Capitalism: A Ghost Story

  Meanwhile the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag-waving of Anna’s Revolution are all borrowed from the antireservation protests, the World Cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not “true Indians.” The twenty-four-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.

  “The Fast” of course doesn’t mean Irom Sharmila’s fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she’s being force-fed now) against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. “The People” does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila’s fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagat­singhpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in the New Okhla Industrial Development Area (NOIDA), or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.

  “The People” means only the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a seventy-four-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. “The People” are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, as Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we’re told. “India is Anna.”

  Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough, we’ve heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer’s suicides in his neighborhood, or about Operation Green Hunt farther away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmers’ agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn’t seem to have a view about the government’s plans to deploy the Indian army in the forests of Central India.

  He does, however, support Raj Thackeray’s Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the “development model” of Gujarat’s chief minister, who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)3

  Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the backstory about Anna’s old relationship with the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).4 We have heard from Mukul Sharma, who has studied Anna’s village community in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or cooperative society elections in the last twenty-five years. We know about Anna’s attitude to “harijans”: “It was Mahatma Gandhi’s vision that every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this way, a village will be self-dependent. This is what we are practicing in Ralegan Siddhi.”5 Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the antireservation (pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years.6 Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), run real estate businesses, and are closely connected to politicians who oversee financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic?

  Remember, the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wiki­leaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced, and it seemed as if some major captains of Corporate India could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people’s anticorruption agitation. Or was it?

  At a time when the state is withdrawing from its traditional duties and corporations and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply, electricity, transport, telecommunications, mining, health, education); at a time when the corporate-owned media with its terrifying power and reach is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions—the corporations, the media, and the NGOs—would be included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them out completely.

  Now, by shouting louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonizing only the government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for the further withdrawal of the state from the public sphere and for a second round of reforms—more privatization, more access to public infrastructure and India’s natural resources. It may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.

  Will the 830 million people living on twenty rupees a day really benefit from the strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and driving this country to civil war?

  This awful crisis has been forged out of the utter failure of India’s representative democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We’re watching India being carved up in war for suze­rainty that is as deadly as any battle being waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at stake.

  Chapter 3

  DEAD MEN TALKING

  On September 23, 2011, at about three o’clock in the morning, within hours of his arrival at the Delhi airport, the US radio-journalist David Barsamian was deported.1 This dangerous man, who produces independent, free-to-air programs for public radio, has been visiting India for forty years, doing dangerous things like learning Urdu and playing the sitar. He has published book-length interviews with Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ejaz Ahmed, and Tariq Ali. (He even makes an appearance as a young, bell-bottom-wearing interviewer in Peter Wintonik’s documentary film based on Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent.) On his more recent trips to India he has done a series of radio interviews with activists, academics, filmmakers, journalists, and writers (including me). Barsamian’s work has taken him to Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Pakistan. He has never been deported from any of these countries.

  So why does the world’s largest democracy fear this lone sitar-playing, Urdu-speaking, left-leaning radio producer? Here is how Barsamian himself explains it: “It’s all about Kashmir. I’ve done work on Jharkand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Narmada dams, farmer suicides, the Gujarat pogrom, and the Binayak Sen case. But it’s Kashmir that is at the heart of the Indian state’s concerns. The official narrative must not be contested.”

  News reports about his deportation quoted official “sources” as saying that Barsamian had “violated his visa norms during his visit in 2009–10 by indulging in professional work while holding a tourist visa.”2 Visa norms in India are an interesting peephole into the government’s concerns and predilections. Taking cover under the shabby old banner of the War on Terror, the Home Ministry has decreed that scholars and academics invited for conferences or seminars require security clearance before they will be given visas. Corporate executives and businessmen do not. So somebody who wants to invest in a dam or build a steel plant or a buy a bauxite mi
ne is not considered a security hazard, whereas a scholar who might wish to participate in a seminar about, say, displacement or communalism, or rising malnutrition in a globalized economy, is. Foreign terrorists with bad intentions have probably guessed by now that they are better off wearing Prada suits and pretending they want to buy a mine than wearing old corduroys and saying they want to attend a seminar. (Some would argue that mine buyers in Prada suits are the real terrorists.)

