AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, Breaking the Sound Barrier. I’m Amy Goodman.

As the crisis in the Occupied Territories escalates, some of the worst ethnic fighting in decades has also erupted in another part of the world, in India. In the last six days alone, more than 500 people have been killed, many in clashes between Hindus and Muslims.

As hundreds die in ethnic infighting in India, thousands continue to lose their lives and livelihoods to the privatization of essential resources like water and energy. While Enron has been by far the highest-profile example of this kind of privatization, Enron was a household name in India years before its collapse made headlines in the United States. Another and equally disastrous example has been unfolding around the construction of big dams in the Narmada Valley. The valley is home to millions of people in central India, many whose families have been working its soil or fishing its rivers for generations. These days, however, it’s also home to one of the country’s largest big dam projects, a project which involves the construction of hundreds of dams and an extensive irrigation system.

Among the most clarion and intrepid of voices in the fight against big dams has been that of the great writer Arundhati Roy. After publishing her acclaimed first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997, Roy became increasingly active in the struggle for the Narmada Valley, as well as in struggles around nuclear disarmament, Enron and, most recently, the so-called war on terror. But in a surreal twist, Roy’s activism has recently led her to the brink of imprisonment. After defending herself in an impassioned affidavit against false charges of threatening the lawyers for the Narmada Valley Development Project, she was slapped with a contempt of court charge, which could send her to jail for up to six months. She’ll be sentenced on Wednesday.

I caught up with Arundhati Roy just before the ethnic violence began to escalate. I spoke to her in New Delhi and asked her about the court case that she now faces.

ARUNDHATI ROY: The court case, it’s — you know, one has to see it at several different levels. One is the specific case, and one is the political context in which it’s all happening. So, I’ll just talk about the specific case first, which is that, basically, I’ve been involved for some years now with this huge struggle against big dams that are being built in the Narmada Valley. And for five or six years, the Supreme Court had ordered a stay against the Sardar Sarovar Dam. And suddenly, in 1999, it partially lifted the stay and, in October 2000, in a final, very controversial court judgment, ordered that the construction of the dam should go ahead, despite the fact that rehabilitation of the displaced people just had not taken place.

So there was a big protest outside the gates of the Supreme Court in December 2000. I was there, as were hundreds of other people, hundreds of people from the Narmada Valley, who were people who had already been displaced by the dam at its existing height and had nowhere to go and so on, and they had come to protest against the judgment. And a few weeks later, what happened was that a group of five lawyers filed a case in the Supreme Court, which was an absolutely ludicrous case, claiming that me and Medha Patkar, who’s the leader of the resistance movement in the valley, and the lawyer for that resistance movement, the NBA — it’s called the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which means “Save the Narmada” — these lawyers claim that we had tried to kill them and that we had raised these slogans against the court, and so on. And even the local — I mean, there were hundreds of police there at the demonstration. There was the entire national media there. It was reported in every paper. And, of course, no such incident happened. I didn’t even see these people. I didn’t even know — I don’t even know who they were. And the Supreme Court actually accepted their petition, even though a local police station wouldn’t accept the, you know, police report — the first information report, they wouldn’t accept it. And the Supreme Court ordered us all to appear like criminals before the court and defend ourselves.

So I responded with an affidavit, basically denying the charges, but also saying that, you know, the fact that the Supreme Court of India should accept such a technically flawed, ludicrous petition was somehow a sign that the court was harassing its critics, and it was bringing its own reputation into disrepute. The court then dropped the petition, the charges made by the lawyers. They said — they themselves said this was a shocking petition, it was technically flawed, it should never have been accepted. And then the court let everybody off, including these lawyers with their false charges, and filed what is called a sua motu case against me. Sua motu means that the court itself charged me with contempt of court. And there have been several hearings now over the last year. And basically, the hearings were held virtually, in camera. In India, courtrooms are supposed to be public, but no members of the public were allowed in. The judge, who was — who is judging it is the judge against whom, supposedly, the contempt happened. So, you know, he’s judging his own case. And on the 6th of March, they are going — they have ordered me to be personally present in court while they read out the judgment. And the punishment for this could be the maximum punishment of six months in prison. And I don’t know whether I will be given a prison sentence or whether I will be sort of publicly humiliated and let off or whether I’ll be symbolically punished. I don’t know what will happen. But that’s the — I mean, that’s just the specifics of this case.

