11 November 2010By Chris Floyd
The Nobel Peace Laureate Barack
Obama, who
in his prize-claiming
speech boldly claimed the mantle of Mahatma
Gandhi, is now visiting India. And why has he made
this pilgrimage to the homeland of his spiritual
mentor? Has he come to drink more deeply of the
wellsprings of satyagraha, to steep himself
more thoroughly in the Gandhian principles of
courageous, active, non-violent resistance to evil, to
the Mahatma's ceaseless dedication to the poor and the
outcast?
No: he has come to seal the deal on the sixth largest
sale of war weapons in the history of the United
States: $5 billion for the bristling, burgeoning
Indian military, currently waging war on millions of
its own people in Kashmir and the poverty-devastated
state of central India, where the despair is so deep
that suicide among the poor is epidemic.
Five billion dollars could have transformed the lives
and futures of millions; instead it will go into the
pockets of a few American war profiteers -- who will
of course spread the wealth around to their favorite
politicians ... such as Barack Obama, the leading
recipient of war industry money in the 2008 campaign,
outdoing even that old soldier and ardent militarist,
John McCain.
And of course the Indian arms deal comes hot on the
heels of the largest transaction of death-machinery in
American history: Obama's $60 billion war-profiteering
bonanza with Saudi Arabia, one of the most
suffocatingly repressive and inhumane regimes on the
face of the earth. But the Peace Laureate doesn't care
about that. He knows what is truly important -- and it
isn't the blighted lives of the Saudi people, or all
those affected by the corruption and extremism that
the Saudi royals have spread around the world (with
the connivance, cooperation -- or at the command of --
the bipartisan American power structure). What matters
most to the progressive paragon of peace is the sixty
billion dollars stuffed into the coffers of his
militarist backers.
If Obama wins re-election in 2012, it will not be
because he "made a mid-course correction" or "learned
the lessons" of the 2010 vote or "moved to the center"
or any such witless expectoration of conventional
wisdom. It will be because his militarist backers have
judged his arms deals and Terror War operations
sufficiently profitable to justify his retention. As
is always the case with the War Machine that rules us,
follow the money -- and the blood.
II.
While Obama peddles the tools of death and destruction
in India, others are taking a different approach. At
the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali recently
provided the context for a short, powerful piece by
Arundhati Roy on speaking truth to - and about --
power.
First Ali:
Arundhati Roy is both loathed and
feared by the Indian elite. Loathed because she speaks
her mind. Feared because her voice reaches the world
outside India and damages the myths perpetrated by New
Delhi regardless of which party holds power. She often
annoys the official Indian Left because she writes and
speaks of events for which they are either responsible
or of which they dare not speak. Roy will not allow
her life to be subjugated by lies. She never affects a
courage or contempt she does not feel. Her campaigns
against injustice are undertaken with no view to
either fame or profit. Hence the respect awarded her
by the poor, ordinary citizens, who know the truth but
are not allowed a voice in the public sphere. The
authorities can't buy her silence. One of the few
voices in India who has spoken loudly against the
continuing Indian atrocities in Kashmir, she is now
being threatened. If she doesn't shut up they'll
charge her with sedition, aping their colonial masters
of yesteryear. Her response to those who would charge
and imprison her is a model of clarity, conviction and
refusal to compromise.
And here is that response, in
full, from the Times of India
"I write this from Srinagar,
Kashmir. This morning's papers say that I may be
arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said
at recent public meetings on Kashmir. I said what
millions of people here say every day. I said what I,
as well as other commentators have written and said
for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts
of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a
call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people
of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal
military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri
Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven
out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in
Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in
their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who
pay the price of this occupation in material ways and
who are now learning to live in the terror of what is
becoming a police state.
Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in
South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days
last year in protest against the brutal rape and
murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose
bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes
and whose murderers have still not been brought to
justice. I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer's husband and
Asiya's brother. We sat in a circle of people crazed
with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would
ever get 'insaf'—justice—from India, and now believed
that Azadi—freedom— was their only hope. I met young
stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I
traveled with a young man who told me how three of his
friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been
taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled
out as punishment for throwing stones. In the papers
some have accused me of giving 'hate-speeches', of
wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say
comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting
people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their
finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say
they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a
society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the
nation that has to silence its writers for speaking
their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those
who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass
murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and
those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free."
Arundhati Roy
October 26 2010
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