Accepting inequality part of Indian culture: Roy

Noted writer Arundhati Roy with revolutionary writer Varavara Rao at the meeting of the Revolutionary Writers Association in Hyderabad on Sunday 23rd September, 2012. Photo: G. Ramakrishna

It is a shame that people cannot talk about the economic order and do not know the frontiers of their battle’

Noted writer Arundhati Roy has regretted that it had become part of the Indian culture to accept inequality in society.

Indians had a fond hope that they will live in an equal society when the Naxalbari movement was launched against the zamindari system in the 1970s. The slogan then was ‘land to the tiller’, but now their demand has transformed to retention of whatever land is left with them, she said, addressing a meeting of the Revolutionary Writers Association against the ban on Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF).

Ms. Roy criticised Indian society as the most “rotten” in the world with its people failing to fight against injustice. “It is a shame that they cannot talk about the economic order which threatened society.” People did not know the frontiers of their battle. As a result, the governments doctored their minds and they were left lurching between Islamic terrorism on one hand and Maoism on the other. The governments had adopted the British policy of deploying their forces to deal with terrorist activities from far and wide, she said.

 She called for new alliances between people to fight the assault from the governments. However, the anger of people had come down by 30 per cent, while there was an equal rise in the strength of security forces since economic reforms were initiated in the country in 1991.

Political parties resorted to hypocrisy by stalling Parliament and organising ‘Bharat bandh’ over foreign direct investment in retail trade. The parties did not think about FDI when it was allowed in mining and infrastructure projects, Ms. Roy added. She warned that the army would be deployed in Chhattisgarh to deal with Maoist activity. Earlier, AP Civil Liberties Committee vice president Suresh said that the government had banned RDF, although it did not have an organisational network in the State. Revolutionary writer Varavara Rao
attended the meeting.

Source:
       http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/andhra-pradesh/accepting-inequality-part-of-indian-culture-roy/article3931253.ece

Team Anna advocating un-Gandhian law: Arundhati Roy

Noting that the anti-corruption agitation by Team Anna is a ‘corporate-sponsored media campaign’, writer Arundhati Roy on Friday said that the law (Lokpal) they are advocating is ‘un-Gandhian’.

Roy also criticised Team Anna for keeping mum on corporate power and cross-ownership of business.
"Their anti-corruption agitation was a corporate- sponsored media campaign and hence Team Anna chose to remain silent," she said, adding that even though the movement was said to follow Gandhian principles, the law they advocate is highly ‘un-Gandhian’.

"They want a centralised, draconian agency with powers to prosecute, investigate and punish," she said, while delivering the 4th Anuradha Ghandy memorial lecture.

"This movement did not say a word about privatisation, corporate power and economic reforms. It did not demand end to cross-ownership of businesses or laws that could dismantle concentration of wealth and power," she said, adding that there was only public mauling of politicians.

Roy said that Hazare's definition of corruption came from an accountant's imagination.

She also said that the media, ‘which is hostile to people's movement, became travel agents for Anna Hazare’. According to her, the movement capitalised on genuine rage against corporate scams and fury of ordinary Indians.

"A round-the-clock corporate sponsored media campaign proclaimed it to be the voice of the people," she said.



Source:
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/nation/west/team-anna-advocating-un-gandhian-law-arundhati-roy-370

Annihilation of debate is annihilation of politics: Arundhati Roy

• January 10, 2012 chennai 

Arundhati Roy reacts to the objection to her attending the fair organised by The Book Sellers and Publishers Association of South India.

“The protest began when The Cage by Gordon Weiss (former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka) was released.
The book indicts the Sri Lankan government for war crimes, but is also sharply critical of the LTTE’s tactics. The protestors did not mention the book, but accused the publishers of being RSS, anti-Dalit, anti-Tamil, anti-Kashmir and anti-Muslim.

I was a little puzzled, because the books being released were a collection of haunting poems by Cheran, the well-known Tamil poet, a book on Dalits and Water by Ko. Raghupathy, a book on Dalit politics and culture by Stalin Rajangam, Curfewed Night, a memoir about Kashmir by Basharat Peer and Broken Republic about the Maoist insurrection, by me, all of which completely bely the accusations being hurled at the publisher.

