{"id":23542,"date":"2023-04-11T14:53:13","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T14:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=23542"},"modified":"2023-09-30T18:18:51","modified_gmt":"2023-09-30T18:18:51","slug":"arundhati-roy-on-things-that-can-and-cannot-be-said-the-dismantling-of-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2023\/04\/11\/arundhati-roy-on-things-that-can-and-cannot-be-said-the-dismantling-of-the-world-as-we-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Arundhati Roy on things that can and cannot be said: The dismantling of the world as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are reposting the Stuart Hall memorial lecture, first posted on thewire<\/a>, given by Arundhati Roy last September. She is author of \u00a0Azadi – Fascism, Fiction and Freedom in the Time of the Virus<\/em>, outlining the ongoing fascistisation of India under Modi. In Arundhati’s lecture, she locates this process in a global context. Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity, says the acclaimed writer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ARUNDHATI ROY ON THINGS THAT CAN BE SAID AND THINGS THAT CANNOT: THE DISMANTLING OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From left to right: Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Arundhati Roy, Narendra Modi and Teesta Setalvad. Photos: Reuters, PTI.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today in memory of Stuart Hall.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been trying to make this happen for what seems like years. I will never ever again take for granted the pleasure of being in a room together with so many fellow human beings. The pandemic has faded somewhat, but many of us are still struggling to get the measure of the trauma it has left in its wake. I can hardly believe that I never met Stuart. But reading his work makes me feel we would have spent a lot of time laughing together about things.<\/p>\n

The main title of this lecture,\u00a0Things That Can and Cannot Be Said,<\/em>\u00a0is the title of a little book I wrote along with the actor John Cusack. It was about a trip that he and I made to Russia in December, 2013 to meet Edward Snowden in Moscow. Our other companion was Daniel Ellsberg \u2013 for those of you who are too young to remember, he was the Snowden of his time; the whistleblower who made public the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war.<\/p>\n

Snowden, who warned us years ago that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state, continues to live in exile in Moscow. And we have tumbled enthusiastically into the surveillance state he warned about, with our little phone-companions that have become as intimate and as indispensable as any vital organ in our bodies, spying on us, recording and transmitting our most personal information so that we can be tracked, controlled, standardised and domesticated. Not just by the state, but by each other too.<\/p>\n

Imagine if your liver, or your gall bladder didn\u2019t have your best interests at heart, your doctor would tell you that you are terminally ill. That\u2019s the sort of bind we find ourselves in. We can\u2019t do without it, but it\u2019s doing us in.<\/p>\n

The first section of my talk will be about things that can and cannot be said. The second, about the dismantling of the world as we knew it.<\/p>\n

This has been a bad year for those who have said and done Things That Cannot Be Said. Or Done. In Iran, 22-year-old\u00a0Mahsa Amini was killed while she was in the custody<\/a>\u00a0of Iran\u2019s moral police for the sin of not wearing her headscarf in the way that is officially mandated. In the protests that followed and are ongoing, several people have been killed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in India, in the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim schoolgirls who wanted to assert their identity as Muslim women in their classrooms by wearing hijabs were\u00a0physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men<\/a>. This in a place where Hindus and Muslims have lived together for centuries but have recently become dangerously polarised.<\/p>\n

Both instances \u2013 strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries \u2013 may appear to be antagonistic, but they aren\u2019t really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isn\u2019t about the hijab. It\u2019s about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women.<\/p>\n

In August,\u00a0Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked in upstate New York<\/a>\u00a0by an Islamist zealot for his book,\u00a0The Satanic Verses;<\/em>\u00a0a book that was first published in 1988. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution and the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued an edict calling for Rushdie\u2019s death. All these years later, just when it had begun to seem that the anger and passions his book aroused had abated and Rushdie gradually came out of hiding, came the attack.<\/p>\n

After the initial news of the 75-year-old Rushdie having survived the attack and being in good cheer, there is no news at all. One can only hope that he is recovering and will return to the world of literature with all his powers intact. Heads of state in Europe and the US have come out robustly in Rushdie\u2019s support, some saying, a little self-servingly, \u201cHis fight is our fight\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Julian Assange, who published and exposed some of the more terrible war crimes committed by soldiers of those countries, wars in which hundreds of thousands died, is in terrible health and remains locked up in Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US, where he may face a death sentence or several life sentences.<\/p>\n

