AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Welcome, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And good day to our listeners around the country. And for those of you who don’t — who haven’t lived in New York but may have heard about New York’s rental prices, you’ll be surprised to know now that the commissioner of New York, the police commissioner, is recommending that as part of the security measures, the increased security measures after September 11th, that all New York tenants have to pass criminal background checks before they should be able to get an apartment in New York. As if it wasn’t tough enough to get an apartment in New York, now you’re going to have to pass a criminal background test, if the police commissioner has his way.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, moving from issues of local security to international security, we’re going to turn back to one of today’s top news headlines. India and Pakistan are balanced on a knife’s edge between small-scale skirmishes and all-out nuclear war. The Indian prime minister and the Pakistani president sat across the table from each other Monday at a regional security summit in Kazakhstan. Musharraf of Pakistan challenged India to agree to unconditional talks to avert war, but he also blamed five decades of conflict on India’s refusal to let the Kashmiri people decide which country they want to join. The Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee refused the offer, saying Musharraf had kept none of his promises over the last six months and that cross-border infiltration by militants into Kashmir has only increased. As both sides struggled to gain the diplomatic high ground, Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged fire along the Line of Control, which divides Kashmir, and they killed eight civilians. Not surprisingly, many civilians are upset at the diplomatic maneuvering of their leaders while the killing continues and are terrified of the threat of nuclear war.

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy, who lives in New Delhi, writes in the British Observer, quote, “If I go away, and everything and everyone — every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved — is incinerated, how shall I live on? … While we wait for rain, for football, for justice, on TV the old generals and the eager boy-anchors talk of first-strike and second-strike capability, as though they’re discussing a board game. My friends and I discuss Prophecy, the film of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. … The dead bodies choking the river. The living stripped of their skin and hair. … We remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of a building. And we imagine ourselves like that. As stains on staircases.”

We go now to New Delhi and are joined by the writer Arundhati Roy.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Arundhati.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. And I’m joined by my co-host, Juan González. Can you give us a sense of the atmosphere right now in New Delhi?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the atmosphere in New Delhi is macabre, because, you know, 98% of the people in this country have no idea what a nuclear bomb is. So, nobody’s particularly worried, you know, and it’s such a — it’s such a difficult thing to know what to think, because, on the one hand, you feel, “Why should people know about the horrors of nuclear bombs? You know, they have enough to live with, without living with that, too,” but, on the other hand, you know that because people don’t take them seriously, this whole business of deterrence is a joke, and, you know, they’re just playing games with human lives. And, you know, whether they use them or they don’t use them, you’re living in a state of — you know, somehow you feel violated. You feel violated when they talk up the war. You feel violated when they talk down the war. And you know that, eventually, you know, the danger is that I don’t think nuclear war is going to be declared. They’re just taking these mincing steps toward the precipice. And, you know, there’s these million men have been on the two — on the border for the last seven months of shelling all the time.

And I think the most dangerous thing of all is that the whole principle now, you know, of the war against terror, the whole acceptance that war is an acceptable solution to terrorism, in the subcontinent has put, you know, nuclear — the terrorists can trigger a nuclear war, because today Musharraf and Vajpayee are talking, but tomorrow there can be a terrorist attack in Kashmir, which neither of them can control, because there have been terrorist attacks in Kashmir since 1989 and earlier, you know? So, this is a very frightening situation where anything can happen, and your rhetoric is really putting the initiative in the hands of terrorists.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what’s been the impact on Indian society for the past few years? For so long the government was led by more secular forces, and now you have the rise of the fundamentalism and conservatism within the Indian government to match the fundamentalism and the conservatism that exists within the Pakistani government for years. What’s been the impact on Indian society of this government?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, in many ways, you know, one doesn’t know. I mean, the truth is that I think much of this war talk has to do with the Indian government wanting to turn the attention away from the genocide that was perpetrated in Gujarat, you know, which was so shocking to us that, for us, it’s, in a way, just as frightening as the prospect of nuclear war. This creeping fascism, you know, the kind of brutality that was — that happened in Gujarat, under the gaze of the state, where policemen and government officers and politicians were all part of the genocide, is so frightening. And that’s a real bomb. You know, it’s like injecting poison into the veins of this country. And, you know, the fundamentalists here have been — it’s not that they just started out. You know, the RSS, which is the sort of cultural guild of fundamentalism in India, Hindu fundamentalism, the prime minister, the home minister, the law minister, all these people belong to the RSS, and the RSS is very clear and open about its support to fascism, its admiration for Hitler. And, you know, they have — the RSS was founded in the ‘20s, and they’ve spread across the country. They have hundreds of thousands of, you know, training centers. They’re distorting history books. It’s just like the Taliban in many ways, you know? And —

