Book review: Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy

Published on Friday 3 July 2009 16:24

LISTENING TO GRASSHOPPERS: FIELD NOTES ON DEMOCRACY Arundhati Roy Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 Review: Marc Lambert

LAUDED as the world's biggest democracy, with an economy growing at 10% a year, India appears to be well on its way to a prosperous modernity. But, Arundhati Roy argues in her third searing collection of essays, it's all a sham.

India is no ideal of what can be achieved in Asia by adopting Western-style politics and business practice. Nor does its recent progress represent a long awaited coming of age. Instead it's the graveyard of democracy, the point at which an old, tired and discredited notion has finally run into the buffers, surrendering to a new fascism built on sectarian politics and a predatory capitalism. Who's to blame? India surely. But just as certainly the West.

Rarely has political writing been so raw. Resisting the urge to update these pieces penned since 2002, Roy presents them as unvarnished examples of an immediate fury, written in the white heat of a magisterial disdain. Marvel at the Indian economic miracle if you will, she tells us. But remember that, in this country of over a billion people, half of all children under three suffer from malnutrition while millions of tons of grain lies rotting in warehouses. If this is democracy, we can keep it. Congress and its allies might have won the last election by what's called a comfortable majority, but this represents just 10.3% of the vote. Meanwhile, what amounts to civil war rages in states such as Orissa, West Bengal, and Kashmir, where more than 70,000 people have lost their lives in the most heavily militarised zone in the world.

Turning her formidable intelligence on recent events, armed with an iron grip of the facts, Roy exposes the putrid underbelly of progress. Recalling the defeat of communism in Afghanistan and Europe, she demonstrates how the new geopolitical alignment with America adopted by India after 1989 enabled the rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism by casting Islam as the new enemy. In 1984, the BJP had just two seats in Parliament. By 1998 it was in power, and one of the first things it did was to conduct nuclear tests. Roy does not mince her words. The Indian state is hypnotised by the twin pillars of Union and Progress – for which we should read Hindu nationalism and economic growth, to be achieved whatever the social cost. In this, she argues, it is animated by the same drivers that gave rise to the worst excesses of the European and American ages of Empire.

What this means for India's 150 million Muslims is what it meant for North American Indians and Europe's Jews. "Union and Progress," writes Roy, "'are the twin co-ordinates of genocide." As proof she provides a shocking analysis of the 2002 Gujarat massacres, orchestrated by Hindu nationalist stalwart Narendra Modi, a figure still much honoured in India. Questioned about him by a western journalist, the editor of the Hindustan Times could only offer: "Modi may be a mass murderer, but he's our mass murderer."

Perhaps more egregious is the role played by India's Supreme Court, the unaccountable instrument of the state's executive power. It is illegal to criticise it, and anyone who does so can be thrown in jail. But Roy is undeterred, fearlessly exposing the financial corruption of one of its key members, and demonstrating how it presides over a country which has the highest rate of custodial deaths in the world, while refusing to ratify the UN's convention against torture.

Since India opened its markets to international finance in the early 1990s, the Court has also ratified what Roy calls "ecocide" – the displacement of millions of people in order to exploit the natural resources they are inconveniently living on. Thirty million people have been displaced in order to build dams alone. The bankruptcy of the Court is confirmed in Roy's forensic account of the 2008 Mumbai attacks and their aftermath, which led to the death penalty passed on Mohammed Afzal, despite there being no proof of his involvement. In reaching judgment, the Supreme Court asserted that "the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender". How this relates to justice is anyone's guess.

Whether one agrees with the uncompromising urgency of Roy's views or not, you close this book understanding why, following her Booker Prize, she turned away from fiction. It's the kind of passionate and unguarded read that makes a writer serious enemies. But it does what the word can, which is speak a truth to power.