Things that Can and Cannot Be Said (4 page)

AR:
They moved in to the spaces that were left when “structural adjustment” forced states to pull back on public spending—on health, education, infrastructure, water supply—turning what ought to be people's rights, to education, to health care, and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it. . . . The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against “corruption” and for “transparency.” They want the Rule of Law—as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardize a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely—unimpeded—around the world today is money . . . capital.

JC:
It's all for efficiency, right? Stable markets, stable world . . . there's a great violence in the idea of a uniform “investment climate.”

AR:
In India, that's a phrase we use interchangeably with “massacre.” Stable markets,
unstable
world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It's enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption. (
Laughing
) But seriously, if you look at the history of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where almost a million people, mainly Communists, were killed by General Suharto, who was backed by the CIA, in South Africa, in the US civil rights movement—or even now, it's very disturbing.
6
They have always worked closely with the US State Department.

JC:
And yet now Ford funds
The Act of Killing
—the film about those same massacres.
7
They profile the butchers . . . but not their masters. They won't follow the money.

AR:
They have so much money, they can fund everything, very bad things as well as very good things—documentary films, nuclear weapons planners, gender rights, feminist conferences, literature and film festivals, university chairs . . . anything, as long as it doesn't upset the “market” and the economic status quo. One of Ford's “good works” was to fund the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations, which worked closely with the CIA.
8
The first eleven World Bank presidents were from the CFR.
9
Ford funded RAND, the research and development corporation which works closely with the US defense forces.

JC:
That was where Dan worked. That's where he laid his hands on the Pentagon Papers.

AR:
The Pentagon Papers . . . I couldn't believe what I was reading . . . that stuff about bombing dams, planning famines. . . . I wrote an introduction to an edition of Noam Chomsky's
For Reasons of State
in which he analyzes the Pentagon Papers.
10
There was a chapter in the book called “The Backroom Boys”—maybe that wasn't the Pentagon Papers part, I don't remember . . . but there was a letter or a note of some kind, maybe from soldiers in the field, about how great it was that white phosphorus had been mixed in with napalm . . . “The original product wasn't so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. [T]hen . . . they started adding Willie Peter [WP—white phosphorus] so's to make it burn better.”
11
Nice people no?

JC:
You remember that by rote?

AR:
I can't forget it. It burned me to the bone . . . I grew up in Kerala, remember. Communist country . . .

JC:
You were talking about how the Ford Foundation funded RAND and the CFR.

AR:
(
Laughs
) Yes . . . it's a bedroom comedy . . . actually a bedroom tragedy . . . is that a genre? Ford funded CFR and RAND. Robert McNamara moved from heading Ford Motors to the Pentagon. So, as you can see, we're encircled.

JC:
. . . and not just by the past.

AR:
No—by the future, too. The future is Google, isn't it? In Julian Assange's book—brilliant book—
When Google Met WikiLeaks
, he suggests that there isn't much daylight between Google and the NSA.
12
The three people who went along with Eric Schmidt—CEO of Google—to interview Julian were Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas—ex-State Department and senior something or other on the CFR, adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. The two others were Lisa Shields and Scott Malcolmson, also former State Department and CFR. It's serious shit. But when we talk about NGOs, there's something we must be careful about . . .

JC:
What's that?

AR:
When the attack on NGOs comes from the opposite end, from the far Right, then those of us who've been criticizing NGOs from a completely different perspective will look terrible . . . to liberals, we'll be the bad guys . . .

JC:
Once again pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded.”

AR:
For example, in India the new government—the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a “Hindu Nation”—they're bigots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns—orchestrated to polarize communities and bring in the vote. It was so in Gujarat in 2002, and this year, in the run-up to the general elections, in a place called Muzaffarnagar, after which tens of thousands of Muslims had to flee from their villages and live in camps.
13
Some of those who are accused of all that murdering are now cabinet ministers. Their support for straightforward, chest-thumping butchery makes you long for even the hypocrisy of the human rights discourse. But now if the “human rights” NGOs make a noise, or even whisper too loudly . . . this government will shut them down. And it can, very easily. All it has to do is to go after the funders . . . and the funders, whoever they are, especially those who are interested in India's huge “market,” will either cave in or scuttle over to the other side. Those NGOs will blow over because they're a chimera, they don't have deep roots in society among the people, really, so they'll just disappear. Even the pretend resistance that has sucked the marrow out of genuine resistance will be gone.

