 In the second, I was hoping to open the floor up to questions and Arundhati will come back towards the end with another reading from her book. So could I ask people to raise their hand for questions? Yes, there are two roving mics, so could you please hold on while we kind of arrange that? You know, I would also like our panelists just to think about, as a historian, how these, you know, given the history, politics, and social embeddedness of institutions in India, how these sort of large scale enclosures have, you know, how our state and civil society organizations are loving these large scale enclosures of land to continue. Every mountain, forest, and glade has an MOU, as Arundhati very poetically put it. It seems to be a phase of Indian history and Indian politics, which is very, very remarkable in the way it's completely selling off or looting, as Felix has said, all its resources to multinational companies now. I mean, it's something that we can think about as well. But yes, could I have a show of hands of questions please? And could you just introduce yourself as well? Hello, yes, my name is Nitin Mehta. Arundhati Roy, you speak with patience, but really your credibility as a champion of the dispossessed is questionable. This is because you are driven by old consuming rage towards India. I don't know what drives that rage. With all its faults, India is the world's largest democracy. If you were Chinese, you would not be able to speak as you do. It is the democratic process of India, which manages to stop powerful companies like Vedanta. You need to take a more wholesome view of India. Allow your mind to at least three good things of India. And spell them out. And you will have a more receptive audience. The unity of India is not negotiable. Jeremy Paxman, the other day, picked many holes in your argument. And you need to know this and you're to be able to answer this. The point is this, you just slipped by saying that this Hindu state is doing something. The Prime Minister of India is a Sikh. Could I ask people to keep it? Let me just finish, just one minute. To keep it short, to keep your point short please. The Prime Minister of India is a Sikh. Why is the question? Sonia Gandhi is a Christian. There are Christian missionary evangelical movements who are spending money and fomenting trouble in India. You need to answer these questions. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Arun Dutty is very happy to answer this, I'm sure. I'm more than happy to answer the question. I think that the most remarkable and wonderful thing about India is the fact that we have the most remarkable resistance movements. Resisting, you have the poorest people in the world. Resisting the richest corporations, putting their bodies on the line to ask the world the most profound question the world can be asked, which is to redefine the meaning of civilization, to redefine the meaning of happiness, to redefine the meaning of modernity. As for this question of if you were in China, you would not be allowed to speak. And Felix too said that if it wasn't a democracy, you wouldn't be allowed to write. It's true. One is not competing for tragedy here. But I, but one sec, but I, can I, can you? So one, what I would like to say though, however, about this freedom of speech in India, can you imagine a few years ago, as you all must know, in 2002 there was a pogrom against the Muslim community. I mean, forget about the fact of what is happening in Kashmir that 70,000 people have been killed in the name of democracy, but let me just talk about Gujarat. There was a pogrom in which almost 2000 Muslims were killed, women were gang raped, people were burnt alive, 150,000 people were driven from their homes. In one instance, an MLA, a Muslim MLA called Ehsan Jafri, was sheltering many Muslims in his house because he was a member of a legislative assembly and people thought that he would be protected, that they would be protected from this mob of about 20,000 who gathered. Anyway, the mob gathered, he called the police, he called Sonia Gandhi, he called whoever he had to call. Nobody helped him. He went down to tell the mob, look, do what you like with me, but leave the women and children alone. He was held up, his arms and legs were hacked off and he was burnt alive and 65 other people were killed in that. A few years later, people who did that confessed on camera to it. Those confessions in this great free speech that we have were published on TV. You had people like Babu Bajrangi boasting about how many Muslims he had killed. You had people boasting about how many Muslims had been raped. You had people describing in great detail how Ehsan Jafri had been killed. All in our free media. Nothing has happened because of that. People said it was actually a campaign by the chief minister to get more popularity among his Hindu voters. So you have a situation in which the elite is fused with the state now and believes itself to be the state. So it's not, I mean, those of us who are saying these things are people who love our rivers and our mountains and who are fighting for the, we love the music of the country that we come from. We love it. We don't speak from a position of hate. We speak from a position of absolute love. And that is why we fight so hard. If there wasn't beauty to preserve, if there wasn't absolute adoration, we wouldn't be there. We wouldn't, I mean, I would be living in, I don't know, Mayfair gardens or something, you know? Why? One lives there because one loves it. And we fight to preserve the wilderness and the beauty of the imagination that still exists, that's still alive in India, which has been lost everywhere else. We fight for that. So please don't give me lectures about hating my country. I don't. Good evening, panel. Sorry, good afternoon. My name is Kevin Keo. I've been asked by Professor Janet Hunter to come here and represent the Economic History Department, the LSE. The reason why nobody from the department is here is, as you know, this is a very, very busy time of year. I did see them and they were going to send somebody along. Okay, so my apologies. But I come here as an unofficial representative of the Economic History Department, the LSE, which has, you know, many, many Indian politicians went through. The