Arundhati Roy - India, On the Road to Theocracy

From Alternative Radio, Arundhati Roy speaks about the current state in India. This speech, On the Road to Theocracy, was recorded in Stockholm, Sweden, on 2023-03-22.

Arundhati Roy: India's democracies being systematically disassembled in 2014 Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. In the nine years since, India has changed beyond recognition. The secular socialist republic mandated by the constitution has almost ceased to exist. The great struggles for social justice and the dogged, visionary environmental movements have been crushed. India for all practical purposes has become a corporate, theocratic Hindu state, a highly policed state, a fearsome state.

That's Arundhati Roy and this is Alternative Radio. I'm David Barsamian. This edition of AR features Arundhati Roy, India, on the road to theocracy. Hindutva is theocratic Hindu nationalism. It is a powerful force in what is now the world's most populous country. Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister, is a lifelong member of the RSS, an openly Hindu supremacist organization. Lamont Deep Lomatic reports, Hindutva followers regard India as a Hindu country. Non-Hindus are at best guests, at worst invaders and must be identified, watched, deprived of certain rights and in some cases expelled or even eliminated. The main victims of Hindutva are India's large Muslim minority. Hindutva followers oppose mixed Hindu Muslim marriages, calling them a love jihad, that aims to convert Hindu women so that their offspring will be raised as Muslims. This paranoid fantasy has encouraged violence and widespread denigration of Indian Muslims.

Our guest today is Arundhati Roy, the world renowned award-winning writer and global justice activist. Author of many books, her latest are Azadi and The Architecture of Modern Empire. She spoke at the Thought and Truth Under Pressure Conference, held by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. This is a special program marking International Women's Day.

Arundhati Roy: Thank you so much for everybody for coming and thank you for this wonderful array of speakers that you organized. I've learned so much from just sitting in this room. It's a difficult task for me because I think I come from a place which most of you are less familiar with. Partly one has to tell the story and then speak about the possibilities or the theories of what awaits us. I have written this down because these days one is in India but also in the world. Every word, every comma, every pause is interrogated. If you follow the news from India now in the last week, it has been said that whoever speaks against the regime on foreign soil is a traitor. So I don't know how much longer my treason is going to be tolerated so I might as well make the most of it. So I thank the Swedish Academy for inviting me to speak at this conference. It was planned more than two years ago before the coronavirus pandemic revealed the full scale of its horror and before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But those two cataclysmic events have only intensified the predicament that we have gathered here to think about.

The phenomenon of democracies transmuting into something unrecognizable but with unknowingly recognizable resonances and the escalating of policing of speech in ways that are very old as well as very new to the point where the air itself has turned into a sort of punitive heresy hunting machine. We seem to be fast approaching what feels like intellectual gridlock. I will reverse the sequence suggested by the title of this talk and begin with the phenomenon of failing democracies. The last time I came to Sweden was in 2017 for the Gothenburg book fair and several activists asked me to boycott the fair because in the name of free speech it had allowed the far right newspaper, Nya Tider [...] to put up its stall. At that time I explained that it would be absurd for me to boycott the fair because Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of my country, who was and is warmly welcomed on the world stage is a lifetime member of the RSS, a far right Hindu supremacist organization founded in 1925 and constituted in the image of the black shirts, the all volunteer paramilitary wing of Mussolini's National Fascist Party.

The RSS today is the most powerful organization in India. It has hundreds of thousands of members, it has militias, its ideologues have referred to Muslims as the Jews of Germany. In Gottenberg I watched what I think was Europe's first Nazi march after the Second World War and I also watched young anti-fascist counter that march but today a far right party even if not openly Nazi is part of the ruling coalition in the Swedish government and Modi is serving his ninth year as India's Prime Minister. When I speak of failing democracy I'll speak mainly about India because it's the place I love, the place I know and live in, the place that breaks my heart every day and mends it too but not because it's known as the world's largest democracy.

