Shall We Leave It to the Experts?

Arundhati Roy

India lives in several centuries at the same time.
Somehow we manage to progress and regress
simultaneously. As a nation we age by pushing outwards
from the middle - adding a few centuries on to either end
of our extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing
head of a hammer-headed shark with eyes looking in
diametrically opposite directions. On the one hand, we
hear that European countries are considering changing
their immigration laws in order to import Indian
software engineers. On the other, that a Naga sadhu at
the Kumbh Mela towed the district collector's car with
his penis while the officer sat in it solemnly with his
wife and children.

As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of
caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breaking and
fashion shows, church burning and expanding cellphone
networks, bonded labour and the digital revolution,
female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who
continue to burn their wives for dowry, and our
delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. I don't mean to
put a simplistic value judgement on this peculiar form
of 'progress' by suggesting that Modern is Good and
Traditional is Bad, nor vice versa. What's hard to
reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically,
is the schizophrenic nature of it. That applies not
just to the ancient/modern conundrum, but to the utter
illogic of what appears to be the current national
enterprise. In the lane behind my house, every night I
walk past road-gangs of emaciated labourers digging a
trench to lay fibre-optic cables to speed up our
digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they
work by the light of a few candles.

It's as though the people of India have been rounded up
and loaded on to two convoys of trucks (a huge big one
and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in
opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a
glittering destination somewhere near the top of the
world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness
and disappears. A cursory survey that tallies the
caste, class and religion of who gets to be in which
convoy would make a good Lazy Person's Concise Guide to
the History of India. For some of us, life in India is
like being suspended between two of the trucks, one in
each convoy, and being neatly dismembered as they move
apart, not bodily, but emotionally and intellectually.

Of course, India is a microcosm of the world. Of
course, versions of what happens here happen
everywhere. Of course, if you're willing to look, the
parallels are easy to find. The difference in India is
only in the scale, the magnitude, and the sheer
proximity of the disparity. In India, your face is
slammed right up against it. To address it, to deal
with it, to not deal with it, to try and understand it,
to insist on not understanding it, to simply survive
itÑon a daily, hourly basisÑis a fine art. Either an
art or a form of insular, inward-looking insanity. Or
both.

To be a writer -a supposedly 'famous' writer- in a
country where millions of people are illiterate is a
dubious honour. To be a writer in a country that gave
the world Mahatma Gandhi, that invented the concept of
non-violent resistance, and then, half-a-century later,
followed that up with nuclear tests, is a ferocious
burden.(Though no more ferocious a burden, it has to be
said, than being a writer in the United States, a
country that has amassed enough nuclear weapons to
destroy the earth several times over.) To be a writer
in a country where something akin to an undeclared
civil war is being waged on its citizens in the name of
'development' is an onerous responsibility. When it
comes to writers and writing, I use words like
'onerous' and 'responsibility' with a heavy heart and
not a small degree of sadness.

What is the role of writers and artists in society? Do
they have a definable role? Can it be fixed, described,
characterised in any definite way? Should it be?

Personally, I can think of few things more terrifying
than if writers and artists were charged with an
immutable charter of duties and responsibilities that
they had to live and work by. Imagine, if there was
this little black book - a sort of Approved Guide to Good
Writing- that said: 'All writers shall be politically
conscious and sexually moral', or, 'All writers should
believe in god, globalisation, and the joys of family
life...'

Rule One for a writer, as far as I'm concerned, is that
There Are No Rules. And Rule Two (since Rule One was
made to be broken) is that There Are No Excuses for Bad
Art. Painters, writers, singers, actors, dancers,
filmmakers, musicians - they are meant to fly, to push at
the frontiers, to worry the edges of the human
imagination, to conjure beauty from the most unexpected
things, to find magic in places where others never
thought to look. If you limit the trajectory of their
flight, if you weight their wings with society's
existing notions of morality and responsibility, if you
truss them up with preconceived values, you subvert
their endeavour.