  David Barsamian did not travel to India to buy a mine or to attend a conference. He just came to talk to people. The complaint against him, according to “official sources,” is that he had reported on events in Jammu and Kashmir during his last visit to India and that these reports were “not based on facts.” Remember, Barsamian is not a reporter, but a journalist who does long-format radio interviews with people, mostly dissidents, about the societies in which they live. Is it illegal for tourists to talk to people in the countries they visit? Would it be illegal for me to travel to the United States or Europe and write about the people I met, even if my writing was “not based on facts”? Who decides which “facts” are correct and which are not? Would Barsamian have been deported if the conversations he recorded had been in praise of the impressive turnouts in Kashmir’s elections, instead of about what life is like in the densest military occupation in the world? (Six hundred thousand actively deployed armed personnel for a population of ten million people.)3 Or if they had been about the army’s rescue operations in the 2005 earthquake instead of about the massive unarmed uprisings that took place in three consecutive summers? (And which received no round-the-clock media attention, and no one thought to call “the Kashmir Spring.”)

  David Barsamian is not the first person to be deported over the Indian government’s sensitivities over Kashmir. Professor Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist from San Francisco, was deported from Delhi airport in November 2010 without being given any reason. Most of us believe it was the government’s way of punishing his partner Angana Chatterji, a co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, which first brought international attention to the existence of unmarked mass graves in Kashmir.4 Earlier this year, on May 28, the outspoken Indian democratic rights activist Gautam Navlakha was deported to Delhi from Srinagar airport. (Farook Abdullah, the former chief minister of Kashmir, justified the deportation, saying that writers like Gautam Navlakha and me had no business entering Kashmir, because “Kashmir is not for burning”—whatever that means.5) Kashmir is in the process of being isolated, cut off from the outside world, by two concentric rings of border patrols—in Delhi as well as Srinagar—as though it were already a free country with its own visa regime. Within its borders, of course, it’s open season for the government and the army. The art of controlling Kashmiri journalists and ordinary people with a deadly combination of bribes, threats, blackmail, and a whole spectrum of unutterable, carefully crafted cruelties has evolved into an art form.

  While the government goes about trying to silence the living, the dead have begun to speak up. It was insensitive of Barsamian to plan a trip to Kashmir just when the State Human Rights Commission was finally shamed into officially acknowledging the existence of twenty-seven hundred unmarked graves from three districts in Kashmir. Reports of thousands of other graves are pouring in from other districts. It is insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the government of India just when India’s record is due for review before the UN Human Rights Council.

  Apart from Dangerous David, who else is the world’s largest democracy afraid of? There’s young Lingaram Kodopi, an Adivasi from Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, who was arrested on September 9, 2011.6 The police say they caught him red-handed in a marketplace while he was handing over protection money from Essar, an iron-ore mining company, to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). His aunt Soni Sori says that he was picked up by plainclothes policemen in a white Bolero from his grandfather’s house in Palnar village. Now she’s on the run too.7 Interestingly, even by their own account, the police arrested Lingaram but allowed the Maoists to escape. This is only the latest in a series of bizarre, almost hallucinatory accusations they have made against Lingaram and then withdrawn. His real crime is that he is the only journalist who speaks Gondi, the local language, and who knows how to negotiate the remote forest paths in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, the other war zone in India from which no news must come.

  Having signed over vast tracts of indigenous tribal homelands in Central India to multinational mining and infrastructure corporations in a series of secret memorandums of understanding—in complete contravention of the law as well as the Constitution—the government has begun to flood the forests with hundreds of thousands of security forces. All resistance, armed as well as unarmed, has been branded “Maoist.” (In Kashmir the preferred phrase is “jihadi elements.”) As the civil war grows deadlier, hundreds of villages have been burned to the ground. Thousands of Adivasis have fled as refugees into neighboring states. Hundreds of thousands are living terrified lives hiding in the forests. Paramilitary forces have laid siege to the forest. A network of police informers patrols village bazaars, making trips for essential provisions and medicines a nightmare for villagers. Untold numbers of nameless people are in jail, charged with sedition and waging war on the state, with no lawyers to defend them. Very little news comes out of those forests, and there are no body counts.

