This week on the NYR Daily: The artist as activist

On the NYR Daily this week Like me, you’ve probably read a good many pieces over the last couple of years decrying the populist majoritarian rule of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in particular over his Bharatiya Janata Party’s links with extreme Hindu nationalist movements—such as the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). And generally, the Western media (self included) is not much more curious or better-informed than that. Which was one reason why I was so glad to get the opportunity to publish earlier this week Arundhati Roy’s impassioned commentary “[Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy](” (September 3)—for the much more textured and detailed account she gave of all the other bad stuff that’s happening in India. Another reason? Well, Arundhati Roy. The crude external view tends to see Indian politics principally through the lens of the Hindu–Muslim divide; I wanted to ask her first what this misses. “Several things,” she said. “Most fundamentally, the issue of caste, which is the motor that runs modern India. It is as vicious as Apartheid was. Second, the costs of “progress” and “development,” which have created a huge new middle class—a class of consumers that makes India a market that cannot be ignored—but at the same time an even larger underclass that has lost homes, lands, and livelihoods. Third, the military occupation of Kashmir, and the decades-old militarization of states in the North East.” It is for her advocacy against caste and on behalf of this underclass that Roy has become best-known as an activist. One of her nonfiction books, Walking with the Comrades (2011), was based on her experience of following and living with Maoist Naxalite insurgents. This is what she was referring to when she told me: “There is a violent civil war in the forests of Central India waged mostly by indigenous people. So, there are two kinds of ‘terrorists,’ according to the state—Muslim terrorists and ‘Maoist’ terrorists.” The result, she says, is that “On the edges of the country, the Indian Army is turning into a bloated, corrupt administrative force. In the center of India, the police is turning into an army fighting people who are being turned into the ‘enemy.’” Photo by Mayank Austen Soofi This sounds like a not-healthy, barely-coping democracy—and, of course, India is haunted by the memory of Indira Gandhi’s suspension of constitutional government during the Emergency of the mid-1970s. Roy is anything but a romantic leftist seduced either by false optimism for the future or nostalgia for an imagined golden past; there is a hard-headed realism in all her responses. Of the recent round of arbitrary arrests of opposition activists that she wrote about in this week’s piece, she explained: “It’s not a new trend at all. The previous regime, led by the Congress [party], had declared an all-out war against anybody who resisted the land-grab of indigenous homelands, which were being handed over to mining companies. But the dangers now are spilling out of the forests and spreading into the rest of the country. “This government combines arrests like these with other forms of repression—mainly creating a climate in which lynch-mobs and thugs feel free to assault and kill Muslims, Dalits, and those who are viewed as ‘anti-national.’ The terror and repression are of a different nature altogether.” Amid this impending doom, it was almost ironic that, later in the week, India’s Supreme Court struck down a colonial-era anti-homosexuality law. As Roy told Amy Goodman in an [interview]( on Democracy Now!, this is “a totally wonderful thing,” and in her view “a sign of spine also from the Supreme Court.” As for next year’s general election, I asked, what are her hopes and fears? “My hope is simple,” she said. “I hope we have a change of government. I fear that even if we do, the RSS has penetrated almost every democratic institution. That has to be addressed.” In the meantime, there is her writing. At this point, she is a prolific nonfiction author of nearly twenty titles, while it took her two decades to publish another novel (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) after her celebrated 1997 début, The God of Small Things. Even so, “in my bones I am, above all, a novelist,” she says. “And my nonfiction has deepened and widened my fiction. They are lovers.” A little bit of a romantic, perhaps, after all. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And if you want to communicate directly with me or Lucy McKeon, please [email us](mailto:daily@nybooks.com). We really like getting your feedback, and aim to respond to all letters. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](