As a westerner, my main interest in India has been her spiritual heritage - mainly yoga and Hinduism. Ahimsa - non-violence - is one of the main principles of these spiritual systems. And since I have considered spirituality to be "universal truth," I have held ahimsa to be universally applicable, assuming that all people, in all situations, should practice non-violence. I thought the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. clearly demonstrated how non-violence really can win in any situation. I remember driving - as a spiritual tourist - through certain parts of India where the hammer-and-sickle communist symbol was a regular sight, and thinking to myself, in my naive, simplistic morality, "How sad that even here - in pure and holy India - they have all this nasty political bickering and fighting!" I had no idea what was actually going on underneath the surface of my "pure and holy India."
Now, after reading Arundhati Roy's Walking With The Comrades, I at least have an inkling about what is going on underneath the surface - and it is very, very ugly. Huge corporations that control (i.e., own) the politicians, the media, and the police/military want the mineral and resource-rich land where India's tribal people are still attempting to live their lives. Those corporations will stop at nothing to get it. Their only view of the world is that it should be exploited to the maximum degree possible - for profit. As a result, all over India, they have wreaked environmental disaster and have displaced untold numbers of people, sending them to live in shantytowns on the outskirts of cities (I have seen them, and they are shockingly squalid) or hiring them as cheap semi-slaves who have no real rights or security and no real access to education or medical care. They have rigged the entire political-economic-military system in their favor in order to be able to do this. In the eastern part of the country, one group has arisen that has had some success defending tribal peoples against the encroachments of the corporations: the communist, Maoist Naxalites. And they do it by fighting - and killing - with guns.
At great risk, Roy embedded herself with a group of forest-dwelling Naxalites and describes their day-to-day lives, their organization, their history, and the ways they have been deceptively misportrayed in the corporate-owned media. Along the way, she humanizes people who have only ever been portrayed as bloodthirsty terrorists, showing them to be real, often lovely, and very dignified, deeply community-minded people fighting for real, human values; people who simply want to be allowed to live their lives. Roy also makes a larger point that concerns us all: wherever tribal peoples are killed off, we lose the people "who still know the secrets of sustainable living."
Roy's book has confronted me - more squarely than ever before - with the stark reality of people living right at this moment, in the so-called "democratic world," who have no choice but to fight and kill or else be wiped out. Can any of us in the west imagine having to face this choice? In this reality, which I have never wanted to look at or even be aware of, there is a clear and obvious difference between the ridiculously wealthy corporations - who kill in order to make themselves even more ridiculously wealthy - and the Naxalites and tribal peoples - who kill only to stop others from either running them off their land (which amounts to killing them) or outright killing them. These are two totally different - almost opposite - forms of violence.
So, would my cherished, universal, spiritual non-violence work for these tribal peoples? I cannot say for sure, but Roy suggests not, and I think I believe her. Ahimsa may be an inviolable spiritual principle; but it may not apply in the perverse reality created by corporatism-gone-mad (which is the only form of it there seems to be).
I'll end with the reflection that, here in America, the exact same forces are at play, only in a slightly different key. Here, large corporations, who also own the politicians, the media, and the pepper-spray-happy police/military, are a bit more polished and restrained. They do not dislocate and kill us in as obvious and blatant a way as they do in India and other parts of the world. This gives us the illusion of having more of a choice in how to respond to them - or even to not respond at all. Maybe non-violent, political resistance makes sense here, at least for now (where at least we have some corporate-free news shows like DemocracyNow! - where I learned about this book - to give fair coverage to such non-violent resistance). But as corporate power continues to grow over here, maybe we should keep the Naxalites in mind - and even view them as, dare I say it, our comrades.
Maybe I'm still being naďve - but probably less so than before I read this powerful book.
