorists. You know, people with bows and arrows
are called terrorists.
So, in India, the poor are the terrorists, and even states like Andhra Pradesh, we have thousands
of people being held as political prisoners, called Maoists, held as political prisoners in
unknown places without charges or with false charges. We have the highest number of custodial
deaths in the world. And we have Thomas Friedman going on and on about how this is an idealistic
-- ideal society, a tolerant society. Hundreds -- I mean, tens of thousands of people killed in
Kashmir. All over the northeast, you have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, where a junior
noncommissioned officer can shoot at sight. And that is the democracy in which we live.
AMY GOODMAN: And the Maoists, what are their demands?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the Maoists are fighting on two fronts. One is that they are fighting a
feudal society, their feudal landlords. You have, you know, the whole caste system which is
arranged against the indigenous people and the Dalits, who are the untouchable caste. And they are
fighting against this whole corporatization. But they are also very poor people, you know,
barefoot with old rusty weapons. And, you know, what we -- say someone like myself, watching what
is happening in Kashmir, where -- or in the northeast, where exactly what America is doing in
Iraq, you know, where you're fostering a kind of civil war and then saying, “Oh, if we pull out,
these people just will massacre each other.”
But the longer you stay, the more you're enforcing these tribal differences and creating a
resistance, which obviously, on the one hand, someone like me does support; on the other hand, you
support the resistance, but you may not support the vision that they are fighting for. And I keep
saying, you know, I'm doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their
social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won. But
the point is that they are the ones that are resisting on the ground, and they have to be
supported, because what is happening is unbelievable.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of Iraq, let me play a clip of President Bush in Chicago Monday, where he
addressed a gathering organized by the National Restaurant Association. In his remarks, the
President talked about Iraq, which has just formed a new unity government.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: For most Iraqis, a free democratic and constitutional government will be
a new experience. For the people across the broader Middle East, a free Iraq will be an
inspiration. Iraqis have done more than form a government. They have proved that the desire for
liberty in the heart of the Middle East is for real. They have shown diverse people can come
together and work out their differences and find a way forward, and they have demonstrated that
democracy is the hope of the Middle East and the destiny of all mankind.
The triumph of liberty in Iraq is part of a long and familiar story. The great biographer of
American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote, “Freedom is ordinarily born in the midst of
storms. It is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know its
benefits.” Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as
a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the
Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in Chicago. Arundhati Roy from India here in New York, your response?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, how can one respond? I just keep wishing there would be a laugh
track, you know, on the side of these speeches. But obviously, you know, the elections in
Palestine, where you had a democratic government, now Palestine is being starved because they have
a democracy, under siege because they have a democracy. But in Iraq, this fake business is called
democracy. Forget about what's happening in Saudi Arabia.
So it's just -- you know, I think the issue is that people like President Bush and his advisors,
or what's happening in India, the Indian government, they have understood that you can use the
media to say anything from minute to minute. It doesn't matter what's really going on. It doesn't
matter what happened in the past. There are a few people who make the connections and fall about
laughing at the nonsense that is being spoken. But for everybody else, I think the media itself,
this mass media has become a means of telling the most unbelievable lies or making the most
unbelievable statements. And everybody sort of just imbibes it. It's like a drug, you know, that
you put straight into your veins. It doesn't matter. And it keeps going. But what can you say?
What kind of democracy is this in Iraq?
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen in Iraq?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I think that the first thing that has to happen is that the American army should
leave. That has to happen. I have no doubt about that. Similarly, I mean, I keep saying this, but,
you know, America, Israel and India, and China in Tibet, are now becoming experts in occupation,
and India is one of the leading experts. It's not that the American army in its training exercise
is teaching the Indian army. The Indians are teaching the Americans, too, how to occupy a place.
What do you do with the media? How do you deal with it? The occupation of Kashmir has taken place
over years. And I keep saying that in Iraq, you have 125,000 or so American troops in a situation
of war, controlling 25 million Iraqis. In Kashmir, you have 700,000 Indian troops fully armed
there -- you know? -- and creating a situation, making it worse and worse and worse. So the first
thing that has to happen is that the army has to come out, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: We're speaking to Arundhati Roy, who has spent time in Kashmir, lives in Delhi, the
acclaimed author and activist. We'll continue with her after this break.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: In June of 2005, World Tribunal on Iraq was held in Istanbul, Turkey. A 17-member
Jury of Conscience at the tribunal heard testimonies from a panel of advocates and witnesses who
came from across the world. Arundhati Roy was selected as the chair of that jury. She is in our
studio today. But let's watch her in Istanbul. Hear what she has to say.