On Facebook the protestors call themselves the May 17th Fighters. (May 17th is the day the war in Sri Lanka officially ended.) It appears that their main objection was Weiss’s criticism of the LTTE.
Whether Weiss is right or wrong in his analysis is not the point. After a war in which an estimated 40,000 Tamils, mostly civilians were killed, I cannot believe that people want to shut out the possibility of debate, of introspection about what went wrong.

It is an insult to the memory of those who were killed as well as to those Tamils who survived and have to continue to live in Sri Lanka.
 
The annihilation of criticism, introspection, debate, difference of opinion, is the annihilation of politics itself. It is a way of thinking and acting that could have been one of the reasons for the LTTE’s defeat.”




Source :

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/cities/chennai/annihilation-debate-annihilation-politics-arundhati-roy-403

Jan Lokpal Bill unGandhian

Writer Arundhati Roy at a book launch function in Chennai on Saturday. Photo: M.Vedhan

Describing most of the anti-corruption movements in the country as right-wing and majoritarian in nature, writer Arundhati Roy on Saturday said the Jan Lokpal Bill, which she said nobody had read, was totally an unGandhian piece of legislation. She alleged that it would concentrate power in the hands of a few.

Ms. Roy, who was here in connection with the release of a Tamil translation of her work Broken Republic published by Kalachuvadu, said a very strong anti-corruption law would always be a tool in the hands of the middle class to take advantage of the poor, who had already been alienated.

She stressed the need to view the anti-corruption movements in the country in the backdrop of the attempt to corporatise people's struggles and to turn people's anger into a blind alley.

Asked for a solution to the Maoist problem in the country, she wanted to know what would be the solution to the Indian government and its Prime Minister and Home Minister openly speaking about violating the Constitution, which she said “does not allow taking away the adivasis' lands and handing them over to corporate houses.”

She also wondered how one could preach to a person on giving up violence and following the Gandhian path when his hut was surrounded by CRPF men and women were raped.

Pointing to various struggles launched by the people across the country including the fight against the Nuclear Power Plant in Kudankulam, she said “to me these battles were somehow more profound than the battle for self-determination and ethnic nationalism.”

source :

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2783790.ece

Arundhati Roy Earth At Risk Photos

Happy 50th birthday, Arundhati Roy

Sandip Roy Nov 24, 2011

Arundhati Roy always speaks her mind even when she knows it will win her no friends. Reuters

Arundhati Roy turns 50 today. (Team Note:  Correction she was born in 1959 and not 1961)

She probably was not expecting a PIL in a Jammu court for her comments on Kashmir as a birthday present. But being Arundhati Roy, she is probably not too surprised.

If she read the weather report, somebody would find some reason to be upset about it. But on her birthday here are five reasons to be thankful for Arundhati Roy.

She is an equal opportunity offender: Arundhati Roy always speaks her mind even when she knows it will win her no friends. Over the years with every cause she’s taken up, every essay she has written, she has probably lost friends. She is not afraid to be the person everyone loves to hate. She annoys us and forces us to stop sitting on the fence. She has lambasted Bush, Kerry, Congress, BJP,  Anna Hazare, fundamentalists and liberals. ” She spares no one.

Except, her critics say, militants, Maoists, terrorists. She is accused of being a hypocrite, taking on the Indian state in Kashmir but not the plight of the Pandits. But she has spoken about it in an interview with Tehelka and not shied away from assigning responsibility.

It is the duty of the leaders of Kashmir’s present struggle to get the Pandits to return. That needs more than rhetoric. Apart from it being the right thing to do, it would give them enormous moral capital. It would also help shape their vision of what kind of Kashmir they are fighting for.

But she says there is a difference between Godhra and the riots in Gujarat. She always, unequivocally, draws a distinction between “a state-assisted pogrom against a people in a country and something that militants have done.

Getty Images.

She is strident, unapologetic, shrill. And these are her virtues. She is not afraid to be the last protester standing.

She takes responsibility as a citizen: You may not agree with her. But in a democracy we always need that person who is willing to take the unpopular view. She is, writes Manu Joseph, Neo in The Matrix.

She is, more than anything, an anomaly that completes the system, a system that not only made her but also needs her for its own balance and survival.

