Some Quotes from "The Chequebook And The Cruise Missile" Conversations with Arundhati Roy, Interviews by David Barsamian.

On Democracy and the State and the Individual

1. Really the line is between the citizen and the state, regardless of what ideology that state subscribes to. Even now in India, or anywhere else, the minute you allow the state to take away your freedoms, it will. So whatever freedoms a society has exist because those freedoms have been insisted on by its people, not because the state is inherently good or bad.

2. What is the systemic flaw in this kind of democracy that makes politicians function by creating these vote banks divided along caste lines, or communal lines, or regional lines. ... Democracy is India's greatest strength, but the way in which electoral democracy is practiced is turning it into our greattest weaknesses.

3. I don't think that people in power becaome uneasy and uncomfortable [replying to the line "the function of journalists was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"]. But you can annoy and provoke people. People who are powerful are not people who have subtle feelings like uneasiness. They got there because of a certain capacity for ruthlessness.

4. Isn't there a flaw in the logic of that phrase ["speak truth to power"] ? It assumes that power doesn't know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. .. Power knows the truth ... Facts are not necessarily the only truths. Facts can be fiddled with by economists and bankers. There are other kinds of truth. It's about telling the story. ... But really in the end, it's about how you tell that story to somebody who doesn't know it.

On Dams, the World Bank and Economic Development :

1. Today's world of specialization is bizarre. Specialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what's happening to them.

2. Education sometimes makes people float even further away from things they ought to know about. It seems to actually obsure their vision. The kind of ignorance t hat people with Ph.D.s display is unbelievable.

3. I think you'll see the entire "development" debate is a scam. The biggest problem is that what they say in their project reports and whay actually happens are two completely different things.

4. Sitting in Washington or Geneva in the offices of the World Bank or the WTO, bureaucrats have the power to decie the fate of millions. It's not only their decisions we are contesting. It's the fact that they have the power to make those decisions. No one elected them. No one said they could control our lives. Even if they made great decisions, it's politically unacceptable.

5. Those men in pin-striped suits addressing the peasants of India and other poor countries all over again -- assuring them that they're being robbed for their own good, like long ago they were colonized for their own good -- what's the difference ? What's changed ? The further and further away geographically decisions are taken, the more scope you have for incredible injustice.

6. If they [the Gujarat Government] want to take water from the Narmada to Kutch just to make a political statement, of course they can, but it will be a circus -- an economically unviable political circus -- like taking red wine or champagne to Kutch. Narmada is so far away from Kutch and Saurashtra that it's a joke to take all that water all the way up through Gujarat. For the price of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, you could finance local water harvesting schemas in every single village in the state of Gujarat.

On India and Pakistan

1. Partition has left a huge and bloody legacy between India and Pakistan. I think both coutnries are doing their best to keep it alive. The reasons for this range from actual communal hatred and religious suspicion, to governments and bureaucrats making money off arms deals. They use this manufactured conflict and hypernationalism to gain political mileage in their own countries.

2. Kashmir is the rabbit that the governments of both India and Pakistan pull out of their hats whenever they're in trouble. They don't want to resolve the conflict. For them, Kashmir is not a problem; it's a solution. Let's never make the mistake of thinking that India and Pakistan are searching for a solution and haven't managed to find one. They're not searching for a solution, because if they were, you would not hear intractable statements like these [that India's Prime Minister says "Kashmir is ours. They {Pakistanis or Kashimiris ?} will never get it. That decision has been made"] -- absurd statements like these -- being made.

On Globalization

1. The call centre industry is based on lies and racism. The people who call in are being misled into believing that they are talking to some white American sitting in America. The people who work in those call centres are told that they're not good enough for the market, that U.S. customers will complain if they find out that their service is being provided by an Indian. ... One way to look at this ist to say "These people at least have jobs". You could say that about prostitution or child labour or anything -- "At least they're being paid for it". Their premise is that either these workers don't have jobs or they have jobs in which they have to humiliate themselves.

2. ... What is corporate globalization. It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected to through America, and to some extent Europe.

3. When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if your'e part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, plitically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down.

On Terrorism

1. It [the U.S. media's obsession with terrorism] completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electrictity. Denying them medicine. Denying them educaiton. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war -- peole who believe that it isn't only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well.

2. If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary poeple pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is makin poeple pay for the actions of the U.S. state, whether it's in Saudi Arabia, Palestine or Afghanistan. The U.S. government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same.

3. .. Yet hundres of thousands or Iraqis and Afghans have been killed, either by economic sanctions or cruise missiles, and we're told t hat these deaths are the result of "just wars". If there is such a thing as a just war, who is to decide what is just and what is not ? Whose God is going to decide that ?

4. The U.S. solution to the spiralling inequalities in the world is not to search for a more equal word, or a way of making things more egalitarian, but to espouse the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance". .. It's a terrorist state, and it is laying out a legitimate blueprint for state-sponsored terrorism.