But on a much more serious level, see, whatever happens to me, whether I get put into jail or whether I get let off, in a world where daisy cutters are being dropped on people, I can’t make a prison sentence into human rights case. But, actually, the problem is a far more serious one. You see, in India, what is happening is that all these institutions, whether it’s the court, whether it’s the executive, as in the Parliament, or whether it’s the local administration, the police and so on, are now being used as instruments in this whole process of corporate globalization that’s taking place. And the Supreme Court is legitimizing huge decisions on privatization, on structural adjustment, all the decisions about whether there should be industry in Delhi or not, whether public-sector units should be privatized or not, whether Enron should be proceeded against or not, whether slums should be cleared or not, whether a dam should be built or not. All these decisions are now being taken by the Supreme Court of India. It’s wading into public life and making decisions that affect the lives of millions and millions of people.

And this contempt of court law says that, basically, nobody can criticize the court. So, in a sense, what you have — what you see here is a retreat from democracy at a pace which is really frightening. And therefore this case is important, where those of us who are involved in it — I mean, I’m the — obviously I’m the person whose head is in the news just now, but many of us feel that this particular law should be struck down, because it is anti-democratic and actually impedes free speech and free criticism.

AMY GOODMAN: What has been the reaction of your fellow and sister Indians to this case against you?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, that’s a difficult question to answer, because, on the one hand, I’d say that the majority of people don’t know what the case really is, because the press is frightened to report it because of the contempt of court law. And the press is not allowed into the courtroom by the police. And so there’s a peculiar silence around it, on the one hand. On the other hand, you know, the silence is in the media, but the media in India, especially the English press, is not — you know, is not read by the majority of people, because most of them can’t read English. Most of them can’t read.

But, you know, the drumbeat, like in — say, in the Narmada Valley or in huge cases where people’s movements have been — have been struck down or, you know, really silenced by the Supreme Court, there’s a tremendous amount of support. Yet, in the established, sort of middle-class urban world, there’s a silence. And there is also this effort to try and portray the whole thing as a very personalized thing, you know, this maverick writer versus the sort of august majesty of the Supreme Court, and to personalize it and to depoliticize it, which is, of course, an old trick. But that’s what’s going on just now here.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Enron. Can you talk about the significance of Enron in India? I mean, I think in the United States, before Enron collapsed, it was not known very much, yet in India it was probably known a lot more.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah, that’s the peculiar thing, because Enron has been on the front pages of the papers in India since 1993, because when it was still this unknown company, it signed an agreement, first with the Congress Party in Maharashtra and the Congress state government in Maharashtra, and then, later on, after a lot of controversy, that particular contract was impugned, and then a new contract was signed with the ruling Shiv Sena and the BJP, which are these right-wing fundamentalist Hindu parties, which are in power today, as well. They signed what is the biggest contract ever signed in the history of India for a power plant in Maharashtra. It was a $30 billion contract, which had a return on equity of something like 30% for Enron, which is completely illegal. It became hugely controversial, because people who had studied the what is called a power purchase agreement, you know, came out with the analysis of it and said that this was the biggest fraud ever perpetrated in India, the most massive fraud, it’s been called. And basically, seven years after the contract was signed, everything that the critics of Enron said came true. Enron began to produce the most expensive electricity ever produced in India. Nobody could afford to buy it. So, eventually, it ended up with the state electricity board paying Enron just maintenance charges, which were something like, I don’t know, $22 million a year or something, not to produce electricity. And this was the state of affairs.

