TIDE? OR IVORY SNOW? - Arundhati Roy

Public Power in the Age of Empire

I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire."
I'm not used to doing as I'm told, but by happy coincidence, it's
exactly what I'd like to speak about tonight.

When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we
understand "public power"? When freedom means occupation, when
democracy means neo-liberal capitalism, when reform means repression,
when words like "empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run
cold - why, then, "public power" could mean whatever you want it to
mean. A biceps building machine, or a Community Power Shower. So,
I'll just have to define "public power" as I go along, in my own
self-serving sort of way.

In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In
Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people.
Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government
is quite separate from "the people." This distinction has to do with
the fact that India's freedom struggle, though magnificent, was by no
means revolutionary. The Indian elite stepped easily and elegantly
into the shoes of the British imperialists. A deeply impoverished,
essentially feudal society became a modern, independent nation state.
Even today, fifty seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished
still look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider.
The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their
bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things.

Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public.
However, as you make your way up India's social ladder, the
distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite,
like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate
itself from the state. It sees like the state, it thinks like the
state, it speaks like the state.


In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the
distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into
society. This could be a sign of a robust democracy, but
unfortunately, it's a little more complicated and less pretty than
that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of
paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate
media and Hollywood. Ordinary Americans have been manipulated into
imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and
protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's
al-Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba. it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the
most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of
weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and
the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is
peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded
to the state not by social services, or public health care, or
employment guarantees, but by fear.

This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction
for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a
spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the
U.S government's Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia,
turquoise, salmon pink.

To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United
States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the U.S.
government from the American people. It is this confusion that fuels
anti-Americanism in the world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon
and amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets.
You know the routine: "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms" .
. etc. . . . etc. This enhances the sense of isolation among
American people and makes the embrace between sarkar and public even
more intimate. Like Red Riding Hood looking for a cuddle in the
wolf's bed.


Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a
tired old horse, which politicians have ridden into power for
centuries. But could it be that ordinary people are fed up of that
poor old horse and are looking for something different? There's an
old Hindi film song that goes yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the
public, she knows it all). Wouldn't it be lovely if the song were
right and the politicians wrong?


Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International
poll showed that in no European country was the support for a
unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks
before the invasion, more than ten million people marched against the
war on different continents, including North America. And yet the
governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to
war.

The question is: is "democracy" still democratic?

Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected
them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries
responsible for the actions of its sarkar?

If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism
and the logic that underlies terrorism is exactly the same. Both make
ordinary citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al-Qaeda
made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the
actions of their government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. The U.S government has made the people of Afghanistan
pay in their thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people
of Iraq pay in their hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam
Hussein.

The crucial difference is that nobody really elected al-Qaeda, the
Taliban, or Saddam Hussein. But the president of the United States
was elected (well ... in a manner of speaking).

The prime ministers of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were
elected. Could it then be argued that citizens of these countries are
more responsible for the actions of their government than Iraqis are
for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban?

Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn't? George Bush
senior once said: "I will never apologize for the United States. I
don't care what the facts are." When the president of the most
powerful country in the world doesn't need to care what the facts
are, then we can at least be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.

So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean
anything at all? Does it actually exist?

In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought
holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of
countries in the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all)
of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the
governments they want?

In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists out of office.
But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs,
neo-liberalism, privatization, censorship, big dams - on every major
issue other than overt Hindu nationalism - the Congress and the BJP
have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the
fifty-year legacy of the Congress Party that prepared the ground
culturally and politically for the far right. It was also the
Congress Party that first opened India's markets to corporate
globalization.

In its election campaign, the Congress Party indicated that it was
prepared to rethink some of its earlier economic policies. Millions
of India's poorest people came out in strength to vote in the
elections. The spectacle of the great Indian democracy was telecast
live - the poor farmers, the old and infirm, the veiled women with
their beautiful silver jewelry, making quaint journeys to election
booths on elephants and camels and bullock carts. Contrary to the
predictions of all India's experts and pollsters, Congress won more
votes than any other party. India's communist parties won the largest
share of the vote in their history. India's poor had clearly voted
against neo-liberalism's economic "reforms" and growing fascism. As
soon as the votes were counted, the corporate media dispatched them
like badly paid extras on a film set. Television channels featured
split screens. Half the screen showed the chaos outside the home of
Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, as the coalition
government was cobbled together.


The other half showed frenzied stockbrokers outside the Bombay Stock
Exchange, panicking at the thought that the Congress Party might
actually honor its promises and implement its electoral mandate. We
saw the Sensex stock index move up and down and sideways. The media,
whose own publicly listed stocks were plummeting, reported the stock
market crash as though Pakistan had launched ICBMs on New Delhi.

