Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Arundhati Roy examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India and how globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to racism and exploitation. The book documents disastrous consequences visible across the country: poisoned rivers, barren wells, clear-cut forests, and hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt. Hundreds of millions of Indians live on less than two dollars a day, while the country's one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India's gross domestic product. Roy maps early-twenty-first-century India's relationship with money, technology, weaponry, and the privatization of everything, alongside the state violence required to protect these interests. She traces how Indian politics have adopted the same model as global capitalism, resulting in 250,000 farmer suicides, 800 million impoverished and dispossessed people, environmental destruction, colonial-like rule in Kashmir, and brutal treatment of activists and journalists. The book also identifies rays of hope that illuminate cracks in this landscape.