[Dryerase] Madison Insurgent - Nov/Dec articles - story #10

[the madison insurgent]

Radical and common sensical
Review of Power Politics, by Arundhati Roy
by Tracy McLellan

“What is happening to our world is almost too colossal
for human comprehension to contain. But it is a
terrible, terrible thing. To contemplate its girth and
circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and    
       fight it all at once, is impossible. The only
way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in
specific ways. A good place to begin would be the
Narmada Valley.” Thusly does Roy conclude the second
of three relatively short essays, which comprise Power
Politics. The Narmada Valley contains one of India’s
major rivers, on which a series of dams are being
built that have already displaced 30 million people.
It is in microcosm the flim-flam of “free-enterprise”
and “privatization,” with the appalling consequences
that have become typical of the corporate
multinationals, many of which, including Enron, are
familiar names. 
This is a short book, only 103 pages not counting the
notes and index, but it is chock full of
salt-of-the-earth ideas, and the passion of a powerful
writer. 
After the huge success of her novel, The God of Small
Things, Roy wrote three political essays that attacked
the shenanigans and malfeasance of “globalisation.”
She was thereafter marked as a trouble-maker and has
been hauled before the Indian Supreme Court twice on
specious charges. She was, in essence, exonerated the
first time. The judgment in the second was pending as
the current book went to press. She presents the
indictment of the second charge verbatim, which is an
exercise in gobbledygook, subterfuge, and venom; and
her response, full of fire and lightning. 
An example of the common sense of Roy’s writing, so
obvious and self-evident as to go unremarked in the
corporate and mainstream media: “When all the rivers
and valleys and hills of the world have been priced,
bar-coded, and stacked in the local supermarket, when
all the hay and coal and earth and wood and water have
been turned to gold, what then shall we do with the
gold? Make nuclear bombs to obliterate what’s left of
the ravaged landscapes and the national notions in our
ruined world?”
This book is a valuable insight into the processes of
globalisation at the most grassroots of levels, and
the corporate domination of the world’s wealth and
resources by the multinationals as they are shaping
India and the rest of the world. Roy’s focus is on her
own country. She witnesses and reports on events that
are easily extrapolated widely. She examines in detail
and with passion, artistry, and outrage, the political
events of the Narmada Valley Development Project. This
project plans to build 3,200 dams, many of them
already started or completed, that, according to Roy
“will alter the ecology of an entire river basin,
affect the lives of about twenty-five million people
who live in the valley, and submerge four thousand
square kilometers of old-growth, deciduous forest,
hundreds of temples, as well as archeological sites
dating back to the Lower Paleolithic Age.” The people
affected aren’t consulted.
Roy laments President Clinton’s visit to India in
March, 2000: “He was courted and fawned over by the
genuflecting representatives of this ancient
civilization with a fervor that can only be described
as indecent... The poor were herded away, and hidden
from the presidential gaze... In Delhi’s dirty sky,
vindicated nuclear hawks banked and whistled: Bill is
here because we have the Bomb.” During his visit
contracts worth 3-4 billion U.S. dollars were signed
and, under terms of “free trade,” import restrictions
were lifted on many basic commodities, many of which
India has in surfeit. Indeed, at the very time that
India was removing the import quota on wheat, in
effect so that American agribusiness could flood the
market, “forty-two million tons of grain were rotting
in (Indian) government storehouses.” Wouldn’t want to
let this tidy fact interfere with the profit-making of
the free enterprise system.
Roy’s book is a rare little gem which manages to say
more in 100 pages than most books do in many more.
Talking about her compatriots she says, “It is strange
to see ‘ordinary’ people march around in khaki shorts
and learn that amassing nuclear weapons, religious
bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, book burning, and
outright hatred are the ways in which to retrieve a
nation’s lost dignity...(to) see... how the two arms
of government work in synergy. How they have evolved
and pretty near perfected an extraordinary pincer
action – while one arm is busy selling the nation off
in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is
orchestrating a baying, howling, deranged chorus of
cultural nationalism... to actually see how the
inexorable ruthlessness of one process results in the
naked, vulgar terrorism perpetrated by the other.”
This book, by the way, was written and published
before the events of September 11th.
If I would have a criticism of this book, it is that
it is too short; and that, only because what she does
offer is so refreshing and forthright, not to speak of
absent from the mainstream. I read the book in an
hour-and-a-half. It is very gripping and enjoyable. It
is full of ideas, and the passion of an artist,
activist, democrat, and writer. 

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