question is as follows. Thank you, thank you, Robert. I'm not like the previous person. Question is as follows. Are the activities of the Indian government and corporate India actions and actions against people such the Adivisis people, is that how it's pronounced? Avastis. The cause of economic growth or the effect of economic growth in India? The situation, if I can try and explain it simply, is that the people who run the country today are those who subscribe to a set of economic policies in which the only vision that they have is of increasing economic growth. And in order to increase the growth rate, at the rate they wish to increase it, the collateral damage is democracy. The Home Minister, who used to be the Finance Minister, has said on several occasions that in his vision he would like to see 75% of India's population live in cities, which means the movement of something like 500 million people. That cannot happen without militarizing the countryside and forcing people out of the cities. Now the growth, much of the growth is driven by this privatization of natural resources and raw material, like the box site, for example, is worth more than $4 trillion. It's been sold to corporations for a small royalty. But, as Felix says, it artificially inflates the growth rate. But to get the box site out of the mountain, you have to commit these atrocities on the Adivasi people. I mean, the history of, there is a history that precedes the deployment of the army in Chhattisgarh today. First, in the 70s, in the early, sorry, in the 90s, there was something called the Jan Jagran Abhyan, where the, in Chhattisgarh, where the government tried to divide the community by sort of culling out a kind of tribal elite, arming them, giving them the powers of the police. That didn't work, because it was met with resistance. Then there was a Jan Jagran Abhyan II. That didn't work. Then they, along with various corporates, started what was called the Salwa Judum, which was a tribal militia. And the policy was one which has been followed by the British in Malaysia, and later by the Americans in Vietnam and by the Indian army in several states in the northeast of sort of strategic hamletting, where hundreds of police and these, what they call special police officers, would go in to the forest, burning and raping and looting their way through villages and forcing tribal people to come out of the forests into police camps. As things stand today, for example, 600 villages were in this way emptied. About 50,000 moved into the police camps. About 350,000 just disappeared off the radar. The chief minister said that anybody who's not in the camps is a Maoist terrorist, which meant that if you were just sowing seeds in your field or looking after your chicken, you were a terrorist. That constituted terrorist activity more or less. But then the Salwa Judoom two failed. Then they announced what is known as Operation Green Hunt, which was where they deployed something like 200,000 paramilitary forces in all the tribal areas across Charkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and West Bengal. That too did not succeed because you must remember that the policemen, the paramilitary that are deployed, are also from there, they're also terribly poor. They also live in the most abysmal conditions and quickly begin to realize that they are just the foot soldiers of corporate masters, and why would they want to keep patrolling the forests and getting killed? Then now they have decided all that having failed to deploy the army in what is undoubtedly a corporate war, and I hope that answers your question. Yeah, let me just first say that I really believe that your hearts lie at the right place and that I also would like to sympathize with you for what you feel about the Maoists and the tribals in those regions. I think it's a tragedy to say the least, but I do have certain criticisms of what you said today of your analysis, and I would like you to address these three. And I'm not trying to start a controversy or a polemic here, so please. Don't get on me. First, I see in this discourse, I see a series of assumptions that have not been supplemented with good evidence or good explanation and things like Tata having good control of the media, I want the channels they control, I want to know the newspapers they control, I want to know how they do it. Because in my opinion, I think it sounds very romantic to say that the bourgeois are working in concert, but actually identifying and explaining it is the hard bit, which I think we all deserve it as an audience. And things like that, it's a corporate Hindu government for the Congress, which one of the major vote banks are the Muslims. I mean, these are very astounding allegations, which I think need to be provided with good supplement. Calling it a corporate voice, I think it's not even registering the complexity, which is generally evident in such cases. So that's my first criticism. Second criticism is when you criticize what is happening in India today, I would also like you to attempt to give an alternative solution, an alternative framework as to what you would think India should be. I mean, the reason why we neoliberalized was because we were bankrupt. I don't think it was because of the Soviet Union collapsing, it was because we just didn't have any money. Our steel mills were running out of the loss, and I think we all agree that- And make it short please. All right, okay, I'm gonna, that's my second criticism. My third is that I would also like you to, at the same time, register some of the benefits that free market has provided, not just to the middle class, but also, like I said, I'm not trying to start. Take more than one question. But also to the 600 million or the 700 million phone subscribers in India, and they're increasing at 20 million and a, that's just an example, three criticism, that's it. Could we just take a cashier question, so problem three? Or do you want, huh? I think it's easier one step, otherwise you'll get confused. Yeah, are you okay? Okay. If you look at the statistics of the economic turnover of the media, you find that more than 90% of its turnover comes from corporate advertising. Recently, for example, Outlook ran a story on how VSNL, which used to be a government