[The text of the writer’s speech as she received the 45th
European Essay Prize on September 12..."What’s happening in India is
not that loose variety of internet fascism. It’s the real thing. We
have become Nazis." ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ARUNDHATI ROY: THE DISMANTLING OF DEMOCRACY IN INDIA WILL AFFECT THE
WHOLE WORLD  
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Arundhati Roy
September 14, 2023
Scroll.in
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_ The text of the writer’s speech as she received the 45th European
Essay Prize on September 12..."What’s happening in India is not that
loose variety of internet fascism. It’s the real thing. We have
become Nazis." _

Arundhati Roy at a press conference in 2020., Prakash Singh / Agence
France-Presse (AFP) // Scroll.in

 

I thank the Charles Veillon Foundation for honoring me with the 2023
European Essay Award. It may not be immediately apparent how delighted
I am to receive it. It’s even possible that I am gloating. What
makes me happiest is that it is a prize for literature. Not for peace.
Not for culture or cultural freedom, but for literature. For writing.
And for writing the kind of essays that I write and have written for
the past 25 years.

They have mapped, step by step, India’s descent (although some see
it as an ascent) into first majoritarianism and then full-blown
fascism. Yes, we continue to have elections, and for that reason, in
order to secure a reliable constituency, the ruling Bhartiya Janata
Party’s message of Hindu supremacism has relentlessly been
disseminated to a population of 1.4 billion people. Consequently,
elections are a season of murder, lynching and dog-whistling – the
most dangerous time for India’s minorities, Muslims and Christians
in particular.

It is no longer just our leaders we must fear, but a whole section of
the population. The banality of evil, the normalisation of evil is now
manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, in very many public
spaces. The mainstream press, the hundreds of 24-hour news channels
have been harnessed to the cause of fascist majoritarianism. India’s
Constitution has been effectively set aside. The Indian Penal Code is
being rewritten. If the current regime wins a majority in 2024, it is
very likely that we will see a new Constitution.

It is very likely that the process of what is called
“delimitation” – a reordering of constituencies – or
gerrymandering as it is known in the US, will take place, giving more
parliamentary seats to those Hindi-speaking states in North India
where the BJP has a base. This will cause great resentment in the
southern states and has the potential to balkanise India. Even in the
unlikely event of an electoral defeat, the supremacist poison runs
deep and has compromised every public institution that is meant to
oversee checks and balances. Right now, there are virtually none,
except a weakened and undermined Supreme Court.

Let me thank you once again for this very prestigious prize and for
the recognition of my work –although I must tell you that a lifetime
achievement award makes a person feel old. I’ll have to stop
pretending that I’m not. It’s a great irony in some ways to
receive a prize for 25 years of writing warning about the direction in
which we were headed – that was not heeded, but instead often mocked
and criticised by liberals and those who considered themselves
“progressive” too.

But now the time for warning is over. We are in a different phase of
history. As a writer, I can only hope that my writing will bear
witness to this very dark chapter that is unfolding in my country’s
life. And hopefully, the work of others like myself lives on, it will
be known that not all of us agreed with what was happening.

My life as an essay writer was not planned. It just happened.

My first book was _The God of Small Things_, a novel published in
1997. That happened to be the 50th anniversary of India’s
independence from British colonialism. It had been eight years since
the Cold War had ended and Soviet communism had been buried in the
rubble of the Afghan-Soviet war. It was the beginning of the
US-dominated unipolar world in which capitalism was the uncontested
victor. India realigned herself with the United States and opened her
markets to corporate capital.

Privatisation and structural adjustment were the anthem of the free
market. India was taking her place at the high table. But then in 1998
a BJP-led Hindu nationalist government came to power. The first thing
it did was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. They were greeted by
most people, including writers, artists and journalists, in a language
of virulent, chauvinistic nationalism. What was acceptable as public
discourse suddenly changed.

At the time, having just won the Booker Prize for my novel, I had
inadvertently been cast as one of this aggressive New India’s
cultural ambassadors. I was on the cover of major magazines. I knew
that if I didn’t say something, it would be assumed that I agreed
with all of this. I understood then that keeping quiet was as
political as speaking out. I understood that speaking out would be the
end of my career as the fairy-princess of the literary world. More
than that, I understood that if I didn’t write what I believed
regardless of the consequences, I would become my own worst enemy and
would possibly never write again.