AMY GOODMAN: And when you talk about what happened in Gujarat, I don’t know that a lot of people really know in this country that —

ARUNDHATI ROY: What happened.

AMY GOODMAN: — what was it? — 2,000 Muslims were killed?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah. Well, the government, the official estimate is one — is about a thousand. But, you know, the fact is that what happened was that, you know, in February and March, there was a huge buildup of communal tension, because the Hindu fundamentalists were saying that they were going to do the puja to inaugurate this temple that they want to build in Ayodhya on the ruins of a mosque that they had broken. And, you know, the people who were involved in building it were traveling from all over India to a Ayodhya, which is in Uttar Pradesh, and there was this horrendous incident where — in a place called Godhra, where a train full of these pilgrims was burned by an angry Muslim mob, because there had been a whole lot of provocation over the week.

And in retaliation to this — supposedly in retaliation, but now it turns out, of course, that this pogrom has been planned — had been planned for weeks in advance, these mobs just went and raped and killed and looted and beheaded and burned people over the next month. In fact, now it’s going to be three months. Police refused to file FIRs. Police refused to protect Muslims who went to them for help. You know, now they’re all living in camps. Apart from the murder of, and especially the rape and dismembering and burning of women, the entire economic base of the Muslim community has been broken. Muslim businesses were targeted. Muslim restaurants were burned. You know, even people who had partnerships with Muslims had their shops burned down. And now people are refusing to let them go back home. So they’re living in these camps, without any shelter. And yet, you know, the chief minister, who always sort of — who watched over all this, also a member of the RSS, and now there are reports coming out in the press about how he had meetings where he called senior politicians and policemen and told them that they were not to interfere with the mobs’, you know, thirst for revenge.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to the writer Arundhati Roy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Why do you think that this kind of fanaticism and move toward fascism has found such a fertile ground in this particular period of Indian history?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I don’t think that it’s just in India. You know, as you said, it’s in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and, in its own way, in America. And I really feel that, you know, we really have to look at the links between the three things that are marching arm in arm through the 21st century, which is corporate globalization, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Even in Gujarat, you know, there are people who’ve been studying labor movements in Gujarat for years and years, who point out how Ahmedabad, the city which suffered most of the violence, used to be known as the Manchester of the East. It had these huge textile mills, which have all closed down over the last 10 years because of globalization. And on either side of the river in Ahmedabad, you can see on one side sort of the glittering rewards of globalization to one side of society, and on the other all these workers, these hundreds of thousands of workers, out of work, just sinking into the marshland of poverty and dispossession. It’s ripping through the fabric of this very complex society. And people are — you know, people have lost their language. They’ve lost their culture. They’ve lost their roots. They’ve lost their jobs. And they’re just wild, wild people now, you know. So, I think one has to study this very, very carefully. And one has to make those connections and see that one-half of the world or more than half of the world is just slipping into despair and anarchy.