company, was sold to the Tata's at the time of the BJP for less money than there was in the bank, almost, in that company. And Tata's, the editor was telling me, they withdrew something like six crores worth of advertising. If you look at how public hearings were held in Luhandiguda, where the Tata integrated steel plant was supposed to have its public hearings, it never happened in the local area, it happened in Jagdalpur in the collector's office, and how the newspapers reported it the next day. A lot of it has to just do with control of advertising. And in fact, now in the Lokpal bill, some of us were saying that we need the media to disclose its sources of funding because major corporations own TV channels. I mean, you should know that from Murdoch, from Italy, from whatever, I mean, one is not saying anything new here, it's not some radical new analysis of how the modern corporate media works. The second question about, what was it about? About, no, that was a third. The corporate Hindu government, if you read, even if you read the essay and the footnotes in Walking with a Comrade, you see that, for example, the chief minister, Chhattisgarh is a BJP state, but the Salwa Judoom was run by Mahesh Karma, who is a congressman. And if you see who was funding the camps of the Salwa Judoom, and these are government reports, you see which corporations were funding them. And the reason I call it a Hindu, India, a Hindu state is because if you look at the history of how the Indian army has fought its own people, since the moment India became an independent country, it has waged war in Nagaland, in Manipur, in Mizoram, in Kashmir, in Punjab, in Telangana, in Hyderabad, in Goa, you look at who are these people. They are the tribal people, Christians, Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits, and so you see an upper caste state at work. When in a situation like Gujarat or in 1993 in Bombay, the police actually cross over, and the people, the Muslims in Gujarat were most terrified of the police. Hunko pulise bachado, you know? So it's not, we are not just people who are talking in the air. You know, if you take the trouble to read the research, there's lots of work being done on this. So it's not something that's going, now again, the question of alternatives. You can ask the question of alternatives in two ways. One way is a genuine way, and the other is a sort of aggressive way. And the genuine way would take into account the fact that today we are where we are because there have been a series of decisions taken about everything, whether it's about hybrid seeds, whether it's about big dams, whatever it's about. Every time there is a decision that has been taken, there has always been an alternative. There was an alternative even at the time of the Bakra Dam. You know, there was an alternative to the Sadatsarovil Dam. There was an alternative to every major way in which you chose to develop. And you, so when you have a system that has been created with a layer and like thousands of decisions, and you want me now to tell you an alternative in one sentence, it isn't possible. But I can tell you that the alternative to what is going on in Chhattisgarh today is what we've been saying again and again, declare those MOUs, how can it be a secret? Why is it a secret between the government and the corporates? What you're selling this whole country down to various, if it's such a great idea, why don't you tell us what it is? Why don't you put it on the table? Why don't you declare the MOUs? Why don't you inform people what's about to happen to them and what your plans are for them? If you look at what is happening in Chhattisgarh, within that tribal society, you've never had one hospital, one clinic, one school for so long, and now suddenly you're calling them terrorists and saying you have to leave your land because we can develop India. What sort of a dialogue is that? You start the Sardar Sarovar project with a wonderful resettlement policy which says everybody will have land for land, every village will be resettled as a village. Then you have the first few villages, one village is resettled in 192 different places, everyone has a tin shed which in any case gets flooded in the monsoon and the rest of it you just forget about and after 10 years you say no, there's no land, just get out of here. There is a sort of structural violence that's taking place and we are not people who, I mean what's in it for any of us? Why would we be sitting here and saying these things, I mean unless we've sort of got a mental problem or something? We are just here to say that there is something so desperately wrong and it's easier to see, it might be far more violent in China but it's easier to see how a totalitarian state functions. It's far more difficult to see it when you have this smoke screen of democracy because India is a democracy but it's a democracy for a few people. You know? I keep saying, I say, you tell me one democratic institution or tell me one institution that an ordinary villager in India can go to if he or she has been wronged. There is no court of appeal. There is no court of appeal. So you can- You had yourself, there are a lot of people waiting here. So it's a system where you have these institutions and you have a constitution which even has some enlightened clauses in it but none of them are implemented. You know, so it's a much more intellectually complicated way to see through something. That's the problem here. Okay, sorry, sorry, there is Daniel Rycroft. There is your, there are three questions here. Daniel first, yourself, second and you third, yeah. Then two questions at this end and then we, I'm afraid we have to stop. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes, yes, okay, okay, okay. Okay, okay. Sorry, here is one. Sorry. Yeah. Raise your hand first in the principle. Here is one here. