Arundhati Roy: The dismantling of democracy in India will affect the whole world
Arundhati Roy at a press conference in 2020. | Prakash Singh / AFP
The text of the writer’s speech as she received the 45th European Essay Prize on September 12.
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.
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 and India’s 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 now controls a 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.