JC:
Is Modi going to succeed long term?

AR:
It's hard to say. There's no real opposition, you know? He has an absolute majority and a government that he completely controls, and he himself—and I think this is true of most people with murky pasts—doesn't trust any of his own people, so he's become this person who has to interface directly with people. The government is secondary. Public institutions are being peopled by his acolytes, school and university syllabi are being revamped, history is being rewritten in absurd ways. It's very dangerous, all of it. And a large section of young people, students, the IT crowd, the educated middle class and, of course, Big Business, are with him—the Hindu right wing is with him. He's lowering the bar of public discourse—saying things like, “Oh, Hindus discovered plastic surgery in the Vedas because how else would we have had an elephant-headed god.”
14

JC:
(
Laughing
) He said that?

AR:
Yes! It's dangerous. On the other hand, it's so corny that I don't know how long it can last. But for now people are wearing Modi masks and waving back at him . . . He was democratically elected. There's no getting away from that. That's why when people say “the people” or “the public” as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

JC:
As they say, “Kitsch is the mask of Death” . . .
15

AR:
Sounds about right . . . But then, while there's no real opposition to him in Parliament, India's a very interesting place . . . there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition. If you travel around—there are all kinds of people, brilliant people . . . journalists, activists, filmmakers, whether you go to Kashmir, the Indian part, or to an Adivasi village about to be submerged by a dam reservoir—the level of understanding of everything we've talked about—surveillance, globalization, NGO-ization—is so high, you know? The wisdom of the resistance movements, which are ragged and tattered and pushed to the wall, is incredible. So . . . I look to them and keep the faith. (
Laughs
)

JC:
So this isn't new to you . . . the debate about mass surveillance?

AR:
Of course, the details are new to me, the technical stuff and the scale of it all—but for many of us in India who don't consider ourselves “innocent,” surveillance is something we have all always been aware of. Most of those who have been summarily executed by the army or the police—we call them “encounters”—have been tracked down using their cellphones. In Kashmir, for years they have monitored every phone call, every e-mail, every Facebook account—that plus beating doors down, shooting into crowds, mass arrests, torture that puts Abu Ghraib in the shade. It's the same in central India.

JC:
In the forest where you went “walking with the comrades”?

AR:
Yes. Where the poorest people in the world have stopped some of the richest mining corporations in their tracks. The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media. There's a virtual civil war going on there and few know about it. Anyway, before I went into the forest, I was told by the superintendent of police, “Out there, ma'am . . . my boys shoot to kill.”
16
The police call the area across the river “Pakistan.”
17
Anyway, then the cop says to me, “‘See, ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
18
His point was that watching TV would teach them greed.

JC:
Greed. . . . That's what this whole circus is about, huh?

AR:
Yes.

That evening, after the awards ceremony, we met up with Dan. The next morning, we caught the flight to Moscow. Traveling with us was Ole von Uexküll from the Right Livelihood Foundation, a lovely man with clear eyes and impeccable manners. Ole was going to give Ed the prize since he couldn't travel to Stockholm to receive it. Ole would be our companion for the next few days. On the flight, Dan was furiously reading Roy's new essay, “The Doctor and the Saint,” scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.
19
My mind began to race, wondering what Roy was making of this mini flying circus hurtling toward Moscow. What I would learn from what she calls—with sinister silkiness and mischief twinkling in her dark brown eyes—“the gook perspective”? She can disarm you at any time with her friendly hustler's grin, but her eyes see things and love things so fiercely, it's frightening at times.