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. You might have to take a cashier questions together. Is that okay? Because you had the question. Okay, so my point relates to this enlightened- Sorry, can you introduce yourself please? My name is Daniel Rycroft. I come from the University of East Anglia. Managing to escape the markings, so no problem there. The point is this enlightened constitution comes from a late colonial moment. The 1930s when provisions were set in place for people who have become known in India's Adivasis. So my question is, can we talk about Adivasis self-rule? Okay, the Adivasis movement has grown within a wider international indigenous movement that's premised on along the lines of indigenous self-determination. And there's a political future being charted for Adivasis by Adivasis, which allows people to gain access to and understand, perhaps as a reconciliatory gesture or more deep than that. The idea of Adivasis self-rule or Adivasis Swaraj. So my question is, can we please understand a bit more about this? And can we also try and understand whether and how the concept of Adivasis Swaraj relates to or is different from some of these provisions that came up in the late colonial period, such as the fifth schedule? Well, actually the day that the Indian constitution came into being was a pretty dark day for the Adivasis people. Because it simply, it simply passed the ownership of Adivasis land from British imperial hands into the hands of the Indian state. Later on in 1996, I think there was the Panchayat extension of Schedule Area Act, which at least somehow recognized the legality of the idea of a collective. And today makes it pretty clear in the constitution that you cannot alienate tribal land, you cannot give them to corporations. So that's nothing close to self-rule. But at this moment of desperation, it ought to have been a bulwark against the actual acquisition and dispossession of tribal people. But what you have instead is a situation where you have these sort of semi-enlightened things in the constitution. But even those are actually openly vandalized by the government. I mean, the prime minister himself says that, you know, we need to exploit these lands for their minerals. And at the same time, you have the Panchayat extension of Schedule Area Act in your constitution. So you have this really ridiculous situation where you have movements that are considered terrorist or radical, people who are being put into jail for sedition and waging war against the state. In fact, fighting for what is actually in the constitution and you have the government vandalizing the constitution. But Adivasi self-rule, of course, is in a different space. I mean, we have not got close to that yet. Maybe only in academic discourse. But in fact, on the ground, you know, in India on the ground, the Adivasis are just becoming, either they are becoming construction labor or you have these, you know, the, what do you call them, these sort of Hindu right-wing groups who are what they call bringing them back to Hinduism. You know, telling them that they are actually really Hindus. And even introducing things like the caste system into Adivasi society, you know. But I suggest that we now take a tranche of questions, which you then, I don't know if even, because we are kind of running short. Someone else should answer questions now. Yeah, as well, yeah. Yes, please, go on. Yes, thank you. David Glue, in China, if a peasant in China wants to live or work in a big city, he needs an internal passport. And the result is that the Chinese government can keep a lid on the maximum population of cities like Shanghai. I think that Bombay and perhaps other Indian cities should also have an internal passport. Because otherwise, any marginal, any improvement at all to the quality of life for the poorest people, and it results in an extra million, they're going to get a million anyway, they get two million each year. I'd like to talk to this lady. You've got a biometric census form, biometric census form, so it is practicable. Practicable, yeah, internal passport for Bombay. Thank you. The question here, and then, question there, the question here. Very quickly. Ogrutosh Mukherjee, I'll be very quick. In terms of the corporates, as Felix mentioned, how the corporates directly funding police stations, and there are examples of how Vedanta is using its meal systems for paramilitaries, that we have proof of how data and SR are funding, the salvage them, so on and so forth. The problem or the challenge is that this information is out there among those of us who are actively involved in these movements, but it's not out there in even this enlightened room, for example, because of the press censorship, so on and so forth. How can this information come out, and what kind of direct action can people in this room, in the UK, from this powerhouse of capitalism take for this purpose? And a very quick question to Samarendra, especially. How do we cut through this net of NGOs to directly help activists in India, such as the right to information activists, and so many others, hundreds of whom are dying, and are being beaten up, and we don't hear anything about them? Yeah, yes. Sorry, this lady here in front. Could I ask my question? My question was from... Excuse me, sorry, this lady in front, that's sorry. Hello. Can you introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Uditi Sen, and my question is kind of a part, question, part also a comment, because one of the risks which I also face when participating in such movements as an activist, is that even within our language, there is a polarization between the middle class and upper class Indians who are the beneficiaries of this neoliberalization, and the poor whom we seek to represent, and whom we, like we are also oppressing, and that kind of leads to a certain reaction, a reaction of disbelief, a reaction of often born of being very, very embedded in these structures. So part of my question is to kind of, all the three speakers really is also a question of language, as also of people who are working in sectors where very few of us in this room are working at the ground level. We are working and speaking to people who fit the category of the people who have gained directly or indirectly or at least complicit by being embedded in these very structures. How do we find a language to speak to them without alienating them as the oppressors, as the people who are reaping these benefits? So that is kind of a general question I had. And the quick comment was, I think we need to stop asking what is the solution, because I think that very question has led us to where we are