AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today for the hour is Arundhati Roy. She just recently flew in from New Delhi, India. She is the author of a number of books, her Booker Prize award-winning book, The God of Small Things, and then her books of essays, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile among them. Arundhati, you were just talking about what is happening in India. Thomas Friedman, the well-known, much-read New York Times columnist and author, talks about the call center being a perfect symbol of globalization in a very positive sense.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, it is the perfect symbol, I think, in many ways. I wish Friedman would spend some time working in one. But I think it's a very interesting issue, the call center, because, you know, let's not get into the psychosis that takes place inside a call center, the fact that you have people working, you know, according to a different body clock and all that and the languages and the fact that you have to de-identify yourself.

AMY GOODMAN: And just for people who aren't familiar with what we're talking about, the call center being places where, well, you might make a call to information or to some corporation, you actually are making that call to India, and someone in a call center is picking it up.

ARUNDHATI ROY: But, you know, the thing is that it's a good example of what's going on. The call center is surely creating jobs for a whole lot of people in India. But it comes as part of a package, and that package, while it gives sort of an English-speaking middle or lower middle class young person a job for a while, they can never last, because it's such a hard job. It actually is also part of the corporate culture, which is taking away land and resources and water from millions of rural people. But you're giving the more vocal and the better off anyway -- the people who speak even a little bit of English are the better off among the millions of people in India. So, to give these people jobs, you're taking away the livelihoods of millions of others, and this is what globalization does.

It creates -- obviously it creates a very vocal constituency that supports it, among the elite of poor countries. And so you have in India an elite, an upper caste, upper class wealthy elite who are fiercely loyal to the neoliberal program. And that's exactly, obviously, what colonialism has always done, and it's exactly what happened in countries in Latin America. But now it's happening in India, and the rhetoric of democracies in place, because they have learned how to hollow out democracy and make it lose meaning. All it means, it seems, is elections, where whoever you vote for, they are going to do the same thing.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the dams, and a judge just in the last week has ruled that one of the major dam projects is allowed to continue. Just physically on the ground, what does it mean, and who are the people who are resisting, and what do they do?

ARUNDHATI ROY: I mean, that actually is something that reached fever pitch in the last few weeks in India, because, you know, the movement against dams is actually a very beautiful political argument, because it combines environmental issues, issues of water, of resources and of displacement, with a political vision for a new kind of society. No political ideology, classic political ideology has really done that properly. Either it's only environmental or it's only about people. Here somehow, that's why I got so drawn into it. But this struggle was against the notion of big dams, and it's been a nonviolent struggle for 25 years.

But now, the dams are still being built, and the argument has been reduced merely to displacement. And even there, the courts are now saying you build a dam and just give people cash and send them off. But the fact is that these are indigenous people. You know, you can't just give -- lots of them are indigenous people. The others are farmers. But you can't -- the levels of displacement are so huge. This dam, the Sardar Sarovar dam displaces 400,000, but just in the Narmada Valley you're talking about millions of people. All over India, you’re talking about many millions who are being displaced. So where are they going to go? Well, the court came out with a judgment with marked a different era in India, where they even stopped pretending that they were interested in resettlement or rehabilitation. They just said, “Build the dam.” So it's very interesting that people were watching this nonviolent movement unfold its weapons on the streets, which is the activists who went on indefinite hunger strike. People paid attention, but then they got kicked in the teeth.

Meanwhile, across India, from West Bengal to Orissa, to Jharkhand, to Chhattisgarh, to Andhra Pradesh, the Maoist movement has become very, very strong. It's an armed struggle. It's taking over district after district. The administration cannot get in there. And the government's response to that is to do what was done in Peru with the Shining Path, which is to set up armed defense committees, which is really creating a situation of civil war. You know, hundreds of villages are being emptied by the government, and the people are being moved into police camps. People are being armed. The Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh says, “You’re either with the Maoists and Naxalites or you’re with the Salva Judum,” which is this government-sponsored resistance, and there’s no third choice. So it’s you’re with us or against us.

And what has happened, which is something I have been saying for a long time, that this whole war on terror and the legislation that has come up around it is going to conflate terrorists with poor people. And that's what's happened. In India, in January -- I don't know if you’ve read about it, but it was a terrible thing that happened -- in Orissa, which is a state where all these corporations have their greedy eyes fixed, because they have just discovered huge deposits of bauxite, which you need to make aluminum, which you need to make weapons and planes.

AMY GOODMAN: And where is Orissa in India?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Orissa is sort of east, southeast. And it's got a huge indigenous population. If you go there, it's like a police state. You know, the police have surrounded villages. You can't move from one -- villagers are not allowed to move from one village to another to organize, because, of course, there’s a lot of resistance. The Maoists have come in. And in Orissa in a place called Kalinganagar, where the Tata, which used to be a sort of respected industrialist, but now I can't say, are setting up a steel factory. So they, the government, took over the lands of indigenous people. The trick is that you only say about 20% of them are project-affected. The rest are all encroachers. Even these 20% are given -- their land is taken from them at, say, 35,000 rupees an acre, given to the Tatas for three-and-a-half lakhs, you know, which is ten times that amount. And the actual market price is four times that amount. So you steal from the poor; you subsidize the rich; then you call it the “free market.”