So, I wrote, to save my writing self. My first essay, _The End of
Imagination,_ was published simultaneously in two major
mass-circulation magazines, _Outlook_ and _Frontline_. I was
immediately labeled a traitor and anti-national. I received those
insults as laurels, no less prestigious than the Booker Prize. It set
me off on a long writing journey, about dams, rivers, displacement,
caste, mining, civil war – a journey that deepened my understanding
and entwined my fiction and nonfiction in ways that they can no longer
be separated.

I will read a brief excerpt from one of the essays in my
book _Azadi, _which is about how these essays live in the world.
It’s called “The Language of Literature”:
 

“When the essays were first published (first in mass-circulation
magazines, then on the internet, and finally as books), they were
viewed with baleful suspicion, at least in some quarters, often by
those who didn’t necessarily even disagree with the politics. The
writing sat at an angle to what is conventionally thought of as
literature. Balefulness was an understandable reaction, particularly
among the taxonomy-inclined, because they couldn’t decide exactly
what this was – pamphlet or polemic, academic or journalistic
writing, travelogue, or just plain literary adventurism?

To some, it simply did not count as writing: “Oh, why have you
stopped writing? We’re waiting for your next book.” Others
imagined that I was just a pen for hire. All manner of offers came my
way: “Darling, I loved that piece you wrote on the dams, could you
do one for me on child abuse?” (This actually happened.) I was
sternly lectured (mostly by upper-caste men) about how to write, the
subjects I should write about, and the tone I should take.

But in other places – let’s call them places off the highway –
the essays were quickly translated into other Indian languages,
printed as pamphlets, distributed for free in forests and river
valleys, in villages that were under attack, on university campuses
where students were fed up of being lied to. Because these readers,
out there on the front lines, already being singed by the spreading
fire, had an entirely different idea of what literature is or should
be.

  I mention this because it taught me that the place for literature
is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways,
but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because
we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is
needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.”  

Today it is unthinkable that any mainstream media house in India, all
of whom live on corporate advertisements, would publish essays like
these. In the last 20 years, the free market and fascism and the
so-called free press, have waltzed together to bring India to a place
where it can by no means be called a democracy.

In January this year two things happened that serve to illustrate this
in a way that nothing else probably could. The BBC broadcast a
two-part documentary called _India: The Modi Question,_ and a few
days later, a small US firm called Hindenburg Research which
specialises in what is known as activist short-selling published what
is now known as the Hindenberg Report, a detailed expose of shocking
wrongdoing about India’s biggest corporation – the Adani group.

The BBC-Hindenburg moment was portrayed by the Indian media as nothing
short of an attack on India’s twin towers – Prime
Minister Narendra Modi
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biggest industrialist, Gautam Adani, who was, until recently, the
world’s third-richest man. The charges laid against them aren’t
subtle. The BBC film implicates Modi in the abetment of mass murder.
The Hindenburg Report accuses Adani of pulling “the largest con in
corporate history”. On August 30, _the Guardian _and
the_ Financial Times_ published articles based on incriminating
documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project that further substantiate the Hindenburg Report.

Indian investigation agencies and most of the Indian media are in no
position to investigate or publish these stories. When the foreign
media does, its easy then, in the current atmosphere of pseudo
hyper-nationalism, to portray it as an attack on Indian sovereignty.

Episode 1 of the BBC film _The Modi Question_ is about the 2002
anti-Muslim pogrom which raged through the state of Gujarat after
Muslims were held responsible for the burning of a railway coach in
which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned alive. Modi had been appointed –
not elected – chief minister of the state only a few months before
the massacre. The film is not just the murdering, but also the 20-year
journey that some victims made through India’s labyrinthine legal
system, keeping the faith, hoping for justice and political
accountability.

It includes eyewitness testimonies, most poignantly from Imtiyaz
Pathan, who lost ten members of his family in the “Gulbarg Society
massacre” in which 60 people were murdered by a mob, including a
former Member of Parliament Ehsan Jaffri who was dismembered and burnt
alive. He was a political rival of Modi’s and had campaigned against
him in a recent election. It was one of several similarly gruesome
massacres that took place over those few days in Gujarat.