A good or great writer may refuse to accept any
responsibility or morality that society wishes to
impose on her. Yet, the best and greatest of them know
that if they abuse this hard-won freedom, it can only
lead to bad art. There is an intricate web of morality,
rigour and responsibility that art, that writing
itself, imposes on a writer. It is singular,
individual, but nevertheless it's there. At its best,
it's an exquisite bond between the artist and the
medium. At its acceptable end, a sort of sensible
cooperation. At its worst, it's a relationship of
disrespect and exploitation.

The absence of external rules complicates things.
There's a very thin line that separates the strong,
true, bright bird of the imagination from the
synthetic, noisy bauble. Where is that line? How do you
recognise it? How do you know you've crossed it? At the
risk of sounding esoteric and arcane, I'm tempted to
say that you just know. The fact is that nobodyÑno
reader, no reviewer, agent, publisher, colleague,
friend or enemyÑcan tell for sure. A writer just has to
ask herself that question and answer it as honestly as
possible. The thing about this 'line' is that once you
learn to recognise it, once you see it, it's impossible
to ignore. You have no choice but to live with it, to
follow it through. You have to bear with all its
complexities, contradictions and demands. And that's
not always easy. It doesn't always lead to compliments
and standing ovations.It can lead you to the strangest,
wildest places. In the midst of war, for instance, you
could find yourself fascinated by the mating rituals of
a purple sunbird, or the secret life of captive
goldfish, or an old aunt's descent into madness. And
nobody can say that there isn't truth and art and
beauty in that. Or, on the contrary, in the midst of
putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate
enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that
once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've
seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as
political an act as speaking out.There's no innocence.
Either way, you're accountable.

Today, perhaps more so than in any other era in
history, the writer's right to free speech is guarded
and defended by the civil societies and state
establishments of the most powerful countries in the
world. Any overt attempt to silence or muffle a voice
is met with furious opposition. The writer is embraced
and protected. This is a wonderful thing. The writer,
the actor, the musician, the filmmakerÑthey have become
radiant jewels in the crown of modern civilisation. The
artist, I imagine, is finally as free as he or she will
ever be. Never before have so many writers had their
books published. (And now, of course, we have the
Internet.) Never before have we been more commercially
viable. We live and prosper in the heart of the
marketplace. True, for every so-called success there
are hundreds who 'fail'. True, there are a myriad art
forms, both folk and classical, myriad languages,
myriad cultural and artistic traditions that are being
crushed and cast aside in the stampede to the big
bumper sale in Wonderland. Still, there have never been
more writers, singers, actors, painters who have become
influential, wealthy superstars. And they, the
successful ones, spawn a million imitators, they become
the torch-bearers, their work becomes the benchmark for
what art is, or ought to be.

Nowadays in India, the scene is almost farcical.
Following the recent commercial success of some Indian
authors, western publishers are desperately prospecting
for the next big Indo-Anglian work of fiction. They're
doing everything short of interviewing English-speaking
Indians for the post of 'writer'. Ambitious middle-
class parents who, a few years ago, would only settle
for a future in engineering, medicine or management for
their children, now hopefully send them to creative-
writing schools. People like myself are constantly
petitioned by computer companies, watch manufacturers,
even media magnates, to endorse their products. A
boutique owner in Bombay once asked me if he could
'display' my book (as though it was an accessory, a
bracelet or a pair of earrings) while he filmed me
shopping for clothes! Jhumpa Lahiri, the American
writer of Indian origin who won the Pulitzer Prize,
came to India recently to have a traditional Bengali
wedding. The wedding was reported on the front page of
national newspapers.

Now where does all this lead us? Is it just harmless
nonsense, best ignored? How does all this ardent wooing
affect our art? What kind of lenses does it put in our
spectacles? How far does it remove us from the world
around us?

