As India grows into its new economic might, it also oppresses and improverishes its people in ways different from those of old. One might say that where once the sins of the Indian state were mainly those of omission — of being too supine and resource-starved to lift several hundred millions citizens out of a cesspool of poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and caste and gender discrimination — increasingly they are mainly those of commission, of conspiracy and corruption under cover of the motions and catchphrases of democracy. Even so, there remains a basic faith, even pride, among Indians in the warming narrative of “the world’s largest democracy” and its institutions.
For over a decade now, the writer Arundhati Roy has served as India’s most powerful and articulate dissident, tearing that broad consensus to shreds. Through a slew of acerbic and impassioned essays, speeches and books, Roy has attacked both the country’s religious right wing and the barons of big business, and excoriated the Indian state’s political, economic and military policy. At times, Roy’s uncompromising hostility, penchant for tendentious theses and juxtapositions, and appropriation of multiple causes have earned her as much notoriety as respect.
(Penguin Books) - ’Walking with the Comrades’ by Arundhati Roy
“Walking with the Comrades,” Roy’s new book, is a riveting account of the face-off in the forests of central India between the Indian state and the Maoists or Naxalites, a shadowy, revolutionary guerrilla force with tens of thousands of cadres. It is a battle over power, land, ideology, mineral riches, rights, ecology — a battle, as Roy sees it,“for the soul of India.”
The thickly wooded states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in central India are home to millions of indigenous tribal peoples. Long neglected by the Indian state because of their inaccessibility and marginality, these areas gradually became the sylvan redoubt of a band of left-wing revolutionaries. These disenchanted and dreaming men and women are contemptuous of “bourgeois democracy” and committed to armed revolution, but have also dedicated themselves to working for and with the tribals to improve their lives. For decades, the Maoists have virtually run a parallel government in these regions.
But in recent years this uneasy equilibrium has been shattered, in part, by India’s booming economy. The tribals live atop lucrative resources: massive deposits of iron ore, bauxite and other minerals meaningless to them but coveted by mining companies. “Commonsense tells us,” Roy quotes India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram as saying in a speech in 2007 at Harvard University, “[that] we should mine these resources quickly and efficiently.” As government and big business draw ever closer in India, the state has become invested in the displacement of tribal peoples — and the flushing out of the Maoists — so that mining companies can blast and burrow in these regions.
Worse, the current government has armed and paid groups of tribals to inform on and smoke out Maoists, setting into motion a gory cycle of killings and reprisals that has claimed hundreds of lives. In this new McCarthyite climate, even to be a Maoist sympathizer in India has become an act of treason.
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