One of the other massacres – not in the film – was the gang rape
of 19-year-old Bilkis Bano and the murder of 14 members of her family
including her 3-year-old daughter. Last August, on Independence Day,
while Modi addressed the nation about the importance of women’s
rights, his government, on the very same day, pardoned the
rapist-murderers of Bilkis and her family who had been sentenced to
life imprisonment . They had spent most of their jail time out on
parole. And now they are free men. They were greeted with garlands
outside prison are now respected members of society and share the
stage with BJP politicians in public programmes.

The BBC film revealed an internal report commissioned by the British
Foreign Office in April 2002, so far unseen by the public. The
fact-finding report estimated that “at least 2,000” people had
been murdered. It called the massacre a pre-planned pogrom which bore
“all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.” It said reliable contacts
had informed them that the police had been ordered to stand down. The
report laid the blame squarely at Modi’s door. After the Gujarat
pogrom, the US denied him a visa. Modi won three consecutive elections
and remained Gujarat’s chief minister until 2014. The ban was
revoked after he became Prime Minister.

The Modi government has banned the film. Every social media platform
complied with the ban and has taken down all links and references to
it. Within weeks of the film’s release the BBC’s offices were
surrounded by the police and raided by tax officials.

The Hindenburg Report accuses the Adani Group of engaging in a
“brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme”, which –
through the use of offshore shell entities – artificially overvalued
its key listed companies and inflated the net worth of its chairman.
According to the report, seven of Adani’s listed companies are
overvalued by more than 85%. Modi and Adani have known each other for
decades. Their friendship was consolidated after the 2002 Gujarat
pogrom.

At the time, much of India, including corporate India recoiled in
horror at the open slaughter and mass rape of Muslims that was staged
on the streets of Gujarat’s towns and villages by vigilante Hindu
mobs seeking “revenge”. Gautam Adani stood by Modi. With a small
group of Gujarati industrialists he set up a new platform of
businessmen. They denounced Modi’s critics and supported him as he
launched a new political career as “Hindu Hriday Samrat”, the
Emperor of Hindu Hearts. So was born what is known as the Gujarat
Model of “development”: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by
serious corporate money.

In 2014, after three terms as chief minister of Gujarat, Modi was
elected prime minister of India. He flew to his swearing-in ceremony
in Delhi in a private jet with Adani’s name emblazoned across the
body of the aircraft. In the nine years of Modi’s tenure, Adani
became the world’s richest man. His wealth grew from $8 billion to
$137 billion. In 2022 alone, he made $72 billion, which is more than
the combined earnings of the world’s next nine billionaires put
together. The Adani Group
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dozen shipping ports that account for the movement of 30% of India’s
freight, seven airports that handle 23% of India’s airline
passengers, and warehouses that collectively hold 30% of India’s
grain. It owns and operates power plants that are the biggest
generators of the country’s private electricity.

Yes, Gautam Adani is one of the world’s richest men, but if you look
at their roll-out during elections, the BJP is not just India’s, but
perhaps even the world’s richest political party. In 2016 the BJP
introduced the scheme of electoral bonds to allow corporations to fund
political parties without their identities being made public. It has
become the party with by far the largest share of corporate funding.
It looks very much as though the twin towers have a common basement.

Just as Adani stood by Modi in his time of need, the Modi government
has stood by Adani and has refused to answer a single question raised
by members of the opposition in Parliament, going so far as to expunge
their speeches from the parliament record.

While the BJP and Adani accumulated their fortunes, in a damning
report Oxfam said that the top 10% of the Indian population holds 77%
of the total national wealth. Seventy three per cent of the wealth
generated in 2017 went to the richest 1%, while 670 million Indians
who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase
in their wealth. While India is recognised as an economic power with a
huge market, most of its population lives in crushing poverty.

Millions live on subsistence rations delivered in packets with
Modi’s face printed on them. India is a very rich country with very
poor people. One of the most unequal societies in the world. For its
pains, Oxfam India has been raided too. And Amnesty International and
a host of other troublesome NGOs in India have been harassed into
shutting down.

