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Capitalism
A Ghost Story
Arundhati Roy
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eBook - ePub
Capitalism
A Ghost Story
Arundhati Roy
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About This Book
- Arundhati Roy is among the most well-known writers and social justice activists in the world today, with a committed global audience.
- This updated version includes essays on the Occupy movement, the ever-growing wealth imbalance in India and Kashmir, as well as why independent media journalist, David Barsamian was deported from India in 2011.
- Her best-selling 1997 novel "The God of Small Things" and her courageous, popular interviews and essays on war and peace, contemporary India and Kashmir, U.S. imperial power, and a renewal of popular democracy across the world, have earned her a large audience and international profile.
- Roy's writings on Southeast Asia come at a time of renewed interest in the subcontinent. But Roy offers an essential counterpoint to the caricatured Western image surrounding India's precarious version of secular democracy.
- As indicated by the title of the book, the topics Roy explores are also of global concern. These include war, terrorism, national and ethnic identity, social inequality, the environment, and globalization itself.
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Section One
Chapter 1
CAPITALISM: A GHOST STORY
Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. âHere we are,â the friend who took me there said. âPay your respects to our new Ruler.â
Antilla belongs to Indiaâs richest man, Mukesh Ambani. Iâd read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawnâa soaring, twenty-seven-story-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadnât worked.
But Gush-Up certainly has. Thatâs why in a nation of 1.2 billion, Indiaâs one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.1
The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis donât live in Antilla.2 No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vastu and feng shui. Maybe itâs all Karl Marxâs fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, âhas conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.â3
In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, postâInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) âreformsâ middle classâthe marketâlive side by side with spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.4 And who survive on less than twenty Indian rupees a day.5
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion.6 He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalization of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fiber, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research, and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 percent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls twenty-seven TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language.7 Infotel owns the only nationwide license for 4G broadband, a high-speed information pipeline which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange.8 Mr. Ambani also owns a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar, and the other Reliance, Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), owned by Mukeshâs brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than one hundred companies in eighty countries. They are one of Indiaâs oldest and largest private-sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, and cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks and own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodized salt, and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be You Canât Live Without Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, as with any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. Indiaâs new megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth.9 Itâs a dream come true for businessmenâto be able to sell what they donât have to buy.
The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agribusiness corporations, and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course this entails commandeering water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and handed over to private corporations for âpublic interestââfor Special Economic Zones (SEZs), infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs, and Formula One racing.10 (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had is actually part of employment generation. But by now we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of âgrowth,â 60 percent of Indiaâs workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of Indiaâs labor force works in the unorganized sector.11
Post-Independence, right up to the 1980s, peopleâs movements, ranging from the Naxalites to Jayaprakash Narayanâs Sampoorna Kranti, were fighting for land reforms, for the redistribution of land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today any talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic but lunatic. Even the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have. The millions of landless people, the majority of them Dalits and Adivasis, driven from their villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and megacities, do not figure even in the radical discourse.
As Gush-Up concentrates wealth onto the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracyâthe courts, the parliamentâas well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.
Each new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame. In the summer of 2011 the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learned that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the minister of communications and information who grossly underpriced the licenses for 2G telecom spectrums and illegally auctioned them to his buddies. The taped telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists, and a TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes were just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.
The privatization and illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not involve war, displacement, and ecological devastation. The privatization of Indiaâs mountains, rivers, and forests does. Perhaps because it does not have the uncomplicated clarity of a straightforward, out-and-out accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all being done in the name of Indiaâs âprogress,â it does not have the same resonance with the middle classes.
In 2005 the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with a number of private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore, and other minerals for a pittance, defying even the warped logic of the Free Market. (Royalties to the government ranged between 0.5 percent and 7 percent.)12
Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MOU for the construction of an integrated steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated. The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up with ârepressionâ by Maoist guerillas in the forest. It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and subsidized by mining corporations. In the other states similar militias were created, with other names. The prime minister announced the Maoists were the âSingle Largest Security Challenge in India.â It was a declaration of war.13
On January 2, 2006, in Kalinganagar, in the neighboring state of Orissa, perhaps to signal the seriousness of the governmentâs intention, ten platoons of police arrived at the site of another Tata Steel plant and opened fire on villagers who had gathered there to protest what they felt was inadequate compensation for their land. Thirteen people, including one policeman, were killed and thirty-seven injured.14 Six years have gone by, and though the villages remain under siege by armed policemen, the protest has not died.
