Arundhati Roy has returned her national award. Clearly, the Modi government is doing something right.
Many small fish returned their national awards recently. We weren’t aware of their existence before they chose to insult the country. Their hypocrisy which was for all to see, at least brought them some publicity which their degrading literature never did. Many now believe the phonies did this at the behest of their political masters, in order to enhance the illusion of intolerance ahead of the Bihar elections. Unfortunately for them, only the ignorant or pervert sections of the urban elite played along. The rest bore witness to their double standards and parasitical tendencies. Arundhati Roy is the epitome of mainstream double standards. She is a mascot of what is wrong with the hypocritical Indian liberal.
Unlike some of her award-returning peers who are closet Naxal sympathizers, Roy has no qualms or secrecy about her love for the forest dwelling gun wielders. One might think such candor is admirable, but this is where several shades of hypocrisy begin to emerge. In an article after 26/11, Arundhati Roy said NOTHING can justify terrorism (More on that article later). Terrorism is defined as the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. Naxalites kill our Jawans every now and then with the aim of overthrowing the Indian state, so let there be no doubt that they are outright terrorists. The Indian state that the Naxalites seek to overthrow is the same Indian state that gave Roy her National Award in 1989, which she accepted gladly. It is the same Indian state which under Manmohan Singh and his minister P. Chidambaram’s leadership butchered Naxalites in hundreds. One of two things happened back then: Either despite being the leading Naxalite voice in the mainstream she was too incompetent to stand up for her constituency. Or it was a friendly regime which fostered people like her and she couldn’t afford to return her award back then.
Roy’s pseudo-liberal stunts aren’t lost on anyone. For years she has been part of a mainstream which has embraced such hypocrisy, but which now finds itself dying a slow death. Most members of this mainstream have been subtle with their anti-national sympathies but not Arundhati Roy. Therefore it comes as no surprise that as bluffs are called one after the other, radical and outspoken double agents such as herself are the hardest hit. Perhaps Arundhati Roy ’s most anti-Indian stance is her open support for the Kashmiri separatists. Kashmir has been the biggest problem that the Indian state has dealt with for the last seventy years. That that part of the world is an integral part of India has been our uniform stance. The separatists in the valley are backed by the Pakistani military establishment and are a key factor in the disruption of peace. Yet, Arundhati Roy stands by them and blames India for the current situation. She has shared the stage with separatists, spoken against India and used her position in the mainstream to legitimize their agenda and justify their misdeeds. She has actively worked in weakening the same Indian state which awarded her and gave her a voice.
It is interesting to examine some of her stands on other issues as well. In the same article after the Mumbai attacks in which she says NOTHING can justify terrorism, she goes on to do exactly that. She says the attacks must be understood in the context of the partition of India, the Kashmir conflict and the 2002 Gujarat riots. We observe that back in 2008 already, the so-called intellectual class had started this mind-numbingly stupid practice of linking everything that went wrong to the then Gujarat chief minister. After the 2001 parliament attack, she called the arrested terrorist Afzal Guru a prisoner of war. She criticized India’s nuclear weaponisation and claimed Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign was corporate backed. She has been at the forefront of opposing several developmental projects. All of these are attention seeking stunts that go against national interest.
The mainstream has embraced a lot of hypocrisy but the tolerance for such a seditious personality is flabbergasting. How the government bestowed a national award on her in the first place, and more surprisingly how it was never retrieved despite her being an open enemy of the state, is unbelievable. For lack of a better explanation, it might have been because of her familial ties with the first families of NDTV and CPM. Whatever it might be, India as a country should be glad of the fact that a prestigious award is no longer in the hands of somebody committed in fragmenting the country. We should be glad about all the prestigious awards which have been returned for that matter. Some of us wish our country displayed some real intolerance towards the likes of Arundhati Roy. After all, apart from the latter being covert, what’s the difference between her and an ISI agent?