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.

Storytelling for Change

The cycle and vast scope of poverty in India are daunting challenges and uncomfortable subjects. Visitors, including myself, struggle to find an appropriate box in our minds in which to categorize the realities we witness on the ground. We read that nearly 80 percent of Indians, or 836 million people, live on less than 50 cents a day (equivalent to about 2 dollars a day in terms of cost of living) — and this from an Indian government report. We cringe, and move to the next headline. We look out the window of our passing car at the street children selling magazines and trinkets and returning to the road divider every few minutes to check on their baby siblings, we see the elderly suffering from leprosy moving from car to car, person to person, rattling a can, and as we make eye contact, we quickly shift our gaze. We feel guilt, sadness, sympathy, frustration, disgust, anger, and more, and we feel helpless. We often maintain stoic faces when faced with someone begging, or we attempt to make a small difference in their day by emptying our pockets of change. Few of us feel empowered to do much more. Last week, I encountered and joined a group that is doing much, much more.

Katha is a local NGO that works to alleviate poverty through an unusual medium: storytelling. Working broadly in the areas of language, culture and translation, Katha-ites are “publishers, teachers, and agents of change” who use stories to increase the accessibility of education to the under-privileged. Katha’s publishing house is based in South Delhi, and is well-known amongst enthusiastic readers for its collection of children’s books, most of which are available in both English and in Hindi (and all of which are beautifully illustrated), as well as for its novels. The concept of engaging new readers and students, regardless of their age, through folkloric stories and cultural familiarity is, in my opinion, brilliant.

Katha’s educational arm has currently enrolled over 6000 children in more than 50 schools and learning centers across India, the majority of which are in and around Delhi. Demonstrating an understanding of that complicated cycle of poverty I referred to earlier, the organization has made some small adjustments to their scope to accommodate a target community. For example, Katha centers have preschools and daycare centers for little ones so that older boys and girls can go to school instead of caring for their baby siblings; some of their schools have adult training and vocational courses with schedules that are more convenient to daily wage earners; and Katha has recently launched an adult English Academy, recognizing that a basic mastery of English will improve economic opportunities for the local residents.

Last week I visited Kathashala, one of Katha’s learning centers in the Govindpuri slum in East Delhi. The sense of excitement to learn and teach, to impart knowledge and effect change permeates every corner of the small brick complex. From the guard at the gate to the carpentry instructor, the class full of 8 year olds who jump up from the floor to recite “Good morning Ma’am!” the minute we walk in the door to the Director who shares her passion for the Katha way of teaching with every listening ear, I could feel the energy and enthusiasm.

If you can’t already tell, I’m looking forward to contributing whatever I can to Katha’s mission in the next few months. In other words, you’ll be hearing more about my adventures with Katha in the days to come!