The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy Read Free Book Online Page B

are in jail once again, most of them accused of being Maoists. The forest is being cleared of all witnesses—journalists, activists, lawyers, and academics. Anybody who muddies the tidy delineation of the state-versus–“Maoist terrorists” paradigm is in a great deal of danger. The extraordinary Adivasi schoolteacher and activist Soni Sori, who was imprisoned in 2011 but went straight back to her organizing work after being released in 2014, was recently attacked and had her face smeared with a substance that burned her skin. She has since gone back to work in Bastar once again. With a burned face. The Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, a tiny team of women lawyers that offered legal aid to incarcerated Adivasis, and Malini Subramaniam, whose series of investigative reports from Bastar were a source of embarrassment to the police, have been evicted and forced to leave. Lingaram Kodopi, Bastar’s first Adivasi journalist, who was horribly tortured and imprisoned for three years, is being threatened, and has despairingly announced that he will kill himself if the intimidation does not stop. (Four other local journalists have been arrested on specious charges, including for posting comments against the police on WhatsApp.) Bela Bhatia, a researcher, has had the village she lives in visited by mobs shouting slogans against her and threatening her landlords. Paramilitary troops and vigilante militias, confident of impunity, have once again begun to storm villages and terrorize people, forcing them to abandon their homes and flee into the forest as they did in the time of Operation Green Hunt I. Horrific accounts of rape, molestation, looting, and robbery are trickling in. The Indian Air Force has begun “practicing” air-to-ground firing from helicopters.
    Anybody who criticizes the corporate takeover of Adivasi land is called an anti-national “sympathizer” of the banned Maoists. Sympathy is a crime too. In television studios, guests who try to bring a semblance of intelligence into the debate are shouted down and compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation. This is a war against people who have barely enough to eat one square meal a day. What particular brand of nationalism does this come under? What exactly are we supposed to be proud of?
    Our lumpen nationalists don’t seem to understand that the more they insist on this hollow sloganeering, the more they force people to say, “Bharat Mata ki jai!” and to declare that “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” the less sure of themselves they sound. The nationalism that is being rammed down our throats is more about hating another country—Pakistan—than loving our own. It’s more about securing territory than loving the land and its people. Paradoxically, those who are branded anti-national are the ones who speak about the deaths of rivers and the desecration of forests. They are the ones who worry about the poisoning of the land and the falling of water tables. The “nationalists,” on the other hand, go about speaking of mining, damming, clear-cutting, blasting, and selling. In their rulebook, hawking minerals to multinational companies is patriotic activity. They have privatized the flag and wrested the microphone.
    The three JNU students who were arrested are all out on interim bail. In Kanhaiya Kumar’s case, the bail order by a High Court judge caused more apprehension than relief: “Whenever some infection is spread in a limb, effort is made to cure the same by giving antibiotics orally and if that does not work, by following second line of treatment. Sometimes it may require surgical intervention also. However, if the infection results in infecting the limb to the extent that it becomes gangrene, amputation is the only treatment.” 10 Amputation? What could she mean?
    As soon as he was released, Kanhaiya appeared on the JNU campus and gave his now-famous speech to a crowd of thousands of students. It doesn’t matter whether or not you agree