Remember what I say today is not a call for help because we in India know very well that no help will come. No help can come. I speak to tell you about a country that although flawed was one so full of singular possibilities, one that offered a radically different understanding of the meaning of happiness, fulfilment, tolerance, diversity and sustainability than that of the western world. All that is being extinguished and spiritually stubbed out. India's democracy is being systematically disassembled and only the rituals remain. Next year you'll surely hear a lot about our noisy colourful elections. What will not be apparent is that the level playing field fundamental to a fair election is actually a steep rock face in which virtually all the money, the data, the media, the election management and security apparatus is in the hands of the ruling party. Sweden's VEDEM institute with this detailed comprehensive data set that measures the health of democracies has categorised India as an electoral autocracy along with El Salvador, Turkey and Hungary and predicts that things are likely to get worse. We're talking about 1.4 billion people falling out of democracy and into autocracy. The process of dismantling democracy began long before Modi and the RSS came to power.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay called Democracy's Failing Light. At that time the congress party, a party of old feudal elites and technocrats, newly and enthusiastically wedded to the free market was in power. And I'll read a short passage from the essay not to prove how right I was but to chart for you how much has changed since then. So this is just this fifteen-year-old essay. While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the card? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? So the question here really is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up when it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?

That was in 2009. Five years later, in 2014, Modi was elected prime minister of India. In the nine years since India has changed beyond recognition, the secular socialist republic mandated by the constitution has almost ceased to exist. The great struggles for social justice and the dogged visionary environmental movements have been crushed. Now we rarely speak about dying rivers, falling water tables, disappearing forests or melting glaciers because those worries have been replaced by a more immediate dread or euphoria depending on which side of the ideological line you're on.

India for all practical purposes has become a corporate, theocratic Hindu state, a highly policed state, a fearsome state. The institutions that were hollowed out by the previous regime, particularly the mainstream media, now seeds with Hindu supremacist fervor.

So here I just wanted to say that you know the media in India is all corporate owned. Most of the corporates have other business interests like mining and infrastructure and so there is no question there's a huge conflict of interest in those platforms themselves which happened before Hindu nationalism but now it combines with Hindu nationalism in a way. So you know the whole structure is corrupted and there's a conflict of interest.

Simultaneously the free market has done what the free market does. Briefly according to the Oxfam 2023 report the top 1% of India's population owns more than 40% of the total wealth while the bottom 50% of the population which is 700 million people has around 3% of the total wealth. So we are the fifth largest economy in the world, a very rich country full of very poor people. But instead of being directed at those who might, the anger instead of being directed at those who might be responsible for some of these things, the anger and resentment that this inequality generates has been harvested and directed against India's minorities. The 170 million Muslims who make up 14% of the population are on the front line and this is not to suggest that the violence directed against Muslims comes only from poor people because the diaspora, the very educated Indians, those who live in America and the UK are all part of this project. Not all but many of them are part of this project.

In January this year, the BBC broadcasted a two-part documentary film called India: the Modi question. It traced Modi's political journey from his debut in 2001 as Chief Minister of the State of Gujarat to his years as Prime Minister. The film made public for the first time an internal report commissioned by the British Foreign Office in April 2002 about the anti-Muslim program that took place in Gujarat under Modi's watch in February and March 2002 just before the elections to the state assembly. So if you track anti-minority massacres and elections you'll find that massacres are part of the democratic process which is such a great irony. That fact-finding report embargoed for all these years only corroborates what Indian activists, journalists, lawyers, two senior police officers and eyewitnesses to the mass rape and slaughter that have been saying for years. It estimates that at least 2,000 people have been murdered. It calls the massacre a pre-planned program that quote bore all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing. It says reliable sources had informed them that when the murdering began the police were ordered to stand down. The report lays the blame for the program squarely at Modi's door.

Now, I have for 20 years been talking about this massacre 100,000 people were driven from their homes, women were mass raped, people were slaughtered like in a city like this on the streets while the police watched. The killers came out they were caught on camera boasting about how they killed, how they slit pregnant women, stomachs open, how they took out the fetuses. All this happened and yet the most of the killers are you know one of them was a woman who was accused of leading a massacre in a particular area called Naroda Patiya where 90 people were massacred and while she was accused of being the killer later she was convicted she was made minister for women and children. The film has been, the BBC film has been banned in India. This film was just shown now in January. Twitter and YouTube were ordered to take down links and they obeyed immediately.

On February 21st the BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai were surrounded by the police and raided by income tax officials as Oxfam's offices have been, as Amnesty International's offices have been, as many major opposition politicians homes and offices have been, as almost every NGO that isn't completely aligned with the government has been. While Modi has been legally absorbed by the Supreme Court of India in the 2002 program the activists and police officers who dare to accuse him of complicity based on a tower of evidence and witness statements are either in prison or facing criminal trials. You know I have read these witness statements. I'm somebody who has you know tracked these things for a long time but let me tell you you can't even read one paragraph without just walking up and down for a long time because the crew it was not just about killing people they were exhibition killings you know. Meanwhile many of the convicted killers are out on bail or parole.