There is very real danger that this neoteric seduction
can shut us up far more effectively than violence and
repression ever could.We have free speech. Maybe. But
do we have Really Free Speech? If what we have to say
doesn't 'sell', will we still say it? Can we? Or is
everybody looking for Things That Sell to say? Could
writers end up playing the role of palace entertainers?
Or the subtle twenty-first-century version of court
eunuchs attending to the pleasures of our incumbent
CEOs? You know - naughty, but nice. Risque perhaps, but
not risky.

It has been some years now since my first, and so far
only, novel, The God of Small Things, was published. In
the early days, I used to be describedÑintroducedÑas
the author of an almost freakishly 'successful' (if I
may use so vulgar a term) first book. Nowadays I'm
introduced as something of a freak myself. I am,
apparently, what is known in twenty-first century
vernacular as a 'writer-activist'. (Like a sofa-bed.)

Why am I called a 'writer-activist' and why - even when
it's used approvingly, admiringly - does that term make
me flinch? I'm called a writer-activist because after
writing The God of Small Things I wrote three political
essays: The End of Imagination about India's nuclear
tests, The Greater Common Good about big dams and the
'development' debate, and Power Politics: The
Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin about the
privatisation and corporatisation of essential
infrastructure like water and electricity. Apart from
the building of the temple in Ayodhya, these also
currently happen to be the major preoccupations of the
Indian government.

Now, I've been wondering why it should be that the
person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a
writer, and the person who wrote the political essays
is called an activist? True, The God of Small Things is
a work of fiction, but it's no less political than any
of my essays. True, the essays are works of non-
fiction, but since when did writers forgo the right to
write non-fiction?

My thesis is that I've been saddled with this double-
barrelled appellation, this awful professional label,
not because my work is political, but because in my
essays, I take sides. I take a position. I have a point
of view. What's worse, I make it clear that I think
it's right and moral to take that position and what's
even worse, use everything in my power to flagrantly
solicit support for that position. For a writer of the
21st century, that's considered a pretty uncool,
unsophisticated thing to do. It skates uncomfortably
close to the territory occupied by political party
ideologuesÑa breed of people that the world has learned
(quite rightly) to mistrust. I'm aware of this. I'm all
for being circumspect. I'm all for discretion,
prudence, tentativeness, subtlety, ambiguity,
complexity... I love the unanswered question, the
unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender
shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time.

But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about
everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful
episodes in human history when prudence and discretion
would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When
caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was
disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a
kind of espousal?

Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that
there are times in the life of a people or a nation
when the political climate demands that we - even the
most sophisticated of us - overtly take sides? I believe
that such times are upon us.And I believe that in the
coming years, intellectuals and artists will be called
upon to take sides, and this time, unlike the struggle
for Independence, we won't have the luxury of fighting
a 'colonising enemy'. We'll be fighting ourselves.

We will be forced to ask ourselves some very
uncomfortable questions about our values and
traditions, our vision for the future, our
responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our
'democratic institutions', the role of the state, the
police, the army, the judiciary and the intellectual
community.

Fifty years after Independence, India is still
struggling with the legacy of colonialism, still
flinching from the 'cultural insult'. As citizens,
we're still caught up in the business of 'disproving'
the white world's definition of us. Intellectually and
emotionally, we have just begun to grapple with
communal and caste politics that threaten to tear our
society apart. But in the meanwhile something new looms
on our horizon.

It's not war, it's not genocide, it's not ethnic
cleansing, it's not a famine or an epidemic. On the
face of it, it's just ordinary, day-to-day business. It
lacks the drama, the large format, epic magnificence of
war or genocide. It's dull in comparison. It makes bad
TV. It has to do with boring things like water supply,
electricity, irrigation. But it also has to do with a
process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has
few parallels in history. You may have guessed by now
that I'm talking about the modern version of corporate
globalisation.

What is globalisation? Who is it for? What is it going
to do to a country like India in which social
inequality has been institutionalised in the caste
system for centuries? A country in which hundreds of
millions of people live in rural areas. In which 80 per
cent of the landholdings are small farms. In which
almost half the population cannot read or write.