Even before the new government was formally sworn in, senior Congress
politicians made public statements reassuring investors and the media
that privatization of public utilities would continue. Meanwhile the
BJP, now in opposition, has cynically, and comically, begun to oppose
foreign direct investment and the further opening of Indian markets.

This is the spurious, evolving dialectic of electoral democracy.

As for the Indian poor, once they've provided the votes, they are
expected to bugger off home. Policy will be decided despite them.

And what of the U.S. elections? Do U.S. voters have a real choice?

It's true that if John Kerry becomes president, some of the oil
tycoons and Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change.
Few will be sorry to see the back of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld
or John Ashcroft and their blatant thuggery. But the real concern is
that in the new administration their policies will continue. That we
will have Bushism without Bush.

Those positions of real power - the bankers, the CEOs - are not
vulnerable to the vote (. . . and in any case, they fund both sides).

Unfortunately the importance of the U.S elections has deteriorated
into a sort of personality contest. A squabble over who would do a
better job of overseeing empire. John Kerry believes in the idea of
empire as fervently as George Bush does.

The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that
no one who questions the natural goodness of the
military-industrial-corporate power structure will be allowed through
the portals of power.

Given this, it's no surprise that in this election you have two Yale
University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same
secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier,
both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who will
lead the war on terror more effectively.

Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the
expansion of U.S. economic and military penetration into the world.
He says he would have voted to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq
even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He
promises to commit more troops to Iraq. He said recently that he
supports Bush's policies toward Israel and Ariel Sharon 100 percent.
He says he'll retain 98% of Bush's tax cuts.

So, underneath the shrill exchange of insults, there is almost
absolute consensus. It looks as though even if Americans vote for
Kerry, they'll still get Bush. President John Kerbush or President
George Berry.

It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a
brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both
owned by Proctor & Gamble.

This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance,
that the Congress and the BJP, New Labor and the Tories, the
Democrats and Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not.
Neither are Tide and Ivory Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow
is a gentle cleanser.

In India, there is a difference between an overtly fascist party (the
BJP) and a party that slyly pits one community against another
(Congress), and sows the seeds of communalism that are then so ably
harvested by the BJP.

There are differences in the I.Q.s and levels of ruthlessness between
this year's U.S. presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in
the United States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and
venality that led to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and
intimidation it faced.

This was a service not just to people here, but to the whole world.
But now, if the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the
rest of the world will think that it approves of his policies of
"sensitive" imperialism. Is U.S. imperialism preferable if it is
supported by the United Nations and European countries? Is it
preferable if UN asks Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing
and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. soldiers? Is the only change that
Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian companies will
share in the spoils of the occupation of their country?

Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject
nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in
power or a stupider one? Is that our only choice?

I'm sorry, I know that these are uncomfortable, even brutal
questions, but they must be asked.

The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical
manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To
believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naïve.

The crisis in modern democracy is a profound one.

On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign
governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a
complex system of multilateral laws and agreements that have
entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame.
This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts
of speculative capital - hot money - into and out of third world
countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy.
Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital
insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant
transnational corporations are taking control of their essential
infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water,
their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like
the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and
parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and
ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile,
interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them.

All this goes under the fluttering banner of "reform."

As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down,
millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.

The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that "[w]e live in the
happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history."
Billions wonder: who's "we"? Where does he live? What's his Christian
name?

The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised
on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate
globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital
needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in
the servants' quarters, this set up ensures that no individual nation
can oppose corporate globalization on its own.

Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it
can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link
hands across national borders.

So when we speak of "Public Power in the Age of Empire," I hope it's
not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth
discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public
which disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public which has
set itself against incumbent power - international, national,
regional, or provincial governments and institutions that support and
service empire.

What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to
resist empire? By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to
effectively force change. Empire has a range of calling cards. It
uses different weapons to break open different markets. You know the
check book and the cruise missile

For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in
the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or
Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local
avatars - losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills,
having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and
uprooted from their land. All this overseen by the repressive
machinery of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary. It is a
process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are
historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and
exacerbate already existing inequalities.

Even until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to
see themselves as victims of the conquests of Empire. But now local
struggles have begun to see their role with increasing clarity.
However grand it might sound, the fact is, they are confronting
Empire in their own, very different ways. Differently in Iraq, in
South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and differently, for that
matter, on the streets of Europe and the United States.

Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists,
artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its
sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and
boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real
despair. They have shown how the neo-liberal project has cost people
their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity.
They have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly
in-CORP-o-real enemy is now CORP-o-real.

This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of
disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they
all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and
their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real
globalization. The globalization of dissent.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of mass resistance movements in
third world countries today. The landless peoples' movement in
Brazil, the anti-dam movement in India, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the
Anti-Privatization Forum in South Africa, and hundreds of others, are
fighting their own sovereign governments, which have become agents of
the neo-liberal project. Most of these are radical struggles,
fighting to change the structure and chosen model of "development" of
their own societies.

Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neocolonial
occupations in contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines
were often arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers.
In Palestine, Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several states in India's
northeast provinces, people are waging struggles for
self-determination.

Several of these struggles might have been radical, even
revolutionary when they began, but often the brutality of the
repression they face pushes them into conservative, even
retrogressive spaces in which they use the same violent strategies
and the same language of religious and cultural nationalism used by
the states they seek to replace.

Many of the foot soldiers in these struggles will find, like those
who fought apartheid in South Africa, that once they overcome overt
occupation, they will be left with another battle on their hands - a
battle against covert economic colonialism.

Meanwhile, as the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper
and the battle to control the world's resources intensifies. Economic
colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.

Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. An illegal
invasion. A brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The
rewriting of laws that allow the shameless appropriation of the
country's wealth and resources by corporations allied to the
occupation, and now the charade of a local "Iraqi government."

For these reasons, it is absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S.
occupation in Iraq, as being masterminded by terrorists or insurgents
or supporters of Saddam Hussein. After all if the United States were
invaded and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a
terrorist or an insurgent or a Bushite?

The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle
against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.

Like most resistance movements, it combines a motley range of
assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up
collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with
opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we
are only going to support pristine movements, then no resistance will
be worthy of our purity.

This is not to say that we shouldn't ever criticize resistance
movements. Many of them suffer from a lack of democracy, from the
iconization of their "leaders," a lack of transparency, a lack of
vision and direction. But most of all they suffer from vilification,
repression, and lack of resources.

Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct
their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should
shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allies
government to withdraw from Iraq.

The first militant confrontation in the United States between the
global justice movement and the neo-liberal junta took place famously
at the WTO conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass
movements in developing countries that had long been fighting lonely,
isolated battles, Seattle was the first delightful sign that their
anger and their vision of another kind of world was shared by people
in the imperialist countries.

In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students,
film makers - some of the best minds in the world - came together to
share their experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire.
That was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the
first, formal coming together of an exciting, anarchic,
unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of "Public Power." The rallying
cry of the WSF is "Another World is Possible." It has become a
platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have
helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should
be.

By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it
attracted 200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more
electrifying gathering. It was a sign of the social forum's success
that the mainstream media in India ignored it completely. But now,
the WSF is threatened by its own success. The safe, open, festive
atmosphere of the forum has allowed politicians and nongovernmental
organizations that are imbricated in the political and economic
systems that the forum opposes to participate and make themselves
heard.

Another danger is that the WSF, which has played such a vital role in
the movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end
unto itself. Just organizing it every year consumes the energies of
some of the best activists. If conversations about resistance replace
real civil disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to those
whom it was created to oppose. The forum must be held and must grow,
but we have to find ways to channel our conversations there back into
concrete action.

As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national
borders and pose a real threat, governments have developed their own
strategies of how to deal with them. They range from cooptation to
repression.

I'm going to speak about three of the contemporary dangers that
confront resistance movements: the difficult meeting point between
mass movements and the mass media, the hazards of the NGO-ization of
resistance, and the confrontation between resistance movements and
increasingly repressive states.

The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a
complicated one.

Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to
hang about in the same place for too long. Like business houses need
a cash turnover, the media need crises turnover. Whole countries
become old news. They cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper
than before the light was briefly shone on them. We saw it happen in
Afghanistan when the Soviets withdrew. And now, after Operation
Enduring Freedom put the CIA's Hamid Karzai in place, Afghanistan has
been thrown to its warlords once more.

Another CIA operative, Iyad Allawi, has been installed in Iraq, so
perhaps it's time for the media to move on from there, too.

While governments hone the art of waiting out crisis, resistance
movements are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis
production, seeking to find ways of manufacturing them in easily
consumable, spectator-friendly formats.

Every self-respecting peoples' movement, every "issue" is expected to
have its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and
purpose.

For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements
for impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don't
quite make the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation
they wreak makes good television. (And by then, it's too late).

