Controversial novelist Arundhati Roy launched an attack on India on Tuesday, September 12, at the 45th Prix Européen de l’Essai, which was hosted in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her usual Anti Bharat campaign.
At the presentation, Roy, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award, took advantage of the occasion to spread misinformation about India and its democracy. She asserted right from the start that her books had shown how India had somehow slipped into “majoritarianism and then full-blown fascism.”
She stated, “Elections are a season of murder, lynching, and dog-whistling – the most dangerous time for India’s minorities, Muslims and Christians in particular,” accusing the BJP of spreading “Hindu supremacy.”
Arundhati Roy made a valiant effort to portray her “figment of imagination” and her warped view of India—which was a product of her far-left politics—as absolute fact. She asserted that “evil” has somehow become commonplace in public places like classrooms and streets.
The disputed “author” charged that the Modi administration was undermining the principles of the Indian Constitution and that the media were supporting “fascist majoritarianism.” She boldly declared, “It is extremely conceivable that we will see a new Constitution if the current dictatorship wins a majority in 2024.
Arundhati Roy also questioned the integrity of the Indian Supreme Court, labelling it as “weak” and “undermined,” and asserted that “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.”
She spreads myths about “delimitation” and makes secessionist inferences.
The controversial author made the untrue assertion that the government was engaging in “delimitation” to give more parliamentary seats to the “Hindi-speaking States” in the North compared to the Southern States to build a wedge between them.
She suggested that there might be secessionism (the dissolution and eventual separation of the Southern part of India from the Union of India): “This will cause great resentment in the southern states and has the potential to balkanize India.”
It must be noted that the 84th Amendment Act, passed in 2002 by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee administration, prevents delimitation till 2026. In accordance with the family planning initiatives implemented by the States and the National Population Policy strategy of the Centre, this was done to promote population stabilisation.
As a result, despite the country’s overall population growth, delimitation has been halted for more than 24 years. The number of electoral districts for the Lok Sabha elections in 2024 won’t grow.
It is not a political manoeuvre by the current government to enrich itself, as Roy suggests; the decision was made back in 2002. She also falsely equated ‘delimitation’ with ‘gerrymandering,’ an undemocratic redistricting technique utilised in the US by politicians to their electoral advantage.
Disputed author complains over being called a “traitor” and “anti-national.”
When Arundhati Roy began spreading misinformation about India in 1998 (which was 25 years ago), she stated that she was “mocked” and “criticised.” She now believes that her propaganda-filled essays will continue to exist and spread the same idea to future generations.
“…A Hindu nationalist administration led by the BJP came to power in 1998. It started by carrying out several nuclear tests. She regretted that the majority of individuals, including writers, artists, and journalists, spoke to them in a fiery, chauvinistic nationalism. The self-described “fairy princess of the literary world” stated that after writing her article titled “The End of Imagination” in Frontline and Outlook, she was labelled a “traitor” and an “anti-national.”
“I took those slurs as awards, just as esteemed as the Booker Prize. It started me on a protracted writing adventure that included topics like dams, rivers, displacement, caste, mining, and civil war. This journey enhanced my understanding and intertwined my fiction and nonfiction in ways that made it impossible to separate them, she said.
It makes sense that Arundhati Roy received advice from those close to her to avoid spreading misinformation against India. But the obstinate “caste baiter” inside of her persisted. She said that she had received strict instructions on how to write, what topics to write about, and how to convey her feelings.
Arundhati Roy praises the BBC’s PM Modi programme while promoting unfounded assertions.
The controversial “author” supported the BBC Narendra Modi documentary, which sought to defend the Islamists who set fire to the Sabarmati Express and killed 59 Hindus (including 29 women and 10 children) as a result.
She stated, “The BBC broadcast a two-part documentary called India: The Modi Question…The BBC film implicates Modi in the abetment of mass murder…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 accountable for the burning of a railway coach in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned alive.
Arundhati Roy attempted to imply that Muslims were ‘wrongly blamed’ for the Godhra atrocity, much like the BBC. In actuality, the Sabarmati Express fire was started by 31 Islamists, who were found to be responsible. On March 1, 2011, a special fast-track court sentenced 11 of them to death.
Abdul Razzak Kurkur, Ismail Suleja, Ramzani Binyamin Behra, Mehboob Hassan, Siraj Bala, Irfan Kalandar, Irfan Patadia, Hassan Lalu, Mehboob Chanda, and Salim Zarda are few of their names. But in October 2017, their death sentence was changed to a life sentence.