AMY GOODMAN: I was speaking with Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani physicist, in Pakistan just a few hours ago, and he was saying, even in his physics department, people do not understand what nuclear war is about, that nuclear weapons have been so glorified that when you talk about radiation sickness or what the real effects of a nuclear war could be, most people are not thinking about that or even understand that at all.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah. You see, in India, I mean, in any society like a developing society, what is — I mean, people keep asking me, “Why isn’t there a peace movement?” And I say, “How can there be a peace movement, when to the ordinary — you know, to 80% of India, peace is a daily battle for water, for food, for shelter, for dignity, and war is only something that is fought somewhere on the border by some professional soldiers, and it’s fine to be jingoistical and shout about it, because you have nothing to do with it?” And nuclear war is something which is completely beyond the comprehension of people. You know, they don’t understand that nuclear war is not between India and Pakistan; it’s between humanity and the planet, you know. And it’s impossible for people to understand that, because the horror is — you know, there isn’t even — there aren’t even words in Indian languages to describe things like thermal blasts and radioactive fallout and a nuclear winter. You know, how do you explain to people who — I mean, they’ve never seen — you know, forget a nuclear bomb, they’ve not seen a TV set, or not — I mean, you know, you’re talking about a different century, people in India. You know, India lives in several centuries simultaneously. And there are people who — I mean, how would they understand, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, we have to break for stations to identify themselves, but we are going to come back with you in 60 seconds. Our guest is Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, Power [Politics], has just written a piece in The Observer about living “under the nuclear shadow.” And after we finish our conversation with Arundhati Roy, we’ll be joined by a member of the loya jirga. She’s in the United States but will be helping to decide the future of Afghanistan. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Freefall,” Laurie Anderson, here on Democracy Now!, The Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Arundhati Roy, the great writer, speaking to us from New Delhi, author of The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize for her book, and has written a piece, “Under the nuclear shadow.” I read a little of it at the beginning. You also write, Arundhati, about a dear friend who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmada Valley, who is on an indefinite hunger strike. Can you talk about how that connects to the prospect of nuclear war right now, and how you’re dealing with all of it?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, I’ve been involved with the movement against big dams and the sort of discussion about corporate globalization here for some time. And as I said earlier, you know, I think these things connect up with religious fundamentalism. In India, for instance, now it is estimated that big dams have displaced up to 57 million people in the last 50 years. And these people, more than 60 to 80% of them are what we call our Adivasis, which in America are known as Indigenous peoples, and Dalits, who are the untouchables, the poorest people in India. And, you know, removing people from their homes, from their backgrounds, from their villages, from their sources of livelihood, from their traditions, eventually throwing them into this pool of, you know, anonymity, scrabbling for a livelihood, scrabbling for a living, all this connects to the growth of religious fundamentalism, and that dovetails into fascism and nuclear war and these kinds of confrontations. So, to me, the movement in the Narmada Valley, for instance, where there is this big movement, and has been for 15 years, against big dams, which is now being broken, as are all people’s resistance movements all over the world these days, but they are fighting back, but they are in disarray and just being ground down by the state in some way.

And my friend, she’s on an indefinite hunger strike. Today is the 15th day. And I just feel — you know, in a way, I feel such awe that in the face of what is happening in this world, you can sit there and say, you know, “I’m not going to use violence. I’m not going to be a terrorist. I’m just going to believe that you’re human enough to understand that you can’t do this to people,” because they are — the government is just now felling trees, filling wells, bulldozing schools, forcing people to move from their villages, because the monsoon is about to come, and then the reservoir will come and inundate the village, and they don’t want people there, because people will just drown. And people have nowhere to go.

So, it’s such a strange situation, where in the name of the nation, you want to fight a nuclear war and, you know, maybe kill millions of people. In the name of the nation, you want to drive millions of people from their home. And I just — you know, I just keep saying that if you were to look at the world today and just remove the political — you know, the political borders and look at the world as a geographical space, the things that people do in the name of the nation are just amazing. I mean, America feels justified in bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for the September 11th attack, and that is called a war against terror. In India, when the mob burned the train at Godhra, the government allowed, you know, mobs to go and rape and kill and murder 2,000 people in Gujarat, and that is fascism, because it’s within the borders of a nation.

You know, we have to ask ourselves some very serious questions about: What are we thinking about? What does terrorism mean? What does nonviolence mean? I keep saying this, that if a government says that it’s against terrorism, it has to show itself to be open to reasonable nonviolent resistance or dissent. Otherwise, you have to — you have to have some avenue for people to express their disagreement, their dissent, to raise their voice. But nonviolent resistance is treated with such complete contempt. And terrorism is given so much attention. It’s honored with wars and rhetoric and nuclear war. We’ve put so much power in the hands of terrorists in the last few months.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, Arundhati Roy, I want to thank you for being with us, writer of The God of Small Things, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1997, The Common Good, The Cost of Living, Power Politics. Arundhati Roy, speaking to us from her home in New Delhi.