The Anti-American

Brilliant people can be remarkably obtuse. The critic and novelist John Berger declares, in hisintroduction to Arundhati Roy's collection of political essays, that the American war in Afghanistan is an"act of terror against the people of the world." He also states that the nineteen hijackers"gave their lives" on September 11 "as did three hundred and fifty-three Manhattanfiremen," as though there were no difference between people who die to commit mass murder and those whodie to save lives. And the killings in New York and Washington, Berger informs us, were "the directresult of trying to impose everywhere the new world economic order (the abstract, soaring, groundless market)which insists that man's supreme task is to make profit."

The soaring market in Algeria? The new world economic order in Sudan? Profit-making in Afghanistan? Ah, ifonly. There were no doubt many reasons for the suicidal murder spree at the World Trade Center and thePentagon, but global capitalism surely comes low on the list. Islam ism flourishes precisely in places thatare relatively or even absolutely untouched by IBM or Motorola or even, strange to say, McDonald's. If the neweconomic order were the problem, why didn't the terrorists come from Bangkok, or Hong Kong?

Still, John Berger is the right man to introduce Arundhati Roy's collection of political polemics. Fewintellectual voices have been as ubiquitous as Roy's after September 11, and few quite so shrill. Roy is theauthor of The God of Small Things, a novel read by millions all over the world. Her articles haveappeared all over the world, too, in--among other publications--The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, and DerSpiegel. One reason people listen to her, apart from her literary fame, is that she has positionedherself, successfully, as an authentic Third World voice. And like Lee Kuan Yew, a very different kind ofAsian voice, she is highly articulate in English, a winning combination.

Roy does not like to be called an "activist," but she has stuck her neck out for a variety ofcauses. Some of them, such as the protest against potentially catastrophic dam-building projects in India, arecertainly worth fighting for. So for that she should be commended. Yet, at the same time, Roy has a tendencyto sound preposterous. Her reaction to the events of September 11 was that we would never know what hadmotivated the hijackers, but that "Mickey Mouse," that is to say, the United States, was not aviable alternative to "the mullahs." (She made this pronouncement on "Nightline" onNovember 3, 2001.) The snobbery of her tone alone betrays the lingering, if perhaps unconscious, influence inIndia of British lefties from the end of the Raj. It is the language of the Bloomsbury drawing room. You couldwell imagine Bertrand Russell taking this line.

The question is whether Roy's preposterousness undermines the causes that she promotes. Ramachandra Guha, awell-respected scholar and writer in India, thinks that it does. In a sharp attack on Roy's politicalstatements, published in the newspaper The Hindu in November 2000, Guha argued that Roy should stick towriting novels, because her vanity and her self-indulgence devalues the work of more serious activists. Hementioned as an example her efforts on behalf of the movement against the huge expensive dams in westernIndia, which will displace hundreds of thousands of poor people. The cause is just, but Guha believes thatRoy's grandstanding on its behalf, which recently earned her a well-publicized night in jail, made a spectacleof her at the expense of the anti-dam movement.

The quarrel between Roy and Guha has implications that go beyond the Indian borders. It touches uponcelebrity culture, on the uses of literary fame in political causes, on the public role of the writer in ademocracy, and on the intellectual roots of anti-Americanism. For these reasons alone, Roy's recent writingsmerit closer attention.

Arundhati Roy may have come late to the anti-dam movement, as Ramachandra Guha says, but she did so in1999, when the movement was in poor shape. She revived flagging spirits among the activists and put theirgoals back in the public eye. Building huge dams has been almost a fetish of Indian governments since Nehru,who made the famous statement (later regretted) that dams were "the temples of modern India." TheHoover Dam was the original model for this kind of thing, but it was Soviet-style nationalist machismo thatinspired developing countries such as India. Dams are the very models of Stakhanovite enterprise, the perfectsymbols of massive modernity. The Chinese are still at it, too.

The results, as Roy has been at pains to point out, have often been disastrous. During the last fiftyyears, as many as fifty million mostly poor, low-caste Indians have lost their homes and livelihoods as aconsequence of big dam projects. The benefits go mostly to the urban rich, while many peasants still have noaccess to safe drinking water. And even the benefits are often exaggerated. In the case of one big Indian dam,only five percent of the area that was promised irrigation actually received any water.

All this is bad enough, especially for the dislocated poor. There is really no need for tastelesscomparisons. But Roy writes: "Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it overwith." It is not immediately clear what gallery she is playing to here--her essays were written forIndian readers--but the effect diminishes the power of her message.

