by ARUNDHATI ROY & EMILY TAMKIN
Arundhati Roy wears many hats. She is a Booker Prize-winning novelist; an essayist, publishing her latest collection, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction, last year; and a political activist.
She’s also someone to whom her readers often turn to make sense of things, whether that’s politics in India, where she lives; globalisation; or the coronavirus pandemic. Roy has written on all these subjects with a moral clarity and sense of purpose. Perhaps it is more accurate to say she wears one hat – that of a person who tries to clearly articulate what she sees happening in the world around her – in a variety of ways.
Roy participated in an email interview with the New Statesman. We sent her seven questions on India, capitalism, nationalism, literature, and politics. She sent back the following.
I read The Algebra of Infinite Justice somewhat recently (in 2019, I think), and it seemed to me that, though it came out two decades ago, so much of what you wrote about and warned about, in general and particularly with respect to Indian politics, came to fruition. Are there aspects of Indian society today about which you feel you were particularly prescient?
Sorry, but there’s no short answer to this question. To call myself prescient would not only be me complimenting myself, but also going easy on many others. After all, most of the things I wrote about were played out right before our eyes, and, more importantly, were lived and experienced by millions of us.
The essays in the book you mention are about many things, about India’s nuclear tests, big dams and the peoples’ movement against them in the Narmada Valley, the massive push for privatisation of water, electricity and other essential infrastructure, the gradual erosion of independence of the courts, the media and other institutions meant to safeguard democracy, and so on.
And of course, the essay called “Democracy: who’s she when she’s at home?” That was about the anti-Muslim pogrom by vigilante Hindu mobs in the state of Gujarat in 2002 when Narendra Modi was chief minister of the state. It was an event that catapulted him from an ordinary activist of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has in its almost 100 years of existence become the most powerful organisation in India today, to becoming the prime minister of India. He is the prime minister because of it. Not despite it.
The 2002 Gujarat pogrom is a good way to examine the question of prescience. That year, over a few weeks in February and March, following an arson attack on a train compartment in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death, more than a thousand Muslims were slaughtered as revenge by organised mobs in the villages and cities of Gujarat. Women were gang-raped and burned alive, more than a hundred thousand people were driven from their homes. The pogrom was covered live on national television. All of us heard Chief Minister Modi’s unrepentant, provocative speeches. Subsequently Ashish Khetan, a journalist working for the news magazine Tehelka went undercover and, in a sting operation, captured some of the mass killers and rapists boasting of their deeds. Those horrifying tapes were aired on TV, we all saw them. Several of the killers openly expressed their admiration for and gratitude to their brave new chief minister. In a recent book called Under Cover: My Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva, Khetan describes in cool, painstaking detail not just what he filmed, but how the police and the whole legal process from the bottom to the top were compromised and subverted to protect the killers.
This is why in India today we have mass murderers and rapists walking free, even holding high office, while the best activists, lawyers, students, trade unionists, and tens of thousands of ordinary people, Muslims, Dalits and a huge number of indigenous tribespeople are imprisoned for years together, some serving life sentences. For nothing.
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