Is the corporatisation and globalisation of
agriculture, water supply, electricity and essential
commodities going to pull India out of the stagnant
morass of poverty, illiteracy and religious bigotry? Is
the dismantling and auctioning off of elaborate public
sector infrastructure, developed with public money over
the last 50 years, really the way forward? Is corporate
globalisation going to close the gap between the
privileged and the underprivileged, between the upper
castes and the lower castes, between the educated and
the illiterate? Or is it going to give those who
already have a centuries-old head start a friendly
helping hand?

Is corporate globalisation about 'the eradication of
world poverty' or is it a mutant variety of
colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
These are huge, contentious questions. The answers vary
depending on whether they come from the villages and
fields of rural India, from the slums and shantytowns
of urban India, from the living rooms of the burgeoning
middle class or from the boardrooms of big business
houses.

Today, India produces more milk, more sugar, more
foodgrain than ever before. Government warehouses are
overflowing with 42 million tonnes of foodgrain. That's
almost a quarter of the total annual foodgrain
produce.Farmers with too much grain on their hands were
driven to despair. In regions that wielded enough
political clout, the government went on a buying spree,
purchasing more grain than it could possibly store or
use. And yet, under the terms of its agreement with the
World Trade Organisation, the Indian government had to
lift import restrictions on 1,400 commodities,
including milk, grain, sugar, cotton, tea, coffee,
rubber and palm oil. This, despite the fact that there
was a glut of these products in the market. While grain
rots in government warehouses, hundreds of millions of
Indian citizens live below the poverty line and do not
have the means to eat a square meal a day. Starvation
deaths (dressed up as measles and food-poisoning) are
being reported from several parts of the country.

From 1 April, 2001 - April Fools Day - once again according
to the terms of its agreement with the WTO, the Indian
government is contracted to drop its quantitative
import restrictions. The Indian market is already
flooded with cheaper imports. Though India is
technically free to export its agricultural produce, in
practice most of it cannot be exported because it
doesn't meet the first world's 'environmental
standards'. (Western consumers don't eat bruised
mangoes, or bananas with mosquito bites, or rice with a
few weevils in it. In India we don't mind the odd
mosquito-bite or the occasional weevil.)

Developed countries like the US, whose hugely
subsidised farm industry engages only 2 to 3 per cent
of its total population, are using the WTO to
pressurise countries like India to drop agricultural
subsidies in order to make the market 'competitive'.
Huge, mechanised corporate enterprises working
thousands of acres of farmland want to compete with
impoverished subsistence farmers who own only a couple
of acres.

In effect, India's rural economy is being garrotted.
Farmers who produce too much are in distress, farmers
who produce too little are in distress and landless
agricultural labour is out of work as big estates and
farms lay off their workers. They're all flocking to
the cities in search of employment.

'Trade not Aid' is the rallying cry of the headmen of
the new Global Village, headquartered in the shining
offices of the WTO. Our British colonisers stepped on
to our shores a few centuries ago disguised as traders.
We all remember the East India Company. This time
around, the coloniser doesn't even need a token white
presence in the colonies. The CEOs and their men don't
need to go to the trouble of tramping through the
tropics risking malaria, diarrhoea, sunstroke and an
early death. They don't have to maintain an army or a
police force, or worry about insurrections and
mutinies. They can have their colonies and an easy
conscience. 'Creating a good investment climate' is the
new euphemism for third world repression. Besides, the
responsibility for implementation rests with the local
administration.

In India, in order to clear the way for 'development
projects', the government is in the process of amending
the present Land Acquisition Act (which, ironically,
was drafted by the British in the nineteenth century)
and making it more draconian than it already is.State
governments are preparing to ratify 'anti-terrorist'
laws so that those who oppose development projects will
be counted as terrorists. They can be held without
trial for three years. They can have their lands and
cattle seized.

