[Reader-list] Reading Roy by Nadeem Paracha(in Dawn)

Fri Aug 28 13:35:52 IST 2009

In continuation of the idea of the starters block jalfarezi:

Nadeem Paracha says:

What Roy seems not to realize (or clearly own up to), is the fact that
the New Right (‘neo-cons,’ etc.) and, for instance, it’s reaction,
‘Islamist terrorism,’ are actually two sides of the same coin.

He might find the following quote useful:

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama
bin Laden?
He's America's family secret. He is the American President's dark
doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and
civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to
waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear
arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full spectrum dominance," its
chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military
interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its
merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of
poor countries like a cloud of locusts, its marauding multinationals
that are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the
water we drink, the thoughts we think.
Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring
into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns,
bombs, money, and drugs have been going around in the loop for a
while. Now they've even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each
refers to the other as "the head of the snake." Both invoke God and
use the loose millenarian currency of Good and Evil as their terms of
reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are
dangerously armed-one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely
powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the
utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the
axe.
The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable
alternative to the other.
President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world-"Either you are
with us or you are with the terrorists"-is a piece of presumptuous
arrogance.
It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

This is from an essay called 'the Algebra of Infinite Justice' by Arundhati Roy.

Best

Sanjay Kak
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: rashneek kher <rashneek at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Reading Roy by Nadeem Paracha(in Dawn)
To: Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>
Cc: Sarai Reader List <reader-list at sarai.net>

Dear Shuddha,

I cant claim to know either Nadeem or Arundhati but through their writings.
While both them and us are entitled to our opinions I dont agree with your
"class betrayer" theory.I think most supposedly intellectuals in India today
are not really afraid to bare their fangs( or speak out their minds).Infact
sometimes most in the class that you are probably referrring to walk that
extra mile to prove their point.For every SuheL Sheth or a Tavleen Singh
arent there people like Shabana Azmi or a Sagarika Ghose.
So it isnt class thing in my opinion.
Well when we are in domain of public discourse we are bound to have both
sides of the opinion and I believe that would true of anyone including
Arundhati Roy.

Regards

Rashneek

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta
<shuddha at sarai.net>wrote:

> Dear Rashneek,
> Thank you for forwarding Nadeem Paracha's article from Dawn. I find it very
> revealing.
>
> Unlike Roy, who always, and invariably, (for those who actually bother to
> read her and not roll their eyes over every time she appears in print)
>  bothers to buttress her judgements in her political essays (which Paracha
> is well within his rights to call prejudices) with evidence and citation, I
> find, that Paracha, does not actually cite a single statement or fragment of
> writing by Roy. All he offers us is opinion. First he argues that Roy is
> guilty of providing fodder to  'right wing claptrap' and Islamists say. Then
> he says that she is guilty of  add an "anti-Islamist (particularly
> anti-Taliban), angle to her on-going narrative concerning India, Pakistan
> and the United States". So to Paracha, she is guilty of being both
> anti-Capitalism and anti-Taliban at the same time, how nice and convenient
> it would have been for the simple world of our baba-log, if she was one
> without being the other. At least then they would know which box to put her
> (and others like her) in.
>
> (How terribly inconvenient that Chomsky is Jewish and Anti-Zionist. Why
> can't opposition to the policies of the State of Israel come in nicely
> drycleaned anti-semitic clothes. How terrible it is that many of the people,
> myself included, who oppose the occupation by India of Kashmir are also
> implacably opposed to Islamist ideologies of all kinds, and to the feudal
> aristocracy that rules Pakistan. How nice it would be, if we were good
> Taliban boys, or at least like most members of the Pakistani ruling elite,
> good old fashioned alchoholic Jihadis)
>
> But coming back to the anti-Roy invective by Nadeem Paracha, I find it
> surprising that none of it, not one sentence , as I have said before, is
> said with a shred of evidence from within the easily available corpus of
> Roy's writing and public utterances. Quoting the dubious opinion of the
> newspaper called the HIndu, of all things to buttress an argument is not a
> sign of having done one's homework.
>
> Basically, It is, I think, intellectually disingenuous to accuse of being
> something (soft on Islamists) , and then being its opposite (anti-islamist)
> , at the same time, and not bother to provide grounds for either of the
> accusations.
>
> The disdain and animosity for Roy which animates the salons of Delhi and
> Islamabad alike has something to do, in my opinion, with the idea that she
> is somehow a 'class betrayer' to significant sections of the Indian and
> Pakistani elite. A 'person like us' (although she never was a 'person like
> them') whom the Suhel Seths, Tavleen Singhs and Nadeem Parachas of the world
> would have ideally liked to have kept as their little pet novelist, but who
> had the temerity to bare her fangs at them and expose their shallow and
> gilded world for what it was.  Somehow, they can't live that down.
>
> In Pakistan, they have done it many times, they did it to Faiz, who was
> imprisoned and exiled, and to many others. They did it to Eqbal Ahmed, too,
> when he was alive.
>
>
>
> best
>
> Shuddha
>
>
>   On 28-Aug-09, at 10:26 AM, rashneek kher wrote:
>
>   http://blog.dawn.com:91/dblog/2009/08/27/reading-roy/
>
>
>
> Quite like Dr. Noam Chomsky, award-wining writer and activist, Arundhati
> Roy, can be one of the most easily predictable intellectuals this side of
> the post-Cold-War left.
>
> And also, quite like Dr. Chomsky (and Naomi Klein), Roy too is fast
> becoming
> the provider of the intellectual fodder that wily and loud post-9/11
> advocates of 21st Century right-wing claptrap sumptuously feed upon.
>
> In fact, it is due to this feeding frenzy by so-called anti-West
> reactionaries (of assorted shapes and sizes) - who cleverly use leftist
> critiques of the West to give some ‘intellectual weight’ to their otherwise
> contemptuous spiels of racial, religious and political hatred - that is
> gradually rendering people like Chomsky, Kalian and Roy somewhat
> ineffectual
> in fully elaborating the otherwise progressive intent of their anti-West/US
> narratives.
>
> Now hijacked and drowned by the noises emitting from right-wing playmakers
> within the post-9/11 anti-US populism, Roy and Co. have tended to sound
> hyperbolic to keep the dwindling left in the race featuring assorted
> celebrity-backed pomposity and demagoguism that is so spectacularly
> unveiling itself on TV screens and in seminars.
>
> It is interesting to note how the once sober, back-stage leftist
> intellectuals whose critiques of capitalism and ‘American imperialism’ came
> attached with well thought-out thesis, rationales and ideas for a new way,
> have reduced themselves to continue dishing out reactive and irresponsible
> sloganeering revolving around narratives that are largely unoriginal, and
> worse of all, smacking of the kind of cynical vanity one usually expects
> from reactionary TV personalities such as Shahid Masood, Zaid Hamid and
> Harun Yahyah.
>
> If such celebrity reactionaries can rightly be accused of exhibiting
> intellectual dishonesty by unabashedly plagiarizing leftist critiques of
> the
