Capitalism (10 page)

The US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistan's official role as America's junior partner in the War on Terror, makes that region a much-reported place. The rest of the world is at least aware of the dangers unfolding there. Less understood, and harder to read, is the perilous wind that's picking up speed in the world's favorite new superpower. The Indian economy is in considerable trouble. The aggressive, acquisitive ambition that economic liberalization unleashed in the newly created middle class is quickly turning into an equally aggressive frustration. The aircraft they were sitting in has begun to stall just after takeoff. Exhilaration is turning to panic.

The General Election is due in 2014. Even without an exit poll, I can tell you what the results will be. Though it may not be obvious to the naked eye, once again we will have a Congress–Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition. (Two parties, each with a mass murder of thousands of people belonging to minority communities under their belts.) The Communist Party of India–Marxist (CPI-M) will give support from outside, even though it hasn't been asked to. Oh, and it will be a Strong State. (On the hanging front, the gloves are already off. Could the next in line be Balwant Singh Rajoana, on death row for the assassination of Punjab's chief minister Beant Singh? His execution could revive Khalistani sentiment in the Punjab and put the Akali Dal and the BJP on the mat. Perfect old-style Congress politics.)
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But that old-style politics is in some difficulty. In the last few turbulent months, it is not just the image of major political parties but politics itself, the idea of politics as we know it, that has taken a battering. Again and again, whether it's about corruption, rising prices, or rape and the rising violence against women, the new, emerging middle class is at the barricades. They can be water-cannoned or lathi-charged, but they cannot be shot and imprisoned in their thousands, in the way the poor can, in the way Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, Kashmiris, Nagas, and Manipuris can—and have been. The old political parties know that if there is not to be a complete meltdown, this aggression has to be headed off, redirected. They know that they must work together to bring politics back to what it
used
to be. What better way than a communal conflagration? (How else can the secular play at being secular and the communal be communal?) Maybe even a little war, so that we can play Hawks and Doves all over again.

What better solution than to aim a kick at that tried and trusted old political football—Kashmir? The hanging of Afzal Guru, its brazenness and timing, is deliberate.
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It has brought politics and anger back onto Kashmir's streets.

India hopes to manage it with the usual combination of brute force and poisonous Machiavellian manipulation designed to pit people against one another. The war in Kashmir is presented to the world as a battle between an inclusive secular democracy and radical Islamists. What then should we make of the fact that Mufti Bashiruddin, the so-called Grand Mufti of Kashmir (which, by the way, is a completely phantom post)—who has made the most abominable hate speeches and has issued fatwah after fatwah, intended to present Kashmir as a demonic, monolithic Wahabi society—is actually a government-anointed cleric? Kids on Facebook will be arrested, but never he.
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What should we make of the fact that the Indian government looks away while money from Saudi Arabia (that most steadfast partner of the United States) is pouring into Kashmir's madrassas? How different is this from what the CIA did in Afghanistan all those years ago? That whole sorry business created Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban. It has decimated Afghanistan and Pakistan. What sort of incubus will this unleash?

The old political football is not going to be all that easy to control. And it's radioactive. A few days ago Pakistan tested a short-range battlefield nuclear missile to protect itself against threats from “evolving scenarios.” Two weeks ago the Kashmir police published “survival tips” for nuclear war. Apart from advising people to build toilet-equipped bombproof basements large enough to house their entire families for two weeks, it said: “During a nuclear attack, motorists should dive out of their cars toward the blast to save themselves from being crushed by their soon-to-be tumbling vehicles.” And it warned everyone to “expect some initial disorientation as the blast wave may blow down and carry away many prominent and familiar features.”
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Prominent and familiar features may have already blown down.

Perhaps we should all jump out of our soon-to-be-tumbling vehicles.

Afterword

Afterword

Speech to the
People's University

Yesterday morning the police cleared Zuccotti Park, but today the people are back. The police should know that this protest is not a battle for territory. We're not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there. We are fighting for Justice. Justice, not just for the people of the United States, but for everybody. What you have achieved since September 17, when the Occupy Movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language, into the heart of Empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerized into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfillment. As a writer, let me tell you, this is an immense achievement. I cannot thank you enough.

We were talking about justice. Today, as we speak, the army of the United States is waging a war of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. US drones are killing civilians in Pakistan and beyond. Tens of thousands of US troops and death squads are moving into Africa. If spending trillions of dollars of your money to administer occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not enough, a war against Iran is being talked up. Ever since the Great Depression, the manufacture of weapons and the export of war have been key ways in which the United States has stimulated its economy. Just recently, under President Obama, the United States made a sixty-billion-dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
1
It hopes to sell thousands of bunker busters to the United Arab Emirates. It has sold five billion dollars' worth of military aircraft to my country, India—my country, which has more poor people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together.
2
All these wars, from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, have claimed millions of lives—all of them fought to secure “the American way of life.”

Today we know that “the American way of life”—the model that the rest of the world is meant to aspire toward—has resulted in four hundred people owning the wealth of half of the population of the United States. It has meant thousands of people being turned out of their homes and jobs while the US government bailed out banks and corporations—American International Group (AIG) alone was given 182 billion dollars.