Last August on the 75th anniversary of India's independence 11 convicts walked out of prison. They had been serving life sentences most of which were spent out on parole not in jail. They had been serving life sentences for gang raping a 19 year old Muslim woman, Bilkis Bano, during the 2002 program and murdering 14 members of her family including her one day old niece and her three three-year-old daughter Salihah by smashing her head on a rock. They were given special amnesty outside prison those rapist murderers were greeted as heroes garlanded with flowers.

Once again there was a state election around the corner. The special amnesty was part of our democratic process. So after 2002 Modi was denied a visa by the United States but as soon as he became prime minister he was given a visa and now whole rally is there as you know. Earlier today, professor Timothy Snyder asked: what is free speech? Let none of what I have just said make you conclude that there isn't free speech in India. There is freedom in speech and deed plenty of it. Mainstream anchors can freely lie about demonized and dehumanized minorities in ways that lead to actual physical harm or incarceration. Hindu godmen and sword-wielding mobs can call for the genocide and mass rape of Muslims. Dalits and Muslims can be publicly flogged and lynched in broad daylight and the videos can be uploaded on youtube. Churches can be freely attacked priests and nuns beaten and humiliated. So the enemies of the RSS are Muslims Christians and communists.

So, in 2021 there were 300 attacks on churches. In Kashmir India is only Muslim majority region where people have fought for self-determination for almost three decades where India runs the densest military administration in the world and where no foreign journalists are allowed to go. The government has allowed itself to freely shut down virtually all speech online and otherwise and freely incarcerate journalists. Peter was talking about how we can try and make laws that connect justice to truth and regulate against speech that overtly leads to the commission of war crimes. Actually that has been reversed engineered in India already because journalists are accused of narrative terrorism. I am routinely called an intellectual terrorist or you know pictures are put out saying everything else is the software this is the hardware you know. So, I don't know whether to be proud or scared but, anyway; in that beautiful valley covered with graveyards well [...], according to the Associated Press, and you know whatever estimates there's something like 78,000 people have been killed in Kashmir in the conflict and thousands have just disappeared and you know in the 90s when the insurrection began Abu Ghraib had nothing on the torture all over the Kashmir valley. In that beautiful valley covered with graveyards the valley from which no news comes the people say in Kashmir the dead are alive and the living are really dead people pretending. They often refer to India's democracy as demon crazy.

In 2019, weeks after Modi and his party won a second term, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was unilaterally stripped of its statehood and the semi-autonomous status guaranteed to it in the Indian constitution was you know eliminated. So that was you know now at the moment it no longer has a representative government and when this was done tens of thousands of people were arrested including all the previous chief ministers and so on. The internet was cut for months.

Soon after the Kashmir status was stripped the parliament passed the citizenship amendment bill, the CAA. This new act manifestly discriminates against Muslims. Under it people mostly Muslim now feel losing their citizenship. The CAA will complement the process of creating a national register of citizens. To be included in the national register citizens people are expected to produce a set of state approved legacy documents. A process not similar this similar to what the Newenburg laws of Nazi Germany required of German people. So none of us have papers obviously you know legacy papers. India's a country where you know there are forest dwellers, people whose birds are not even registered. Where are they going to produce the papers? So then once everyone is illegal you can decide who's going to be persecuted and who is not. Already two million people in the state of Assam have been struck from the national register of citizens and stand to lose all their rights. Two million people in one state. Huge detention centers are being constructed with the hard labor often done by future inmates those who have been designated declared foreigners or doubtful voters.

Our new India is an India of costume and spectacle. Picture a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad Gujarat. It's called the Narendra Modi stadium and has a seating capacity of 132,000. In January 2020, it was packed to capacity for the Namaste Trump rally when Modi facilitated then US President Donald Trump. Standing up and waving to the crowd in the city where, during the 2002 pogrom, Muslims had been slaughtered in broad daylight and tens of thousands driven from their homes and where Muslims still live in ghettos. Trump praised India for being tolerant and diverse. Modi called down a round of applause. A day later Trump arrived in Delhi. His arrival in the city coincided with yet another massacre. A tiny one, this time: a mini massacre by Gujarat standards. You know, we classify our massacres nowadays. In a working class neighborhood only kilometers away from Trump's fine hotel and not far from where I live. Hindu vigilantes once again turned on Muslims. Once again the police stood by. The provocation was that the area has seen protests against the anti-Muslim citizenship amendment act.

