[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy in Karachi

[Pawan Durani]

I am surprised ....."RSS has inflitrated the Indian Army" ........What are
the basis on which such a general statement is made by Aran-Dhat-Tri-Ki-Roy
?

Pawan

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> The Delhi based writer Arundhati Roy has recently been in Karachi,
> Pakistan at the invitation of civil society organizations and womens
> rights groups. Here are two reports from Dawn, a Karachi based daily,
> about meetings she attended (with an organization titled 'Womens
> Action Forum') and interactions she had. I hope that they will be of
> interest to people on the list.
>
> regards,
>
> Shuddha
> ------------------------------
> 1.
>
> Arundhati Roy and the WAF
> By Zubeida Mustafa
> Wednesday, 13 May, 2009
> http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/
> pakistan/11-arundhati-roy-and-the-waf--02
>
> ‘WOMEN to reclaim public spaces: a programme of defiance and
> resistance.’ That is how the Women’s Action Forum defined the meeting
> it held last Friday to mobilise public opinion against extremism.
>
> Although WAF’s concern to protect the space women have created in the
> public mainstream has been on its agenda for some time, this goal has
> acquired urgency in the wake of the events in Swat. The Nizam-i-Adl
> Regulation in Malakand Division has brought people face to face with
> the ugly reality of the Talibanisation phenomenon in the rural
> backwaters as well as in modern urban centres.
>
> The Karachi meeting was well-attended by WAF’s standards. It is not
> easy to mobilise women for any cause in this city of multiple
> identities. The metropolis has a diversity of populations, cultures,
> languages and economic interests posing a challenge to bring women
> together on a single platform. Learning from its experience of the
> lawyers’ movement that had succeeded in uniting the extreme right and
> centrist political parties and the professionals on a single-point
> agenda for two years, WAF also decided to make Talibanisation and
> women the focal issue.
>
> That strategy paid off. Women had already been galvanised by the
> video showing the flogging of a teenaged girl in Swat that activist
> Samar Minallah courageously brought to the world media’s attention,
> invoking in the process the wrath of the Taliban whose fatwa declared
> her as wajibul qatl. The oppression of women is an issue that cuts
> across classes to touch every female raw nerve. Whether it is the
> smartly turned-out high-society woman or the working woman who slaves
> all day long to feed an army of children and a drug-addict husband or
> even the heavily veiled orthodox woman, each type, with few
> exceptions, has expressed her horror at the flogging incident.
>
> Hence on this occasion WAF managed to bring a diverse crowd together
> — the activists reaching out to the grassroots such as Amar Sindhu
> from Sindh University Hyderabad, Parveen Rahman from the Orangi Pilot
> Project and Sadiqa Salahuddin whose Indus Resource Centre runs
> schools in the interior of Sindh, as well as the elites sitting side
> by side with the three van-loads of women from Neelum Colony who
> clean the homes of the rich and will be starting their adult literacy
> classes from next week, courtesy Shabina’s Garage School.
>
> The variety of speakers focusing on the theme of women’s oppression
> by the Taliban found a responsive audience. But the question that
> made many ponder was: what next? Can this interest be sustained? If
> they had not already started probing for answers, the thought-
> provoking speech by Arundhati Roy, the renowned Indian writer and
> activist, did the trick. Coming from New Delhi on a solidarity
> mission to WAF’s meeting. Roy raised four issues:
>
> • What do we mean by the Taliban and what gave birth to them?
>
> • Define your own space and do not surrender it.
>
> • Don’t allow yourself to be forced into making choices of the ‘with
> us or against us’ type.
>
> • Don’t be selective in your injustices.
>
> These should provide food for thought for those struggling against
> oppression. Without being specific, Roy exhorted her audience to look
> into the structures and systems that lead to a situation of such
> extreme oppression, some of which is rooted in the class conflict.
> She believes one has to take a ‘total view’ of the matter, which she
> admitted she had come to Pakistan to understand.
