Today’s guest post is by Joel Lee, a dear friend and classmate from my time at Kenyon. He has spent much of his time since graduation engaged in human rights work in India. This note hit my inbox on April 6th, 2003, and is reproduced here with Joel’s permission.
Yesterday, on the banks of the sacred Ganges River, here in the ancient city of Patna in northern India, a procession of rural women demonstrating against the war in Iraq and American Imperialism in general shouted anti-war slogans in Hindi and set fire to a straw effigy of George Bush. Having joined them along with my host, Sister Leena, a nun and human rights activist, I found myself swarmed by media cameras and journalists keen to interview an American citizen opposed to the war.
But this was relatively small news. Aside from the rural women’s march, the All India Youth Federation, the All India Students Association, the Student Federation of India, the Bihar State Employees Federation, several political parties and the Vaisya Youth Front each took to the streets in separate, massive anti-war rallies. Dozens of Bush effigies were burned; thousands of demonstrators committed to boycotting American products. One group led a “donkey march” through the city in which George Bush and Tony Blair were depicted as donkeys.
Yesterday’s anti-war rallies in Patna took place not in response to any organized call. On the contrary, it was a typical day in a typical city in India, whose population of one billion — one sixth of the world — is surging with spontaneous public outrage over America’s imperialist aggression in Iraq. Citizens of every major city in India have demonstrated against the war literally every day since the killing began. McDonalds was the target of non-violent protesters in Jaipur. More radical groups destroyed equipment at Coca-cola and Pepsi plants in Andhra Pradesh. In Bihar, a train station was blown up in protest against the war.
According to Outlook magazine’s recent survey, 86% of Indians oppose the war. In my experience, the number is considerably higher. In my daily life in north India, I encounter and talk with hundreds of people — rickshaw drivers, bus drivers, students, shopkeepers, doctors, musicians, human rights activists, priests, bureaucrats, “untouchables” and brahmins, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, atheists, children, women, men, and even India’s “third gender” eunuchs. To date, I have met literally not a single person who supports this war. Rather, every day I face questions of bafflement, expressions of disgust and moral outrage from everyone I meet. A seasoned journalist in Allahabad told me, “Your country is screwing up the rest of the world — that’s the bottom line.” A south Indian Catholic nun remarked quietly: “Your Bush is giving Christianity a bad name in the world.”
To understand why the vast majority of Indians — and for that matter, all South Asians, as the populations of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka also overwhelmingly oppose the war — find the American/British invasion of Iraq repugnant, Americans need to understand three things. First, like most of the so-called Third World, India has had a long and bitter experience with economic and political manipulation at the hands of US administrations. The CIA’s energetic collaboration with Pakistan’s secret service to set up mujahideen training camps in Pakistan in the 1980s, for instance, continues to produce bloody results and profound resentment in Kashmir, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The US government’s historical and current support for military dictators in Pakistan likewise fuels disenchantment with America (read, for example, the US State Department’s little-advertised statement of last October, supporting General Musharraf’s vision of a “special role” for the military in guiding any future democracy in Pakistan). These and other experiences give rise in South Asia to an analytical framework through which the publicly stated motives of American foreign policy — “establishing democracy”, “fighting terrorism”, etc. — are measured against the realities of US actions, and are found to be utterly fraudulent.
I have in hand a copy of this week’s Outlook magazine — a mainstream Hindi and English weekly — whose cover features Bush as the devil: horns emerge from his forehead, fangs from his mouth, and he wears a cartoon red crown and collar. The first paragraph of the lead article, “Bush has become the Villain,” accurately sums up mainstream Indian perspective on US policy: “After removing Saddam Hussein from power, will America be able to sit back and relax? After all, this isn’t the first time America has sent bomber jets to enforce total imperial rule. Not just in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but even in European countries, the American government shakes up the throne, puts the crown on its favored man, sets up its political pawns according to personal business and military interests and keeps playing the game. For this reason, you won’t find anyone ready to believe that this attack is being perpetrated with the aim of establishing democracy.” The article goes on to interview all of the former prime ministers of India still living, each one of whom articulates views in opposition to the US-UK war on Iraq. The current prime minister, incidentally, and all of the political parties in India’s parliament, have also unanimously condemned the US-UK attack.
Second, in India as well as in the rest of the world unbound by the myopic “patriotism” of the US media, we see pictures from all sides of the war. From the day the first bombs dropped, the print and television media in India (and Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia, Italy, South Africa, indeed, the entire world outside of the US) began carrying visual coverage of civilian casualties. On day one, I woke up to see an Iraqi baby with a bloody bandaged head and an Iraqi man whose legs had been shredded, some of the first civilian victims of US missiles, on the front page of the Hindi newspapers. While US media consumers have little choice but to ingest the available “war news” like a video game, seen through the green night vision goggles of the invading army and narrated by Bush, Pentagon spokesmen and other blatant propagandists masquerading as reasonable people, the rest of the world has grown well acquainted not just with all the high-tech military equipment of the invading army, but with the horrific realities inside Baghdad hospitals. It is difficult to know what news reaches the American public and what doesn’t — the US bombing of a Syrian passenger bus packed with Syrian civilians fleeing Iraq, killing all on board? The spate of spontaneous abortions by Iraqi women in dread of US bombs and invading forces? The US-UK rocket attacks on civilian marketplaces in Baghdad, killing hundreds, including dozens of children?
