Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy last night expanded on her audacious claim that India is not a democracy in an interview with Amy Goodman on the syndicated radio show Democracy Now!
Read the edited transcript of the provocative interview here: http://www.alternet.org/story/36643/
Below is the relevant portion from the interview on why Roy thinks India is not a democracy.
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Amy Goodman: I’m just looking at a newswire story from May 23 which says, “Human rights activist and prominent Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, has said India is not a democratic state.” Can you talk about that idea?
Arundhati Roy: Well, I do think that we are really suffering a crisis of democracy, you know? And the simplest way I can explain it is that in 2004, when the general elections took place in India, we were reeling from five years of rightwing communal BJP politics, the rightwing Hindu party.
AG: Would you make any parallels to political parties in the United States?
AR: Very, very much so. I mean, it was very similar to the Republicans versus the Democrats, and in fact —
AG: The Congress Party being the Democrats.
AR: The Congress Party being the Democrats, and the Republicans being the rightwing Hindu BJP. And, of course, in a country—like in America, their politics, apart from affecting Americans to a great deal, also affects the rest of the world. But in India, India not being a world power, however much it wants to claim it is, turns those energies on its own people.
So in Gujarat, you had in 2002 this mass killing of Muslims on the streets, a bloodbath where people were burnt alive, women were raped on the streets, dismembered, killed in full public view.
What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the elections. So you’re thinking, “Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist Democrat who has the approbation of all these people?” Continues to be in power in Gujarat. Nothing has happened.
It’s a Nazi type of society, where hundreds of thousands of people are still economically boycotted Muslims, something like 100,000 driven from their homes. Police won’t register cases. One or two important cases are looked at by the Supreme Court, but the mass of it is still completely unresolved.
That’s the situation, anyway, and while you’re orchestrating this communal killing, you’re also selling off to Enron and to all these private companies, and so on the one hand you’re talking about Indian-ness and all this, and this nationalism in this absurd way, and on the other, you’re just selling it off in bulk.
But during the elections, all of us were waiting with bated breath to see what would happen. And when the Congress came to power, supported by the left parties from the outside, obviously we allowed ourselves a huge gasp of relief, you know, walked on our hands in front of the TV for a bit. But the Congress campaigned against the neoliberal policies that it had brought in, actually.
But before even we knew whether Sonia Gandhi was going to be the prime minister or what was going to happen, there was an orchestrated drop in the stock market. The media’s own stocks began to drop. The cameras that had been in all these villages, saying look at this wonderful democracy, and the camels and the bullock carts and everyone that’s coming to vote was outside the stock market now.
And before the government was formed, both from the left and from the Congress, spokesmen had to come out and say, “We will not dismantle this neoliberal regime.” And today we have a prime minister who has not been elected. He is a technocrat who has been nominated. He is part of the Washington Consensus.
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Also see: ARUNDHATI ROY: India is not a democracy
http://churumuri.wordpress.com/2006/05/23/arundhati-roy-india-is-not-a-democracy/
Arundhati Roy has no business to go around the world with cheap bitching gimmicks, particularly about her own motherland. It looks as though we are running a banana government in our country to her. There is a saying in kannada which means – Anything seen by a person having Jaudice will be yellow. This is very much apt for this dumb lady. I guess, she can do a better job by taking on people in their own state – for eg. Narendra Modi in Gujarat. I see her all around the world except India where she is a visitor for cheap gains. Let us not care for her itchy bitchy remarks made on American TV. Dogs should be left alone to bark without botheration. Mind you, barking dogs, never bite. For god’s sake, I think, Congress party will not need this ‘female dog’ which keeps barking like this. If so, they should come out strongly and oppose this.
