There is much in Arundhati Roy's writings and pronouncements that I have little difficulty, at least with certain qualifications, in accepting. I agree that Indian democracy is far from perfect. I agree that successive regimes in India, at the Centre and at the level of the states, have short- changed vast sections of Indian people, mostly the poor and the marginalised. I think that the continuation of outfits like the Salwa Judum is an abomination and no civilised society ought to tolerate such vigilante groups.
I am with Roy when she says that the lifestyles and livelihood of the adivasis is under grave threat in the name of harebrained ideas of progress and development.
I also agree that P. Chidambaram is a disaster as Home Minister and has scant political sense and no vision, the proverbial man without qualities. At the same time, I dislike Roy's illusions of certainty, her self- righteousness, her inability to go beyond self- serving monologues and her prophetic tone.
Apologist
Arundhati Roy's essays remind me of two people. Their length and their tone of moral certitude remind me of Arun Shourie, the journalist. He landed ultimately in the BJP and now endorses every crime and misdemeanour of the BJP, including the 2002 post- Godhra riots and Narendra Modi's role during that period. The second person that Roy's writings remind me of is Carl Schmitt.
Those unfamiliar with Schmitt would do well to remember that he was Hitler's apologist, who wrote tracts that
supported the Nazi regime. He found liberal democracy and parliamentarianism impotent and mediocre ways of organiaing human societies. But even today, he is studied seriously for suggesting that in the age of technology, the only political relationship that is feasible is the one between friend and foe. The political for him lies in identifying the enemy and eliminating the enemy. There is, therefore, always an in- group and an outgroup, those who belong and those who do not.
While Roy might use the word " fascist" as a term of abuse, she is hardly aware that she, perhaps
unconsciously, shares much with one of the most articulate and thoughtful apologists of the Nazi regime.
In romanticising the naxals and justifying their violence, she is merely a victim of a philosophy that designates virtue and moral superiority to one section of the population and delineates the rest as morally and ethically compromised. It would be perfectly right to say that the naxals imitate the criminality of the state ( a phrase paraphrased from Marx, no less), but to justify violence as a legitimate means of redressal of grievances is plainly silly.
Justification
Roy justifies naxal violence by adding emotive elements on to the question of naxal violence. Hunger and the loneliness of the forests in her eyes justifies this brand of violence. Let us take the question of hunger first. The assumption implicit in Roy's argument is that once people are understanding, but because she is incapable of holding a conversation with anyone other than those that agree with her.
This instinct has two sources. The first comes from the fear that she will lose her identity if she ceased to be marginal. Her marginality is her advertisement, and excess of anything, as Lenin's Russia taught us, is advertisement. The second is a degree of Platonism, where politics is seen as a relentless tutorial in the hands of a few chosen wise men and women.
These wise men and women, it is assumed, have seen the Light and have truth and God on their side. Everyone
else lives under a veil of ignorance, incapable of perceiving their true interests and what is good for society as a whole.
The reason why Roy finds Gandhi to be pious humbug stems from the above reasons.
Gandhi, with all his faults, did not divide the world into friend and foe. He did not believe in winning wars
quickly and expeditiously. If delay in getting justice be the price to pay for simple ideas of decency and civility,
Gandhi was patient enough to wait, sacrifice and endure, rather than let the wild beasts of the forest rule our
world. Aurobindo Ghosh asked Devdas Gandhi what the Mahatma would have done in the face of an adversary
like Hitler, who was different from the imperial, but fundamentally liberal, British rule. Gandhi thought it would
be right for millions to happily die in the gas chambers than compromise on ideas of civility and decency.
Gandhi
Roy finds Gandhi redundant because his politics depended on a certain degree of theatricality and the presence of an audience, something denied to the naxals and the tribals. This is right in a way, since even Roy, the city- dwelling champion of those in the forest, has to invoke Gandhi in order to be heard in order to carry off her own piece of theatre. She obviously knows that the modern Indian state has nothing to do with either Gandhian ideas or with Gandhian methods.
Had she said Manmohan Singh is pious humbug or Sonia Gandhi is pious humbug, foreign newspapers would
hardly have reproduced her article in their pages. Both Mont Blanc and Arundhati Roy need Gandhi, after all, to sell their products.
Having said this, Roy is " right" that Gandhi has little to say about the plight of the naxals and tribals, and even
much less about the mining sharks and the marauding multinationals active in India.
But he also did not have much to say about the cell phone, the ipod and cybercrime.
In sharp contrast, Roy is better placed in having a view about all things known and unknown.
She suffers from no degree of doubt, has little sense of irony and no humour. Along with the BJP and certain strands of the loony Left, she has opened her own National Bureau of Moral Certification.
We now await the founding of her autonomous republic, where the heart will always be full, but the mind empty.
The writer teaches politics at the University of Hyderabad
