Most Popular Choices
Share on Facebook 49 Printer Friendly Page More Sharing
OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 12/31/18

Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism

By       (Page 1 of 2 pages)   No comments

ArundhatiRoy
ArundhatiRoy
(Image by (From Wikimedia) Jaypee, Author: Jaypee)
  Details   Source   DMCA

From Truthout

"How to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everybody. No, by slowly becoming everything." That's the line that stuck with me from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the latest book by one of our favorite guests, Arundhati Roy. Roy's strength as a writer and what she does that so many of us struggle to do is weave many stories into one fabric, without diluting the integrity of those stories. I've spoken to her often about her writing on capitalism, nationalism, solidarity and resistance. In this conversation we'll talk about all those things again, and visit her new novel against the backdrop of anti-Muslim violence and landmark changes for queer people in her home country of India.

Laura Flanders: You dedicate your book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to the unconsoled, and I believe that we are unconsoled in this moment. But I do worry that we in the United States, as you've alluded, become inured, become maybe muddied in our seeing, in our thinking, because there's so much coming at us at all times. Insofar as you have a take on what's happening here, where do you think we are? And then obviously I want you to talk about home and where India is, because India we barely see at all.

The thing is, people spend so much time mocking Trump or waiting for him to be impeached. And the danger with that kind of obsession with a single person is that you don't see the system that produced him. You don't see that, obviously, there was something about those eight years of Obama's presidency that created Trump and if we just keep obsessing about this one person without seeing what would happen ... what would happen if he wasn't there tomorrow and Mike Pence came? Would it be better? You know? The kind of havoc that has been created in the world when I think about it now, between Europe and America increasingly, the simple truth is that these economies can only function by selling the weapons that they manufacture. Weapons which you cannot even imagine that the human mind can conceive of and they are doing the selling and we're doing the buying.

To keep that economy going, you need a world at war, or almost at war, or just about to go to war, whatever it is. Forget the past, but just look at it from 9/11 onwards. How many countries have been destroyed? Europe is now in chaos also because of the refugees and so on. But what is creating it? How is it possible to continuously believe that you can destabilize country after country after country and anything good is going to come of it?

Is India destabilizing or stabilizing in a scary way?

India, it's hard to say. This year's going to be very important here.

How so?

Because the elections are coming next May and we've had a situation where somehow, since 1925, the goal of the Hindu nationalists was achieved in 2014 when Modi came to power with this absolute majority. In a way I was grateful for the absolute majority because there wasn't anyone else to blame. There isn't anyone else to blame for the chaos that has been unleashed. But what is very worrying is that, again, I keep saying you have to look and we have to find ways of keeping up our understanding of what's going on. Two years ago Modi appeared on TV at 10 o'clock at night and announced that 80 percent of Indian currency was illegal from the next morning. That was like taking a baseball bat and breaking every single citizen's spine.

They called it "demonetization."

That's right. We don't even have a word in any Indian language for it. But then when you do that, regardless of the economic implications, what you're doing is you're sending a message saying, "I can control you at all points, every single one of you." Now there's another huge thing which they are trying to bring into legislation called the Aadhaar card where every citizen's private information, biometrics, all of it is going to be put on a unique identity card. Now, as you know, these databases are being hacked. People's private information is being bought and sold. Information is gold now. That is a form of surveillance and control that is there forever. Once they've got it there, you can't undo it.

So, these are things which are impossible to wrap your head around. You have the whole new media now. For example, I'm not even talking about Facebook, I'm not even talking about Twitter. I'm talking about a messaging service called WhatsApp, which is very, very big in India. And at one point all of us used to use it because it's encrypted and the information [is] not available to the authorities. But now you have these kind of WhatsApp farms where fake news, fake videos, and videos that are meant to create communal conflagration are deliberately being sent around. So you have a situation where the only way now that Modi is going to win the election again, is to create massive communal strife between Hindus and Muslims, and so on. Or what they call a limited war with Pakistan, as you know, both are now nuclear neighbors. But the systematic sort of administering of hatred, a manifesto of hatred, is the basis of these people.

We wonder about that here in the US, too. Once that hatred has been unleashed, is the individual required, if Modi doesn't get elected or doesn't get an absolute majority in 2019...? Is that the end of it? I mean, there was an eight-year-old girl kidnapped, raped, and murdered, Asifa Bano, recently. We can talk about who did it, et cetera, but what killed her? How do you reel that back?

The thing is that there are so many different kinds of rape, right? You might have a group of ... [rapists who kill] a child, but do they then have huge processions [of] people supporting them? Do they have demands that they be released or that the investigation doesn't continue or that the investigation is handed over to people whom the majority community "trust"?

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).

Valuable 1  
Rate It | View Ratings

Laura Flanders Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Laura Flanders is the host of "GRIT TV" the new, news and culture discussion program aired daily on Free Speech TV (Dish Network ch. 9415) and online at the popular blog site Firedoglake.com. Flanders also hosts RadioNation, on Air America (more...)
 

Go To Commenting
The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Writers Guidelines

 
Contact AuthorContact Author Contact EditorContact Editor Author PageView Authors' Articles
Support OpEdNews

OpEdNews depends upon can't survive without your help.

If you value this article and the work of OpEdNews, please either Donate or Purchase a premium membership.

STAY IN THE KNOW
If you've enjoyed this, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to get lots of great progressive content.
Daily Weekly     OpEd News Newsletter
Name
Email
   (Opens new browser window)
 

Most Popular Articles by this Author:     (View All Most Popular Articles by this Author)

Jeff Sessions Sets Back the Clock

WTF White Women?

Democracy vs Dictatorship: Don't Let Bloomberg Muddy That Choice

Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism

Woodstock Urges Roaming

Is Donald Trump Responsible for Violence? Yes.

To View Comments or Join the Conversation:

Tell A Friend