Global Policy Forum

by Nashen Moodley

Arundhati Roy laughs a lot. Sometimes she laughs because she says something that's very funny. But mostly she laughs at the lunacies that she encounters as she exposes injustice, corruption and the eradication of human rights, both in her native India and further afield. Sometimes you feel that she's laughing because the only alternative would be to cry, at others because some of the reactions of government, some of the atrocities that are committed, really do have a twisted humour to them.

Even though she talks about very serious issues like corporate globalization, nuclear weapons, the rise of fascism, censorship, her own battle with the courts, the war on terror, Roy retains her sense of humour while articulating her views clearly and passionately. In her writing too, Roy wittily and lucidly eviscerates global capital, governments that lie to and betray people, and the religiously intolerant but, uniquely, also makes them utterly personal, incorporating her notions of fame, celebrity, friendship, love and self.

In The End Of Imagination - the first of her essays after the massive international success of her Booker Prize-winning novel The God Of Small Things - she wrote after India and Pakistan both engaged in nuclear testing: " My world has died and I write to mourn its passing. Forgive me, I realise that sentimentality is uncool - but what shall I do with my desolation."

Her mourning soon turned into articulate anger and her essays - which have also taken on the mythology surrounding big dams, the corrupting influence of global capital, the war on terror and India's growing fascination with a strong relationship with America - have been widely read and extremely influential, earning her both respect and enmity, and together form a diverse politics of opposition.

The first question I ask Roy is what the major crises facing humanity today are, and she says: "Normally I would not answer a question like that. I would say 'ask Miss Universe'. But I think that in these times there is a very clear answer to that question: there is a definite, distinct and terrible link between three things in the world today, the link between the so-called war against terrorism and the project of corporate globalization, and the rise of nationalism and religious fascism.

"These things are what are defining the skeleton structure of the 21st century and we have to understand what those connections are and work towards realigning the world."

Roy's essays make the link between the war on terror, corporate globalization and the rise in religious fundamentalism quite apparent. A hypothetical example would have a multinational spread around a bit of money amongst the political elite thereby securing a huge deal to produce vastly over-priced electricity, say.

A population made paranoid by right-wing leaders insisting that people of a different religion are going to steal their jobs, women, land, places of worship, etc, are sufficiently distracted to ignore the unholy alliance between their government and multinationals. And as for those who are astute enough to see the deception, well, they must be terrorists and can easily be crushed, marginalised or silenced in the war against terror.

"The interesting thing is that it all started before September 11" says Roy, "which is why I am trying to tell you that there is a very deep link between this whole business of terrorism and corporate globalization. It's just that September 11 gave them legitimacy to just do it in the most brutal, open manner possible under the flag of the war against terror."

Roy sees South Africa at a very similar, and susceptible, economic stage to India and sees the warning signs, like the privatization of infrastructure.

She says: "South Africa, in a really strange way, between apartheid and today, has in these nine years compressed what has happened to India in 56 years. We had independence in 1947 and now there is this business of neo-liberalism. You had the end of apartheid and almost straightaway switched into neo-liberalism, so it's almost like a fast-forward version, almost like a comic book version of what happened in India. But we are at the same stage right now, except that it is much harder for people here (in South Africa) because they fought for this so recently and are now watching people betray them so quickly."

I ask her why people who were heroes, who fought for freedom, betray people when they come into power.

"It's the nature of power," she answers. "It has nothing to do with the people as such. It's in the nature of what it means to be in power. Some people are less corrupt, some people are more corrupt, some are not corrupt, but the idea of feeling that you are responsible for this mass of lower beings is a corrupting process."

It is a mistake, Roy argues, to give governments credit for what rightfully belongs to the people, like freedom and democracy.

She says: "It is very important to understand that if you align yourself with civil society you have to understand that a government is your enemy whatever that government is, because it is no government that ever gives you your freedom; these are freedoms that you fight for... In the same way, if you allow the ANC or any government to amass credit for itself, for the freedoms or the democracy, then it is the end. You have to understand that it is you who fought for freedom, not any party; it's the people who fought."

Our conversation moves to the impending war on Iraq and I ask Roy if we should fear America. "Yes," she says emphatically. "One of the things that this whole movement has done, our part of the movement, is to lay siege to empire and to strip it of its mask, to make it drop its clothes, to make it appear before us in all its nakedness and it can't look its own people in the eye.

"So when it goes to war, if it goes to war, it is an act of such naked aggression it hasn't got that halo around its head. American history is street talk now; everybody knows what's going on. It's a very dangerous stage to be in because we've got a maddened king who can't stop, which is why we must fear it because all empires rise and fall and have done so in history... but none of them had nuclear weapons."

But, says Roy, with or without war, there is a space for every person and not just activists to take on the superpowers, the corporate giants, governments and the powerful.

It isn't incumbent on those in opposition to find a "super, single alternative" to corporate globalization?

She says: "The point is that we don't want to be put into a straitjacket; we want a million alternatives and we want those alternatives to change like mercury, to adjust to the environment, the situations, the culture, to be open. We don't want to slice through the world with a sharp blade like corporate globalization is doing. We want the opposite, we want the right to think, to be confused, to be ambiguous, to say that this isn't working so get out."

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