53 people mostly Muslim were killed. Hundreds of businesses homes and mosques were burnt. Trump said nothing. Burned into some of our minds from those terrible days is a different kind of spectacle. A young Muslim man is lying grievously injured close to death on a street in India's capital city. He's being prodded and beaten and forced by police to sing the Indian national anthem. He died a few days later. His name was Faizan. He was 23 years old and no action has been taken by the police.

None of this should matter very much to the provosts of the democratic world. Actually none of it does because there is after all business to attend to because India is currently the West's bulwark against a rising China or so it hopes and because in the free market you can trade a little mass rape and lynching or a sport of ethnic cleansing or some serious financial corruption for a generous purchase order for fighter jets or commercial aircraft or crude oil purchased from Russia refined stripped of the stigma of US sanctions and so to Europe and yes or so our newspapers report to the United States too. Everybody's happy and why not. For Ukrainians, Ukraine is their country, for Russia, it's a colony, and for Western Europe and the US it's a frontier like Vietnam was like Afghanistan was but for Modi it's merely yet another stage on which to perform time to this time to play the role of the statesman peacemaker and also homily such as this is not the time for war.

In India, inside what is increasingly feeling like a cult, there is sophisticated jurisdiction but there is no equality before the law. Laws are applied selectively depending on caste religion gender and class. For example a Muslim cannot say what Hindus can a Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. It makes solidarities speaking up for one another more important than ever but that too has become a perilous activity and this is what I mean by the title of my lecture approaching gridlock.

Unfortunately at just such a moment the things the list of things that can and cannot be said and words that must not be uttered is lengthening by the minute. Time was when governments and mainstream media houses control the platforms that control the narrative. In the West that would for the most part be white folks. In India Brahmins are the top of the caste system, [...] the gods who walk on earth and then of course there are the fatwa folks for whom censorship and assassination mean the same thing but today censorship has turned into a battle of all against all. The fine art of taking offense has become a global industry. The question is how does one negotiate this hydra-headed, multi-limbed, hawkeyed, forever-awake, ever-vigilant, heresy-hunting machine? Is it even possible or is it a tide that must pass before we can even discuss it?

In India, like in other countries, the weaponization of identity as a form of resistance has become the dominant response to the weaponization of identity as a form of oppression. Those who have historically been oppressed, enslaved, colonized, stereotyped, erased, unheard, and unseen, precisely because of our identities our race religion cast ethnicity gender or sexual preference, are now defiantly doubling down on those very identities to face off against oppression. It's a powerless powerful explosive moment in history in which enabled by the social media wild in canvassed anger is battering down old ideas, old patterns of behavior, entitled assumptions that have never been questioned. Loaded words and language that is coded with prejudice and bigotry. The intensity and suddenness of it has shocked a complacent world into rethinking, reimagining and trying to find a better way of doing and saying things.

Ironically, almost uncannily, this phenomenon, this fine-tuning, seems to be moving in step with our search into fascism. This explosion has profound revolutionary aspects to it as well as absurd and destructive ones. It's easy to suit down on its more extreme aspects and use these to tar and dismiss the whole debate. For example, should women now be called people who menstruate? Should an art professor in the US teaching the rich diversity of Islam be summarily sacked for showing her students a 14th century painting of Prophet Muhammad after announcing that she was going to do so and excusing from her class all students who might be offended or upset by it? Should there be an established immutable hierarchy of historical suffering that everybody must accept? That is the fuel which the far right uses to consolidate itself but to buckle under it fearfully and unquestioningly as many who think of themselves as liberal and left-wing do is to disrespect this transformation too because in the politics of identity there is all too often an important pivot a hinge which when it turns upon itself begins to reinforce as well as replicate the very thing it wishes to resist.