> West, and anti-secular narratives devised by early 20th Century Christian
> Fundamentalists, then their leftist counterparts like Roy and Chomsky can
> be
> equally blamed for failing to openly condemn those who are using their work
> to forward a clearly reactionary agenda.
>
> These are tricky times we live in; a time when the media can neither be
> called liberal/leftist nor entirely conservative. Take the case of the
> Pakistani electronic media’s darling, Imran Khan. Within a single sentence
> he manages to sound like a dedicated Socialist, a Taliban sympathizer, and
> a
> conscientious democrat without even batting an eyelid. In other words, just
> like the media today, the great Khan is merely playing to a gallery of
> jumbled up ideas that have been constructed by the media itself.
>
> However, no matter how populist and passionate the animation behind such
> left-meets-right jumbling, its bottom-line remains reactionary in essence.
> The effect of this colourful ideological circus has absolutely nothing to
> do
> with reformism or democracy as such, but rather, the effect is either pure
> entertainment or worse, the insinuation of an unsound modern political
> narrative within the psyche of the more impressionable and impulsive
> viewers.
>
> Coming back to Roy, it wasn’t really her terrific novel, ‘God of Small
> Things,’ that turned her into a celebrity in Pakistan; rather, it is her
> (albeit bold) stands on matters such as Kashmir and (albeit hackneyed)
> understanding of ‘American colonial designs’ in the region that has made
> her
> a darling of urban Pakistani drawing rooms.
> Nevertheless, it is also true that Roy is also perhaps the most tolerated
> non-Muslim Indian amongst the usual India/Hindu-baiting Islamists. No
> prizes
> in guessing why.
>
> Conscious of the intellectual and ideological dichotomy generated by the
> acceptance that she receives from Pakistani leftist/liberal drawing-rooms
> and in right-wing circles, Roy soon started to add an anti-Islamist
> (particularly anti-Taliban), angle to her on-going narrative concerning
> India, Pakistan and the United States.
>
> But this angle soon falls flat (and in fact negates itself) at the wake of
> her verbose ramblings about ‘American Imperialism,’ ‘Globalization’ et al.
> Thus, the question arises: How exactly is all this beneficial to the
> egalitarian and conscientious audience that Roy has in her mind? To them
> this is not news.
>
>  But to those liberals/leftists who are more concerned about the impact
> religious extremism, bigotry and counter-democratic moves are having on
> their respective societies, these ramblings become an irritant when they
> are
> liberally quoted by their rightist nemeses.
>
> If during the Cold War there were leftists who got stuck in the hey days of
> the New Left in the 1960s - and consequently failed to counter the
> resurgence of the right-wing from late-‘70s onwards - Roy increasingly
> belongs to a generation of leftists who got embroiled in the post-Cold-War
> anti-Globalization movements of the late 1990s. Her politics are still
> being
> informed by the dictates and sentiments of these movements that culminated
> with the anti-Globalization riots in Seattle in 1999 and then by the
> publishing of Naomi Klein’s classic book of the era, ‘No Logo.’
>
> Roy is still firmly entrenched in the 1990s (albeit with the spirit of the
> archetypal 1960s’ radical), and like Chomsky, she too failed to note the
> many elusive symptoms that are now clearly marking the fall of the
> post-Cold-War ‘New-Right.’
>
> What Roy seems not to realize (or clearly own up to), is the fact that the
> New Right (‘neo-cons,’ etc.) and, for instance, it’s reaction, ‘Islamist
> terrorism,’ are actually two sides of the same coin.
>
> It is true that the whole paranoid spiel about the so-called ‘war on
> terror’
> was a creation of American neo-conservatives to help them to continue
> occupying the decision-making corridors of United States. The neo-cons had
> looked to restoring the American pride that was lost in its unsuccessful
> war
> against the Soviet-backed North Vietnam (1975).
>
> They did this by using the Regan presidency (1980-88), and the media to
> create a Soviet ‘bogey’ radically heightening the Soviet threat by more
> than
> doubling the projected size of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and its
> plans for world domination. This was done to force Reagan to take a more
> militaristic stance against the Soviets.
>
> The Soviet Union’s incompetence during the Afghan war and its eventual
> collapse clearly stated the weakness of its economic and political systems,
> and proved that the neo-cons’ exaggerated estimation of Soviet power had a
> malicious intent. In fact, even had the US not intervened in the war, the
> Soviets would still have been unable to hold on to Afghanistan. But the
> neo-cons’ agenda insisted that the Reagan regime fatten autocratic regimes
> like that of General Ziaul Haq in Pakistan and assorted Arab monarchies to
> use them to heavily arm the so-called Afghan mujahideen against the
> Soviets.
>
> After the collapse of the inflated Soviet bogey, the neo-cons lost power in
