Call me Roy

 What’s not to love? How can you resist this? And why should you?

For all the talk of AI and authoritarianism, is it not true that some of our best, most beloved antifascist YouTubers and tireless activists (certainly in India), with tens of millions of subscribers collectively, are devoted proponents of AI? Or that the Gen-Z Cockroach uprising against the Modi government, which fell on us like rain on parched earth, rolled in on the most delightful, irreverent AI videos?

It is.

But when the threat assessment spells real danger, that window can be slammed shut in an instant. As I write this, during what is being called Season 2 of the Cockroach protests in Delhi, the internet in my neighbourhood has been shut down. During other protests in states like Kashmir and Manipur, the Indian government ordered internet shutdowns that lasted for months.

Pitting people against each other like this is a ploy so old that it stinks like a corpse at high noon. Watching it play out in Kerala, the southern state of India where I come from, is how I learned that viewing everything only through the polarising prism of the “left” or the “right” isn’t always useful.

Here’s a little story, far removed in both space and time, but one that still holds lessons for the present.

One of the first things that Kerala’s first democratically elected Communist government did in the late 1950s was to invite a big corporation to set up a rayon factory in the north of the state, upstream from the city of Calicut on the banks of the Chaliyar River. The industrialist promised that the factory would create 3,000 jobs, asking in return for government subsidies on raw materials, electricity and water. It was given bamboo from the forests nearby at one rupee per tonne, while bamboo workers, mostly indigenous people, had to buy it at one rupee for a single culm.

When the factory started production, it took in more water in one day than all of Calicut city, then dumped its poisonous effluent straight back into the river. Downstream, the city water was polluted. Fish died. Thousands of fishermen lost their livelihoods. When all the available bamboo had been consumed, they started using eucalyptus. Acres of dense, old-growth forest were clear-felled for a monoculture eucalyptus plantation. Thousands of forest dwellers, bamboo and wicker workers lost their livelihoods. But the 3,000 factory workers unionised themselves, and thrived.

Until, over time, poisonous factory fumes began to cause outbreaks of cancer and respiratory illness among the workers. They went on strike demanding compensation. The industrialist built a (private) cancer hospital. The militant factory workers held sit-ins and lockouts demanding pay hikes and other benefits. They won small, incremental victories for themselves, and went back to work.

After a few years, the eucalyptus plantation vanished, too. The factory closed down. The workers with good union jobs went on hunger strike demanding it be reopened. It never was.