India following facist model according to Indian author

India: Government Brutality, Injustice, and Questionable Democracy.

A sellection of quotes from the book "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire" by Arundhati Roy (the author of The God of Small Things, on the NYT best seller list for 49 weeks, and she lives in New Delhi); ISBN 0896087271, c 2004.

Parts of the book criticise US foreign policy, and other parts criticise Indian foreign and domestic policy. All of the chapters were originally given as speeches or were published as articles in major printed media. The book contains hundreds of sources for details about which statements were made. The book gives substantial detail about the internal political and social components of modern India and India's problems and changes while undergoing modernisation. At one point the author identifies fascist themes in some government policy and especially in connection with globalization. The book is easy to read and contains a great deal of information about the political situation in India, today. If you are a corporate goon-parasite, then all this doesn't matter. If you care about democracy, ethics, morals, and people, then read on.

Quotes:

page 12 "According to the State, when victims refuse to be victims, they become persons and are dealt with as such. They're either end or arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act). In states like Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand, which are rich in mineral resources and, therefore, vulneralble to ruthless corporations on the hunt, hundreds of villagers, including minors, have been arrested under POTA and are being held in jail without trial. Some states have special police battalions for 'anti-development' activity. This is quite apart from the other use that POTA is being put to--terrorizing Muslims, particularly in states like Jammu and Kashmir and Gujarat. The space for genuine nonviolent civil disobediance is atrophying. In the era of corporate globalization, poverty is a crime, and protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. In teh era of the War on Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism." I have sellected just a few pbuttages to show the message that this book offers and that it is important to everyone, not just India or Indians.

*** page 13: "Vast parts of the country are already more or less beyond the control of the Indian state--Kashmir, the North East, large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand." *** "The real issue is that the privatization of essential infrastructure is essentially undemocratic. The real issue is the towering mbutt of incriminating evidence against big dams. The real issue is the fact that over the last fifty years in India alone big dams have displaced more than 33 million people.... The real issue is the fact that the Supreme Court of India ordered the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to proceed even though it is aware that it violates the fundamental rights to life and livelihood of the citizens of India."

I should point out that dam construction and other Army Corps of Engineer projects in the USA have been seriously criticised by environmentalists in the USA at least as far back as 50 years ago. Many dam construction projects in the USA have been declared failures and Jared Diamond, in his book "Collapse" mentioned at least one US dam that was blown up to restore water flows back to their original nature without loss of non-existent benefits but with the restoration of the fishing industry in the area.

page 45: "Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a succesful coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists reference given. An entire intellectual community was dissolutioned. (The same technique was used to mbuttacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.reference given)....In 1980...the US said 'We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq reference given.'"

page 55: "In South Africa, after three hundred years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a nonracial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal acheivement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its mbuttive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. Official unemployment among blacks has increased from forty percent to fifty percent since the end of Apartheid reference given. The corporatization of basic services-- electricity, water, and housing-- has meant that ten million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity reference given."

Now how does propaganda work?

page 57: "...Clear Channel Communications is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than twelve hundred channels, which together account for nine percent fo the market reference given. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel orgaized pro-war patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country reference given. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news."

It should be noted that consolidation in the broadcast radio and TV business continues, today. Same for the book publishing business. Soon, only a few enbreasties will control all media.

page 71:

This deals with Hindu nationalism. Many pbuttages in the book talk about this with parallels with the development of Nazi power in Germany in the 1930s.

"On August 15, 2003, Independence Day he Cheif Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi hoisted the Indian flag before thousands of cheering people. In a gesture of menacing symbolism, he wore the black RSS cap--which proclaims him as a member of the Hindu nationalist guild that has not been shy of admiring Hitler and his methods reference given."

"One hundred and thirty million Muslims--not to mention the other minorities, Dalits, Christians, Sikhs, Adivasis--live in India under the shaddow of Hindu nationalism."

page 85:

Additional text documenting thousands of people end and hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Indian police.

page 91:

"Gandhi's Salt March was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws."

page 97:

"The U.S. government used the lies and disinformation generated around the September 11 attacks to invade no just one country, but two.... The Indian government uses the same strategy not with other countries, but against its own people. Over the last decade the number of people who have been end by the police and security forces runs into the thousands. Recently several plantay policemen spoke openly to the press about how many 'gangsters' they had eliminated on 'orders' from their senior officers reference given. Andhra Pradesh chalks up an average of about two hundred 'extremists' in 'encounter' rests a year reference given. In Kashmir in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated eighty thousand people have been end since 1989. Thousands have simply 'disappeared' reference given. According to the records of the buttociation of Parents of Disappeared People (APDP), more than three thousand people were end in 2003, of which four hundred and sixty- three were soldiers reference given."

The text goes on to say things are getting worse.

page 102:

"Fourty-seven percent of India's children below three suffer from malnutrition, forty-six percent are stunted reference given."

page 103: "Today, an average rural family eats about one hundred killograms about 220 lbs. less food in a year than it did in the early 1990s refernce given."

"But in urban India, wherever you go--shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports...--you have TV monitors in which election promises have already come true. India's Shining, Feeling Good."

page 104:

The thing that is happening is that much infrastructure (eg. water supplies, electricity, transport, telecommunications, health services, education, etc, that the government was "supposed to hold in trust for the people it represents, buttets that have been built and maintained with public money over decades--are sold by the state to private corporations." Guess where that leads?

The book ends with a short glossary of terms, names, etc., that define or explain political parties, important people, important historical events, and a long list of information sources (21 pages), and an index.

If you want to see how globalization is affecting the so-called "developing countries" this is one good book to start with.