In her latest book, author and activist Arundhati Roy yanks aside the curtain to expose what can only be described as democracy's dark side. Draconian police-state persecutions, savage terrorist attacks and even government sanctioned pogroms by mobs bent on revenge: All these exist in today's democratic India where, as the author demonstrates, social unrest doesn't just bubble beneath the surface, it explodes -- often quite literally. "In February 2002, following the burning of a train coach in which fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Marendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide against Muslims in the state. ... The machinery of the Gujarat state stood by and watched while more than two thousand people were massacred. Women were gang-raped and burned alive. One hundred and fifty thousand Muslims were driven from their homes."
"Field Notes on Democracy" is a collection of personal essays that demonstrate the difficulty of maintaining even the illusion of peace, freedom and justice in a country plagued by centuries of racial, ethnic and religious conflict. With the fearsome honesty that has become her trademark, Roy reflects on the acts of violence and injustice that have been visited on the people of India, often by their very own government. "Dams alone have displaced more than thirty million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, government-controlled militias, or corporate thugs. ... The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps, and resettlement colonies where, cut off from any means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty."
While many of India's woes are a direct result of disparities in wealth -- the sad legacy of the caste system -- the rise of modern corporations have added another institutional layer of oppression. In addition, the author also demonstrates the corrosive effect ethnic and religious hatred has on the democratic process. For example, the Prevention of Terrorism Act or POTA (India's answer to the PATRIOT Act) has been used like a sledgehammer, surpassing the worst domestic excesses attempted by the Bush administration: "In Jharkhand thirty-two hundred people, mostly poor Adivasis accused of being Maoists, have been indicted under POTA. ... In Gujarat after the state-assisted pogrom in which an estimated one thousand Muslims were killed and one hundred and fifty thousand driven from their homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these 286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh." And though much of the book focuses on India, Roy does touch on atrocities in other countries, such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka. There is even a chapter entitled: "Listening to Grasshoppers" about the recent assassination of the Armenian journalist and activist Hrant Dink.
"Field Notes" does contain some literary flourishes that echo Roy's earlier writings -- as in this description of the Indian audience at a George Bush speech: "They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries." Ultimately, however, the book focuses less on literature and more on bearing witness to atrocities and identifying modern political injustices such as laws designed to "criminalize the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism."
Many of the most poignant observations in the book focus on violence toward women. For example, on the subject of Kashmiri independence, the author writes, "I asked a young (Muslim) woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said, 'What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?' Her reply silenced me."
Because of its subject matter, "Field Notes" is bleak. But Roy's amazing ability to transcend horror and look for the sublime rescues the book from being merely a litany of injustices: "The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens when democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions have metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?"
But for the numbers of dead and displaced, much of the violence documented in the book seems eerily familiar. At times it feels the author could just as well be writing about our own fragile experiment in democracy. After reading the casual injustices of India's representative government, one wonders if the savagery she catalogues could be a harbinger of things to come in this country? "Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the end game of the human race?" Or, as Arundhati Roy puts it most succinctly, "Is there life after democracy?"