today, because we've found solutions, we have found very cost effective and horrific solutions. And the cost effectiveness of course depends on which categories are measured and which aren't. And I haven't seen a single economic analysis which till date has factored in the environment and environmental damage in cost and benefit analysis. And until and unless we do that, I don't think we can keep asking. And until and unless we can put a value on environmental degradation, I just don't see how cost and benefit analysis of what is the solution can drive us forward towards an understanding of what the solution of these things can be. Okay, I'd like to go back to the previous question because I think that was the question of the, I think that was the question. You know, could you say more about the struggles of grassroots people in the area, particularly women, and I'm from women of color in the global women's strike and we're a network of grassroots organizers. And I think some of us here are grassroots organizers. And we want to hear about the organizing there, particularly the women. We're in touch with women in Chattisgar who've organized against bonded labor, a rate by landlords and for money for widows and families in poverty, including after the floods. I wanted to quickly ask if you, I think the brother who spoke about the NGOs and their scandalous behavior in Haiti, Haiti has more NGOs than any country in the world. And it's absolutely being carved up by the NGOs who are working closely with the US State Department and corporations. So I think if we could hear more about the role of the NGOs, there may not be time, but it would be great to know which MPs and which corporations here in the UK and the US that need to be targeted because we're part of an international network and we want to call them out. And you know, the House of Commons is just down the road and we should really get those people and expose them. My last question, again, there may not be time, but is there any connections or strength that you're able to get from the fantastic struggles in the Middle East and the Arab world where they're really turning the dictators out? And I'd just like to mention about, we know that the struggle of women in India is absolutely crucial to our struggle here. And I would also mention the struggle of women in Africa who are up against a similar battle where with proxy wars and civil wars and environmental devastation. And I would like at some point, if we could talk about that connection because that would strengthen all of us. Thank you. Can you tell us your name, please, again? My name is Sarah from Women of Color in the Global Women's Trials. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Mansi. I'm a master student here at SOAS. I'm very interested in what you called as the colonial legacy in terms of the land laws and the legal frameworks that most of these conflicts are associated with. With special reference to the recent political drama in Great Anoida, I'd like you to talk a little about the Land Acquisition Act and the proposed revision of the act. We'll take two more questions here. And then I'm going to turn to Chandler, and we can do your final reading. Yeah, I think this is a lot, though. A lot? You want to answer? How many minutes do you have? Two more. Is that okay? Could we take two more questions, and then I'll give a panel a chance to respond. And then Arundhati will do her final reading. Okay, my name's Dan. Thank you very much, everyone. My question relates to tactics. There's been some great, sorry, there's been some great suggestions and information about what's going on. And in the UK, we're facing a lot of the same issues, maybe not to that scale, but still the environmental injustices and social injustices on race, class, gender are happening in the UK as well, and people are very preoccupied with that. So how tactically, as Samarendra related to, alluded to some of the targets, but in your experience, what are the best strategies for resistance to be able to challenge them in the closing window of opportunity of time that we have, because obviously the urgency has been alluded to, and I know that obviously police infiltration and security issues are an issue in India, and they are here too, so we can't obviously be as open as we'd like to be in terms of our tactics. But it was around that, but thank you again. The last question, yeah. Hello, my name's Andrew. I just wanted to actually reference what that lady has just said about NGOs being complicit in these problems. And I was specifically interested to hear what the panel thought about WWF in India specifically, who are incredibly embedded with the mining community and even share similar directors. And of course, if we're looking for targets for people to put pressure on in the UK, WWF enjoy a very fine reputation, probably not one that's at all deserved. And I'd be quite interested to get some more information about that from the panel. So thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. I think we should get the final chance to respond and then Arun Dutty will do a final reading. I'm sorry to people who still want to ask questions. Okay, I'll only speak for a moment because I took more than my flash out of time at the beginning, but I want to say, for one thing, I'm very happy with some of these questions because looking at these links between NGOs and corporations at Samarandra, especially has drawn a lot of attention to it. It's very, very, very important and there's so much that needs to come out. The question over there about women and I would just like to say that in all of these movements, literally hundreds of movements, women are often really leading them. And I feel that is because often women understand what is life in a more fundamental way than men because they obviously carry life inside and they know when they lose their land, they know they will lose absolutely everything. And that's why disproportionate number of women have often been targeted and killed in these movements but the women leadership is also a very strong phenomenon. I think that's all I'll say. Thank you. Okay, I'll answer a few of them and I think Samarandra will have some good answers for a few. The question about whether people or to have