Arundhati Roy Speaks on G20 Summit and Fascism in India

Arundhati Roy Speaks on G20 Summit and Fascism in India

“We have a situation where we are talking about one nation, one language, one election. But actually we are in a situation where you have one dictator (Modi), one corporation.”

Leading Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy says that the G20 Summit (September 9 – 10) in New Delhi is a vanity event for the prime minister (PM) of India Narendra Modi.

The excerpts of a September 8 interview of Arundhati Roy with Al Jazeera are given below. You can also click here to watch a related video.

G20 and Treatment of Minorities

I don’t think anybody really cares about that because… the G20 is here, everybody is looking for an opportunity, a trade deal or a military equipment deal or a geopolitical strategic understanding. 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. 

I think what’s interesting is that if you were in Delhi, as I am now, if you look at the publicity, if you look at the banners, if you look at all the preparations that are being made for the G20, you would be forgiven for imagining that it wasn’t the government of India that is hosting the G20, but the BJP. Every single banner has a huge lotus on it, which is the symbol of a political party. Modi’s BJP.

The poor have been purged from the city. The slums have been screened off. The roads are barricaded, the traffic is shut down. It’s as quiet as death. 

Vanity Event for Modi

Of course it’s a vanity event.  All these Western leaders who speak about democracy – I mean, you can forgive someone like Trump because he doesn’t believe in democracy – but Biden, Macron, all these people who talk about democracy, they know exactly what’s going on here. 

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.

Fascism in India

The 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. There was a moment in time in 2002 after the anti-Muslim Gujarat massacre – in which intelligence reports by countries like the UK actually held Modi responsible for what they called ethnic cleansing. Modi was banned from travelling to the US, but all of that is forgotten now. But he’s the same man. 

We have a situation where we are talking about one nation, one language, one election. But actually we are in a situation where you have one dictator (Modi), one corporation.

As world leaders gather in India for the G20 summit, author Arundhati Roy warns them of the consequences of ignoring what she calls fascism in her country ⤵️ #AJOpinion pic.twitter.com/RdWMosBgtM

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 8, 2023

Flawed Elections and Danger for Minorities

Although we do have elections, I wouldn’t call us (India) a democracy anymore. But because we have elections, this message of Hindu supremacy has to be beamed out to 1.4 billion people in order to create a reliable constituency. So election season becomes extremely dangerous for minorities.

It’s no longer just the leadership that we must fear, but a section of this indoctrinated population that has made the streets dangerous for minorities.

We have a civil war unfolding in Manipur where the state government is partisan, the centre (Modi regime) is complicit, the security forces do not have a chain of command. It’s beginning to resemble what happened in the Balkans.

Complicit Courts

We have a situation where the prime minister (ModI) speaks on Independence Day about women’s rights, but at that very moment, his government signs a pardon for the 14 men who gang-raped Bilkis Bano and killed 14 members of a family. And they are now respected members of society. These are men who had been convicted to life imprisonment by the highest court in the land. 

Modi-Adani Collusion

We have a corporate head (Adani) who has been an old friend of Modi from the time of the Gujarat pogrom, who now is accused by not just a short selling company called the Hindenburg Research, but now by a whole coalition of journalists who report organised crime, talking about him pulling off the biggest corporate sort of scandal in history. But nothing will be done. 

Current State of India

We have a situation in which the constitution has been effectively set aside. We have a situation in which the BJP (Modi’s political outfit) is now one of the richest political parties in the world. And all the election machinery is more or less compromised.

And yet – not just because of the violence against minorities, which of course causes a kind of majoritarianism and may not cause them to lose elections – but because of unemployment and because we live in one of the most unequal societies in the world, we have an opposition that is building up.