Recently, corporate globalisation has come in for some
criticism. What happened in Seattle and Prague will go
down in history. Each time the WTO or the World
Economic Forum wants to have a meeting, they have to
barricade themselves with thousands of heavily armed
police. Still, all its admirers, from Bill Clinton,
Kofi Annan and A.B. Vajpayee to the cheering brokers in
the stalls, continue to say the same lofty things. If
we have the right institutions of governance in place --
effective courts, good laws, honest politicians,
participatory democracy, a transparent administration
that respects human rights and gives people a say in
decisions that affect their lives -- then the
globalisation project will work for the poor, as well.
They call this 'globalisation with a human face'.

The point is, if all this was in place, almost anything
would succeed: socialism, capitalism, you name it.
Everything works in Paradise, a communist State as well
as a military dictatorship! But in an imperfect world,
is it corporate globalisation that's going to bring us
all this bounty? Is that what's happening in India now
that it's on the fast track to the free market? Does
any one thing on that lofty list apply to life in India
today? Are state institutions transparent? Have people
had a say? Have they even been informed -- let alone
consulted -- about decisions that vitally affect their
lives? And are Mr Clinton (or now Mr Bush) and Mr
Vajpayee doing everything in their power to see that
the 'right institutions of governance' are in place? Or
are they involved in exactly the opposite enterprise?
Do they mean something else altogether when they talk
of the 'right institutions of governance'?

In November 2000, the World Commission on Dams report
was released by Nelson Mandela. It is the first time
ever that any serious attempt has been made to study
the performance of big dams. For those of us who are
opposed to big dams, the WCD report is a contested
document with many unacceptable, wishy-washy clauses.
However, at least it attempted to address the serious
social and ecological issues that have been raised and
debated over the years. At least, it attempted to set
out guidelines for those governments and agencies
engaged in building dams. At least, it attempted to
estimate how many people have been displaced by big
dams.

India is the only country in the world that refused
permission to the World Commission on Dams to hold a
public hearing. The government of Gujarat, the state in
which the Sardar Sarovar dam is being built, threatened
members of the Commission with arrest.

In February 2001, the Indian government formally
rejected the World Commission on Dams report. Does this
sound like a transparent, accountable, participatory
democracy?

Recently, the Supreme Court ordered the closure of
77,000 'polluting and non-conforming' industrial units
in Delhi. The order will put 500,000 people out of
work. What are these 'industrial units'? Who are these
people? They're the millions who have migrated from
their villages, some voluntarily, others involuntarily,
in search of work.They're the people who aren't
supposed to exist, the 'non-citizens' who survive in
the folds and wrinkles, the cracks and fissures of the
'official' city. They exist just outside the net of the
'official' urban infrastructure.

Close to 40 per cent of Delhi's population of 12
million - about 5 million people - live in slums and
unauthorised colonies. Most of them are not serviced by
municipal facilities - no electricity, no water, no
sewage systems. About 50,000 people are homeless and
sleep on the streets.These 'non-citizens' are employed
in what economists rather stuffily call the 'informal
sector', the fragile but vibrant parallel economy that
both shocks and delights the imagination. They work as
hawkers, rickshaw-pullers, garbage recyclers, car-
battery rechargers, street tailors, transistor-knob
makers, buttonhole stitchers, paper-bag makers, dyers,
printers, barbers. These are the 'industrial units'
that have been targeted by the Supreme Court.
(Fortunately, I haven't had that knock on my door yet,
though I'm as non-conforming a unit as the rest of
them.)

The trains that leave Delhi these days carry thousands
of people who simply cannot survive in the city.
They're returning to the villages they fled in the
first place. Millions of others, because they're
'illegal', have become easy meat for the rapacious,
bribe-seeking police and predatory government
officials. They haven't yet been driven out of the city
but now must live in perpetual fear and dread of that
happening.

In India, the times are full of talk of the 'free
market', reforms, deregulation and the dismantling of
the 'licence-raj'-- all in the name of encouraging
entrepreneurship and discouraging corruption. Yet, when
the state obliterates a flourishing market, when it
breaks the backs of half-a-million imaginative,
resourceful, small-scale entrepreneurs, and delivers
millions of others as fodder to the doorstep of the
corruption industry, few comment on the irony.

