This is the best piece I’ve seen from Arundhati Roy, not usually my favourite columnist (Mr Chidambaram’s War, Nov 9). It is not important to advertise how many millionaires and billionaires India has, but much more important to banish poverty, hunger and illness for the greatest number of Indians. Even the wretched media needs to get off focusing only on the rich. It’s amazing that a purely commercial venture like the Apollo Hospital has been honoured with a postage stamp. Why not the Sankara Nethralaya?
P. Balasubramanian, Chennai
An impassioned and excellent piece.
Umair Muhajir, New York
Let’s accept Arundhati’s plea and keep the bauxite and iron ore in the mountain. Will it end Maoist violence? The fact is, they are using the deprivation of the tribals as an intellectual cover for a more dangerous and altogether different agenda. And won’t hesitate to use these tribals as human shields in case the state declares war on them.
Pradeep Bhatia, New Delhi
May I suggest a planned elimination of all those groups of people who are perceived as blots on the “vision” of India as a superpower democracy? Talking about poverty, hunger, human rights etc—surely all this undoes the good work done by middle-class Indians working abroad to propagate the image of India as a posh country with great malls, big cars, superhighways.
Harikumar, Coventry, UK
Defend those who do not have the means to defend themselves. These tribals are not asking the state for anything. They are only asking it not to snatch their homes, their forests and livelihood. You don’t have to call a dog mad to kill it.
Gopinath Reddy, Hyderabad
Ms Roy has a point regarding the violations of the land rights of tribals. But she has a knack of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: in this instance, her defence of Maoist violence.
A. Kumar, Mumbai
You only have to come to the West Champaran district of Bihar to see how the government grabs land in the name of development. Thousands of acres of land were occupied for the construction of the Gandak canal in 1970. Now this canal lies completely useless and is only a showcase of government failure.
Adil Hussain, West Champaran
Capital formation and capitalism are essential at this stage of Indian economy. However capitalism, either of the devious bania/moneylending type native to India, or of the Anglo-Zionist imperial/slavery kind thrust on us from outside, is not the only choice. During their own development, France, Germany and later Japan adhered to a much more socially conscious form of capitalism. It is high time that our still colonised/lobotomised “intelligentsia” started looking at alternative models of development (and I don’t mean a blind adoration of Mao or neo-imperialist China—Nehru’s copycat imposition of the Soviet model for four decades was bad enough) and evolved one that makes more sense for India.
Gaurav Gupta, Japan
How right was Masahiko Fujiwara, the Japanese mathematician who said, “The market economy is a system that clearly divides the society into a minority of winners and a majority of losers!”
K.R. Narasimhan, Chennai
Isn’t it strange that of the 200-odd districts where Operation Green Hunt will be launched, there is not a single Dalit or adivasi DM/SP?
Charwak Satya, Delhi
Arundhati Roy is nothing but a billionaire who is in the business of selling poverty.
Akhilendra, Noida
Outlook has now become a mouthpiece of the far left. I guess it’s time to move on....
Ben, Thiruvananthapuram
You can always expect brickbats when Arundhati takes up the cause of the hapless peoples of this country. It is somehow unpalatable to the middle-class readership of your magazine. But sooner or later, they have to realise that their castles are built on the crushed hopes of a million others.
C.V. Francis, New Delhi
Why can’t development benefit the locals? Why can’t they be compensated at market prices? Why do they have to have their land grabbed? Why do the banias (business) have to tie up with the brahmins (our administrators) and use the kshatriyas (our police and security forces) to steal their land? Why do they have to make us exploiters by proxy?
Middle Path, London
I’m not a huge fan of Arundhati. In fact, I loathe her. But there is a grain of truth in what she writes. I was born and brought up in a forested area of Jharkhand. Corporates like Tatas, Jindals and Mittals are turning the once one-laned road to a camel hump road with their 20-wheelers.
Praveen Tiwari, Bangalore
As someone who attended the same school as you did, Ms Roy, and a self-confessed left-liberal political ideologue, I must appreciate your understanding of the plight of poor tribals. However, your defence of the Maoists is condemnable and despicable, bordering on the “anti-national”, in fact.
Hari, Chennai
With all due respect to Arundhati, it is too much for Outlook to devote nine full pages to her. I still have to read her whole article, which will require some patience and effort.
Achal Narayanan, Chennai
Never before in the history of the world have so many people become so rich in so short a time. In the process, the country’s mineral wealth has been drained away and its assets compromised with nary a thought for the morrow.