And, of course, what has happened with Enron, as everybody knows now in America, is that it’s exposed the rot and the lie in this whole issue of privatization. You know, the whole business of privatization as the alternative to a corrupt, inefficient state is such a piece of nonsense, because, as you can see in the case of Enron in India even, really there was nothing private about Enron. Basically, the only thing that was private were the profits, because all the risks were public. All the money that Enron put in, all the loans that it took, was underwritten by Indian financial institutions. So, today, even though Enron is bankrupt, really the money is all from Indian financial institutions. So it doesn’t help us that Enron is bankrupt. And while Enron is unraveling in America, George Bush has sent the U.S. treasury secretary — who, you know, by some quirk of fate, is called Mr. Dam — to India to insist that we honor our contract with Enron and pay them a $1.2 billion exit payment. And so, really, though Enron doesn’t exist anymore, its liabilities and the mess that it’s created is being borne by the poorest people in among the poorest countries in the world, as in America by the shareholders and all that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to the great writer Arundhati Roy, speaking to her in New Delhi, India, where she lives and works. You are listening to Democracy Now! How does Enron connect to the story of the dams that you have been so passionately fighting against?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Enron doesn’t directly connect to the story of the dams, but what it connects to is the fact — is the story of the privatization of infrastructure. So, now, for instance, in the Narmada Valley, they have the first privatized hydroelectric project, which is called the Maheshwar Dam. And structurally, the Maheshwar Dam is exactly the same as Enron. It’s being presented to the people as a private project. But, once again, the money is public. The government underwrite — you know, it does — as in the case of Enron, even here, they have what’s called an escrow contract, where basically the government signs this contract with a private company with the escrow clause in it. And that means that whatever money comes into the government account, before the government pays its own employees, before it pays its workers, before it pays anything, the private company that runs this project has first call on that money, you know, regardless of how much electricity is produced, regardless of how expensive that electricity may be. So, this is the same thing that happened with Enron.

So, in India, you know, while people are fighting — say, in America, you know, you have these huge protests against Nike and Starbucks and Kmart and things. In India, the biggest problem is the privatization of essential infrastructure, you know, so the privatization of water, the privatization of rivers, the privatization of electricity, which end up with dispossessing people on a barbaric scale. And, you know, you can’t — and the whole thing is being presented as though it’s a new alternative to what was undoubtedly an inefficient, corrupt state. But what I keep saying is that it’s not an alternative. It’s like saying, “Do you want a Coke or Pepsi?” because the state is behind both. And really, the shift of power has just been from the bribe taker to the bribe giver. As you can see with Enron, it penetrated the entire state apparatus. So, eventually, Kenneth Lay is interviewing people for the energy — for jobs in the energy ministry in America. You know, he’s placing people there. He’s writing the policy. So, what’s the difference?

Corruption is not genetic to a government officer or a government servant. Corruption is linked to power. So, if the state has the power, the state is corrupt. If that power shifts to the private sector, the private sector is corrupt. So, really, the only alternative is to empower civil society. The only alternative is the politics of opposition, you know, the politics of demanding accountability, whether it’s from the courts, whether it’s from the private sector, or whether it’s from the government. There’s no shortcut to that.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things and Power Politics. We’ll be back with her in New Delhi in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, The Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman, as we go back to the great writer Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and Power Politics. She faces sentencing in court on Wednesday for her activism. This is the conversation I had with her several weeks ago in New Delhi.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, what does this have to do with The God of Small Things, which has won you such acclaim all over the world as an artist and a writer?

ARUNDHATI ROY: This has to do with The God of Small Things, if you — if you were to reread The God of Small Things now, you’d see that it is about this. It is about all this. You know, it is about preserving — The God of Small Things is sort of patrolling the borders of humanity, I think, saying, “Look, this is what we need to say when these are the dangers that are really facing us today.” And so many people ask me whether, you know, my next book is going to be about dams, and it makes me laugh, because I think The God of Small Things is the fiction version of “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” and all the — you know, or Power Politics and the understanding of all that, in a way. But it’s a very — it’s a very difficult thing for me to explain. But, actually, to me, there isn’t a difference between fiction and nonfiction. You know, there’s a difference between truth and lies, but fiction sometimes is the truest thing that there ever was. So, in bookshelves and in reviewers’ minds and in publishers’ minds, there are differences between fiction and nonfiction, but I don’t really see that difference. You know, I just see all these things that I write as a way of presenting, a way of seeing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what you mean by “the algebra of infinite justice”?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I can, actually, because I’ve been thinking about that a great deal. And what I mean by “the algebra of infinite justice” is really what — it’s really almost mathematical or arithmetical. What are the things that count in the calculus of power? Who are the people that count? Who are the people that don’t count? Whether you look at, you know, Madeleine Albright saying that 500,000 children dying in Iraq was a price worth paying, or whether you look at the War in Afghanistan and the fact that we don’t even want to know — the world — the world’s media doesn’t even want to know how many people were killed in Afghanistan, how many innocent people died in Afghanistan. We don’t want to follow up on the U.N. report saying that seven-and-a-half million people were about to starve. And suddenly it’s off the news. So, the only way of finding out is to go to Afghanistan. And if you can’t go to Afghanistan, you don’t know what happened, but they don’t count anymore. So there are people in the world that count, and there are people in the world that don’t count. And I’m not saying this is a genetic problem with the American state. It’s true of any state. And the more powerful you are, the cruder the algebra of infinite justice becomes.

