A Tragedy Worse Than A Tragedy

Best-selling author Arundhati Roy takes an uncompromising position on capitalist greed, the dark path India has taken, Mohandas Gandhi and the Guptas.

- Susan Segar

FOR TWENTY YEARS AFTER RELEASING her best-selling debut novel, The God of Small Things, Indian author Arundhati Roy put all thoughts of fiction aside and focused on writing about Indian politics, environmental issues and the effects of capitalist greed on her country and the world.

During that time, she wrote about the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and slammed its champion, the country’s prime minister Narendra Modi; she’s condemned India’s military occupation of Kashmir; she’s travelled to India’s “valleys and forests” to try to make sense of huge, sudden changes that have been taking place post-globalisation; she’s been present during police raids at universities and endless student arrests; and she’s listened closely to the struggles of her fellow citizens in a country where the caste system is alive and well, where Muslims are persecuted and Dalits (so-called untouchables) are lynched.

It is also a country in which 300 million people live on less than half a dollar a day and where hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden small-scale farmers have committed suicide, often through drinking pesticide.

Her conclusion, Roy told Noseweek during a recent interview in Cape Town, is that India is a country that’s heading towards “very serious trouble”. The country’s economy is inextricably linked to the massive rise of Hindu nationalism, to the detriment of many ordinary Indians.

Roy described the government as “a democratically elected government gone rogue”. The prime ministership of Modi, she added, has been “a tragedy much worse than a tragedy. Today we are living in a world in India where people (Muslims and Dalits) are being lynched every day on the streets, where videos are being put up on the lynchings. Our whole society is having vitriol and poison dripped into its veins…