So, we must pause before casting this horrifying attack on Rushdie in cliched terms such as a \u2018Clash of Civilisations\u2019 or \u2018Democracy versus Darkness\u2019. Because millions have been killed in invasions led by these so-called free-speech evangelists, and among those, millions have been writers, poets and artists, too.<\/p>\n

As for the news from India, in June, Nupur Sharma, spokesperson of the BJP, India\u2019s ruling Hindu nationalist party, once a permanent, bullying presence on TV talk shows, made several\u00a0intemperate comments against Prophet Mohammed<\/a>\u00a0in a provocative performance whose very purpose appeared to be to cause offence. There was an international uproar, and several death threats later, she has retreated from public life. But two Hindu men who supported her comments were brutally beheaded. In the days that followed, throngs of Muslim zealots have gathered to chant \u201ctan se sar juda<\/em>\u201d (separate the head from the body) and call for the state to pass a blasphemy law. It doesn\u2019t seem to occur to them that nothing would make the state happier.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not the only ones who conflate censorship and assassination. Earlier this month I was in Bangalore to speak on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of my friend Gauri Lankesh, the journalist who was\u00a0shot down outside her home by Hindu fanatics<\/a>. Hers was one in a series of assassinations that appear to be connected to the same shadowy group: Dr Narendra Dabholkar, the physician and well-known rationalist thinker,\u00a0was shot in 2013;<\/a>\u00a0comrade Govind Pansare, a writer and member of the Communist Party of India, was\u00a0shot in February 2015<\/a>, and the Kannada scholar\u00a0professor M.M. Kalburgi in August that same year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Assassination is of course, not the only form of censorship we experience. In the year 2022, India ranks\u00a0150th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index<\/a>, below Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. We are policed not just by the government, but by mobs on the streets, by social media trolls and, ironically, by the media itself.<\/p>\n

On the hundreds of 24\u00d77 TV news channels we often refer to as \u2018Radio Rwanda\u2019, our baying TV anchors rage against Muslims and \u201canti-nationals\u201d, call for dissenters to be arrested, sacked, punished. They have ruined lives and reputations with absolute impunity and no accountability. Activists, poets, intellectuals, lawyers and students are being arrested almost every day. As for Kashmir \u2013 the Valley from which No News Can Come\u2013 it is a giant prison. Soon there could be more soldiers there than citizens.<\/p>\n

Every communication by Kashmiris, private as well as public, even the very rhythm of their breathing, is supervised. In schools, under the guise of learning to love Gandhi, Muslim children are being taught to sing Hindu\u00a0bhajans<\/em>. When I think of Kashmir these days, for some reason I think of how, in some parts of the world, watermelons are being trained to grow in square moulds so that they are cube-shaped and easier to stack. In the Kashmir valley, it looks as though the Indian government is running that experiment on humans instead of melons. At gun-point.<\/p>\n

Down in the Gangetic plains \u2013 the cow belt \u2013 of North India, mobs of sword-wielding Hindus led by godmen, who the media for some reason calls \u201cseers\u201d, call for the\u00a0genocide of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women<\/a>\u00a0with complete impunity.<\/p>\n

We have witnessed daylight lynchings, and the genocidal killing of more than a thousand Muslims (non-government figures put that number at closer to two thousand) in Gujarat in 2002 and in hundreds in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 2013. Not surprisingly, both massacres took place just before crucial elections.<\/p>\n

We have watched the man under whose chief ministership the Gujarat massacre took place, Narendra Modi, consolidate his position as\u00a0Hindu Hriday Samrat (<\/em>the Emperor of Hindu Hearts) and rise to assume the highest office in the country. He has never expressed regret or apologised for what happened. We have watched him continue to amass political capital from his dangerous, sneering anti-Muslim rhetoric. We have watched the highest court in the land absolve him of all responsibility, legal as well as moral. We have watched, nauseated, as leaders of the so-called Free World embrace him as a statesman and a democrat.<\/p>\n