internal passports and not be allowed to move into cities. As I said, the government is trying very hard to force people out of their villages and it does have this sort of dream of these big, huge mega cities. But I mean the question of the internal passport, you know what is actually happening in India now? It was a debate that happened here about these identity cards. And in India, the sort of infotech corporations have taken it very seriously. And a government that cannot provide food or water or shelter wants to give everyone a unique ID from which you can read every single piece of information. And in another way, it is like the enclosure of the commons because people in India don't have documentation of their lands, the tribal people have been there before India very existed. So to try and digitize and everybody will leave a huge population that would be illegible. You know, people who you're calling Maoists are not going to come out to get ID cards, right? So if you kill them, they won't be dead. If you don't give them ration cards and they starve, it won't register. So this is a very, very frightening thing, the unique ID scheme. The question of what should people here be doing? I'm going to leave to Shamrindu. The question about the use of language. I think, you know, I'll say this, that language, not just within activist movements, but language, the use of language, and I'm saying this as a writer, the use, the robbing of language has been the keystone of this war. You know, the taking words like freedom and democracy and empowerment and so on, and deploying them as weapons to mean the exact opposite of what they're meant to mean has development, progress, all these words, language has been stolen from us and we are fighting to find a new language in which you're not just anti-development or anti-progress and all that. Apart from that, the idea of people in this room being those who are privileged and benefiting in some way and speaking on behalf of the poor, I think these are very, very important issues, you know, and how do you, in India, certainly, a lot because of the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, which made it seem like unless you, sort of, wore a loincloth and ate goat's curd, you couldn't do politics, you know, unless you were pure and you didn't have sex and you didn't shop. So it delegitimizes everybody but saints and there is a huge effort to try and say isolate the poor and say only the poor can speak for the poor and in any case, no one's gonna hear them. So say you come from another class or say you're me, a writer who's very successful and even wealthy because my books sell a lot of copies. You know, how do I deploy my privileges politically is a question for me. I spend my time thinking about it and using it in whatever way I can but I think we shouldn't ever get into the position of guilt-tripping ourselves to the point where we are just useless, you know? Because I know from my comrades in the forest that they are bloody happy, that I have some money and that I can come here and that I can speak and I can do things which I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So it's very important to think these things through. Now, this is a very, very interesting question about the women, the grassroots women's movements that was asked and I will link this to a quick summary of what we're going to do and a quick sort of sketch about what's happening with the NGOization of resistance in India. You see, it's very interesting that there's a lot of money pouring into these NGOs but who are the NGOs? We know that in the most troublesome places in the world you have the more the trouble, the more the NGOs, right? So in Haiti, obviously you have a lot of NGOs and Kashmir, you have a lot of NGOs and Orissa is just overflowing with NGOs. And it's very interesting that the feminist movement in India has more or less been hijacked by NGOs because there is a certain kind of feminist, professional feminist discourse which is important. I'm not saying it's not important but it does not threaten the economic imperialism that's going on. So it's ripe for NGO money. All kinds of identity struggles like Dalit struggles can be sort of defanged with NGO money. However, if you look at the issues of what is happening to women on the ground, I've spent a lot of time with the Narmada movement, the anti-dam movement and of course it's led by women, they are the battering ram of the movement and they do understand that when they lose their land they lose everything. I've seen when the government has gone and dumped truckloads of stone on a farmer's land which they haven't even acquired, I've seen 10,000 women pick up that stone and dump it in the collector and say next time it'll be in your house. But of course that movement was marginalized but you will not see the so-called sort of professional funded feminists ever supporting the anti-dam movement in which actually you have women being dispossessed on a scale that's unbelievable and the compensation only mostly goes to the men who drink it away and the women are left with nothing but most extraordinary of all I would like to say that when I went into the Chhattisgarh forests on an invitation from the banned CPI Maoist I went with one prejudice and that was that an armed struggle is going to victimize women. You know it's going to turn against women. This is what I fervently believed and when I went in I was first stunned to know that 45% of the people's liberation guerrilla army women and then I met an organization which is within the Maoist party called the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangatan which means the revolutionary Adivasi women's movement. It had 90,000 members, perhaps the most radical feminist group in India but if anyone were to identify themselves as a member of the KAMS they could be shot because they're Maoists. Now I'm not a Maoist and when I read the end of my last thing to you, you know that. However, I want to say that these women I asked them so many of them, why did you join the guerrilla army? And a lot of them had watched, you see they had watched the Selvajudu rape and kill their sisters and their mothers and they had decided they're not going to take this anymore prior to that the forest