That happens when identity is desegregated and atomized into micro categories and even these micro categories then develop a hierarchy and a micro elite usually located in big cities big universities with social media capital which eventually mimics the same kind of exclusion, erasure and hierarchy that is being challenged in the first place. If we lock ourselves into the prison cells of the very labels and identities we have been given by those who have always had power over us we can at best stage a prison revolt not a revolution and the prison guards will appear soon enough to restore order in fact they're already on their way. When we buy into a culture of prescription and censorship eventually it is always the right and usually the status quo that benefits this proportionately.

So I always say, that along with free speech, we need fearless listening. We need to listen to things that we don't want to hear. Sealing ourselves into communities religious and caste groups, ethnicities and genders reducing and flattening our identities and pressing them into silos precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was, and is, the ultimate goal of the Hindu caste system in India. Divide people into an hierarchy of unbreachable compartments and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict. It works like a self-operating, intricate, administrative surveillance machine in which society, administers and surveills itself and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom and these categories are minutely graded too is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature not Shakespeare for sure not tall story. Leave aside his Russian imperialism. Imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karina. Not Dostoevsky who only refers to older women as croons. By his standards I qualify as one for sure but I still like people to read him or if you like try reading the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi. I can guarantee you that you will be appalled on every count: race, sex, caste, class. Does that mean he should be banned or rewritten? Even Jane Austen wouldn't make the cut. It goes without saying that by these standards every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster. Amidst the noise in public discourse we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine it should be challenged analyzed argued about calibrated by precluding it we reinforced the very thing we claimed to be fighting against.

But what does all this do to literature? As a fiction writer few things perturb me more than the word appropriation which is one of the rallying calls of the new censorship. In this context appropriation crudely put is about predators even contrite predators attempting to write or represent or speak over or actually tell the stories of their prey on their behalf. It's pretty skanky and a useful principle to keep in mind while critiquing something, but it's not a good reason to ban or censor things. Yes, the mic has been hogged. Yes, we've heard too much from one kind of people and too little from others but the web of life is dense and intricate. Its creatures and their deeds cannot be essentialized and so easily and unintelligibly catalogued. Coming specifically to fiction, there can be no fiction without appropriation, because we fiction writers are predators too.

If serial killers are merciless sociopaths, no less are merciless appropriators. To construct our fictional worlds we appropriate everything that crosses our path and we put it all in play. That is what makes great novels dangerous and revelatory things.

Speaking for myself I have tried to learn my craft not only from politically irreproachable writers like Tony Morrison and James Baldwin but also from imperialists like Kipling and from bigots, racists, troublemakers, and rascals who write beautifully. Should it now be rewritten to march to the beat of some narrow manifesto? The recent decision to re-edit the works of Roald Dahl? My god, who next? Nabokov? Shall the leader vanish from our shelves or shall she be recast as an undercover pre-teen activist? Shall old masterpieces be repainted shown of the male gaze? It's so sad to even have to say all this. Where will it leave us on a shore without footprints in a world without history?

If literature is going to be immobilized by this web of a thousand snarling threads it will turn into some sort of lead-in rigid manifesto and sadly those who are so enthusiastically involved in the policing aren't just petrifying others they're petrifying themselves as well they are laying landmines that they know they themselves will inevitably step on. [...]

In any case driving things underground won't make them go away if these debates could take place without the bullying and vindictiveness that accompany them then most definitely along with the usual mess of bigotry racism and sexism there will be glorious new voices telling stories that have never been told before putting much of the past to shame but having said this it's never a bad idea to pay close attention to words because sometimes a word can signify a universe. For example, when I became a published novelist on the occasions when I would speak outside India, I would more often than not be introduced on the stage as an Indian woman writer. In India, it would be the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize. Each time it happened I would win inwardly and wonder at this way of labeling somebody. Was it necessary or was it a way of limiting and circumscribing them? After all it was literature we were talking about, not a visa application. I winced because I was constantly being lectured by privileged and entitled men not just privately but on the front pages of newspapers about how to write, what to write, what tone to take, what topics would be suitable for a unspoken woman writer like me.

Children's stories was a suggestion that came up frequently. The fiction didn't seem to bother them as much as a nonfiction even if they agreed in principle with what I was saying. On one occasion I was holed up at the Supreme Court of India for contempt of court for my writing on big dams. During the trial their lordships the brother judges on the bench would refer to me as that woman as they threw my essay around in exasperation as if I wasn't standing there right in front of them. I'd refer to myself privately as the hooker that won the Booker. When I refused to apologize to the court I was told that I wasn't behaving like a reasonable man and sent to prison for a day. Things have changed since then. Each of those words in that card index introduction of me, Indian woman writer, is these days the subject heading of some anxious and difficult interrogation and almost irreconcilable conflict. Who is a woman or indeed who is a human? What is a country? Who is a citizen and in the era of OpenAI and ChatGPT? Who or what is a writer?