Arundhati Roy can be accused of being uncompromising, of making the perfect the enemy of the good. But she takes responsibility for her country in a way few of us have the courage to.

At a time when everyone wants to point fingers at everyone, from the UPA government to bureaucrats to the media for the malaise in the country, Roy is not afraid to look into the mirror. As we pat ourselves on the back endlessly  about being the world’s largest democracy, Roy asks the uncomfortable question in an interview with India Currents:

But when I am a citizen of a democracy, I have to take responsibility for what the state I voted for does. Are people in a democracy more responsible for the acts of their elected government?

She lives outside Page 3. Arundhati Roy burst on our national scene as a star with the Booker Prize in 1996. She was smart, beautiful and photogenic. She could have cashed in on that for the rest of her career and been the toast of literary fests around the world.  But she chose to march to her own drummer. Shoma Chaudhury says in Tehelka sometimes it’s easy to forget the moment when she burst into the limelight.

Watching her now, few will remember that Roy was first announced to the world by a breathless article in a leading Indian magazine. The year was 1996. Liberalisation was just five years old. An ebullient middle-class was looking for a mascot. Roy came tailor-made from heaven: she had an elfin beauty, a diamond flash in her nose, a mane of gorgeous hair, a romantic backstory and a manuscript that triggered an international bidding war. India loved her….Arundhati Roy was India’s triumphant entry on the global stage. She was the princess at the ball.

But this Cinderella chose to instead turn her back on the ball and instead show that the emperor had no clothes. In 1998, fresh from the Booker euphoria, she wrote The End of Imagination, her angry critique of India’s nuclear bomb. That was her first act of “betrayal” and she hasn’t stopped.
She lives her stories: Arundhati Roy has been accused of being an activist butterfly, a Janey-come-lately to various causes who then sucks up all the media oxygen. A western filmmaker making a documentary about dams was told she could get funding only if she could get Arundhati Roy in the film. The filmmaker capitulated and the film got made.

A picture of Roy when she had won the Booker Prize. Reuters.

But in an age where journalism comes out of Wikipedia and Google searches, Roy lives her stories. She goes into the forests and spends time with Maoist guerillas before she writes about them. You can accuse her of being too romantic in her view of them, or justifying their violence but you cannot accuse her of not getting her hands dirty in the pursuit of a story.

She has been accused of hypocrisy, of paying fines instead of slogging it out in jail.  But she still goes the extra mile for her story. It is true that sometimes the story then becomes about Arundhati Roy not tribals, or Maoists or Kashmir. But she understands fully that she is a star and that sometimes causes need stars.

I know I will be a lightning conductor. I know the press will come. They will have to be accountable. On the other hand I’ll also be a celebrity arriving on the scene. I went because you have to realise you can’t always be pristine and say I am the Snow Queen and I will only do what is right for me. You have to take the shit.

She is 100 percent Indian:  In  The Guardian, Leo Mirani posed the question:

Who would want to live in Arundhati Roy’s India? Who would even want to read about Arundhati Roy’s India? … Confronted with the relentlessly bleak picture she paints, one in which the only good guys are murderers and mercenaries, who can blame middle India for retreating into their iPods and tabloid newspapers?

Well there is one person who for sure wants to live in India. And that is Arundhati Roy. I have seen Arundhati Roy on stage in Berkeley, the tumultuous applause that greets her. It almost feels like a cult, vibrating with some kind of Arundhati-aura. It makes you wonder why she keeps returning to India where she is routinely harassed, censured, accused of sedition, of being a traitor and trotted out on television shows to boost the ratings. She is like the red meat routinely served to a hungry rabble. She could easily be a princess in exile, lobbing self-righteous firebombs at the world’s largest democracy. But she chooses to live in Delhi, in the heart of the beast. As she told Tehelka:

I’m not going to explain my relationship with this country and its people. I am not a politician looking for brownie points.

We could say Happy Birthday, Arundhati Roy. But then she’s claimed she’s never liked that word “happy.”
“Happy is a tinny middle-class word. We think it’s our right to be happy. It comes in unexpected snatches,” she once said.

Here’s hoping for a  little snatch of happiness today for Arundhati Roy.

Source:
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/happy-50th-arundhati-roy-139491.html/2