department which is India's biggest landlord for years just felt that it was their right to go in and pick up any tribal woman that they wanted. Just as upper caste men in many villages in places like Tamil Nadu believe is their right to go and pick up any Dalit woman they want and rape her or do whatever. And now that doesn't happen. So forget just this is not just a fight about mining corporations. It's a fight about a whole history of feudalism and casteism which we can't forget. And these women had joined not only because of the Selvajudu but also to escape the patriarchy of their own tribal societies which are not perfect, you know. It's not as if they are just some perfect society which we all need to emulate. So there's a lot of texture and complexity in all of this that sometimes gets ironed out in a short conversation. But I'd just like to say that India has some of the most extraordinary and the most free women in the world and yet it's busy committing female fetus side where female fetuses are being destroyed in their millions. So that. The last question about tactics. Obviously inside England your tactics are going to be completely different from what we are talking about there. But often I have been accused especially after I wrote walking with the comrades I have been accused of being a terrorist, of being a Maoist, of being a person who supports violence in some unqualified sense. But I believe that there is a, what is really remarkable about what is happening in India is that there is a bandwidth of resistance movements. The Maoists are the most militant end. There's the Gandhians and there's everything in between. And their differences can be ideological but often they are tactical. And I say to people who say you support armed struggle or you support violence that when you're living in a forest village in a tribal area and 100, sorry 800 central reserve police force come and surround your village and start to burn it and kill people and rape people, what are you supposed to do? Declare a hunger strike when you're already starving anyway, you know? The politics of nonviolent resistance is a very effective form of theater but it needs an audience. In that tribal village there is no audience, you know? And so you know they are going to turn to the people who they think can protect them even if they don't necessarily at the end of the day agree with their ideological vision, you know? So I will say that people who are hungry cannot go on a hunger strike. People who have no money cannot boycott foreign goods or you know, they don't have any goods. Sometimes the kinds of violence that the police will do whether it's in Kashmir or whether it's in a tribal village where people have nothing, people have no money. So when it's minus 30 degrees you go and break somebody's window panes and you know that they're going to just freeze to death or just be homeless, is Amnesty going to write, Amnesty International going to say oh the police broke their window panes or you go and fire bullets into the few vessels that they have so they cannot collect water. Are you going to have a human rights report that says oh they fired bullets into my brass pot people will laugh but it's a terrible act of violence. And I will say that today I believe that what is happening in India is nothing short of a kind of genocide and people have the right to resist by any means possible. Thank you. We have a couple of minutes for some rain to respond and then Arundhati will end with the reading and after that we have Robert Wallace and Jennifer coming on stage to tell us a little bit about the exhibition and why you should see it which is kind of part of this event. Yeah, thanks Arundhati. Coming back to Arundhati's question about WWF I want to make one interesting story here which took place in Iceland. When Kauran Yukodem was on the top of the agenda of WWF's one of the major campaign they dropped the campaign out of the blue not explaining to this their own shareholders and their own trustees as well as their own checkbook regular standing order mail post. It was very interesting to see why this happened because WWF got Catherine Fuehler who was one of the board of director of Alcoa and the Kauran Yukodem was built to smelt for the aluminum for Alcoa. So after getting one million dollars donation from Alcoa Catherine Fuehler became the director of WWF and see the AGM say that we have to drop this campaign. So in one click of a mouse, WWF deleted Kauran Yukod from its campaign website. So 2.4 million so-called standing order WWF supporters around the planet could know what happened in Kauran Yukodem. So this is where when she talks about NGOization Roy talks about NGOization of the whole global politics. I feel that we have to make the politics of protest visible. We are protesting every year at the AGM of Vedanta for the last seven years and last year we had a big audience so we expect that some of you will come to the AGM. We have got spare shares so you can come into the boardroom and part of the action please do make yourself visible. This is the new age of tactics and politics we are talking about where protest is the center. And if we talk about this like Sara was talking about House of Commons is just around the corner. In fact actually after the financial crisis Gillian Tett wrote a book called Fool's Goal and she has mentioned that out of 700 some odd MPs in House of Commons not a single one has ever visited to the city finance center to see what is going wrong in these places. So that also speaks about the new politics which has been shifted from House of Commons to the boardrooms of these big multinationals. BHU Billiton is far more important and influential than House of Commons. JP Morgan Chase is much more influential than House of Commons or Washington's whatever you call all these parliaments. The politics has already been taken out of the people and that's one of the reasons why we say that NGOs are part of this agenda. Very clearly if you see that NGOs don't talk about politics but they lobby around the same corridors of power to get some little bit of help. It is the same DFID minister I was mentioning Sriti Vaderas. She was the most influential minister in the Gordon Browns cabinet and this year she has joined BHU