We now know even if many won't accept it that the border between male and female is a fluid one and not what convention has assumed it to be. But what about the border between human being and machine, between art and coding, between artificial intelligence and human consciousness? Are those as hardwired as we thought they were? I mean artificial intelligence our natural intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival. Now we want to outstrip our intelligence. The era of chatbots is here and some are calling artificial intelligence to force industrial revolution. Will writers, journalists, artists and composers now be phased out in the same way that we were craftsmen, factory workers and old world farmers have been? Maybe like hand crafted and hand woven garments and artifacts novels will return to be handwritten and sold as limited editions as works of art and not literature. Will literature be better produced by ChatGPT or Sydney or Bing?

The great linguist, Noam Chomsky thinks not. If I understand him correctly, he holds that a machine learning program can produce full science or full art by processing an almost infinite volume of data at high speed. But it can never replace the complex abilities of human instinct. There's a great deal of anxiety around what might happen if open AI finds it way into the world without regulations and guardrails as there should be. When it comes to literature, my worry is less about whether chatbots will replace writers, perhaps I'm a little too old and a little too vain for that. Or maybe it's just that I don't view literature as a product. The pain and the pleasure and the sheer insanity of the process is the only reason that I write. But my worry is that given the amount of data and information that human writers, see I said it, human writers, have to process these days and given the maze of tripwires we have to negotiate to be error free and politically perfect, the danger is that writers may lose their instincts and turn into chatbots. Maybe then there'll be a transfer of souls, then chatbots will appear to be real souls and real souls will be chatbots pretending. In the midst of all this fluidity and porousness, the only borders that seem to be hardening are the borders between nation states. Those continue to be hardwired, patrolled. When they are breached by armies we call it war. When they are breached by people, we call it a refugee crisis. When they are breached by unregulated movement of capital, we call it the free market. The modern nation state is right up there with God as an idea was killing or dying for. But now in the digital era, are we heading for a new kind of state, the electronic state or what is being called a state in a smartphone, an avatar state, if you like.

Funded by USAID and backed by big tech, Amazon, Apple, Google, Oracle, the avatar state is almost upon us. In 2019, the government of Ukraine launched Diia, a digital identification app for smartphones. In addition to providing more than 100 government services, Diia can house passports, vaccine certificates and other ID. DiiaCity is its extraterritorial financial capital, a sort of venture capital hub where citizens can register and conduct businesses. After the Russian invasion began, Diia initially conceived of as a bureaucratic tool to ensure transparency and efficiency was in the words of Samantha Powell, administrator, USAID repurposed for war. From all accounts, Diia has done a tremendous service to the brave people of Ukraine. It now has a 24-7 government news channel for citizens to update themselves on the war. Refugees can use it to register themselves and file compensation claims. Citizens can reportedly use it to upload information on collaborators and photographs of Russian troop movement, a sort of real-time public intelligence and surveillance network operated by ordinary citizens. When the war began, Ukrainian citizens' private data on Diia was transferred for safe keeping onto Amazon's military-grade hard drives called AWS Snowball, the terrestrial equivalent of the cloud and transported out of the Ukraine and uploaded to cloud.

In a war as devastating as the one the one that Ukrainians are fighting and enduring, if people are completely aligned behind their government, then having your state in a smartphone surely has incredible advantages. But do those advantages accrue in peacetime too? Because, as we know from Edward Snowden, surveillance is a two-way street, our phones are our intimate enemies. They spy on us. In order to protect the democratic world, USAID plans to take Diia or its equivalent to other states, countries like Ecuador, Zambia, the Dominican Republic are ahead of the queue. The worry is that once an app like Diia has been repurposed for war, can it be unpurposed or depurposed for peace? Can a weaponized citizenry be unweaponized? Can privatized data be unprivatized? India is quite far down to part two.