Standing in the rising water of a reservoir for days on end, watching
your home and belongings float away to protest against a big dam used
to be an effective strategy, but isn't any more. The media is dead
bored of that one. So the hundreds of thousands of people being
displaced by dams are expected to either conjure new tricks or give
up the struggle.

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are
not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when
soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto
ships and aircrafts, when people boycott the economic outposts of
Empire that are strung across the globe.

If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we will have
to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its
fear of the mundane. We have to use our experience, our imagination,
and our art to interrogate the instruments of that state that ensure
that "normality" remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We
have to expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things -
food, water, shelter and dignity - such a distant dream for ordinary
people. Real pre-emptive strike is to understand that wars are the
end result of flawed and unjust peace.

As far as mass resistance movements are concerned, the fact is that
no amount of media coverage can make up for mass strength on the
ground. There is no option, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking
political mobilization.

Corporate globalization has increased the distance between those who
make decisions and those who have to suffer the effects of those
decisions. Forums like the WSF enable local resistance movements to
reduce that distance and to link up with their counterparts in rich
countries. That alliance is an important and formidable one. For
example, when India's first private dam, the Maheshwar Dam, was being
built, alliances between the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the NBA), the
German organization Urgewald, the Berne Declaration in Switzerland,
and the International Rivers Network in Berkeley worked together to
push a series of international banks and corporations out of the
project. This would not have been possible had there not been a rock
solid resistance movement on the ground. The voice of that local
movement was amplified by supporters on the global stage,
embarrassing and forcing investors to withdraw.

An infinite number of similar, alliances, targeting specific projects
and specific corporations would help to make another world possible.
We should begin with the corporations who did business with Saddam
Hussein and now profit from the devastation and occupation of Iraq.

A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of
resistance. It will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an
indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky
waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax
dodges (in states like Bihar, they are given as dowry), of course
there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's important to consider
the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.

In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s
and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to
neo-liberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the
requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from
rural development, agriculture, energy, transport, and public health.
As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in
these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds
available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in
public spending. Most large funded NGOs are financed and patronized
by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western
governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some multinational
corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are
certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees
the neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government spending
in the first place.

Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned
missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the
impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating
state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their
real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as
aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.

They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims
and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of
buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its
subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the
facilitators.

In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the
people they work among. They're what botanists would call an
indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation
caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing
illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S.
preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go
in and clean up the devastation.

In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the
governments of the countries they work in will allow them to
function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework more
or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an
inconvenient historical or political context.

Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress
reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark)
people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims.
Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another
Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese . . . in need of the
white man's help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and
re-affirm the achievements, the comforts, and the compassion (the
tough love) of Western civilization. They're the secular missionaries
of the modern world.

Eventually - on a smaller scale but more insidiously - the capital
available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the
speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor
countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation
into negotiation. It depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with
local peoples' movements that have traditionally been self-reliant.
NGOs have funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be
activists in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing
some immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they're at
it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a
well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks
thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

This brings us to a third danger I want to speak about tonight: the
deadly nature of the actual confrontation between resistance
movements and increasingly repressive states. Between public power
and the agents of Empire.

Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving
from symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crack
down is merciless. We've seen what happened in the demonstrations in
Seattle, in Miami, in Göthenberg, in Genoa.

In the United States, you have the USA PATRIOT Act, which has become
a blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments across the
world. Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom.
And once we surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a
revolution.

Some governments have vast experience in the business of curbing
freedoms and still smelling sweet. The government of India, an old
hand at the game, lights the path.

Over the years the Indian government has passed a plethora of laws
that allow it to call almost anyone a terrorist, an insurgent, a
militant. We have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Public
Security Act, the Special Areas Security Act, the Gangster Act, the
Terrorist and Disruptive Areas Act (which has formally lapsed but
under which people are still facing trial), and, most recently, POTA
(the Prevention of Terrorism Act), the broad-spectrum antibiotic for
the disease of dissent.

There are other steps that are being taken, such as court judgments
that in effect curtail free speech, the right of government workers
to go on strike, the right to life and livelihood. Courts have begun
to micro-manage our lives in India. And criticizing the courts is a
criminal offense.

But coming back to the counter-terrorism initiatives, over the last
decade, the number of people who have been killed by the police and
security forces runs into the tens of thousands. In the state of
Andhra Pradesh (the pin-up girl of corporate globalization in India),
an average of about 200 "extremists" are killed in what are called
"encounters" every year. The Bombay police boast of how many
"gangsters" they have killed in "shoot outs." In Kashmir, in a
situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated 80,000 people have
been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply "disappeared." In the
northeastern provinces, the situation is similar.

