I'm Not At All Playing For Sainthood'

"[W]hen you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge militarypower, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world.And I think many U.S. citizens want to."

-  Arundhati Roy, 
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile
with David Barsamian.

Arundhati Roy was catapulted to fame in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, The God ofSmall Things. She is trained as an architect, worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays fortwo films. Since then she has also become known internationally for her lyrical political writing in bookslike Power Politics, War Talk, and her latest, about to be released: An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.Arundhati Roy was recently in the United States to publicize her book The Checkbook and the CruiseMissile,which is a series of interviews with journalist David Barsamian. KPFK’s host of Uprising. Sonali Kolhatkar,interviewed Roy in San Francisco on August 16th , 2004 and this interview appears here courtesy Znet

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Sonali Kolhatkar: The last time I saw you, you were in Mumbai, India. You were on a very big stage andyou were speaking to tens of thousands of people at the World Social Forum and you were one of the few peoplewho made a specific suggestion about boycotting a couple of American companies that were profiting from thewar in Iraq and you got a lot of applause for it because that was sort of a rare thing – there were mostlyplatitudes at the WSF. Has anything come of that suggestion?

Arundhati Roy: Well I don’t know that anything has come of it concretely but I think people are workingon that idea. How exactly it should be done is a difficult issue. But I would just like to repeat the factthat it’s really dangerous for us to limit our protests to purely symbolic spectacle and that we have tobegin to inflict real damage and we have to be able to signal to these absolutely heartless multinationalcompanies that they cannot function like this. And if we don’t do that, then we’re going to take a verybig hit. We’re just going to be a comical movement of people who like to feel good about ourselves.

Sonali Kolhatkar: But you’re also very much a believer in non-violent struggle. How does one hit theempire without using a little violence – and can boycotts be effective?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t also want to go around being the Barbie doll of non-violent struggle. To confusenon-violence with passivity is one of the things that’s dangerous. And the fact is that neither am I aperson who feels that I have the right, or I am in a place where I should be dictating to people how theyshould conduct their movements. 

Personally I’m not prepared to pick up arms now. But maybe I can afford notto, at whatever place I am in now. I think violence really marginalizes and brutalizes women. It depoliticizesthings. It’s undemocratic in so many ways. But at the same time, when you look at the massive amount ofviolence that America is perpetrating in Iraq, I don’t know that I’m in a position to tell Iraqis that youmust fight a pristine, feminist, democratic, secular, non-violent war. I can’t say. I just feel that thatresistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to support it. And we can’t be looking for pristinestruggles in which to invest our purity. 

But I feel that for those of us who are prepared to resistnon-violently, the economic outposts of empire are vulnerable. These same companies that first did businesswith Saddam Hussein, then were on the Defense Policy Board advising America to go to war, now are getting hugecontracts from the destruction of Iraq, are also the same companies that are privatizing water and privatizingpower and so on, in Latin America, in Africa, in India. Therefore we do have a foothold and we can shut themdown if we wanted to.

Sonali Kolhatkar: I want to touch on what you said about not demanding that a particular movement bepristine. Women are on the forefront of the struggle against globalization. At the same time, they arefighting a slightly different battle from men – they are against the misogynist traditions of theircommunity, as well as against the "modernity of the global economy" as you call it. How do you explain thedynamics then between men and women – the men who on the one hand fight the same fight against globalizationbut may want to retain, even harder, the structures of misogynist traditions?

Arundhati Roy: Well, look, people like me, and I’m sure you, are in this dilemma full time, right? Ispent the first part of my life just fighting tradition, just refusing to be the woman that the community thatI come from wants me to be. And you escape that and you come slap-bang up against some that, it’s hard tosay which is worse. But I think that’s beautiful in a way, to pick your way through that fight. And thoughthe experiences of women are different, the fact is that the fight is not being fought separately by women andmen. There are plenty of men who see that side and there are plenty of women who don’t. The battle lines arenot drawn between women and men. They are drawn between particular world views.

What is disturbing, I think, is that there are two kinds of struggles going on in the world today -- I meanresistance movements-wise. And they are almost like in two different eras even though they are bothcontemporary. One is the struggle of movements like the Zapatistas, or the anti-dam movement in the Narmada,or the anti-privatization forum, or the landless peasant movements, those movements which are fighting theirown states and are radically wanting to restructure their society.

And then there are those movements whichare fighting neo-colonial occupations whether it’s Tibet, or Palestine, or Kashmir, or in the Northeast [ofIndia]. And there the repression is so extreme that those movements, even if they were more radical when theystarted, or more progressive, are being pushed into retrogressive positions, where they are misogynist, orthey are fundamentalist and in many ways, using the same language and the techniques as the states they seekto replace. 