None of this has made any difference whatsoever to the leaders of
Western democracies. Within days of the Hindenburg-BBC moment, after
“warm and productive” meetings, Prime Minister Modi, President Joe
Biden and President Emmanuel Macron announced that India would be
buying 470 Boeing and Airbus aircraft. Biden said the deal would
create over million American jobs. The Airbus will be powered by Rolls
Royce engines. “For the UK’s thriving aerospace sector,” PM
Rishi Sunak said, “the sky is the limit.”

 

In July Modi travelled to the US on a State visit and to France as the
Chief Guest on Bastille Day. Can you even begin to believe that?
Macron and Biden fawned over him in the most embarrassing manner,
knowing full well that this would be spun into pure campaign gold for
the 2024 general elections in which Modi will stand for a third term.
There is nothing they would not have known about the man they are
embracing.

They would have known about Mr Modi’s role in the Gujarat pogrom.
They would have known about the sickening regularity with which
Muslims are being publicly lynched
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how some lynchers were met with garlands by a member
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Mr Modi’s cabinet and the precipitous process of Muslim segregation
and ghettoisation. They would have known about the burning down of
hundreds of churches by Hindu vigilantes.

They would have known about the hounding of opposition politicians
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rights activists, lawyers
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some of whom have received long
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sentences, about the attacks
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police and suspected Hindu nationalists, the rewriting
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history textbooks, the banning of films
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the shutdown
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Amnesty International India, the raid
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the India offices of the BBC, the activists, journalists and
government critics placed on mysterious no-fly lists
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the pressure on academics, both Indian
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They would have known that India now ranks at 161 out of 180 countries
on the World Press Freedom Index
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that many of the best Indian journalists have been hounded out of the
mainstream media and that journalists could soon be subjected to a
censorial regulatory regime in which a government-appointed body will
have the power to decide whether media reports and commentary about
the government are fake or misleading.
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the new IT law that is designed to shut down dissent on social media.

They would have known about the sword-wielding, violent Hindu
vigilante mobs who regularly and openly call for the annihilation of
Muslims and the rape of Muslim women.

They would have known about the situation in Kashmir, which beginning
in 2019 was subjected to a monthslong communication blackout
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the longest internet shutdown in a democracy – and whose journalists
suffer harassment, arrest and interrogation. Nobody in the 21st
century should have to live as they do, with a boot on their throats.

They would have known about the Citizenship Amendment Act passed in
2019 that barefacedly discriminates against Muslims, the
massive protests
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it touched off and how those protests only ended after dozens of
Muslims were killed
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following year by Hindu mobs in Delhi (which, incidentally, took place
while President Donald Trump was in town on a state visit, and about
which he uttered not a word). They would have known about how the
Delhi police forced grievously injured young Muslim men who were lying
on the street to sing the Indian National Anthem while they prodded
and kicked them. One of them died subsequently.

They would have known that at the same time they were feting Modi,
Muslims were fleeing
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small town in Uttarakhand in northern India after Hindu extremists
affiliated with the BJP marked X’s on their doors and told them to
leave. There is open talk of a “Muslim-free” Uttarakhand. They
would have known that under Modi’s watch, the state of Manipur in
the India’s North East has descended into a barbaric civil war. A
form of ethnic cleansing has taken place. The Centre is complicit, the
state government is partisan, the security forces are split between
the police and others with no chain of command. The internet has been
cut. News takes weeks to filter out.

Still, the world’s powers choose to give Modi all the oxygen he
needs to destroy the social fabric and burn India down. To me, this is
a form of racism. They claim to be democrats, but they are racists.
They don’t believe their professed “values” should apply to
non-white countries. It’s an old story of course.

It doesn’t matter. We will fight our own battle – and ultimately
we will win our country back. However, if they imagine that the
dismantling of democracy in India is not going to affect the whole
world, they must indeed be delusional.

For all those who believe India is still a democracy – these are a
few of the events that have happened just over the last few months.
This is what I meant when I said we have moved into a different phase.
The time for warnings is over, and we must fear sections of the people
as much as we fear our leaders:
 

In Manipur where a civil war rages, the police, which is entirely
partisan, handed two women over to a mob to be paraded naked through a
village and then gang-raped. One of them watched her young brother
being murdered before her eyes. Women who belong to the same community
as the rapists have stood by the rapists and have even incited their
men to rape.

