Almost Genocide

This post honours a great lady who is a comrade of all those who are poor, hungry, dispossessed, oppressed and who are exploited for the sake of money.

Speaking in the School of Oriental and African Studies on 5 June 2011, the legendary Indian writer Arundhati Roy put on yet another memorable performance in rebuking India’s sham democracy (to view the whole lecture please click here and scroll down). During her two-hour talk the acclaimed writer cited a plethora of atrocities which she directly attributed to the Indian state. Roy mercilessly pilloried India’s rulers on several fronts. She said that they were “almost” guilty of “genocide”. For her nationalism, Hindu fundamentalism and unmitigated capitalism unequivocally repudiated India’s claims to being a leading democracy – or even a democracy at all.

Although the public forum with Roy was about the Adivasis (India’s tribal or aboriginal people) of Chattisgarh, she did not hesitate in chiding the Indian state’s murderous behaviour in places such as Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Kashmir, Punjab, Nagaland, Orissa and Jharkand. (This list, of course, is non-exhaustive.)

Arundhati Roy also blamed the west for being complicit in corruption and dictatorship; she also argued that had it not been for the west’s endorsement of Indian state atrocity, which arose out of greed, the Indians would have been free long ago. For Roy, the utopian India Gandhi and Nehru envisioned long years ago has all but ceded sovereignty to despotism: the country is a paper tiger run by a coterie of greedy mercenaries and capitalists.