> Washington, giving way to the moderate Bill Clinton years (1992-99).
> However, by 2000 the neo-cons were back. They returned much stronger with
> the arrival on the scene of George W. Bush, especially after the 9/11
> attacks in 2001.
>
> Though to a certain extent, the justification behind the war on terror was
> a
> bogey called Islamic terrorism, ironically this war was also aided by
> nihilistic Islamic fundamentalists like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
>
> Led by the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda is
> basically a group of failed Islamic revolutionaries; a bunch of frustrated
> Islamists who were deluded into believing that it was they who defeated the
> Soviets and could now impose Islamic regimes wherever.
>
> The truth is, it was the Soviet Union’s weak economy and worn-out political
> structure and, of course, the billions of dollars worth of arms that the
> mujahideen received from the US that did the trick.
>
> I am in total agreement with the line of thought that insists that the
> neo-cons and the Islamists are two sides of the same coin. And that’s why
> the more terrorism the Islamists practiced, the stronger the neo-cons got.
> After all, the neo-cons lost all purpose and requirement once the USSR
> collapsed.
>
> Interestingly, the bait of the post-Soviet Islamic bogey dangled by the
> neo-cons was not only taken by groups of renegade Islamic revolutionaries;
> the media took it too.
>
> In the West the media continues to portray skewed perceptions of ‘Islamism’
> fed to it by the neo-cons; while in the Islamic world, the media is playing
> out to the other side of the coin by indulging in crass speculative gossip,
> conspiracy theories and images of the West sketched by frustrated Islamists
> dreaming of a global Islamic revolution and the reinstatement of the
> Caliphate.
>
> Thanks to the media, this pseudo (but deadly) conflict has now trickled
> down
> to realms of society as well. For example, today an average westerner is
> more likely to feel uneasy if confronted by a person with a Muslim name. He
> perceives this person with the aid of what he hears and sees in the western
> media. He will see the Muslim as potentially violent, oppressive, and most
> probably a wife beater!
>
> On the other side, a Muslim is just as likely to interpret western society
> as being satanic, Jewish-dominated and obscene. This person’s source in
> this
> respect is the media in the Islamic countries. It triggers a flippant
> effect
> in which the person is then bound to do two things: either fall in the
> luring trap of the violent Islamist minority, or react by suddenly donning
> a
> long beard or a headscarf.
>
> What really keeps the neo-cons and the Islamists afloat is the larger
> social
> fall-out of this conflict. The conflict then becomes a battle of reactive
> images in which a westerner influenced by neo-con rhetoric in the media
> becomes Islamophobic, and a Muslim driven by his country’s conspiratorial
> media suddenly grows a long beard or starts doing the hijab. Paradoxically,
> he or she then becomes more receptive to what so-called leftists like
> Chomsky and Roy have to say about the West.
>
> To quote from an article about Roy in The Hindu (November 26, 2000):
> ‘Arundhati Roy might very well equal (activist writers) Orwell and Karanth
> in her bravery. But she lacks their intellectual probity and judgment.
> Those
> men wrote with a proper sense of gravitas, in a prose that was lucid but
> understated, each word weighed before it was uttered. Perhaps they were
> lucky to work in a pre-television and pre-colour supplement era, when the
> principle would take precedence over the personality.’
>
> I think the above paragraph says it all. Writer-activists such as Roy,
> Naomi
> Klein and even the more aged Chomsky have allowed themselves to be bitten
> by
> the post-modern celebrity bug that usually feeds on their more reactionary
> and right-wing counterparts.
>
> They have become too self-conscious of their ‘intellectual importance,’
> with
> their overall make-up now bordering on plain vanity. This is something
> their
> bygone contemporaries like Edward Said and Iqbal Ahmed would have balked
> at.
>
> *And, for example, while the later two’s writings and thoughts actually
> helped improve the world’s understanding of the plight of, say, the
> Palestinians and the Third World in general, Roy and Chomsky’s writings in
> the last five years have contributed more to fatten reactionary arguments,
> even if the original intent of the writings were/are as noble as those of
> Said’s and Ahmed’s.*
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> best
>
>
> --
> Rashneek Kher
> http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
> http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com
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>
>  Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> The Sarai Programme at CSDS
> Raqs Media Collective
> shuddha at sarai.net
> www.sarai.net
> www.raqsmediacollective.net
>
>
>

--
Rashneek Kher
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com
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