The Sardar Sarovar plan to build 3,200 dams on the Narmada River, which runs through three states inwestern India, is designed to be the biggest dam project of all. Roy says that it will submerge and destroy4,000 square kilometers of forestland, and displace hundreds of thousands of people without adequate plans forre location or compensation. The other odd aspect of this huge irrigation scheme is that it will benefit onlyone of the three states, Gujarat, while the sacrifices are all to be born by villagers in the other two,Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Guja rat is naturally all in favor of this, as was the World Bank, at leastinitially. An enterprise that began as a form of Third World mimicry of Soviet methods now finds its mostvociferous defenders among free-marketeers, right-wing Hindu chauvinists in the Indian government, and Westerncorporations. One of the most disturbing stories in Power Politics, Roy's essay against the dams, isabout the way Enron squeezed billions of dollars out of the state of Maharashtra for a power plant that mostlocal industries cannot even afford to tap.

Critical studies of big dam building began to appear in India in the 1980s. The Narmada Bachao Andolan(NBA), a movement of protest specifically against the Sardar Sarovar dam, organized demonstrations and strikesthrough the 1980s and 1990s. Independent reports, commissioned by the Indian government as well as by theWorld Bank and the World Conservation Union, were highly critical of the dam, for environmental reasons aswell as social reasons, and after much pressure from activists the World Bank withdrew its support. Still, theIndian Supreme Court, after being petitioned by the NBA, decided to let the project go ahead anyway.

Anti-dam activists, including Roy, were smeared in the pro-government press as traitors, and accused ofassaulting a group of lawyers at the Supreme Court. There was no evidence for this, but the case went tocourt, and Roy wrote in her affidavit that this showed "a disquieting inclination on the part of thecourt to silence criticism and muzzle dissent." As a result, she was charged with contempt of court,spent her night in jail, and paid a fine. Unwise, perhaps; but more people read about the dam problem becauseof her than would otherwise have been the case.

When Roy got involved in the anti-dam movement, she was already a famous writer. But it was not her firstbrush with organized protest. Her mother, Mary Roy, is a well-known promoter of women's rights in India, soArundhati imbibed dissent with her mother's milk. But she is also rather melodramatic about the public role ofthe writer. To be a writer, she says, "in a country that gave the world Mahatma Gandhi ... is a ferociousburden." Quite where Gandhi fits in is unclear. Still, Roy writes about politics not as a famousnovelist, but as a citizen, "only a citizen, one of many, asking for a public explanation." She hasno "personal or ideological axe to grind." She has no "professional stakes to protect." Itis simply "time to snatch our futures back from the 'experts.' "

There is nothing wrong with this. Experts are fallible. Famous novelists are citizens, too. But there is infact something professional at stake here. For Roy goes further than saying that a writer should use her fameto promote worthy causes. She believes that what "is happening in the world lies, at the moment, justoutside the realm of human understanding." But help is at hand: it is "the writers, the poets, theartists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into therealm of common understanding." Some of the reactions among the writers, the poets, and the artists tothe events of last September make this kind of special pleading less than convincing.

Roy's efforts on behalf of the victims of dam-building show her to be a good citizen; but if her aim, as awriter of political essays, is to promote common understanding, she is less than a success. The essays expressher convictions and her prejudices with great passion, but by her own account she aims higher. Roy wantslanguage to cut through platitudes and lies: "As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into theheart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought. 'Languageis the skin of my thought,' I remember saying to someone who once asked what language meant to me." Ifso, her thoughts could do with a course of Clearasil.

Roy showed a fondness in her novel for overlush imagery and showy stylistic flourishes. The same thing istrue in her essays, where her literary mannerisms often obscure understanding. The text is pockmarked withflip haiku-like clichés of the following kind: "My world has died. And I write to mourn itspassing." (This is about India's development of the nuclear bomb.) Or this tired old dictum: "Onecountry's terrorist is too often another's freedom fighter. " There is also the constant hyperbole, whichactually weakens the power of language. Privatization, Roy writes, is a "process of barbaricdispossession on a scale that has few parallels in history." Really? On the same topic: "What ishappening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible,terrible thing." Well, perhaps it is, but this judgment does little to help my own human comprehension ofinternational economics. And if we are really dealing with matters outside human understanding, then humanreason is obviously an inadequate tool, so why bother to write an essay at all?

