Free Capitalism by Arundhati Roy Page B

investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won’t have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.
    Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In the future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?
    Meanwhile the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag-waving of Anna’s Revolution are all borrowed from the antireservation protests, the World Cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not “true Indians.” The twenty-four-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.
    â€œThe Fast” of course doesn’t mean Irom Sharmila’s fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she’s being force-fed now) against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. “The People” does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila’s fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagat­singhpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in the New Okhla Industrial Development Area (NOIDA), or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.
    â€œThe People” means only the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a seventy-four-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. “The People” are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, as Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we’re told. “India is Anna.”
    Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough, we’ve heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer’s suicides in his neighborhood, or about Operation Green Hunt farther away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmers’ agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn’t seem to have a view about the government’s plans to deploy the Indian army in the forests of Central India.
    He does, however, support Raj Thackeray’s Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the “development model” of Gujarat’s chief minister, who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.) 3
    Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the backstory about Anna’s old relationship with the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). 4 We have heard from Mukul Sharma, who has