No, Arundhati Roy is not Anna!

I know Anna Hazare is not Arundhati Roy. He does not possess her facility with words, especially of the English language. He is just a semi-literate villager, from a nondescript village in Maharashtra; an ex-Havildar of the Indian Army, honourably discharged after service with a minor medal. He cannot claim to have won the Booker or any other glittering award, nor has he written such scathing attacks on the establishments worldwide as Ms Roy has in “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” and “An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire”, books for which she must have received hefty sums from publishers. Such is her influence in the literary world that a publisher had paid a royal sum even before the novel “The God of Small Things” was written. I am not asking whose money owns these publishing firms, but you can bet that some “Captains of the Corporate” world would have had something to do with them. Of course, what she did with all that money is not my concern. The lady from Ayemenem is certainly entitled to use it in whichever way she likes.

But I know what Anna Hazare did with the meagre retirement fund that he received after being discharged from the army. He spent it all on his village Ralegan Siddhi in an attempt to better the lives of his fellow villagers. Today Ralegan Siddhi is a model village from where alcohol has been banished, where primary healthcare centres function, where schools have teachers and students. Anna lives amidst his people, in an 8 x 10 feet room in the village temple, and his possessions would probably be less than what a sadhu in the upper Himalayas would have. Some people have complained that he is a dictator and has forced the villagers to abjure alcohol and other evils. I cannot understand how an unarmed man, without a gang of enforcers, can make a whole village to follow his diktats. Unless it is some moral pressure that only those who have led a moral life can command. I don’t know how Ayemenem is doing, because its most famous resident has not lived there for a very long time, and has not enlightened us about its condition. Maybe Ms Roy should pay a visit to both Anna’s village and her own.

There was a time when I used to admire Ms Roy for her bold and forthright views on the dehumanisation of societies at large and the manner in which she used to take on the establishments on matters of human rights, land reforms, and other political and social issues. Almost three years ago when she made her bold statement that “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India” I had come out in support of her and an article written by me was published by The New Indian Express on 1st September 2008 on its Op-Ed page. I believed that she had understood the Kashmir problem well and had come to the same conclusion that an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, had written in 1952, that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in “India After Gandhi” writes, “Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.”

Subsequent events proved that her Kashmir slogan was nothing but a call for the vivisection of this nation; her call for Azadi but a hollow statement when she said “Indian government is a hollow superpower, and I dissociate from it.” Comparing the protests in Kashmir to the protests of the naxals operating in central India and elsewhere, she made the statement that “bows and arrows in adivasis hands and stones in the hands of the Kashmiri youngsters are essential, but we need more.” Of course this harangue made from the capital of India won her a lot of admirers, especially in Kashmir, who wasted no time in presenting her with a box of the choicest, and now the rarest of the rare, Amri apples from Shopiyan.

Having dissociated her self from the Indian state, it sounds a bit ironic when she says that Anna Hazare’s means may be Gandhian, but his demands are certainly not. When in October 2010 she came on a platform in New Delhi with the Kashmiri separatists represented by S. A. Geelani, the Maoist like Vara Vara Rao, and even representatives of the erstwhile Khalistan movement, she forfeited her right to speak on Gandhi or his methods. Now to invoke Gandhiji while heaping abuse on Anna Hazare and his supporters is nothing but hypocrisy of the meanest kind. Anna’s demand for a credible machinery to check institutional corruption in public life, through peaceful, democratic means, becomes unacceptable while bows and arrows and stones are the correct means to achieve one’s end. Further, Ms Roy tries to insinuate that because the NGO’s associated with Anna Hazare’s supporters have received funds from American corporates and the Ford Foundation, their motives should automatically become suspect. For Ms Roy’s information, The Indian Institution of Management Calcutta (IIMC), an institution where the PM was seen awarding the diplomas, was also funded by the Ford Foundation, while a sizeable number of its early faculty members were drawn from the Sloane School of Management, MIT. By Ms Roy’s logic, the IIMC should also be “suspect” as it has been founded with “tainted” money.

To suggest that Anna’s demand for a Jan Lokpal is a Corporate stunt created by its captive media for control of infrastructure and the natural resources of the nation, through the foreign-funded NGO’s is as preposterous as her statement that “we’re watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle waged by the warlords of Afghanistan…” and deserves to be dismissed with equal contempt. Her command over the English language may continue to stir, but no amount of perfect English can take away the charm of the childish smile of the new Gandhi, Anna Hazare!