Capitalism: A Ghost
Story
Arundhati
Roy
Arundhati
Roy is an Indian
novelist,
activist
and a social critic. The God of Small Things is the only novel written
by Roy. She won the Booker Prize for it in 1997. Since then, she
concentrated her writing on political issues. These include her criticism on the
Narmada Dam
project, India's testing of Nuclear Weapons in Pokhran, India’s new economic
policy and the exploitation of the tribal and the poor peasants. She is a
figure-head of the anti-globalization and anti-corruption movements
and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.
Capitalism:
A Ghost Story is a collection of essays in which
Arundhati Roy examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. She
also shows how the globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to
the intense form of racism and exploitation. She is worried that the government
which promises to uplift the poor supports only the wealthy to amass more and
more wealth.
Arundhati Roy begins
the essay by describing the house of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. She wonders whether it is a house or a temple
of new India or a warehouse for the ghosts of India. The building has twenty
seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, gymnasium and six
hundred servants. Roy points out that in India 100 richest people own assets
equivalent to one-fourth of India’s GDP. Here, one has to remember that
millions of people in India survive on less than twenty rupees a day. She
attributes this disparity to
Government’s new economic policy. The new economic policy has made the rich
richer and the poor poorer.
Arundhati Roy gives a
long list of investments made by the corporates like Ambanis, Tata, Jindals,
Infosys, Essar and Vedanta. In their race for growth, they have spread their
wings across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and America. Privatisation has been a
boon to these corporates. They sell the rich minerals of India to other
countries at an exorbitant rate after paying a pittance to the government.
Roy is quite critical
that Indian government seizes lands from the poor farmers in the name of
infrastructure projects, dams, construction of high ways, airports and car
manufacturing units. It shows its generosity to the multi-national companies by
liberally contributing these huge tracts of land to them. Once national leaders
like Vinobhave and Jayaprakash Narayan fought for land reforms. They
redistributed the land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today it is vice
versa. The government takes away lands from the poor peasants and deliver them
to industrial giants. It is disheartening to note that millions of Dalits and
adivasis who are thus driven away from their villages live in slums and shanty
colonies in small towns and mega cities.
The off shoot of
capitalism is privatisation. Privatisation leads to corruption. In India,
corruption has pervaded all fields. Each new corruption makes the last one look
small. Even mountains, rivers and forests are privatised in our country. But it
is done in the name of ‘progress’. In 2005, the state governments of
Chattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand signed MoUs with many private companies for
mining Bauxite, iron ore and other minerals. These companies paid a pittance to
the governments but earned trillions of dollars by exporting these valuable
resources to foreign countries. Sometimes the government facilitated the
industrialists to set up their factories by forcibly displacing the people who
lived there for many generations. The people who refused to leave their
homeland were branded as ‘maoists’ and were put in prison.
The government is very
keen on attracting foreign investment in India. For this, they create necessary
infrastructure at the cost of poor Indians. In Gujarat, for the construction of
dams, thousands of people lost their lands and houses. They were compelled to
move to some other parts of the state. Arundhati Roy indignantly argues that
even the cruellest dictators who lived in the past would not have done such a merciless
act. Thus the capitalism and globalization have destroyed the life of the
people who are marginalized.
Arundhati Roy’s Capitalism: A Ghost Story though points
out certain bitter truths, one has to keep in mind that creating necessary
infrastructure is essential for the growth of a nation. For this, it is
inevitable to acquire land from the land owners. This kind of inconveniences is
to be tolerated in the interest of the growth of the nation.
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