Creative Menopause

“I cannot believe this army. As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist. But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalised. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. (The new instructions from the high command are that captured vehicles should be buried and not cremated. So they can be resurrected when needed.) Should I write a play I wonder—Gandhi Get Your Gun? Or will I be lynched?”

This is how Arundathi Roy defines Naxals. An in-depth essay appeared on Outlook magazine. This is after she spent lot of time in the jungles. Not sure if she was trying to explore the wild side of herself or she was just running away from the routine stressful life.

This was then followed up with a very confusing interview in one of the news channels (don’t remember which one, but doesn’t matter). She kept confusing viewers & interviewer with some weird argument about differentiating between tribals and Maoists. I had an intellectual indigestion and felt an urgent need to purge out the overdose of confusion. For most part of the interview, I could not make sense of which side she was on. She kept yapping on how tribals are being attacked in the name of Maoists. She also mentioned that these tribals had taken up guns to fight injustice.

I could not stop myself from reaching out to the remote. I rather watch ‘Saas & the city’ on headlines today rather than being subjected to this emotional atyaachaar.

Here’s a quick synopsis of what Arundathi Roy has been in news for.

1. In 2008, Arundhati Roy announced that Kashmiris desire independence from India, and not union with India. She expressed her support to this cause.

2. She campaigned along with activist Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people, with little or no compensation, and will not provide the projected irrigation, drinking water and other benefits. She donated her Booker prize money as well as royalties from her books on the project to the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

3. In a 2001, she spoke against US Military invasion of Iraq in The Guardian. She put the attacks on the World Trade Center and on Afghanistan on the same moral level, that of terrorism. Roy criticized US President George W. Bush's visit to India, calling him a "war criminal”.

4. She criticized India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan. Roy wrote The End of Imagination (1998), a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living (1999). She also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

5. In August 2006, Roy, along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others, signed a letter in The Guardian called the 2006 Lebanon War a "war crime" and accused Israel of "state terror.

6. Roy has raised questions about the investigation into the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the trial of the accused. She has called for the death sentence of Mohammad Afzal to be stayed while a parliamentary enquiry into these questions are conducted and denounced press coverage of the trial.

7. In 2003, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha, a social movement for adivasi land rights in Kerala, organized a major land occupation of a piece of land of a former Eucalyptus plantation in the Muthanga Wildlife Reserve, on the border of Kerala and Karnataka. After 48 days, a police force was sent into the area to evict the occupants—one participant of the movement and a policeman were killed, and the leaders of the movement were arrested. Arundhati Roy travelled to the area, visited the movement's leaders in jail, and wrote an open letter to the then Chief Minister of Kerala, A.K. Antony now India's Defence Minister, saying "You have blood on your hands’

8. In an opinion piece for The Guardian (13 December 2008), Roy argued that the November 2008 Mumbai attacks can not be seen in isolation, but must be understood in the context of wider issues in the region's history. Roy warns against war with Pakistan, arguing that it is hard to "pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state", and that war could lead to the "descent of the whole region into chaos".

9. In an opinion piece, once again in The Guardian (April 1, 2009), Roy made a plea for international attention to what she perceived, based on reports, to be a possible government-sponsored genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

10. Now, Roy has criticized Government's armed actions against the Naxalite-Maoist insurgents in India, calling it "war on the poorest people in the country". According to her, the Government launched the offensive in Naxals to aid the corporations with whom it has signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs).

11. Roy also calls India a ‘fake democracy’

Having said all that, this is the same person who won the booker prize in 1997 for her book, ‘The God of small things’. This book was partially based upon real life incidents. How did an author land herself into a self appointed full time critique and anti-India mouth piece?

Could be a creative menopause!!

Suzanna Arundathi Roy, we enjoyed your book. We would have been happy if you had continued writing. But we do not enjoy your hysterical diatribes against India & all things that are Indian. ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’ is not in the same league as ‘The God of small things’