ANOTHER TAKE ON INDIA

Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades (New York: Penguin Books, 2012) ("People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the repression, the arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that, in places like Orissa, the police seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people--anyone who was seen to be a dissenter--were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed its inability to resettle even a fraction of the fifty million people who had been displaced by 'development' projects was suddenly able to identify 140,000 hectares of prime land to give to industrialists to set up special economic zones, India's onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice the Supreme Court was practising when it refused to review the meaning of 'public purpose' in the Land Acquisition Act even when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name of 'public purpose' to give to private corporations. They asked why, when the government says that 'the Writ of the State must run', it seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or clinics or housing or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of the police--anything that would make people's lives a little easier. They asked why the 'Writ of the State' could never be taken to mean justice." Id. at 28-29. From the backcover: "Arundhati Roy draws on her unprecedented access to a little-known rebel movement in India to pen a work full of earth-shattering revelations. Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerrillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens. Allied with the mining and banking conglomerates, government soldiers are committing unspeakable atrocities daily, their actions undocumented by a weak domestic press and unnoticed by an indifferent world. "In Walking with t eh Comrades, Arundhati Roy chronicles the weeks she spent living with the forest guerrillas resisting these assaults taking us to the front lines of a conflict over whether global capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its colossal control.").