  So it’s not hard to see why young Lingaram Kodopi poses such a threat. Before he trained to become a journalist, he was a driver in Dantewada. In 2009 the police arrested him and confiscated his jeep. For forty days he was locked up in a small toilet, where he was pressured to become a special police officer (SPO) in the Salwa Judum, the government-sponsored vigilante army that was at the time tasked with forcing people to flee from their villages. (The Salwa Judum has since been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.8) The police released Lingaram after the Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar filed a habeas corpus petition in court.9 But then the police arrested Lingaram’s old father and five other members of his family. They attacked his village and warned villagers not to shelter him. Eventually Lingaram escaped to Delhi, where friends and well-wishers got him admission into a journalism school. In April 2010 he traveled to Dantewada and escorted to Delhi the witnesses and victims of the barbarity of the Salwa Judum, the police and paramilitary forces enabling them to give testimony at the Independent People’s Tribunal. (In his own testimony Lingaram was sharply critical of the Maoists as well.10)

  That did not deter the Chhattisgarh police. On July 2, 2010, the senior Maoist leader Comrade Azad, official spokesperson for the Maoist Party, was captured and executed by the Andhra Pradesh police.11 Deputy Inspector General Kalluri of the Chhattisgarh police announced at a press conference that Lingaram Kodopi had been elected by the Maoist Party to take over Comrade Azad’s role. (It was like accusing a young schoolchild in 1936 Yenan of being Zhou En Lai.) The charge was met with such derision that the police had to withdraw it.12 They had also accused Lingaram of being the mastermind of a Maoist attack on a Congress legislator in Dantewada. But perhaps because they had already made themselves look so foolish and vindictive, they decided to bide their time.

  Lingaram remained in Delhi, completed his course, and received his diploma in journalism. In March 2011 paramilitary forces burned down three villages in Dantewada—Tadmetla, Timmapuram, and Morapalli.13 The Chhattisgarh government blamed the Maoists. The Supreme Court assigned the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Lingaram returned to Dantewada with a video camera and trekked from village to village documenting firsthand testimonies of the villagers, who indicted the police. (You can see some of these on YouTube.)14 By doing this he made himself one of the most wanted men in Dantewada. On September 9, the police finally got to him.

  Lingaram has joined an impressive lineup of troublesome news gatherers and disseminators in Chhattisgarh. Among the earliest to be silenced was the celebrated doctor Binayak Sen, who fir
st raised the alarm about the crimes of the Salwa Judum as far back as 2005. He was arrested in 2007, accused of being a Maoist, and sentenced to life imprisonment. After years in prison, he is out on bail now.15 Several people followed Binayak Sen into prison—including Piyush Guha and the filmmaker Ajay T.G.16 Both have been accused of being Maoists. These arrests put a chill into the activists’ community in Chhattisgarh but didn’t stop some of them from continuing to do what they were doing. Kopa Kunjam worked with Himanshu Kumar’s Vansvasi Chetna Ashram, doing exactly what Lingaram tried to do much later—traveling to remote villages, bringing out the news, and carefully documenting the horror that was unfolding. (He was my first guide into the forest villages of Dantewada.) Much of this documentation has made its way into legal cases that are proving to be a source of worry and discomfort to the Chhattisgarh government. In May 2009 the Vansvasi Chetna Ashram, the last neutral shelter for journalists, writers, and academics who were traveling to Dantewada, was demolished by the Chhattisgarh government.17 In December 2009, on Human Rights Day, Kopa was arrested. He was accused of colluding with the Maoists in the murder of one man and the kidnapping of another.

  The case against Kopa has begun to fall apart as the police witnesses, including the man who was kidnapped, have disowned the statements they purportedly made to the police.18 It doesn’t really matter, because in India we all know the process is the punishment. It will take years for Kopa to establish his innocence, by which time the administration hopes the arrest will have served its purpose. Many villagers who were encouraged by Kopa to file complaints against the police have been arrested too. Some are in jail. Others have been made to live in roadside camps manned by special police officers (SPOs). That includes many women who committed the crime of being raped. Soon after Kopa’s arrest Himanshu Kumar was hounded out of Dantewada. In September 2010 another Adivasi activist, Kartam Joga, was arrested. His offense was to have filed a petition in the Supreme Court in 2007 about the rampant human rights abuses committed by the Salwa Judum. He is being accused of colluding with the Maoists in the April 2010 killing of seventy-six Central Reserve Police personnel in Tadmetla. Kartam Joga is a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), which has a tense, if not hostile, relationship with the Maoists. Amnesty International has named him a prisoner of conscience.19