C.J.M. Mathew, Bangalore
I have read through Arundhati’s extremely lucid and painstakingly crafted article, which does enough to arouse passions. However, like all her pieces before, she does not offer any solution. She says that adivasis live in abject poverty and chronic hunger verging on famine. But that was before the sezs came. The so-called predatory mining or manufacturing companies might actually provide opportunities for employment, either directly or indirectly. Even if they do not, the adivasis won’t be any worse off than they already are. She also says that the government has not provided access to education, healthcare or legal redress even after 60 years of independence. Let me remind Ms Roy that most of the resources, if not all, that the government generates come from the same companies that she so liberally heaps scorn on. All excise, customs and octroi duties as well as corporate and income tax collections go towards meeting social obligations like loan waivers for farmers. If these companies are not allowed to expand, where will we get resources to feed a burgeoning population? China chose a capitalist path and its economic success trickled down to the poor despite the corruption and displacement such development brings.
Mohan Narayanan, on e-mail
To those who see no problem with mining, please check the devastating impact mining has had on the Aravali hills.
Nikhil, Austin, US
People like Arundhati miss the point that the rest of Indians existed alongside tribes in forests for a few thousand years. You can’t draw parallels with the American tribes, whose way of life was severely disrupted by the arrival of Europeans to America. Indian civilisation has had city-dwellers, rural folk and forest tribes coexist for a long time. My mother-tongue, Telugu, has a good mix of Gondi in it. Many Hindu deities, worshipped in cities and villages alike, have their origins in the forests. What is sacred to the tribes will be sacred to the rest of Indians too. It’s sad that people like Arundhati see India from a Western view.
Vikram Chandra, Visakhapatnam
Arundhati, as usual, raises a million questions and answers none. Would it not be better, for instance, if the state built a network of good roads, a grid of roads north-south and east-west for every 25 km in all tribal areas? Set up psus for exploiting mineral wealth in tribal areas, employing only local tribals? Let them run with subsidies; we will bear it as the compensatory cost of development of these areas. All government personnel working in schools, primary health centres, agriculture, animal husbandry, sericulture, horticulture, police etc should be recruited only from local, unemployed tribals, if necessary giving relaxation in educational qualifications. This, more than any Operation Green Hunt, could be an acceptable solution to both sides.
D.S. Chitta, on e-mail
Is Operation Green Hunt a part of the continuing war between the Aryans and the aboriginal Indians?
Dilip Mandal, Delhi
India should think twice, nay over and over again, before using the Sri Lankan prototype to deal with Maoists.
Shan, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
I too would like to have my cake and eat it too. I too want to own land free of cost and taxes (my great-great-great grandfather once squatted on that location, so it’s mine), have someone develop it for me free of cost and keep all the tax-free profits generated from it. Please tell me how to sign up....
Abhishek Agrawal, Mumbai
What Arundhati simplistically calls a conflict between the mining rights of the state and the tribals is “a protracted guerrilla war on the state”, in the Maoists’ own words. Nor is the nation at war with tribals but with those who go about abducting and beheading innocents in cold blood in fake combat fatigues in the name of fighting a ‘people’s war’.
Priyabrata Chowdhury, Calcutta
Give the Taliban a chance, and they would as persuasively defend the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as Ms Roy exonerates the Maoists. The only difference is, being a writer (and a good one at that), Ms Roy has added generous doses of flavour-enhancers like mythology and environment. So we are to consume that the government is acting on behalf of the mncs and, without the benevolent protection of the Maoists, all the remaining forest cover and tribal land would be given for open-cast mining and the resulting moraine could be seen from the moon! What simplicity! And we have been blaming poor Reader’s Digest all these years for oversimplification!
Dipankar Mukherjee, Calcutta
Sometime back, one Abhinav Kumar in your magazine declared that the men in khaki “always rise to the national duty and are the sole guarantors of our national freedoms”. Perhaps he is unaware of the human rights violations security forces have committed in Kashmir and the Northeast, or the murderous state-backed militias like the Salwa Judum or the Harmad Vahini. Why, unable to catch any Maoist during Operation Lalgarh, men from the armed forces urinated into the village wells which were the only source of drinking water for the people!
Umar Khalid, New Delhi
For a police officer like me, it was heartening to see the Outlook opinion poll (Oct 26) which said that only 7.9 per cent think that police atrocities are the main cause of the growth of Maoism. Likewise, only 11.4 per cent advocate the use of police and security forces to deal with the Maoists, 50.5 per cent think it would be better to deal with the Maoists directly.
Rajeev Ranjan, Samastipur
In Arundhati’s book, only the bigger adversary is the culprit. She absolves the Maoists of any sort of crime. The latter have demonstrated no effort whatsoever to resolve issues through democratic means. If you take guns and randomly kill people, how can you expect the law not to retaliate?
Nandakumar, Chennai
For the first time perhaps, I agree with Arundhati.
A.K. Ghai, Mumbai