And then you have the cycle turning full circle and coming back to Iraq where you’rere-colonizing a place and appropriating its resources and so on. I think that the fact is that those movementsthat are fighting liberation struggles have to start asking themselves now, what kind of state are theyfighting for. And especially the women have to ask that question now. They can’t be saying once it happens,then we’ll be okay, because they won’t be.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Speaking of women as well, the situation in the United States is interesting on theleft. It’s very refreshing for me to see a South Asian woman, a woman who looks like me, be the newsuperstar of the left. And you may reject that term, "superstar" but unfortunately, or fortunately,whether you like it or not, when you walk into a room today, you command an audience. And it’s the NoamChomsky effect – when he walks into a room, he gets a standing ovation before he even says a few words. Soon the one hand I’m ecstatic that it’s not just another straight white male with a fancy education. How doyou deal with that and is it healthy for the left?

Arundhati Roy: I think it’s very unhealthy. This process of iconization is also a political one. Thatit is a way of making real political resistance very brittle. Because it’s okay to say oh Arundhati Roy, she’sa superstar. And then tomorrow say, but actually you know, she’s this and she’s that and it’s over. Butit’s not about me and what a nice human being I am because I’m not a nice human being. I’m not at allplaying for saint-hood here. So I think it’s a very dangerous process. It’s hard to know what to do aboutit. Because all one does is to continue to write and say what one writes and says. Then the rest of it is afallout that you have to deal with and realize and that the option is to shut up and go away. Is that what Iwant to do? I don’t know.

But it is dangerous because it does make the whole movement very brittle. Obviously it’s not just me,there are others. But individuals who are picked out – we are very fragile things. I could be ... how easyis it for the propaganda machine to try to discredit me tomorrow?

Sonali Kolhatkar: You’ve talked about, in the book, [The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile] with David [Barsamian]the way in which ordinary people are different from powerful people who can be ruthless, cold, calculating.Does ruthlessness and coldness just come from power? Unless people have power we can’t solve the problems ofthe world. What are your ideas on distributing power?

Arundhati Roy: Tonight, the subject of my talk is "Public Power in the Age of Empire". I think it’sprobably a subject that occupies many of my waking hours and what does that mean in today’s age? What doesit mean in an election year? Does it mean just going out and voting? What does it mean? I think that it’svery very important for us to also accept a certain amount of culpability for what is happening to the worldand what we have allowed to happen. So how do we as people who are not walking the path to public office orgovernment, how do we shorten the leash on power because that’s the only way. 

Like I keep saying thatbasically the pre-neo-liberal era, already in countries like India, the distance between people who madedecisions and people who suffered those decisions was big enough. Corporate globalization has just increasedit and we have to minimize that distance. And sometimes in order to minimize it, we have to reach acrossnational boundaries and borders. If you see in a very simple way, democracies are premised on an almostreligious acceptance of the nation-state. Neo-liberalism is simply not. Capital moves across these boundariesin the way that it does. And so while that project needs the coercive powers of the nation state to quell therevolt at the servant quarters, it also ensures that no individual nation can stand up to the project ofcorporate globalization. 

So whether it’s Lula or whether it’s Nelson Mandela, whoever they are, they’vecrumbled in the face of that. The only way the public can ensure that…. Like in India what is called nowwhen people are arrested and called terrorists and put in jail in the thousands under this new POTA[Prevention of Terrorism Act, the counterpart to the USA PATRIOT Act in India] act? You know what it’scalled? Creating a good investment climate. So we’ve got to create a bad investment climate.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Speaking of elections and of what’s happening in India – the election here in theUnited States is seeing a face off between Democrats and the Republicans and some of the left is very muchrooted in the "Anybody But Bush" strategy. I wonder if you see a comparison between what happened in Indiaand what could happen in the US –the Congress versus the BJP similar to the Democrats versus the Republicans– it’s good to have the Democrats but still lots of work to be done.

Arundhati Roy: Well, yes and no. There is a parallel. And yet, we have to admit that whether it’s theCongress or the BJP that came into power in India it doesn’t affect the rest of the world as much as theoutcome of the American election, in theory. I’ve been here for just a few days and one thing that bothersme is that the whole thing has been reduced to some personality contest – like some squabble between twoboys who belong to Yale, and were in the "Skull and Crossbones" club or whatever. 

Let’s say -- as asubject of empire I speak -- Kerry says that even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction,he would still have gone to war. He says that he wants to send another 40,000 troops more to Iraq. He wants tosend Indians and Pakistanis or other people there to kill and die instead. He’ll get UN cover. For theIraqis what does it mean? That the French and the Germans and the Russians can also partake of the spoils ofthe occupation? These are very difficult questions. 

But the fact is that if the antiwar movement in the leftopenly campaigns for Kerry then people in the rest of the world will ask, do you support "soft imperialism"a la Kerry or not? In terms of the fact that people like me and many of us have gone out of our way to make ahuge distinction between American government and the American people. But now you have to accept that peoplein democracies are more responsible for the actions of their governments than the Iraqis are for the actionsof Saddam Hussein or the Afghans were for the actions of the Taliban. 

