NEW DELHI: Renowned Indian author and activist 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.
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 travelling to the US, but all of that is forgotten now.__Pakistan Today
