You get to smell Roy’s nausea from the 2002 riots of Gujarat, hear her impassioned plea for those incarcerated in the Parliament attack case, touch the pulse of Istanbul in the wake of Hrant Dink’s assassination, taste the morbidity of President George W. Bush’s visit to India and see the utter pointlessness of our rhetoric- laced reaction to last year’s Mumbai attack.
Her targets are the government, the police, the judiciary and the media — particularly the media.
All along these writings, there is a sixth sense of a deeper malaise, an intuition of a more fundamental fault with the way things are.
This sense is given sensibility in her astutely powerful introduction to the anthology.
“What have we done to democracy?” asks Roy. “What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short- term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race?” Roy, of course, doesn’t talk of a return to authoritarianism. She X- rays the symbiotic relationship between democratic governance, the growth of fascism and the free market, and exposes how they all feed off one another.
The ascent of the “fascist BJP” began around the same time as economic liberalisation, the book points out. Today, the Sangh Parivar’s biggest project is “Hinduising” Dalits and Adivasis, and pitting them against each other and against the minorities and Maoists. This has been visible in the way Dalits and Adivasis were unleashed on Muslims in Gujarat, the killings of Christians in Orissa, and in the creation of the anti- Maoist Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, Roy argues.
http://newageislam.com/why-democracy-isn%E2%80%99t-about-vote-margins/books-and-documents/d/1608
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11:20 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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