In Maharashtra an armed Railway Protection Force Officer walked down
the corridor of a train, shooting Muslim passengers and calling on
people to vote for Modi.

A hugely popular Hindu vigilante, often photographed hobnobbing with
top politicians and policeman, called on Hindus to participate in a
religious march through a densely populated Muslim-majority
settlement. He is the prime accused in the murder of two young Muslims
who were tied to a vehicle and burned alive in February.

The town of Nuh abuts Gurgaon, where major international corporations
have their offices. The Hindus in the march carried machine guns and
swords. The Muslims defended themselves. Predictably, the march ended
in violence. Six people were killed. A 19 year-old imam was butchered
in his bed, his mosque vandalised and burnt. The response of the state
has been to bulldoze all the poorest Muslim settlements and cause
hundreds of families to flee for their lives.

The prime minister has had nothing to say about any of this. It is
election season. Next May there will be a general election. It’s all
part of an election campaign. We are braced for more bloodshed, mass
killing, false-flag attacks, pretend-wars and anything to further
polarise an already-polarised population.

I have just watched a chilling little video filmed in a classroom of a
small school. The teacher makes a Muslim child stand by her desk and
asks the rest of the students, Hindu boys, to come up one by one and
slap him. She admonishes those who haven’t hit him hard enough. The
action taken so far has been that the Hindus in the village and the
police have pressurised the Muslim family not to press charges. The
Muslim boy’s school fee has been refunded and he has been taken out
of school.

What’s happening in India is not that loose variety of internet
fascism. It’s the real thing. We have become Nazis. Not just our
leaders, not just our TV channels and newspapers, but vast sections of
our population too. Large numbers among the Indian Hindu population
who live in the US and Europe and South Africa support the fascists
politically as well as materially. For the sake of our souls, and for
those of our children and our children’s children, we must stand up.
It doesn’t matter whether we fail or succeed. That responsibility is
not on us in India alone. Soon, if Modi wins in 2024, all avenues of
dissent will be shut down. None of you in this hall must pretend you
didn’t know what was going on.

If you permit me, I will end by reading a section from my first
essay, _The End of Imagination._ It’s a conversation with a friend
about failure – and my personal writer’s manifesto.
 

“I said in any case hers was an external view of things, this
assumption that the trajectory of a person’s happiness, or let’s
say fulfilment, had peaked (and now must trough) because she had
accidentally stumbled upon ‘success’. It was premised on the
unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of
everybody’s dreams.

You’ve lived too long in New York, I told her. There are other
worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible.
Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which
recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.
There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more
valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that
they will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most
vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will
live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.
(Prescience? Perhaps.)

‘Which means exactly what?’ (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.)

I tried to explain, but didn’t do a very good job of it. Sometimes I
need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin.
This is what I wrote: _To love. To be loved._ _To_ _never forget
your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence
and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the
saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair._ _To never simplify
what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength,
never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look
away. And never, never, to forget.”_

Let me thank you again for the honor of this award. I loved the part
in the prize citation in which it says, “Arundhati Roy uses the
essay as a form of combat.”

It would be presumptuous, arrogant, and even a little stupid of a
writer to believe that she could change the world with her writing.
But it would be pitiful if she didn’t even try.

Before I go…I just want to say this: This prize comes with a lot of
money. It will not stay with me. It will be shared with the very many
impossibly courageous activists, journalists, lawyers, filmmakers, who
continue to stand up to this regime with almost no resources. However
grim the situation is, please know that there is a tremendous fight
back.

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Watch here [[link removed]]  
 

_Arundhati Roy was awarded the 45th European Essay Prize for lifetime
achievement on the occasion of the French translation of her essay
Azadi – Liberté, Fascisme, Fiction on September 12._

* India
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* Narendra Modi
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* Hindus
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* Muslims
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* Fascism
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* British colonialism
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* Nationalism
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* ethnic genocide
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* Genocide
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* ethnic cleansing
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* Arundhati Roy
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