So then if you are responsible, then youhave to take responsibility. It’s a complicated and dangerous situation right now. And what you say is veryimportant. Can you openly support this man?

Sonali Kolhatkar: We deal with a lot of these issues on KPFK. We don’t hear much discourse on corporateglobalization and free trade in the United States. But during this election we are hearing a conversation that’sfocused on the outsourcing of jobs which is very much related to India with hi-tech and other jobs going toIndia. Some people on the left think that they should embrace this as a positive benefit of globalization[with jobs going to a third world country] but others end up falling into the nationalistic trap and denouncethe losing of jobs to India. What is your approach and how does one walk the line and how does one treat theissue of outsourcing jobs in India?

Arundhati Roy: The middle and upper classes in India who completely support the neo-liberal corporateglobalization project now say, look, we have call centers, isn’t that wonderful? Not seeing that part of theproject of India having many thousands of people working for call centers, but who are they? They are also theEnglish speaking, middle class or upper middle class people, at the cost of what? Of millions losing theirlands and their jobs and the rest of the corporate globalization project, because of the privatization ofelectricity and water and removal of subsidies and so on. So once again, for a few people who arecomparatively better off getting jobs there, millions are losing jobs there. And over here, what is happeningis that the poor are losing jobs. So you have to see it as a complete process of what is happening. It’s notjust that you say, oh look, some people are losing jobs here and they’re getting jobs there. It’s just alittle part of a much larger project.

Sonali Kolhatkar: A distraction if you will?

Arundhati Roy: It’s not a distraction because in India it’s the main issue.

Sonali Kolhatkar: … I mean here in the United States in election terms…

Arundhati Roy: … It’s a kind of jingoism. I think that what actually globalization has done here ismore than people losing jobs in call centers. If you look at the fact that America and Europe are trying toforce a country like India to remove subsidies for farmers and poor people while they pay 1 billion dollars aday in subsidies to their farmers, but not to their poor farmers, but to the corporate farmers. So withinAmerica too, that project … you see it’s really important for people to understand that it isn’t just adivide between rich countries and poor countries – it’s a divide between rich people and poor people. Andthat affects the Indian poor as well as the American poor.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Some people, liberal economists for example, like the New York Times’ Paul Krugmanwho will take a pretty decent position on the issue on war, will disagree with the anti-globalization movementsaying that we should embrace the issue of globalization, it’s good for the world. But then you havemovements represented by the World Social Forum who are wholly rejecting it. In your opinion, is thereanything good about globalization, or what would "your" globalization look like? Or is there just no spacefor globalization? Should everything turn back to localism?

Arundhati Roy: I suppose it’s one of the most loosely used words in history. Globalization, what doesit mean? I keep saying, we are pro-globalization. It would be absurd to think that everybody should retreatinto their little caves and continue oppressing Dalits and messing around the way they used to in medievaltimes. Of course not. And of course I think when you look at it, we are the people who are saying we shouldhave global treaties on nuclear weapons, on international justice, on environmental issues and how can therenot be that kind of globalization? 

And then there’s that issue of whether organizations like the WTO and theIMF and the World Bank can be reformed. And even within the global justice movement there are two schools ofthought. One says, scrap them and other says, no no, you can reform them. To me, it doesn’t matter. If youcan reform them, then reform them. But the fact is of course it would be good to have financial institutionsthat are just institutions, fair institutions. But it’s much worse to have an entrenched, unfairinternational agreement. You know what I mean. You can’t entrench injustice and institutionalize it in theway that these institutions are doing. It isn’t a vague debate about globalization is good or bad. You’vegot to understand what it means.

And it keeps changing and warping. Five years ago the World Bank was funding big dams. Not five years ago,in 1993 they were driven out of the Narmada Valley. Now they are back. But how? They are not directly fundingthem. But they are trying to fund them through organizations like the NHPC which is the National HydroelectricPower Corporation, they are trying to come in through the back door now. They are trying to hold hands withthe government. Because in any case, these private projects have to have government support. You can’tprivatize power without government support. You can’t privatize a dam without using the coercive powers ofthe state. So it keeps warping and changing. You can’t just have clichéd reactions to it, also keepunderstanding what is happening.

Sonali Kolhatkar: The issue of globalization from the perspective of activists who want justice, is aninteresting one because it brings up ideas and challenges that I noticed – in the World Social Forum therewas one topic that kept coming up was the issue of language. You had all these people coming together – mostof them didn’t speak one common language. And Nawal el Saadawi [famed Egyptian feminist] was talking aboutrejecting the use of the colonial language, English. Even though the "God of Small Things" [Roy’s firstnovel] has been translated into many languages, your primary language that you write in is English.