In recent years, the Indian police have opened fire on unarmed
people, mostly Dalit and Adivasi. Their preferred method is to kill
them and then call them terrorists. India is not alone, though. We
have seen similar thing happen in countries such Bolivia, Chile, and
South Africa. In the era of neo-liberalism, poverty is a crime and
protesting against it is more and more being defined as terrorism.

In India, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) is often called the
Production of Terrorism Act. It's a versatile, hold-all law that
could apply to anyone from an al-Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus
conductor. As with all anti-terrorism laws, the genius of POTA is
that it can be whatever the government wants. After the 2002
state-assisted pogrom in Gujarat, in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims
were savagely killed by Hindu mobs and 150,000 driven from their
homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these, 286 are
Muslim and one is a Sikh.

POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as
judicial evidence. In effect, torture tends to replace investigation.
The South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center reports that India
has the highest number of torture and custodial deaths in the world.
Government records show that there were 1,307 deaths in judicial
custody in 2002 alone.

A few months ago, I was a member of a peoples' tribunal on POTA. Over
a period of two days, we listened to harrowing testimonies of what is
happening in our wonderful democracy. It's everything - from people
being forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given
electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up
their anuses, to being beaten and kicked to death.

The new government has promised to repeal POTA. I'd be surprised if
that happens before similar legislation under a different name is put
in place. If its not POTA it'll be MOTA or something.

When every avenue of non-violent dissent is closed down, and everyone
who protests against the violation of their human rights is called a
terrorist, should we really be surprised if vast parts of the country
are overrun by those who believe in armed struggle and are more or
less beyond the control of the state: in Kashmir, the north eastern
provinces, large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and
Andhra Pradesh. Ordinary people in these regions are trapped between
the violence of the militants and the state.

In Kashmir, the Indian army estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 militants
are operating at any given time. To control them, the Indian
government deploys about 500,000 soldiers. Clearly, it isn't just the
militants the army seeks to control, but a whole population of
humiliated, unhappy people who see the Indian army as an occupation
force.

The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers, but
even junior commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers of
the army, to use force and even kill any person on suspicion of
disturbing public order. It was first imposed on a few districts in
the state of Manipur in 1958. Today, it applies to virtually all of
the north east and Kashmir. The documentation of instances of
torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape, and summary
execution by security forces is enough to turn your stomach.

In Andhra Pradesh, in India's heartland, the militant
Marxist-Leninist Peoples' War Group - which for years been engaged in
a violent armed struggle and has been the principal target of many of
the Andhra police's fake "encounters" - held its first public meeting
in years on July 28, 2004, in the town of Warangal.

It was attended by about hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA,
all of them are considered terrorists. Are they all going to be
detained in some Indian equivalent of Guantánamo Bay?

The whole of the north east and the Kashmir valley is in ferment.
What will the government do with these millions of people?

There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more
crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the
choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is
also in the hands of sarkar.

After all, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has
done, with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be
expected to be a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it
were conventional, it would still be called terrorist.) In a strange
sense, the U.S. government's arsenal of weapons and unrivalled air
and fire power makes terrorism an all-but-inescapable response. What
people lack in wealth and power, they will make up with stealth and
strategy.

In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they
can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege
those who turn to violence. No government's condemnation of terrorism
is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by to
nonviolent dissent.

But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any
kind of mass political mobilization or organization is being bought
off, or broken, or simply ignored.

Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let's not forget
the film industry, lavish their time, attention, technology,
research, and admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been
deified.

The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to
air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.

As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to
appropriate and control the world's resources to feed the great
capitalist machine becomes more urgent, the unrest will only
escalate.

For those of us who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation
is becoming unbearable.

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child.
Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of
their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were
humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in
a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are
victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process,
which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.

The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the
politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and
shake their heads sternly. "There's no Alternative," they say. And
let slip the dogs of war.

Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and
Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of
Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of
Andhra Pradesh and Assam comes the chilling reply: "There's no
alternative but terrorism." Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency.
Call it what you want.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators, as
well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is
the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war.
They are people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on
the legitimate use of violence.

Human society is journeying to a terrible place.

Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It's called justice.

It's time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons or
full-spectrum dominance or daisy cutters or spurious governing
councils and loya jirgas can buy peace at the cost of justice.

The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with
greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others.

Exactly what form that battle takes, whether its beautiful or
bloodthirsty, depends on us.