>
> The fact is that we live in a largely grey area where the lines are
> not sharply drawn. There is a lot of overlapping between issues
> touching gender, class, ethnicity, culture, political power and
> economic gains. It is this reality one has to recognise and see how
> the contradictions can be addressed. The demand to take sides
> unambiguously, expressed so vividly in the days following 9/11 by
> George Bush as ‘You are with us or against us,’ can create a dilemma
> for people when negotiating these grey areas.
>
> Roy’s advice to avoid being ‘with us or against us’ has implications
> she didn’t elucidate. In times when action is needed and a position
> has to be taken — even if verbally — inaction or neutrality
> unwittingly props up the status quo. If the status quo has been
> created by inimical forces ostensibly now fighting their self-created
> Frankenstein, where does one go?
>
> The practical approach would be to prioritise strategies that can be
> adapted to changing circumstances. And what should these be? Here Roy
> has a point when she says that one cannot be selective in the
> justices one espouses and the injustices one denounces. In this
> context Pakistanis find themselves trapped between the devil and the
> deep sea. Attempting to rectify a problem here and another there
> really doesn’t help because our entire state structure is colonial,
> as a booklet titled Making Pakistan a Tenable State points out.
>
> Produced by 17 intellectuals, with Dr Mubashir Hasan as the driving
> force, the book describes the state structure as being ‘based on the
> concentration of political and administrative power in the steel
> frame of the civil services under the protection of the armed forces.
> The structure could be defined as feudal-military-bureaucratic.’
>
> The problem is systemic. In a state ruled by ‘a government of the
> elites, by the elites, for the elites’ it is inevitable that it is
> authoritarian and exploitative. Change can come when there is
> mobilisation of the people for change. When WAF mobilises women to
> fight against injustices it prepares them to also fight for change.
> The need is to empower them and instill confidence in them.
>
> Two women I have written about who are fighting for change come from
> the poorest of the poor and theirs is not a feminist agenda. They are
> fighting to have a roof above their heads. One is the wife of Walidad
> from Muhammad Essa Khaskheli who came all the way to Karachi in the
> heat of summer to save her goth from being snapped up by a feudal in
> the neighbourhood.
>
> The other is Parveen whose one-room ‘mansion’ in a katchi abadi of
> Clifton is now under threat of demolition. She is resisting the
> exploitative system that cannot provide shelter to the poor.
> Initially she hesitated — was it ‘proper’ for a woman to protest she
> had asked me. When encouraged she decided it was. These are women on
> the way to empowerment and that is WAF’s agenda.
>
>  2.
>
> ‘I’m here to understand what you mean by Taliban’
> by Salman Siddiqui
> Friday, 08 May, 2009
> http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/
> pakistan/arundhati-roy-sal-02
>
> Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region?
>
> I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need
> for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanisation). In
> India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and
> the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask,
> what do they mean by it.
>
> In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When
> we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it
> mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do
> you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that
> is being fought? That needs to be clarified.
>
> I think both needs to be fought. But if it’s an ideology it has to be
> fought differently, while if it’s a person with a gun then it has to
> be fought differently. We know from the history of the war on terror
> that a military strategy is only making matters worse all over the
> world. The war on terror has made the world a more dangerous place.
> In India, they have been fighting insurgencies military since 1947
> and it has become a more dangerous place.
>
> Swat and the Taliban boy
>
> It is very important for me to understand what exactly is going in
> Swat. How did it start? A Taliban boy asked me why women can’t be
> like plastic bags and banned. The point is that the plastic bag was
> made in a factory but so was the boy. He was made in a factory that
> is producing this kind of mind(set). (The question is) who owns that
> factory, who funds it? Unless we deal with that factory, dealing with
> the boy doesn’t help us.
>
> Water is the main issue
>
> One danger in Pakistan is that we talk about the threat of Taliban so
> much that other important issues lose focus. In my view, the problem
> of water in the world will become the most important problem.  I
> think big dams are economically unviable, environmentally
> unsustainable and politically undemocratic. They are a way of taking
> away a river from the poor and giving it to the rich. Like in India,
> there’s an issue of SEZs (Special Economic Zones), whereby the land
> of the people are given to corporations. But the bigger problem is
> that there are making dams and giving water to the industries. This
> way the people who live in villages by the streams and rivers have no
> water for themselves. So building dams is one of the most
> ecologically destructive things that you can do.