The Indian government worships US economic policy. As a result of twenty years of the Free Market economy, today one hundred of India's richest people own assets worth one-fourth of the country's GDP while more than 80 percent of the people live on less than fifty cents a day.
3
Two hundred fifty thousand farmers driven into a spiral of death have committed suicide.
4
We call this progress and now think of ourselves as a superpower. Like you, we are well qualified, we have nuclear bombs and obscene inequality.

The good news is that people have had enough and are not going to take it anymore. The Occupy Movement has joined thousands of other resistance movements all over the world in which the poorest of people are standing up and stopping the richest corporations in their tracks. Few of us dreamed that we would see you, the people of the United States, on our side, trying to do this in the heart of Empire. I don't know how to communicate the enormity of what this means.

They (the 1%) say that we don't have demands . . . they don't know, perhaps, that our anger alone would be enough to destroy them. But here are some things—a few “pre-revolutionary” thoughts I had—for us to think about together.

We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality.

We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations.

As cap-ists and lid-ites, we demand:

One: An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example: weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations, mining corporations cannot run newspapers, business houses cannot fund universities, drug companies cannot control public health funds.

Two: Natural resources and essential infrastructure—water supply, electricity, health, and education—cannot be privatized.

Three: Everybody must have the right to shelter, education, and health care.

Four: The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth.

This struggle has reawakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

As a cap-ist and a lid-ite, I salute your struggle.

Salaam and Zindabad.

Notes

1
.
Pablo Neruda, “The Judges,” in
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, ed. Ilan Stavans (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 229.

PREFACE: THE PRESIDENT TOOK THE SALUTE

1
.
“Migrants Blamed for Surging Crimes in Cities,”
Indian Express, April 2, 2013, http://newindianexpress.com/nation/Migrants -blamed-for-surging-crimes-in-Delhi/2013/04/22/article1555785.ece.

CHAPTER 1: CAPITALISM: A GHOST STORY

1
.
“Mukesh Ambani Tops for the Third Year as India's Richest,”
Forbes Asia, news release, September 30, 2010. The article notes, “The combined net worth of India's 100 richest people is $300 billion, up from $276 billion last year. This year, there are 69 billionaires on the India Rich List, 17 more than last year.” India's 2009 GDP was $1.2 trillion.

2
.
Vikas Bajaj, “For Wealthy Indian Family, Palatial House Is No Home,”
New York Times, October 18, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/ 10/19/business/global/this-luxurious-house-is-not-a-home.html.

3
.
Frederick Engels and Karl Marx,
Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samel Moore (Torfaen, UK: Merlin, 1998), 17.

4
.
P. Sainath, “Farm Suicides Rise in Maharashtra, State Still Leads the List,”
Hindu, July 3, 2012, www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/ sainath/article3595351.ece.

5
.
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS),
Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector, Government of India, August 2007. The state-supported study notes that though a “buoyancy in the economy did lead to a sense of euphoria by the turn of the last century . . . a majority of the people . . . were not touched by this euphoria. At the end of 2004–5, about 836 million or 77 per cent of the population were living below Rs.20 a day and constituted most of India's informal economy” (1).

6
.
As of March 2013, Mukesh Ambani was worth $21.5 billion, according to a Forbes profile: http://www.forbes.com/profile/mukesh-ambani/.

7
.
“RIL Buys 95% Stake in Infotel Broadband,”
Times of India, June 11, 2010, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-06-11/telecom/28277245_1_infotel-broadband-broadband-wireless-access-spectrum-world-class-consumer-experiences.

8
.
Depali Gupta, “Mukesh Ambani–Owned Infotel Broadband to Set Up over 1,000,000 Towers for 4G Operations,”
Economic Times, August 23, 2012, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012 -04-23/news/31387124_1_telecom-towers-largest-tower-tower-arm.

9
.
Brinda Karat, “Of Mines, Minerals and Tribal Rights,”
Hindu, May 15, 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/of-mines -minerals-and-tribal-rights/article3419034.ece.

10
.
See Michael Levien, “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India,”
Journal of Peasant Studies 39, nos. 3–4 (2012): 933–69.

11
.
S. Sakthivel and Pinaki Joddar, “Unorganised Sector Workforce in India: Trends, Patterns and Social Security Coverage,”
Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006, 2107–14.

12
.
“India Approves Increase in Royalties on Mineral Mining,”
Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB125006823591525437.html.

13
.
From a 2009 Ministry of Rural Development report titled “State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms,” commissioned by the Government of India: “The new approach came about with the
Salwa Judum. . . . [Its] first financiers . . were Tata and the Essar. . . . 640 villages as per official statistics were laid bare, burnt to the ground and emptied with the force of the gun and the blessings of the state. 350,000 tribals, half the total population of Dantewada district are displaced, their womenfolk raped, their daughters killed, and their youth maimed. Those who could not escape into the jungle were herded together into refugee camps run and managed by the
Salwa Judum. Others continue to hide in the forest or have migrated to the nearby tribal tracts in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. 640 villages are empty. Villages sitting on tons of iron ore are effectively de-peopled and available for the highest bidder. The latest information that is being circulated is that both Essar Steel and Tata Steel are willing to take over the empty landscape and manage the mines” (161). http://www.rd.ap.gov.in/ IKPLand/MRD_Committee_Report_V_01_Mar_09.pdf.