Last month, India celebrated the 75th\u00a0anniversary of independence from British Rule. From his elevated lectern in the Red Fort in Delhi, Modi thundered about his dream of empowering women in India. He spoke with passion, clenched his fist. He wore a turban flecked with the colours of the national flag.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves at the audience during the 75th Independence Day function at the historic Red Fort, in New Delhi, Sunday, August 15, 2021. (PTI Photo\/Kamal Singh) (PTI08_15_2021_000025B)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Empowering women in a society built on the Hindu caste system where privileged-caste men have for centuries exercised what they believe to be their ordained right to the bodies of Dalit and Adivasi women, is not a matter of policy alone. It\u2019s about a socialisation, and a belief system.<\/p>\n

There is a rising graph of crimes against women in India, putting it on the map of amongst the most unsafe places in the world for women. It surprises no one these days to see how often the criminals belong to or are related to members of the current ruling dispensation. In such cases, we have seen public rallies in favour of rapists. In the most recent case in which a 19-year-old girl was raped and murdered, a local leader blamed her father for\u00a0\u201cspreading raw milk before hungry cats.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Even as Modi was delivering his Independence Day speech, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state of Gujarat announced special amnesty for\u00a011 men who were serving life-sentences for the 2002 gang rape of 19-year-old Bilkis Bano<\/a>\u00a0and the murder of 14 members of her family, including her mother, her sisters, her baby brothers, her aunts, her uncle, her cousins, her cousin\u2019s one-day-old infant, and Saleha, Bilkis\u2019s three-year-old daughter, whose head was smashed against a rock.<\/p>\n

This grisly crime, only one of several similar ones, was a part of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom I mentioned earlier. The panel that approved their release had several members from the BJP, one of them an elected legislator who went on record later to say that, since some of the convicts were Brahmins with \u2018good sanskar\u2019 (good upbringing), it was unlikely they were guilty at all.<\/p>\n

In cases investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as this one was, it is legally mandated that any decision to give convicts amnesty has to be approved by the Central government, which is of course the government of Narendra Modi. So, we must assume that that permission was given.<\/p>\n

When the convicts came out, they were greeted outside the prison walls as heroes \u2013 they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets and had their feet touched \u2013 by members of Hindu groups loosely affiliated to the BJP (the \u2018looseness\u2019 is to provide what is called plausible deniability) that make up the \u2018Sangh Parivar\u2019, the Joined Family. In a few months\u2019 time, Gujarat goes to the polls.<\/p>\n

In India, strange things happen just before our free and fair elections. It\u2019s always the most dangerous time.<\/p>\n

As the rapist-mass murderers return to take their place as respected members of society, Teesta Setalvad, the activist whose organisation, Citizens for Justice and Peace, has meticulously compiled a tower of documentary evidence that points to the complicity of the Gujarat government in general and Narendra Modi in particular with the 2002 massacre, was\u00a0arrested<\/a>, accused of forgery, tutoring witnesses and attempting to keep \u2018the pot boiling\u2019.<\/p>\n

These are the conditions in which we live and work. And say the things that cannot be said. In speech, as in everything else, the law is applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. A Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity.<\/p>\n

In India as in other countries, the weaponisation of identity, in which identity is disaggregated and atomised into micro-categories, has turned the air itself into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. Even these micro-identities have developed a power hierarchy. In his book\u00a0Elite Capture<\/em><\/a>, the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo describes how certain individuals then become elevated from among these groups, individuals usually located in powerful countries, in big cities, in big universities, those with social capital on the internet, and then are given platforms by foundations, by media, by corporations to speak for and decide on behalf of the rest of their communities.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an understandable response to historic pain and humiliation. But it\u2019s not a revolutionary response. Micro-Elite Capture cannot be the only answer to Macro-Elite Capture. As some empirical research has shown, when we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, it is the Right that benefits disproportionately. A recent study by PEN America of banned school textbooks shows that the overwhelming majority of proscribed textbooks contain progressive texts on gender and race.<\/p>\n

Sealing in communities, reducing and flattening their identities into silos can be perilous and precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the caste system in India \u2013 divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable silos, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict. It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative\/surveillance machine in which society administers\/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom (and these categories are minutely graded too) is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.<\/p>\n

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy \u2013 imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as \u201ccrones.\u201d By his standards, I\u2019d qualify as a crone for sure. But I\u2019d still like people to read him. It goes without saying that by these standards, every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.<\/p>\n

Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine. It should be challenged, debated, argued about, corrected. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.<\/p>\n