But even, say, you look at the Narmada Valley. If you look at a dam project — you know, when I wrote my first essay on dams, what shocked me more than the facts that do exist are the facts that don’t exist, that we don’t have any — we didn’t have any facts about how many people are displaced by big dams, after all these years. If you look at the particular dam that I studied, who counts as an officially displaced person, and who doesn’t? The people who have land at least count as officially displaced. The people who don’t have land but who, say, are fisherpeople or who who are sand couriers or people who belong to the lower castes in India, who lose everything, they don’t count as displaced people. So, the fact that most of the — I mean, now we know because the World Commission on Dams came out with a report. The India country study on the World Commission on Dams estimates the number of displaced people as being 56 million — 56 million people. And we have no figures, because most of those people are untouchables or Indigenous people, who don’t count as people in the scheme of things.

So that’s what I mean by “the algebra of infinite justice” — where you choose to draw the limits of your formula for your cost-benefit analysis. When you do — when you have a war against Iraq or Afghanistan, or any war, what do you choose — where do you choose to draw the limit of the damage that you’ve done? Is it just the number of people that you’ve killed? Does the fact that you’ve destroyed crops, the fact that whole generations might suffer in the future from cluster bombs, the fact that the animals and the fish and the grass and the insects and the air have been contaminated? Do those things count, or do they not? That’s what I mean by “the algebra of infinite justice.”

AMY GOODMAN: Todd Gitlin, a writer in the United States, in a piece he did in Mother Jones magazine — you were also interviewed in the same issue — says, “From the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who has admirably criticized her country’s policies on nuclear weapons and development, came the queenly declaration that ‘American people ought to know that it is not them but their government’s policies that are so hated.’” He goes on to say, “One reason why Americans were not exactly clear about the difference is that the murderers of September 11 did not trouble themselves with such nice distinctions. When Roy described bin Laden as ‘the American president’s dark doppelganger’ and claimed that ‘the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable,’ she was in the grip of a prejudice invulnerable to moral distinctions.” What is your response?

ARUNDHATI ROY: My response is that I’m not prejudiced against American people or against any people, because I don’t think in nations in that sense. But I think that anybody who justifies the bombing of Afghanistan is, in a way, in retrospect, justifying terrorism, because this was a form of terrorism. And for me, the deep moral ambiguity that we have toward violence is what lies at the root of this, you know. So, in fact, this whole debate about what is an acceptable war and what is a just war, again, it comes down to the issue of the algebra of infinite justice. You know, to say that, “Oh, we were dropping bombs, but we didn’t intend to kill people,” is such a piece of — what do you call it? — fastidious shuffling about, trying not to take responsibility for what you’re doing. And it is true. In fact, when people justify the sanctions against Iraq, that’s what they say, that people should take responsibility for — the people of Iraq should take responsibility for the excesses of Saddam Hussein. Now, Saddam Hussein is a dictator. He’s a military man. You know, the people of Iraq are less responsible for him than the people of America are for their democratically elected government and its policies. But I do feel that here the American media does owe people an explanation, because people are eventually a product of the information that they receive. And really, on the 11th of September, the twin towers came down, but so did the twin myths of free speech and the free market.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

ARUNDHATI ROY: I mean that the American media and the way it reported this war, and what — again, what it chooses to write about and what it chooses to leave out, what it chooses to discuss and what he chooses not to, is — you know, it was there for everybody to see what was going on after the 11th of September there, you know, the CNN saying, “Don’t report on civilian deaths in Afghanistan.” And so, the rest — the experience in the rest of the world of the 11th of September onwards was very different from the experience of the American people, because of the way the American press was reporting it.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your role as an artist, as a writer, as an activist?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I have written an essay about why I — I don’t think of myself as an activist, because I just feel that I do what writers — I don’t mean what writers should do, but what writers can do, you know, that the definition of “writer” should encompass what I do, not that there should be any rule that all writers should do what I do. I’m not — I don’t mean that at all. But I see my role as being perfectly normal, a perfectly normal thing for a writer to do.