Billiton. It's not shocking at all to me that a Prime Minister, Tony Blair will join JP Morgan as a consultant. So this actually talks a lot about, speaks a lot about today's politics. Helmet Kohl, German Chancellor, joins the Gageprom, gas company. So all these people are actually running corporates and they are actually not thinking about politics. We have to bring politics alive. It's very exciting. And Tata, yes, Tata has been appointed as a consultant to the British establishment and part of the same JP Morgan. So Tata shares the same board with Tony Blair. So what can you expect? Thank you. In Hindi there's a saying called Paltu Sher which means like a tiger on a leash. You know, that's a lot of what these NGOs do, this kind of posturing. But they are actually just in a way to mop up the real resistance, the real politics and to diffuse it. So that's what they do. Shia, you're saying? Okay, this is, we are not refiring. Yeah. We are not refiring. Your struggle are here. Well, the last question is. Let me just say that this thing is not our struggle. It's your struggle too. You know, it's a struggle for the whole world. You know, and that's why it's so important this fight that's happening in India. It's everybody's, it's everybody's and everybody has a finer way of being involved with it. So I'm just going to, it'll start a bit suddenly because, you know, I don't want to go back too much. But judging from what's happening in Russia and China and even Vietnam, eventually communists and capitalist societies seem to have one thing in common, the DNA of their dreams. After their revolutions, after building societies that millions of workers and peasants paid for with their lives, these countries have now begun to reverse some of the gains of their revolution and have turned into unbridled capitalist economies. For them too, the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of progress you need industry. To feed the industry, you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising. Same story, different characters, rich countries plundering poor ones. Yesterday it was Europe and the United States today it's India and China, maybe tomorrow it'll be Africa. Will there be a tomorrow? Perhaps it's too late to ask, but then hope has little to do with reason. Can we expect that an alternative to what looks like certain depth for the planet will come from the imagination that has brought about this crisis in the first place? It seems unlikely. The alternative, if there is one, will emerge from the places and the people who have resisted the hegemonic impulse of capitalism and imperialism instead of being co-opted by it. Here in India, even in the midst of all the violence and greed, there is still hope. If anyone can do it, we can. We still have a population that has not yet been completely colonized by that consumerist dream. We have a living tradition of those who have struggled for Gandhi's vision of sustainability and self-reliance for socialist ideas of egalitarianism and social justice. We have Ambedkar's vision which challenges the Gandhians as well as the socialists in serious ways. We have the most spectacular coalition of resistance movements with their experience, understanding and vision. Most important of all, India has a surviving Adivasi population of almost 100 million. They are the ones who still know the secrets of sustainable living. If they disappear, they will take those secrets with them. Wars like Operation Green Hunt will make them disappear. So victory for the prosecutors of these wars will contain within itself the seeds of destruction, not just for Adivasis but eventually for the human race. That's why the war in central India is so important. That's why we need a real and urgent conversation between all those political formations that are resisting this war. The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination. The day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless is the day when change will come. If there's any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them. The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination, an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism, an imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers, can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest, can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars. Thank you. Could I invite Robert Wallace and Jennifer Wallace who've organized this event and to whom we owe a great number of thanks and also have organized the exhibition to say a few words about the exhibition before we sign off. Thank you. First of all, I'd just like to thank Erin Datty, Felix, Samarinda and Benita for making this possible and all of you for being here. The exhibition upstairs is one example of what we've been talking about in the Indian state of Jharkhand where mining, primarily coal mining is destroying an ancient tribal culture. So I hope you'll take time to come look at it. Jennifer who wrote all the text and interviewed people on the ground will be with me in the gallery for a while if you'd like to speak with us. It's on two levels. The upper level shows the culture as it still exists. The upper level shows the alternative imagination that Erin Datty has just spoken so eloquently about. A different imagination which is being destroyed by the lower level which depicts the mining in Jharkhand. So I hope as a form of initial protest people are talking about how they can protest. We put on this exhibition as our attempt to try and bring the news about what's happening in this region to London. So I hope as an initial form of protest you will go and have a look at the exhibition in the gallery upstairs. How long is it on? Yeah. The exhibition runs until the 25th of June. Can we thank Robert and Jennifer Wallace for putting this wonderful show together and the exhibition? And can we thank our three panelists, Erin Datty Roy particularly, for her very powerful reading and to all three of them, and to all three of them for underlining the fact that as writers, academics, we cannot afford to hold neutral positions in the way in which we are kind of brokers in the situation and we cannot afford to be neutral. I think this is very, very important. Thank you for saying that.