her dishonesty in not acknowledging the initiative of the left in organising anti-bush rallies across india, is appalling. nor does she mention that it was the threat of left disruption that led to abandoning the proposed address to parliament. nor does she mention the honourable decision of the communist speaker of the lok sabha to disassociate himself from all engagements featuring the bush. to her the embodiment of the entire anti-bush coalition is the gang of widows from her native kerala. it would be well, if she were to occasionally read her mother tongue, malayalam, which as a lapsed malayalee she might have fashionably forgotten, to know about the media circus that the whole exercise was and the dubious nature of its’ sponsors.
also revealing is that she refuses to name medha patkar, who has single-handedly ignited the anti-dam (narmada) protest in india, from which association she preens in reflected glory. as for her activism, let us also remember that this was the valiant lady who showed the intellectual ‘courage’ of defending her beliefs by not spending even one night in the tihar jail…and she has the atavistic temerity to term the judiciary an ‘old enemy of mine’.
let us reserve the best for the last. that she was jailed is a blatant lie. she paid the fine and scooted. this act of moral cowardice was enacted when in ‘which is where i come from’ kerala, agitating government employees, including women, were being pulled out of their homes at midnight, by the congress-led udf government. were she have to have gone to jail on that day, the galvanising potency of that political act on the morale of the striking employees would have been phenomenal..instead we were witness to to an activist shod in designer clay.
her attempts to mitigate the american rapacity of iraq and the defilement of its people, by comparing it to the kashmir scenario is frivolous to the extent of being farcical.
let her tribe of designer activists increase.. thankfully they are confined to delhi, when not posing for the media with genuine agitationists, who sometimes cynically exploit their hype wattage.
Its a mail i got from a well wiswher of mine called Mr.Sudhir, who is working in Mathrubhumi daily, in calicut
what’s with the sudden prominence to Arundhati Roy, may we ask?
Agree with Sukhi… why this sudden fascination with AR? Is Churumuri part of her “publicity machine”?
Come on !!! There are many other interesting topics to cover.
India is NOT a democracy. It’s elected Dictatorship. Reservation issue is one example of this… there are countless more.
Agree with both Sukhi & Vijay. Why is churumuri giving her comments so much importance?
i always read & listen to indian people who speak & write in english with sceptism.but what arundathi has said appears to be a scary truth
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What is the alternative she proposes ? Easy to just oppose than propose…Does she want a Soviet, N Korea or Chinese style ‘People Deomocracy’. .. As Churchill once said, Democracy as practised in the West and India might be the worst form of government, but there isn’t a better form we know…So…Also she has to shut her trap on Gujarat…Modi for all his faults was elected by the people of Gujarat..Respect that…
She is one of my heroes, along with Chomsky, Cornel West and the other freedom fighters who brave the rapids of conformity to state propaganda so that the powerless may have a voice and thus real freedom might have a chance.
It seems that Ar is more concerned and moved with the Gujarat episode, but somebody please ask her opinion on the attrocities in Kashmir on the Kashmiri pandits who were thrown out of their own homes and were subjected to all that mess through the ages. Let her speak AGAINST those pseudo secularists who were responsible for this sorry state of affairs in India since our independence.
Can this pseudo intellectual AR suggest why muslims do not agree to (i) family planning, (ii) stop polygamy (iii) triple talaq.
Let her suggest why they dont agree to a common civil code, If she is so interested help elelminate india’s problems.
Other wise, let us help her to keep her mouth shut.
Amy Goodman’s must come on air after midnight!
why so much importance to Ar,these people are always engaged in cheap publicity stop giving importance to her as nobody is ready to listen her words
She is an attention hungry, media hound who plays right into the western worlds concerted effort to make developing countries like India look bad, no matter what they do. Is there any evidence of her giving up the trappings of an urban lifestyle that she wants to deny the adivasis of Narmada valley?
Arundhati has touched many scars on india’s face of democracy, instead of getting angry at her the best thing would be to start thinking of the remedy.
I don’t think we should care much about who is saying these things.It’s more important to correct our selves.
How can anyone deny the ugly plitics played by mr. modi in gujarat.