Arundhati Roy Capitalism A Ghost Story (epub

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.However, as with any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals.India’s new megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth.9 It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land banks.All over the world, weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agribusiness corporations, and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land.(Of course this entails commandeering water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and handed over to private corporations for “public interest”—for Special Economic Zones (SEZs), infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs, and Formula One racing.10 (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had is actually part of employment generation.But by now we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth.After twenty years of “growth,” 60 percent of India’s workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India’s labor force works in the unorganized sector.11Post-Independence, right up to the 1980s, people’s movements, ranging from the Naxalites to Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, were fighting for land reforms, for the redistribution of land from feudal landlords to landless peasants.Today any talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic but lunatic.Even the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have.The millions of landless people, the majority of them Dalits and Adivasis, driven from their villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and megacities, do not figure even in the radical discourse.As Gush-Up concentrates wealth onto the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy—the courts, the parliament—as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to.The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.Each new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame.In the summer of 2011 the 2G spectrum scandal broke.We learned that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the minister of communications and information who grossly underpriced the licenses for 2G telecom spectrums and illegally auctioned them to his buddies.The taped telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists, and a TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery.The tapes were just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.The privatization and illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not involve war, displacement, and ecological devastation.The privatization of India’s mountains, rivers, and forests does.Perhaps because it does not have the uncomplicated clarity of a straightforward, out-and-out accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all being done in the name of India’s “progress,” it does not have the same resonance with the middle classes.In 2005 the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with a number of private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore, and other minerals for a pittance, defying even the warped logic of the Free Market.(Royalties to the government ranged between 0.5 percent and 7 percent.)12Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MOU for the construction of an integrated steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated.The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up with “repression” by Maoist guerillas in the forest.It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and subsidized by mining corporations.In the other states similar militias were created, with other names.The prime minister announced the Maoists were the “Single Largest Security Challenge in India.” It was a declaration of war [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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