Interview Arundhati Roy: Manufacturing Dissent

It’s really interesting, what’s going on in India today. It’s hard to know what to say or how to think about it anymore. We are all well versed in Noam Chomsky’s thesis of the manufacture of consent, but actually what’s going on now here is we’re living in the era of the manufacture of dissent, where you have these corporations who are making so much money. For example, the way the bauxite business works is that the corporates just pay the Orissa government a royalty, a small percentage, and they are making billions. And with those billions they can set up an NGO. Somebody says they’re going to set up Vedanta University in Orissa. They will mop up all the intellectuals and environmentalists. Alcan has given a million-dollar environmental award to one of the leading environmental activists in India. The Tatas have the Jamsetji Tata Trust and the Dorabji Tata Trust, which they use to fund activists, to stage cultural events and so on, to the point where these people are funding the dissent as well as the devastation. The dissent is on a leash; it’s only apparent. It’s a manufactured situation in which everyone is playing out this kind of theater. It’s completely crazy.