During Modi's first term as prime minister, Reliance Industries, then India's largest corporation launched Jio, a free wireless data network that came bundled together with a dirt cheap smartphone. Once it had successfully muscled competition out of the market, it began to charge a small fee. Jio has turned India into the largest consumer of wireless data in the world, more than China and the US put together. By 2019, there were 300 million smartphone users. Along with the undeniable benefits of being collected to the internet, millions of people have become a ready-made audience for hateful, socially active, radioactive messaging and endless fake news that flows relentlessly into their phones through the social media. And it is here you will see India unadorned. It is here those calls for genocide and the mass rape of Muslims are identified, where videos of avenging Hindu warriors massacring Muslims and blaming Muslim fruit sellers for secretly spitting on fruit to spread COVID, like the Jews in Nazi Germany were accused of spreading typhus are sent around to drive people into a frenzy of rage and hate.

The Hindu-Supremists social media channels are to the mainstream media what a vigilante media is to a conventional army. militia can do things that are illegal conventional armies to do. The digital revolution in India is a perfect example of how the interests of big business and Hindu supremacy coincide perfectly. As Indian citizens are ushered into the digital arena and their millions, entire lives are lived online, education, medical care, business, banking, the distribution of food rations and social media corporations have to be more and more attentive to the government that controls this huge market share. And when that government is unhappy as it often is, it can shut down everything. We await the new 2023 digital India Act, which gives the government unthinkable power over the internet. Already India imposes more internet shut downs than any other country in the world.

In 2019, the 7 million citizens of Kashmir value were put under a blanket telecommunication and internet siege that lasted for months, no phone calls, no texts, no messages, no OTPs, no internet and nobody around to drop a star-link satellite for them. Today, even now, as we speak Punjab with 27 million people has had this internet shutdown because the government is hunting for a political fugitive.

By 2026, India is projected to have one billion smartphone users. Imagine that volume of data in an India-bespoke Diia app. Imagine all that data in the hands of private corporations or on the other hand, imagine it in the hands of a fascist state and its indoctrinated weaponized supporters. For example, say, after passing a new citizenship law, country X manufactures millions of refugees out of its own citizenry. It can't deport them. It doesn't have the money to build prisons for all of them. But it can just switch them off. Country X won't need a Gulag or concentration camps. It can switch the state off in their smartphones. It could then have a vast service population, virtually a subclass of labor without rights, without minimum wages, voting rights, health care, or food rations. They wouldn't need to appear in books. It would improve country X's statistical markers enormously. It could be quite an efficient and transparent operation. It could even look like a great democracy. What would a state like that smell like or taste like? Something unrecognizable or something very recognizable?

Thank you for your patience. And for now, let me leave you with these thoughts. What is a country? What is a state? What is a human? And whom or what is the writer? Thank you. Thank you so much. It's hard to add much to this. Let me just ask one question. You're standing here very bravely talking about the state of your country. And at the same time, we hear people in the West speaking of India as a democracy. I mean, we've had this discussion in Sweden. We speak of Turkey as a democracy for political convenience. And I imagine something similar is going on now. There's a shift towards stopping China and so on. Is this very much part of what's going on that the rest of the world just turns a blind eye to what's happening to Indian democracy because for political convenience?

So I am in some ways as a writer and as a person who believes that there are many of us who say that we may go down, but we'll never be on your side. And in those ways, I'm an idealist. But when it comes to understanding how the world works, I'm a complete cynic because I know that at all these summits and meetings, what I was saying here, what is on sale in the free market? It's all these are things.

Just to give you an example, last week, China brokered a deal. I mean, I've resolved the conflict, let's say, between Saudi Arabia and Iran. So now that's a huge shift in how power is going to work. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia. So where does India come into play? China is on India's border, inside India's border, but there's the Quad, which is trying to use India to push back on China. But India can't say anything about Russia. There's nothing to do with morality. 90% of the weapons are from there. 90% of the service in takes place there. All the oil is coming from there. There's huge, it's impossible. A nation of 1.4 billion people with intricate economic ties. So now, how are these things going to be engineered? If India shifts a little more than comfortably towards Russia, now it's playing both ways, then suddenly America will start talking about Kashmir. This is how it is. It's not like anyone is genuinely concerned about human rights violations. I mean, if in any other country, which wasn't a big market, if someone sat and watched a daylight slaughter of 2,000 people, wouldn't someone do something or say something but no, because it's a huge market. So that's how it is. I mean, that's how international relations are. So we can't break our hearts over it, but we want to understand it and not expect anything else. I don't. Thank you so much.