The US shooting of a family of seven Iraqi women and children seems to have attracted at least some notice among the perpetrators; what the American public must understand, however, is that this event was not the exception but the rule. The wholesale slaughter of Iraqi women and children, as well as civilian men and of course the Iraqi military, is a daily event, the constant and inevitable result of massive bombing. Conservative estimates put the Iraqi civilian death toll at 600-700 by April 3, with well over 5,000 maimed and injured (Hindustan Times). India and the rest of the world know this and see its visual evidence every day. While Americans hear confidence and righteousness of purpose from Bush, those of us in India are looking at an A.P. photo from Basra after an American bombing — an old Iraqi man cradles in his arms an Iraqi girl perhaps twelve years old. Her fair-skinned face, though blood-smeared, is peaceful. Her legs have been blown off below the knees; the remaining skin of her right ankle hangs like wet cloth. It is unclear whether the old man is setting her down upon or picking her up from the pile of corpses and mangled body parts at his feet.
Equally as disturbing as the US media’s complicity in suppressing visual coverage of Iraqi civilian casualties is its distortion of other ground realities in the interests of propping up government justifications for the invasion. That the “liberating forces” myth continues to have any currency in the US is a sad indicator of this. The Shi’a inhabitants of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq, who have always opposed Saddam, have re-written the graffiti in their neighborhoods; “down with America” has replaced “down with Saddam” since the killing began (HT, March 31). Responsible journalists from all over the globe, in interviews with Iraqi citizens from every walk of life, are finding this to be representative of Iraqi public opinion — Iraqis hate being bombed and killed, hate being forced into dependence on paltry, poorly distributed allied army handouts, and therefore hate the invaders for what they are doing to Iraq. Utter devastation of an entire people is not liberation. That a poor trader in Sueb, who lost his wife, mother, sister, nephew, two sons, home and livelihood to US missiles last Monday (HT, April 4), had then to listen to Bush publicly claim commitment to the Iraqi people as his righteous mission on Tuesday, must give birth to a profound rage. The BBC, in a brief departure from the army’s green goggles version of the war, interviewed a middle-class Baghdadi woman whose home had been blown apart by US-UK bombs. She gave the most understated articulation of Iraqi sentiment that I have heard to date when she told the BBC reporter that Tony Blair must be a fool to think she or anyone else in Iraq will welcome the allied troops as “liberators”.
Third, and finally, to understand Indian popular response to the war on Iraq, the American public must recognize that here, much more so than in the USA, the general public knows terrorism and what breeds it. This weary intimacy with decades of bloody terrorism — of both the state-sponsored and anti-state varieties — prompted Hosni Mubarak to point out the obvious, that this war will create “a hundred new Osama bin LadensÖ this war will have horrible consequences.” (HT, April 4). Last week, a sincerely puzzled hotel owner in Lucknow asked me, “Surely, the American public knows that by attacking Iraq like this they are inviting another September Eleventh?” Familiar with the time-tested, well-established patterns of terrorism, people in India shake their heads with disbelief that any Americans buy Bush’s line. No one here is surprised that hospital officials in Bangladesh have reported a spate of mothers naming their new babies after Saddam Hussein in the last two weeks. Military action nurtures terrorism; tanks can never crush it. Bombing, invasion and military occupation — however laced with food packets and hollow human rights rhetoric — is only helping the Osamas of the world build a more massive, more furious recruit base. The culture of suicide bombing thrives on heavy-handed military repression — in Palestine, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and now Iraq. In short, state terrorism breeds anti-state terrorism.
In the US, soon after September 11, 2001, a question that came into popular currency was “Why do they hate us?” Setting aside the loaded implications of this formulation’s “they” and “us”, I can say that, standing in India today, two weeks into the war on Iraq — this is why. Everything that Bush and Blair are doing right now is why. Economic imperialism, blatant disregard for the UN and international opinion, military invasion and occupation, slaughter of innocents, screamingly hypocritical invocations of the Geneva Convention on one hand while dropping globally condemned Cluster Bombs on the other, the establishment of barbaric precedents for international relations in the 21st century — all of these are reasons which I hear every day in India for “why they hate us”.
What makes it palatable and even uplifting to be an American in India in these times is the peace activism in American cities and towns. The mass demonstrations, traffic-blocking tactics and arrests of peace activists in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere in the USA has, thanks to international press coverage, helped spread awareness that the American public is not a monolith of united contempt for the rest of the world. This awareness, and the concomitant sense of a newly consolidating, world people’s community struggling to achieve peace and justice on a global scale, inspires hope in these grim days.
Let me conclude with a final image that sums up the atmosphere here. Amul, one of India’s largest dairy product companies, in the last week put up a new line of billboards in Indian cities. The billboard features the universally familiar caricature of the American Uncle Sam, minus the nose. In Indian culture, having one’s nose cut off is the ultimate sign of disgrace. Beneath the picture, the billboard states simply: Uncle Shame.
Inconsequential edits due to character set differences have been made to the original text, as well as one name change .
