AGAIN, ON perhaps widening the definition of terror, what does it mean when more than 270,000 Indian farmers commit suicide because of their financial destitution? Incidentally, that figure is considered conservative. It is probably much more than that. Or the hundreds of thousands of Indian children who, for lack of water and food, die? ARUNTHTHI ROY:: THE FARMER suicides. I really think that the establishment rather admires farmers who commit suicide, because, after all, they’re not suicide bombers, they’re just quietly killing themselves. And then their families have to go around begging to be entered in the list of farmers. And the definition of who is a farmer and who isn’t helps you get compensation or not. So 270,000, as you say, is a conservative estimate, because lots of people are just told that they are not farmers. A lot of women, for example, would not be included in that list, even though they are farmers and were trying to keep their families going. But to understand what’s going on in India, you need to approach it from so many different angles. We are a society that has institutionalized inequality through caste. And I increasingly think that you can’t understand India until you understand caste, when you understand that there are these sealed communities that then don’t necessarily feel sorry for or remorse over something that happens somewhere else. I’m not saying that the farmers that killed themselves are lower caste. They’re not. They’re all mostly small farmers who were really trying to get into the big league and then fell off the truck. What I’m saying is, why does not something like this cause anguish? Why doesn’t it cause a scandal? It doesn’t. In fact, even today politicians are continuing with irrigation scams and fertilizer scams and every kind of scam in those areas where these suicides are happening. There is a curious hardness that has set in. I’ve been writing about displacement and all of this for so long. Increasingly I hear the middle classes saying, “India is poised to become one of the most powerful countries in the world. Every country that has become powerful has ‘a past.’ We can’t”—when I say “we” now, I am talking about this class of people that has fused itself with the idea of the nation. “We can’t progress unless somebody pays the price. And it can’t be all sort of touchy-feely and human rights and sympathetic. Something has to give.” People openly talk about that, that this is the way it has been in the past and this is the way it has to be now. So you hear these ugly statements. You hear people on TV trying to provoke war with Pakistan, openly talking about nuclear war, openly talking about the fact that the leading candidate now for the next prime minister in India is Narendra Modi. But the fact that he was the chief minister that presided over the massacre of thousands of Muslims in the most brutal way in Gujarat, they just say, “Forget about it.” So even people like us, who are political and who are writing politically, need to understand that evoking people’s sympathy, describing horror, describing terrible things, it isn’t necessarily reaching that moral listening space that you imagine exists. Yet, you have to be doing it. You have to keep doing it. You have to keep your foot on the pedal. But we also have to understand that we are up against something very, very ugly now, which is going to become more and more ugly in this next year as we run up to the next election, because what has happened is that the Indian shining economy, the people who are sitting in the aircraft ready for takeoff, that exhilaration they felt has turned into panic now, because the economy is not moving at the pace they expected it to. And that panic is creating a lot of ugliness. It takes different forms and different ways, but you can see the violence and the anger in those same middle-class people that were so happy a few years ago. That violence, that anger, that impatience the political parties don’t know how to deal with, because it’s new. They are trying to push it back into the old spaces that everybody knows and recognizes—communal strife or a war with Pakistan or some provocation in Kashmir—because they know how to make those moves. Whereas this new middle class is aggressive, it knows that it can get media attention, and it’s attacking the old idea of politics itself. isreview.org/issue/90/corporate-power-women-and-resistance-india-today
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 05:13:15 +0000
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