>
> Fight over Siachen glacier
>
> There are thousands of Pakistani and Indian soldiers deployed on the
> Siachen glacier. Both of our countries are spending billions of
> dollars on high altitude warfare and weapons. The whole of the
> Siachen glacier is sort of an icy monument to human folly. Each day
> it is being filled with ice axes, old boots, tents and so on.
> Meanwhile, that battlefield is melting. Siachen glacier is about half
> its size now. It’s not melting because the Indian and Pakistani
> soldiers are on it. But it’s because people somewhere on the other
> side of the world are leading a good life….in countries that call
> themselves democracies that believe in human rights and free speech.
> Their economies depend on selling weapons to both of us. Now, when
> that glacier melts, there will be floods first, then there will be a
> drought and then we’ll have even more reasons to fight. We’ll buy
> more weapons from those democracies and in this way human beings will
> prove themselves to be the stupidest animals on earth.
>
> Money and the Indian elections
>
> Whatever system of government you have, whether it is a military
> dictatorship or a democracy, and you have that for a long time,
> eventually big money manages to subvert it. That has begun to happen
> even in a democracy (like India). For example, political parties need
> a lot of publicity, but the media is also run by corporate money. If
> you look at the big political parties like the Congress and the BJP,
> you see how much money is being put out just in their advertising
> budgets. Now where does all that come from?
>
> RSS and the Indian establishment
>
> The RSS has infiltrated everything to a great extent. In India, we
> have 120-150 million Muslims and it’s considered a minority…It’s
> impossible to not belong to a minority of some sort in India. Caste
> or ethnicity or religion or whatever, in some way everyone belongs to
> a minority. The fights that many of us are waging against the RSS and
> against the BJP are to say that we live in a society which
> accommodates everybody. Everybody doesn’t have to love everybody, but
> everybody has to be accommodated.  The RSS has infiltrated the
> (Indian) army as much as various kinds of Wahabism or other kinds of
> religious ideology have infiltrated the ISI or the armed forces in
> Pakistan. They are human beings like everyone else and they too get
> influenced.
>
> Indian media and sensationalizing of news coming out from Pakistan
>
> I think the media in both countries play this game. Whenever
> something happens here, they hype it up there, while when something
> happens there, they hype the news here. We say that we live in times
> of an information revolution and free press, but even then nobody
> gets to know the complete picture…
>
> The Pakistani media is a little different from the Indian media. They
> stand on a slightly different foundation. But both share the problem
> of a lack of accountability…The trouble in India is that 90 per cent
> of their revenue comes from the corporate sector…there’s increasing
> privatization and corporatization of governance, education, health,
> infrastructure and water management. So in India you see an open
> criticism of governance, but very rarely criticism of corporations.
> It’s a structural problem. It’s not about good people or bad people.
> It’s just that you can’t expect a company to work against itself.
> This is a very serious issue which needs to be sorted out.
>
> Is the Indian army a sacred cow?
>
> The Indian army is quite a sacred cow especially on TV and Bollywood.
> But at the same time if you talk to the people in the Indian army,
> they say that they feel that the media is very critical of them. I
> don’t share that view. I think it is a sacred cow. People are willing
> to give them a lot of leeway.
>
> Women and their fight for justice
>
> When women fight for justice, we must fight for every kind of justice…
> We must fight for justice for men and justice for children. Because
> if you fight for one kind of justice and you tolerate another, then
> it’s a pretty hollow fight. You may not be able to fight every
> battle, but you should be able to put yourself on the line and say I
> believe this.
>
>
>
> Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> The Sarai Programme at CSDS
> Raqs Media Collective
> shuddha at sarai.net
> www.sarai.net
> www.raqsmediacollective.net
>
>
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