India on the Brink of Genocide?

Outlook published an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008 to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos. As Roy mentions, Dink advocated Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey, and tried to fill the nationwide silence on the topic of the systematic murder of one and a half million Armenians in a genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

Roy’s (abridged) lecture continues as an exposé on genocide, its denial, and its celebration. She highlights incidents of genocide in India and throughout the world, and details the quest for Lebensraum underlying genocide throughout history. Lebensraum, literally defined as “living space,” was the term coined by German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel “to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species’ natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species…that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.” Connecting dots between the concepts of living space (or economic determinism), “union,” and “progress” employed by perpetrators of genocide, Roy speculates that a country that is standing at the threshold of “progress” might also stand at the threshold of genocide.

Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

The forward march towards “Union and Progress,” or in contemporary Indian terms “Nationalism and Development,” which has been undertaken by the two major national political parties since 1989, and the destruction meted upon communities and minorities in its wake have been documented elsewhere (and are discussed in Roy’s lecture).

Roy presents a question based on that concept of Lebensraum and India’s future: where will the New India go? The nation’s wealth of natural resources and prime industrial real estate are also home to its under-represented poor, and the New India long ago began to lay territorial claim to those resources in several regions, including Chhattisgarh and Nandigram. These states’ internally displaced peoples now live in police camps, tenements, and resettlement colonies, and have been sucked into the spiral of poverty. Yet these are not the news headlines we read in the international or even the domestic media. This is not the New India, the one the world is chattering about.

In this ‘counterfeit’ version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by NGOs.)

There are Two Indias — one pushing “forward,” and the other supposedly holding back. And the “pulsating, dynamic, new India” is bursting at many seams, and may even be looking for more living space.