Meanwhile in Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum burned, raped, and murdered its way through hundreds of forest villages, evacuating six hundred villages and forcing 50,000 people to come out into police camps and 350,000 people to flee.15 The chief minister announced that those who did not come out of the forests would be considered âMaoist terrorists.â In this way, in parts of modern India plowing fields and sowing seed came to be defined as terrorist activity. Eventually the Salwa Judumâs atrocities succeeded only in strengthening the resistance and swelling the ranks of the Maoist guerilla army. In 2009 the government announced what it called Operation Green Hunt. Two hundred thousand paramilitary troops were deployed across Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, and West Bengal.16
After three years of âlow-intensity conflictâ that has not managed to âflushâ the rebels out of the forest, the central government has declared that it will deploy the Indian army and air force.17 In India we donât call this war. We call it âCreating a Good Investment Climate.â Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade headquarters and airbases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the world is now preparing its Terms of Engagement to âdefendâ itself against the poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the army legal impunity and the right to kill âon suspicion.â Going by the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland, we might judge it to be a very suspicious army indeed.18
While the preparations for deployment are being made, the jungles of Central India continue to remain under siege, with villagers frightened to come out or to go to the market for food or medicine. Hundreds of people have been jailed, charged with being Maoists under draconian, undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with Adivasi people, many of whom have no idea what their crime is. Recently, Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher from Bastar, was arrested and tortured in police custody. Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to âconfessâ that she was a Maoist courier. The stones were removed from her body at a hospital in Calcutta, where, after a public outcry, she was sent for a medical checkup. At a recent Supreme Court hearing, activists presented the judges with the stones in a plastic bag. The only outcome of their efforts has been that Soni Sori remains in jail, while Ankit Garg, the superintendent of police who conducted the interrogation, was conferred the Presidentâs Police Medal for Gallantry on Republic Day.19
We hear about the ecological and social reengineering of Central India only because of the mass insurrection and the war. The government gives out no information. The MOUs are all secret. Some sections of the media have done what they could to bring public attention to what is happening in Central India. However, most of the Indian mass media is made vulnerable by the fact that the major share of their revenues come from corporate advertisements. If that is not bad enough, now the line between the media and big business has begun to blur dangerously. As we have seen, RIL virtually owns twenty-seven TV channels. But the reverse is also true. Some media houses now have direct business and corporate interests. For example, one of the major daily newspapers in the region, Dainik Bhaskarâand it is only one exampleâhas 17.5 million readers in four languages, including English and Hindi, across thirteen states. It also owns sixty-nine companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate, and textiles. A recent writ petition filed in the Chhattisgarh High Court accuses DB Power Ltd (one of the groupâs companies) of using âdeliberate, illegal and manipulative measuresâ through company-owned newspapers to influence the outcome of a public hearing over an open cast coalmine.20 Whether or not it has attempted to influence the outcome is not germane. The point is that media houses are in a position to do so. They have the power to do so. The laws of the land allow them to be in a position that lends itself to a serious conflict of interest.
There are other parts of the country from which no news comes. In the sparsely populated but militarized northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, 168 big dams are being constructed, most of them privately owned.21 High dams that will submerge whole districts are being constructed in Manipur and Kashmir, both highly militarized states where people can be killed merely for protesting power cuts. (That happened a few weeks ago in Kashmir.)22 How can they stop a dam?
The most delusional dam of all is the Kalpasar in Gujarat. It is being planned as a 34-km-long dam across the Gulf of Khambat with a ten-lane highway and a railway line running on top of it. The idea is to keep out the seawater and create a sweet-water reservoir of Gujaratâs rivers. (Never mind that these rivers have already been dammed to a trickle and poisoned with chemical effluent.) The Kalpasar dam, which would raise the sea level and alter the ecology of hundreds of kilometers of coastline, was the cause of serious concerns amongst scientists in a 2007 report.23 It has made a sudden comeback in order to supply water to the Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR) in one of the most water-stressed zones not just in India but in the world. SIR is another name for a SEZ, a self-governed corporate dystopia of industrial parks, townships, and megacities. The Dholera SIR is going to be connected to Gujaratâs other cities by a network of ten-lane highways. Where will the money for all this come from?
In January 2011 in the Mahatma (Gandhi) Mandir, Gujaratâs Chief Minister Narendra Modi presided over a meeting of ten thousand international businessmen from one hundred countries. According to media reports, they pledged to invest $450 billion in Gujarat. The meeting was deliberately scheduled to take place on the tenth anniversary of the massacre of two thousand Muslims in February 2002. Modi stands accused of not just condoning but actively abetting the killing. People who watched their loved ones being raped, eviscerated, and burned alive, the tens of thousand who were driven from t...