But one of the things that I feel very, very strongly about is that what’s happening to the world today is just outside the grasp of ordinary people, you know, whatever it is, whether it’s what’s happening in the Narmada Valley, or whether it’s what’s happening, say, with me and the Supreme Court just now, or whether it’s the whole issue of what is globalization. What does it mean? What is it doing to us? Now, I think that we live in an era where experts have captured little pieces of territory and carried them off to their lairs, and they guard them against the unauthorized curiosity of people passing by, almost as if you want to make things so complicated that ordinary people can’t understand. You want to professionalize things. Lawyers wants to professionalize things so that they are needed, you know, so that ordinary people can’t understand what’s going on in a court. Architects want to do the same thing with design. And I feel that it’s very important to somehow grab this back, not to vulgarize it, not to simplify it, but to try and explain what’s going on in the world. Why are people being deprived of their livelihoods in the name of corporate globalization? What is corporate globalization? What is privatization? What does it mean? And I think, as a writer, you know, that’s where I try and tell the story, tell the story of the Narmada Valley, in all its detail, to people who don’t quite understand it, to ordinary people who don’t quite understand it.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you afraid to go to jail?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Some days I am, and some days I’m not. You know, some days I’m so — some days I’m so angry that I don’t care. And some days I’m, you know — I’m not scared, but I’m just, let’s say, thoughtful, because, you know, obviously, you’re very vulnerable when you’re there. I don’t mean that anything is going to happen to me, but I just mean, you know, it’s frightening to be controlled by the people that you’re fighting against, in some way. But, no, I mean, I’m not — I’m not — I mean, I have to say that maybe I’m — I mean, maybe I’m being cheeky, and maybe I’m being optimistic, but I think that I don’t think that they’ll put me into jail. I think they’ll try to humiliate me in other ways. But I think it would be — I don’t know, anyway. I don’t even want to speculate. But this is — you see, the problem in India is this is the whole business with courts. It’s not whether they put you into jail or not. That’s not — what is the biggest harassment is thing of going for court hearings, appearing personally, having to spend your life with lawyers, you know? They just — this is the punishment. I’ve already had the punishment. The jail, or no jail, is just the end of it. But the punishment has already been — I’ve already been through it. So, in a way, now I may as well treat — you know, I may as well commit the crime to fit the punishment. I may as well talk about what the role of the courts is in all these issues and so on, which I haven’t really done before.

AMY GOODMAN: And the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan, how do they affect you personally?

ARUNDHATI ROY: They affect me inasmuch as one sees — one sees the absolutely puerile, you know, instigation of the basest feelings on both sides. And it’s very — it’s very frightening to be in the middle of it and to know that, you know, anything that you’re saying — after all, the fight for the dam, say, the fight in the Narmada Valley, is a fight for life. You know, it’s a fight for the beauty of a river, for the forests, for the fish, for the flowers, for those things. And to know that up against you are people who are both — I mean, and I’m not talking about India and Pakistan. Again, you know, I mean, America and Osama bin Laden and everybody’s involved in this absolute — absolutely terrifying world, where nuclear weapons are being pointed at each other. And the knowledge that you’re up against people who are comfortable with the notion of a wasted world — for them, what’s a wasted valley? Nothing. You know? So, that’s very unnerving, to know how little what you’re saying actually counts, whatever — you know, however much attention one is given, or whatever it is, you know, the interviews you do or the prizes you win or all that. It’s just nothing compared to the absolute contempt that the establishment has for what one is saying.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things and Power Politics. She was speaking to us from New Delhi, India. She will be sentenced in court on Wednesday for her protest against privatization in India. If you’d like to get more information, you can go to our website at democracynow.org or to SouthEndPress.org, the publisher of Power Politics.

Coming up this week on Democracy Now!, Fred Hampton Jr. and Dead Prez talking about their trip around college campuses dealing with issues of police brutality. Fred Hampton Jr.’s father, Fred Hampton, was assassinated by the Chicago Police in 1969. Also a debate on Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean elections are coming up this week, as well.

Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Miranda Kennedy, Lizzy Ratner and Jeremy Scahill. Anthony Sloan is our music maestro and engineer. You can email us at mail@democracynow.org. That’s mail@democracynow.org. Broadcasting from the studios of Downtown Community Television, just blocks from where the towers of the World Trade Center once stood, I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.