And when they protested, there was dynamite, you know, in the ground. Some of them were blown up, killed. Six of them, I think, were injured, taken to hospital, and their bodies were returned with their hands and breasts and things cut off. And those people have been blocking the highway now for six months, the indigenous people, because it became a big issue in India. But it’s been happening everywhere, and they are all called terrorists. You know, people with bows and arrows are called terrorists.

So, in India, the poor are the terrorists, and even states like Andhra Pradesh, we have thousands of people being held as political prisoners, called Maoists, held as political prisoners in unknown places without charges or with false charges. We have the highest number of custodial deaths in the world. And we have Thomas Friedman going on and on about how this is an idealistic -- ideal society, a tolerant society. Hundreds -- I mean, tens of thousands of people killed in Kashmir. All over the northeast, you have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, where a junior noncommissioned officer can shoot at sight. And that is the democracy in which we live.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Maoists, what are their demands?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, the Maoists are fighting on two fronts. One is that they are fighting a feudal society, their feudal landlords. You have, you know, the whole caste system which is arranged against the indigenous people and the Dalits, who are the untouchable caste. And they are fighting against this whole corporatization. But they are also very poor people, you know, barefoot with old rusty weapons. And, you know, what we -- say someone like myself, watching what is happening in Kashmir, where -- or in the northeast, where exactly what America is doing in Iraq, you know, where you're fostering a kind of civil war and then saying, “Oh, if we pull out, these people just will massacre each other.”

But the longer you stay, the more you're enforcing these tribal differences and creating a resistance, which obviously, on the one hand, someone like me does support; on the other hand, you support the resistance, but you may not support the vision that they are fighting for. And I keep saying, you know, I'm doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won. But the point is that they are the ones that are resisting on the ground, and they have to be supported, because what is happening is unbelievable.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of Iraq, let me play a clip of President Bush in Chicago Monday, where he addressed a gathering organized by the National Restaurant Association. In his remarks, the President talked about Iraq, which has just formed a new unity government.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: For most Iraqis, a free democratic and constitutional government will be a new experience. For the people across the broader Middle East, a free Iraq will be an inspiration. Iraqis have done more than form a government. They have proved that the desire for liberty in the heart of the Middle East is for real. They have shown diverse people can come together and work out their differences and find a way forward, and they have demonstrated that democracy is the hope of the Middle East and the destiny of all mankind.

The triumph of liberty in Iraq is part of a long and familiar story. The great biographer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote, “Freedom is ordinarily born in the midst of storms. It is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know its benefits.” Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in Chicago. Arundhati Roy from India here in New York, your response?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, how can one respond? I just keep wishing there would be a laugh track, you know, on the side of these speeches. But obviously, you know, the elections in Palestine, where you had a democratic government, now Palestine is being starved because they have a democracy, under siege because they have a democracy. But in Iraq, this fake business is called democracy. Forget about what's happening in Saudi Arabia.

So it's just -- you know, I think the issue is that people like President Bush and his advisors, or what's happening in India, the Indian government, they have understood that you can use the media to say anything from minute to minute. It doesn't matter what's really going on. It doesn't matter what happened in the past. There are a few people who make the connections and fall about laughing at the nonsense that is being spoken. But for everybody else, I think the media itself, this mass media has become a means of telling the most unbelievable lies or making the most unbelievable statements. And everybody sort of just imbibes it. It's like a drug, you know, that you put straight into your veins. It doesn't matter. And it keeps going. But what can you say? What kind of democracy is this in Iraq?

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen in Iraq?

ARUNDHATI ROY: I think that the first thing that has to happen is that the American army should leave. That has to happen. I have no doubt about that. Similarly, I mean, I keep saying this, but, you know, America, Israel and India, and China in Tibet, are now becoming experts in occupation, and India is one of the leading experts. It's not that the American army in its training exercise is teaching the Indian army. The Indians are teaching the Americans, too, how to occupy a place. What do you do with the media? How do you deal with it? The occupation of Kashmir has taken place over years. And I keep saying that in Iraq, you have 125,000 or so American troops in a situation of war, controlling 25 million Iraqis. In Kashmir, you have 700,000 Indian troops fully armed there -- you know? -- and creating a situation, making it worse and worse and worse. So the first thing that has to happen is that the army has to come out, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: We're speaking to Arundhati Roy, who has spent time in Kashmir, lives in Delhi, the acclaimed author and activist. We'll continue with her after this break.