ARUNDHATI ROY: To ask us why we are doing this, you know, why is there a World Tribunal on Iraq,
is like asking, you know, someone who stops at the site of an accident where people are dying on
the road, “Why did you stop? Why didn't you keep walking like everybody else?”
While I listened to the testimonies yesterday, especially, I must say that I didn't know -- I
mean, not that one has to choose, but still, you know, I didn't know what was more chilling, you
know, the testimonies of those who came from Iraq with the stories of the blood and the
destruction and the brutality and the darkness of what was happening there or the stories of that
cold, calculated world where the business contracts are being made, where the laws are being
rewritten, where a country occupies another with no idea of how it's going to provide protection
to people, but with such a sophisticated idea of how it's going to loot it of its resources. You
know, the brutality or the contrast of those two things was so chilling.
There were times when I felt, I wish I wasn't on the jury, because I want to say things. You know?
I mean, I think that is the nature of this tribunal, that, in a way, one wants to be everything.
You want to be on the jury, you want to be on the other side, you want to say things. And I
particularly wanted to talk a lot about -- which I won't do now, so don't worry, but I wanted to
talk a lot about my own, you know, now several years of experience with issues of resistance,
strategies of resistance, the fact that we actually tend to reach for easy justifications of
violence and non-violence, easy and not really very accurate historical examples. These are things
we should worry about.
But at the end of it, today we do seem to live in a world where the United States of America has
defined an enemy combatant, someone whom they can kidnap from any country, from anyplace in the
world and take for trial to America. An enemy combatant seems to be anybody who harbors thoughts
of resistance. Well, if this is the definition, then I, for one, am an enemy combatant.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy speaking at the World Tribunal on Iraq, head of the jury there, the
Jury of Conscience in June of 2005. Your thoughts almost a year later right now, Arundhati Roy, as
enemy combatant?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, I guess, you know, I think one of the things that I worry about is that there
is a way in which, say, somebody like me can also be used by the other side. You know, I know --
I'm very aware of the fact that in India, you know, they kind of leak the political meaning out of
things, and they say, “Oh, we have this great batsman, cricket batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, and we
have Miss Universe, Aishwarya Rai, and we have this writer Arundhati Roy.” And, you know,
everything is telescoped as a kind of “Look at all the things that we have on display,” and “We
are a democracy, so we allow her to say these things, you know, and go on with it.” And yet these
democracies have learned to just stare things down, you know? So even in America, eventually all
of us who are protesting or writing or whatever, we can be commodified. You know, it can just turn
into something that we're doing, and yet they carry on what they're doing. We carry on doing what
we’re doing. But ultimately, people are being displaced. Countries are being occupied. People are
being killed. Laws are being changed. And the status quo is on their side, not on our side. You
know, so I worry about that a lot, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: I remember when you were last here, you were headed off to an interview with Charlie
Rose. And so I looked to see you on Charlie Rose, and I waited and I waited, and I never saw you.
What happened?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was interesting. He -- well, when the interview began, I realized that the
plan was to do this really aggressive interview with me, and so the first question he asked was,
“Tell me, Arundhati, do you think that India should have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don't
think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I
don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.
It's something that I have written a lot about.” He said, “I asked you whether India should have
nuclear weapons.” So I said, “Well, I don't think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think
the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons.” Then he
said, “Will you answer my question? Should India have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don't think
India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't
think Israel should have nuclear weapons.” And I asked him, I said, “What is this about? Why are
you being so aggressive? I have answered the question, you know, clearly. And I think I made my
position extremely clear. I'm not some strategic thinker. I'm telling you what I believe.” So
after that it just sort of collapsed into vague questions about world poverty and so on, and it
was never shown. I mean, I wouldn’t have shown it if I were him either, but -- because it was, you
know, I don't know, treating me like I'm some kind of politician or something.
AMY GOODMAN: Has he invited you back on in this new trip that you have had?
ARUNDHATI ROY: No more, no, no. I don't think.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you found that through your celebrity, through your writing, that you’re invited
into forums, into various places where when you talk about what you think, you're then shut down?
ARUNDHATI ROY: No. I think what happens is that -- well, I don't come to, you know, the U.S. that
often, and like, for instance, this time I came to do an event with Eduardo Galeano, but I really
wasn’t -- I didn't want to do any -- except for this, I made it clear that I didn't want to be
working on this trip, because I want to think about some things. But I think it's the opposite
problem that I have. I think that there are many ways of shutting people down, and one is to
increase the burners on this celebrity thing until you become so celebrity that all you are is
celebrity.