No doubt it's true that the informal sector is
polluting and, according to a colonial understanding of
urban land use, 'non-conforming'. But then we don't
live in a clean, perfect world. What about the fact
that 67 per cent of Delhi's pollution comes from motor
vehicles? Is it conceivable that the Supreme Court will
come up with an act that bans private cars, or limits
the number of cars a household can own?

If pollution is indeed the main concern of our courts
and government, why is it that they have shown no great
enthusiasm for regulating big factories run by major
industrialists that have polluted rivers, denuded
forests, depleted and poisoned groundwater, and
destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of people who
depend on these resources for a living? The Grasim
factory in Kerala, the Orient Paper Mill in Madhya
Pradesh, the noxious 'sunrise belt' industries in
Gujarat. The uranium mines in Jaduguda, the aluminum
plants in Orissa. And hundreds of others.

This is our in-house version of first world bullying in
the global warming debate, i.e., we pollute, you pay.

In circumstances like these, the term 'writer-activist'
as a professional description of what I do makes me
flinch doubly.First, because it is strategically
positioned to diminish both writers and activists. It
seeks to reduce the scope, the range, the sweep, of
what a writer is and can be. It suggests, somehow, that
writers by definition are too effete to come up with
the clarity, the explicitness, the reasoning, the
passion, the grit, the audacity and, if necessary, the
vulgarity, to publicly take a political position. And
conversely, it suggests that activists occupy the
coarser, cruder end of the intellectual spectrum. That
activists are by profession 'position-takers' and
therefore lack complexity and intellectual
sophistication, and are instead fuelled by a crude,
simple-minded, one-sided understanding of things. But
the more fundamental problem I have with the term is
that this attempt to 'professionalise' protest has the
effect of containing the problem and suggesting that
it's up to the professionals - activists and writer-
activists - to deal with it.

The fact is that what's happening today is not a
'problem', and the issues that some of us are raising
are not 'causes'. They are huge political and social
upheavals that are convulsing the world. One is not
involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One
is involved because one is a human being. Writing about
it just happens to be the most effective thing a writer
can do. It is vital to de-professionalise the public
debate on matters that vitally affect the lives of
ordinary people. It's time to snatch our futures back
from the 'experts'. Time to ask, in ordinary language,
the public question and to demand in ordinary language,
the public answer.

Frankly, however trenchantly, angrily, persuasively or
poetically the case is made out, at the end of the day,
a writer is a citizen, only one of many, who is
demanding public information, asking for a public
explanation.

Speaking for myself, I have no personal or ideological
axe to grind. I have no professional stakes to protect.
I'm prepared to be persuaded. I'm prepared to change my
mind. But instead of an argument, or an explanation, or
a disputing of facts, one gets insults, invective and
the Experts' Anthem: You don't understand and it's too
complicated to explain. The subtext, of course, is:
don't worry your little head about it. Go and play with
your toys. Leave the real world to us.

It's the old Brahminical instinct. Colonise knowledge,
build four walls around it, and use it to your
advantage. The Manusmriti, the Vedic Hindu code of
conduct, says that if a Dalit overhears a shloka or any
part of a sacred text, he must have molten lead poured
into his ear. It isn't a coincidence that while India
is poised to take her place at the forefront of the
Information Revolution, millions of her citizens are
illiterate. (It would be interesting, as an exercise,
to find out how many 'experts' - scholars, professionals,
consultants - in India are actually Brahmins or from the
upper castes.)

If you're one of the lucky people with a berth booked
on the small convoy, then Leaving it to the Experts is,
or can be, a mutually beneficial proposition both for
the expert and yourself. It's a convenient way of
easing your conscience, shrugging off your own role in
the circuitry.And it creates a huge professional market
for all kinds of 'expertise'. There's a whole ugly
universe waiting to be explored there. This is not at
all to suggest that all consultants are racketeers or
that expertise is unnecessary, but you've heard the
saying: There's a lot of money in poverty. There are
plenty of ethical questions to be asked of those who
make a professional living off their expertise in
poverty and despair.

