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Arundhati Roy: India is colonizing itself

Tamar Shlaim18 October 2011

Arundhati Roy, interviewed for the Independent, speaks about the 'Maoist rebels' fighting India's internal colonization, and why their resistance is legitimate: 

Today India is going down the same path travelled centuries back by the European colonial powers: identifying sources of strategic minerals, driving off the people living on top of them, extracting the iron ore, the bauxite and so on, and using it to industrialise and grow rich. The difference is that India has no Australia or Latin America it can plunder. Instead, as Roy says, "It is colonising itself, turning upon its own poor to extract raw materials."

Centuries after the plunder of mineral resources began, some people living in countries like ours began to understand the horrors that had been committed along the way: the indigenous peoples massacred, their traditions erased, the survivors reduced to penury. But by then, remorse came cheap: the damage had been done, the great fortunes made.

But in India all this is happening now, in real time. As a result, remorse is far more expensive: if sincerely meant, it could really throw a spanner in the happiness machine...

"From being stigmatised as criminals" - squatters on state-owned land - "now [the adivasis] have become terrorists," she says, "just for staying in their villages and planting their crops. This is terrorist activity because they are with the Maoists. Anybody who is in the forest is with the Maoists."

When her essay about the trip, 'Walking with the Comrades', first appeared in India last year, Roy was fiercely criticised for humanising these rebels. For the Indian middle class, wedded to Gandhian ideas about non-violence, their adherence to the gun put them beyond the pale. But, says Roy, what other option did they have?

"I believe that Gandhian resistance is an extremely effective and moral form of political theatre, provided you have a sympathetic audience," she says. "But what happens when you are a tribal village in the heart of the forest, miles away from anywhere? When the police surround your village, are you going to sit on a hunger strike? Can the hungry go on hunger strike?"..

"The country that I live in is becoming more and more repressive, more and more of a police state.... India is hardening as a state. It has to continue to give the impression of being a messy, cuddly democracy but actually what's going on outside the arc lights is really desperate."

Visit the Independent to read the full interview. 

Arundhati Roy is a contributor to Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out in November. 

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