For example, I’ll give you a wonderful example of how it works, say, in India. I was at a meeting
in Delhi a few months ago, the Association of Parents for Disappeared People. Now, women had come
down from Kashmir. There are 10,000 or so disappeared people in Kashmir, which nobody talks about
in the mainstream media at all. Here were these women whose mothers or brothers or sons or
husbands had -- I'm sorry, not mothers, but whatever -- all these people who were speaking of
their personal experiences, and there were other speakers, and there was me. And the next day in
this more-or-less rightwing paper called Indian Express, there was a big picture of me, really
close so that you couldn't see the context. You couldn’t see who had organized the meeting or what
it was about, nothing. And underneath it said, "Arundhati Roy at the International Day of the
Disappeared." So, you have the news, but it says nothing, you know? That's the kind of thing that
can happen.
Actually, I'm somebody who is invited to mainstream forums, and I'm not shunned out. You know, I
can say what I have to say. But the point is, Amy, that there is a delicate line between just
being so far -- you know, just being so isolated that you become the spokesperson for everything,
and this kind of person that it suits them to have one person who’s saying something and listen to
it and ignore what is being said, and I don't want to move so far away from everybody else, that
if you want to listen to me, then why don't you listen to so and so? Why don't you speak to so and
so? Why don't you get some other voices, because otherwise it sounds like you're this lone brave,
amazing person, which is unpolitical.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, I'm just looking at a KMS newswire story -- that’s Kashmir Media
Service -- May 23, just after you spoke here in New York. It says, “A human rights activist and
prominent Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, has said India is not a democratic state. The 1997 Booker
winner, Arundhati Roy, addressing a book-reading function in New York, said India is not a
democratic society.” Can you talk about that idea?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I do think that we are really suffering a crisis of democracy, you know? And
the simplest way I can explain it is that in 2004, when the general elections took place in India,
we were reeling from five years of rightwing communal BJP politics, the rightwing Hindu party.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you make any parallels to political parties in the United States?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Very, very much so. I mean, it was very similar to the Republicans versus the
Democrats, and in fact --
AMY GOODMAN: The Congress Party being the Democrats.
ARUNDHATI ROY: The Congress Party being the Democrats, and the Republicans being the rightwing
Hindu BJP. And, of course, in a country -- like in America, their politics, apart from affecting
Americans to a great deal, also affects the rest of the world. But in India, India not being a
world power, however much it wants to claim it is, turns those energies on its own people. So in
Gujarat, you had in 2002 this mass killing of Muslims on the streets, a bloodbath where people
were burnt alive, women were raped on the streets, dismembered, killed in full public view.
What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the
elections. So you're thinking, “Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist Democrat who
has the approbation of all these people?” Continues to be in power in Gujarat. Nothing has
happened. It's a Nazi type of society, where hundreds of thousands of people are still
economically boycotted Muslims, something like 100,000 driven from their homes. Police won't
register cases. One or two important cases are looked at by the Supreme Court, but the mass of it
is still completely unresolved. That's the situation, anyway, and while you're orchestrating this
communal killing, you're also selling off to Enron and to all these private companies, and so on
the one hand you’re talking about Indian-ness and all this, and this nationalism in this absurd
way, and on the other, you're just selling it off in bulk.
But during the elections, all of us were waiting with bated breath to see what would happen. And
when the Congress came to power, supported by the left parties from the outside, obviously we
allowed ourselves a huge gasp of relief, you know, walked on our hands in front of the TV for a
bit. But the Congress campaigned against the neoliberal policies that it had brought in, actually.
But before even we knew whether Sonia Gandhi was going to be the prime minister or what was going
to happen, there was an orchestrated drop in the stock market. The media's own stocks began to
drop. The cameras that had been in all these villages, saying look at this wonderful democracy,
and the camels and the bullock carts and everyone that's coming to vote was outside the stock
market now. And before the government was formed, both from the left and from the Congress,
spokesmen had to come out and say, “We will not dismantle this neoliberal regime.” And today we
have a prime minister who has not been elected. He is a technocrat who has been nominated. He is
part of the Washington Consensus.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of
war?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and
some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the
artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight,
you know? But in a country like India, I'm not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers
or poets or artists, you know? It's all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a
good medieval beheading never could.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think artists should do?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Exactly what anyone else should do, which is to pick your side, take your position,
and then go for it, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Arundhati Roy, author
of The God of Small Things, as well as a number of books of political essays, like An Ordinary
Person’s Guide to Empire.
www.democracynow.org
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)