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

[Venugopalan K M]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Sanjay Kak<kaksanjay at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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