Western world ignoring the circumstances of India due to its economic interests: Arundhat Roy

NEW DELHI, Sep 09 (SABAH): Renowned Indian author of international fame Arundhati Roy has deplored that the leaders of G20 nations attending the 18th Summit of the grouping like the US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron know what’s going on in India but they won’t talk about it due to the interests of their countries. She said that the Western world is ignoring the circumstances of India due to its economic interests.

Arundhati Roy in an interview with “Al Jazeera” said all these Western leaders who speak about democracy, know exactly what’s going on in India. She said, they know that Muslims have been massacred, that Muslims who protest have their homes bulldozed, which means all the public institutions – courts, magistrates, the press – collude in that.

“They know that Muslims in certain towns have X marks on their doors and are being asked to leave. They know that Muslims have been ghettoised. And that now people who are accused of actually lynching, murdering Muslims are leading so-called religious processions through these ghettos. They know that vigilantes are out there with swords, calling for annihilation, calling for the mass rape of Muslim women. They know all this, but that doesn’t matter because as always with certain Western countries, it’s like “democracy for us” and, you know, “dictatorship or whatever else it is for our non-white friends”. It doesn’t matter,” she said.

Arundhati Roy, who is a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi-led Indian government’s treatment of minorities – mainly its 200 million Muslims since it came to power in 2014, said she doesn’t think anybody really cares about that because everybody is looking for an opportunity, a trade deal or a military equipment deal or a geopolitical strategic understanding. She said, in countries like the US and the UK and France, the mainstream media has been so critical of what’s happening in India, but the governments have a different agenda altogether. “So I don’t think one needs to be naive enough to believe that that is an issue at all for the people coming here,” she said.

To a question Arundhati Roy said that it would be foolhardy for you to think that a process in which a country of 1.4 billion people that used to be a flawed democracy – and is now falling into a kind of, well, I can only use the word fascism – is not going to affect the rest of the world, you’re extremely wrong. She said there was a moment in time in 2002 after the anti-Muslim massacre in Gujarat – in which intelligence reports by countries like the UK actually held Modi responsible for what they called ethnic cleansing. She said, Modi was banned from traveling to the US, but all of that is forgotten now.

The acclaimed author maintained that there is a civil war unfolding in Manipur where the state government is partisan, the central government is complicit, the security forces do not have a chain of command. “We saw the horrifying sight of women being paraded naked and gang-raped. We learned that it was the Manipur police who handed the women over to the mob,” she deplored.

Arundhati Roy pointed out that the state of India is very precarious. “We have a situation in which the constitution has been effectively set aside. We have a situation in which the BJP is now one of the richest political parties in the world. And all the election machinery is more or less compromised.”

Arundhati Roy said, “We are in a situation of great flux and we don’t expect, I don’t think anybody expects, anybody outside of India to stand up and take notice because all their eyes have dollar signs in them, and they are looking at this huge market of a billion people.” However, she said, there won’t be a market when this country slides into chaos and war, as it already has in places like Manipur. She said, what they don’t realise is that this market won’t exist when this country falls into chaos as it is. The beauty of India are being reduced to something small and snarling and petty and violent, she said, adding, and when that explodes, I think there’ll be nothing like it.