For instance, at what point does a scholar stop being a
scholar and become a parasite who feeds off despair and
dispossession? Does the source of a scholar's funding
compromise his or her scholarship? We know, after all,
that World Bank studies are the most quoted studies in
the world. Is the World Bank a dispassionate observer
of the global situation? Are the studies it funds
entirely devoid of self-interest?

Take, for example, the international dam industry. It's
worth tens of billions of dollars a year. It's bursting
with experts and consultants. Given the number of
studies, reports, books, PhDs, grants, loans,
consultancies, eias -- it's odd, wouldn't you say, that
there is no really reliable estimate of how many people
have been displaced by big dams in India? That there is
no estimate for exactly what the contribution of big
dams has been to overall food production? That there
hasn't been an official audit, a comprehensive, honest,
thoughtful, post-project evaluation of a single big dam
to see whether or not it has achieved what it set out
to achieve? Whether or not the costs were justified, or
even what the costs actually were?

What are the experts up to?

On the whole, in India, the prognosis is - to put it
mildly - Not Good. And yet, one cannot help but marvel at
the fantastic range and depth and wisdom of the
hundreds of people's resistance movements all over the
county. They're being beaten down, but they simply
refuse to lie down and die.

Their political ideologies and battle strategies span
the range. We have the maverick Malayali professor who
petitions the President every day against the
communalisation of history texts; Sunderlal Bahuguna,
who risks his life on indefinite hunger strikes
protesting the Tehri dam; the Adivasis in Jaduguda
protesting uranium mining on their lands; the Koel Karo
Sangathan resisting a mega-dam project in Jharkhand;
the awe-inspiring Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha; the
relentlessly dogged Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan; the
Beej Bachao Andolan in Tehri-Garhwal fighting to save
the biodiversity of seeds; and of course, the Narmada
Bachao Andolan.

India's redemption lies in the inherent anarchy and
fractiousness of its people and its political
formations. Even our heel-clicking, boot-stamping Hindu
fascists are undisciplined to the point of being
chaotic. They can't bring themselves to agree with each
other for more than five minutes at a time.
Corporatising India is like trying to impose an iron
grid on a heaving ocean, forcing it to behave. My guess
is that India will not behave. It cannot. It's too old
and too clever to be made to jump through the hoops all
over again. It's too diverse, too grand, too feral,
and -- eventually, I hope -- too democratic to be lobotomised
into believing in one single idea, which is,
eventually, what corporate globalisation really is:
Life is Profit.

What is happening to the world lies, at the moment,
just outside the realm of common human understanding.
It is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers,
the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can
find ways of bringing it into the realm of common
understanding. Who can translate cash-flow charts and
scintillating boardroom speeches into real stories
about real people with real lives. Stories about what
it's like to lose your home, your land, your job, your
dignity, your past, and your future to an invisible
force. To someone or something you can't see. You can't
hate. You can't even imagine.

It's a new space that's been offered to us today. A new
kind of challenge. It offers opportunities for a new
kind of art. An art which can make the impalpable
palpable, the intangible tangible, the invisible
visible and the inevitable evitable. An art which can
draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real.
Bring it to book.

Cynics say that real life is a choice between the
failed revolution and the shabby deal. I don't
know...maybe they're right. But even they should know
that there's no limit to just how shabby that shabby
deal can be. What we need to search for and find, what
we need to hone and perfect into a magnificent, shining
thing, is a new kind of politics. Not the politics of
governance, but the politics of resistance. The
politics of opposition. The politics of forcing
accountability. The politics of joining hands across
the world and preventing certain destruction. In the
present circumstances, I'd say that the only thing
worth globalising is dissent. It's India's best export.