It doesn't help either that Roy adopts the patronizing tone of a tour guide for schoolchildren: "Allowme to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze." And her attempts tofind a literary expression for her contempt of American capitalism are equally childish. America is likened toRumpelstiltskin with "a bank account heart" and "television eyes" and a "SurroundSound stereo mouth which amplifies his voice and filters out the sound of the rest of the world, so that youcan't hear it even when it's shouting (or starving or dying) and King Rumpel is only whispering, rolling hisr's in his North American way."

In the end, though, how much does it really matter? Does Roy's style really do asmuch damage to the substance of her cause as Ramachandra Guha thinks? In the case of the Sardar Sarovar dam,the merits of her involvement surely outweigh the limitations of her prose or the manner of her publicpresentation. The cause is clear enough. There are many more sober, more scholarly, more considered books andarticles to read, for those who take a serious interest in the matter. And for those who would rather not bebothered, such as millions of Indian voters, Roy's passionate advocacy at least brings it to their attention.

But when Roy attempts to tackle a wider world, fulminating against the American intervention inAfghanistan, or against "globalization," her tone and her stylistic tics become more thanirritating. Her demonology of the United States takes on the foaming-at-the-mouth, eye-rolling quality of themad evangelist. Un fortunately, it is this side of her, and not the campaigning against dam projects, that hasfound a worldwide audience. Roy has become the perfect Third World voice for anti-American, or anti-Western,or even anti-white, sentiments. Those are sentiments dear to the hearts of intellectuals everywhere, includingthe United States itself.

The litany is well-known. America is the most belligerent power on earth. Its government is committed to"military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and un imaginablegenocide (outside America)." The economic policies of the United States, otherwise known asglobalization or imperialism, are "merciless" and rapacious, destroying economies "like a cloudof locusts." This means, in Roy's view, that "any Third World country with a fragile economy and acomplex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower like America in ... would be like invitinga brick to drop through your windscreen." This rather ignores the historical fact that it is preciselyAmerica's old "client states" in East and Southeast Asia--South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan--thathave done rather well, politically and economically. South Vietnam, had it remained under American patronage,would no doubt have been among them.

If American economic imperialism is bad, American militarism is worse. Not only is America responsible forthe deaths of millions in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central America, but also, according toRoy's account, in ... Yugoslavia! So the belated American intervention, which saved countless Bosnian andAlbanian Kosovar lives, is now also a part of America's bellicose record. Rumpelstiltskin's empire is an evil,evil place. To drive this home, Roy uses the usual tricks of the demagogue. One of those tricks is themisleading quotation. The other is what used to be called, in Cold War days, moral equivalence.

One quotation pops up in many an anti-American diatribe, including Roy's. This is the way she reports it:"In 1996, Madeleine Albright ... was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that fivehundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of U.S. economic sanctions. She replied that it was `avery hard choice,' but that all things considered, `we think the price is worth it.'" This sounds prettyhorrible. In fact, Albright had already made it clear to Lesley Stahl of CBS, who asked the question, that theIraqi children were not dying because of the sanctions. Iraq can buy as much medicine as it wants. Sheadmitted that sanctions did have negative consequences, but she argued that this was a price worth paying forcontaining the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The moral-equivalence argument is crudely employed. Terrorism, Roy writes, is "as global an enterpriseas Coke or Pepsi or Nike." Terrorists move their "factories" from country to country "insearch of a better deal. Just like the multinationals." This is true, as far as it goes, but the businessof Pepsi is not exactly mass murder. The terrorists, Roy goes on to say, are "the ghosts of the victimsof America's old wars." Osama bin Laden is "the American President's dark doppelgänger," and"the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable....Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed...." And so on and so forth. One gets the drift.

Now why would an Indian novelist get so overwrought about the United States? And sheis not the only writer to do so. Consider Harold Pinter's description of America in the latest issue of Grantamagazine: "The `rogue state' has--without thought, without pause for reflection, without a moment ofdoubt, let alone shame--confirmed that it is a fully-fledged, award-winning, gold-plated monster."

For a start, it must be said that American corporations--Enron being just one instance--have not alwaysplayed a pretty role in India. Union Carbide's involvement in the Bhopal gas leak in 1984, which killed morethan ten thousand people, was horrendous. And American foreign policy, especially its support of Pakistanduring the Bangladesh war, has distressed many Indians. Indeed, over-sensitive though Indians may sometimes beto slights (or imagined slights) from Western powers, Washington has not done nearly enough over the years tocultivate goodwill in Asia's biggest democracy. But there must be more to Roy's rage.