Wednesday, 25 October 2017



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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