She has been the rebel with no pause for more than two decades now. But this time, Arundhati Roy has outdone herself.
In a shocking analogy, the Booker Prize winner of The God of Small Things declared that India has ‘perpetually waged war on its own citizens’ while Pakistan never used its army against its own people.
Having spent nearly two decades on the International Desk at Gulf News, following every coup, crackdown and counter-insurgency from Karachi to Kathmandu, I can safely say Ms Roy does not know a rat’s droppings about our neighbourhood. But when did truth or facts ever come in the way of her compulsive India-bashing?
The god of small facts
For someone who wrote about ‘small things’, Roy has an enviable record of ignoring big ones. She reeled off a laundry list – Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Telangana, Punjab, Goa, Hyderabad – as proof of India’s supposed ‘war’ on its citizens.
In her worldview, every police action becomes genocide, every army deployment a fascist plot, every government a villainous upper-caste Hindu state in progress.
In Roy’s parallel universe, the land of coups, dictatorships, disappearances, and drone strikes is a peace-loving social service organisation. That Pakistan ran military campaigns in Balochistan, Waziristan, and Swat Valley is news she never bothered to read.
Operation Zarb-e-Azb? Operation Rahat-e-Nijat? The killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti in 2006 go missing from Roy’s syllabus. Perhaps she was too busy writing glowing essays on Maoists being the darlings of the oppressed, when not busy with ambushes.
In a viral video clip, writer Anand Ranganathan skewered Roy on X with the line: ‘When irresistible weed meets immovable hallucination.’ He added with biting sarcasm that, by her twisted logic, even the 1961 liberation of Goa was nothing but an ‘upper-caste Hindu state waging war against Christians.’
Venom as vocation
Former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal nailed it: Roy is ‘venomous against her own country’ and ‘deeply anti-Hindu.’ Admirers call her a conscience-keeper. Critics more accurately call her an attention-keeper. Either way, she never lets go. Every time she opens her mouth, India is fascist, corporations are agents of doom, Kashmir must secede, and Pakistan is somehow on the moral high ground.
But it is not just diplomats and editors shaking their heads. On social media, the outrage was unanimous. ‘Let her go to Pakistan and live there,’ wrote Vanit Sethi, a friend and former colleague, echoing a sentiment familiar to millions.
Others pointed out her selective amnesia about the genocide in East Pakistan [Bangladesh] in 1971, or Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan’s jail term which makes Indian democracy look like an open house in comparison.
Rebel without a clue
Roy has long perfected the art of outrage without accountability. The fact that she lives comfortably in the very state she calls fascist, publishes globally in English, and receives standing ovations in literary festivals is proof enough of the freedoms she so casually dismisses.
Misuse of free speech, said one reader; sedition, cried another. I would simply add: hypocrisy beyond measure.
But Arundhati Roy remains what she always was: a polarising figure who mistakes provocation for courage, distortion for insight, and venom for virtue.