Twenty of those found guilty received life sentences. Suleman Ahmad Hussain, Abdul Rehman Abdul Majid Dhantiya, Kasim Abdul Sattar, Irfan Siraj Pado Ghanchi, Anwar Mohmmad Mehda, Siddik, Mehboob Yakub Mitha, Soheb Yusuf Ahmed Kalandar, Saukat, Siddik Mohmmad Mora, Abdul Sattar Ibrahim Gaddi Asla, Abdul Rauf Abdul Majid Isa, Yun
The conviction of the 31 fanatics will continue to disprove all conspiracy ideas, despite attempts by the BBC and people like Arundhati Roy to minimise the Godhra train atrocity. However, the far-left “author” didn’t stop there and went on to say:
Only a few months before the massacre, Modi had been appointed the state’s chief minister, not elected. Not only is there murder in the movie, but there is also the 20-year journey some victims took through India’s complex judicial system in the hopes of finding justice and political accountability. It contains eyewitness accounts, including one from Imtiyaz Pathan who tragically lost ten family members in the “Gulbarg Society massacre” in which 60 people—including former MP Ehsan Jaffri—were killed by a mob and burned alive and dismembered. He was Modi’s political adversary and ran an election campaign against him. It was one of several horrifying killings that occurred in Gujarat during those few days.
The BBC documentary made public an internal report ordered by the British Foreign Office in April 2002 but never before made public. According to the fact-finding report, “at least 2,000” individuals had been killed. It said that trustworthy informants had told them that the police had been ordered to stand down and described the massacre as a pre-planned pogrom with “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.” The report placed full responsibility on Modi. He was denied a visa by the US following the pogrom in Gujarat. Modi won three elections in a row and served as Gujarat’s chief executive till 2014. After he was elected prime minister, the ban was lifted.
After the 2002 Godhra train disaster and the ensuing riots, some in the media and civil society painted then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the man “who orchestrated the riots,” but the same cabal persisted in spreading the same lies after the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team cleared him in 2012.
The clique started saying that Narendra Modi did not ‘do enough’ to stop the riots after realising their unsupported statements were not persuading people. Every time they are exposed as liars, propagandists utilise this time-honoured trick to reposition the goalposts. Arundhati Roy’s tale is hardly an exception.
OCCRP and Hindenburg Research :
Arundhati Roy also stirred up controversy over the Adani-Hindenburg Research report, which caused the market value of the Indian company to drop by more than $100 billion. She claimed that the Modi administration was practising “crony capitalism” and favoured Adani.
“The Hindenberg Report, a thorough exposé of startling malfeasance regarding India’s largest corporation—the Adani group—was issued by a small US company named Hindenburg Research, which specialises in activist short-selling.
According to the Hindenburg Report, the Adani Group engaged in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme” that artificially overvalued its key listed firms and increased the net wealth of its chairman by using offshore shell entities. The analysis claims that seven of Adani’s publicly traded companies are 85% or more overvalued. Adani and Modi have been friends for many years. After the Gujarat pogrom in 2002, their friendship was strengthened, she alleged.
The Adani Group denounced the Hindenburg Research research as a “malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations” when it was released on January 24, 2023. In a 413-page response that was later published, it explained how the US-based investment research firm had hoped to profit from its devastating findings.
The Indian conglomerate had then stated, “This is rife with conflict of interest and intended only to create a false market in securities to enable Hindenburg, an admitted short seller, to book massive financial gain through improper means at the expense of countless investors.”
Despite a significant increase in share price, Adani Enterprises is still trading below where it was before the release of the report. She also made mention of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) study, which was released on August 31, 2023 and was funded by George Soros.
“The Hindenburg Report accuses Adani of pulling off “the biggest fraud in business history.” The Hindenburg Report was further supported by pieces that were published on August 30 in the Financial Times and the Guardian based on damaging papers obtained by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project,” Roy stated.
Additionally, the propagandist claimed that Gautam Adani supported violent Hindu nationalism with funds from his company and assisted Narendra Modi in starting his political career. She claimed that Prime Minister Modi returned the favour by allegedly assisting him in increasing his wealth over the previous nine years.
According to Arundhati Roy, “Just as Adani stood by Modi in his hour of need, the Modi government has stood by Adani and has refused to answer a single question raised in Parliament by members of the opposition, even going so far as to expunge their speeches from the record of the parliament.”
Arundhati Roy demands foreign action against India, complains bitterly about the CAA, and demands that Article 370 be repealed. The controversial “author” complained bitterly during her speech at the 45th Prix Européen de l’Essai about how Western democracies had done nothing to stop India and its democratically elected government.
This was made clear when she stated:
“The leaders of Western democracies haven’t noticed any difference at all from all of this. After “warm and productive” conversations just days after the Hindenburg-BBC incident, Prime Minister Modi, President Joe Biden, and President Emmanuel Macron declared that India will be purchasing 470 Boeing and Airbus aircraft. According to Biden, the agreement would generate nearly one million new jobs for Americans. Rolls-Royce engines will be used to power the Airbus. The sky is the limit for the growing aerospace industry in the UK, according to PM Rishi Sunak.
Modi headed to the US on a state visit in July then to France to attend Bastille Day as the Chief Guest. Could you possibly believe that? Knowing full well that this would be turned into pure campaign gold for the 2024 general elections, in which Modi will run for a third term, Macron and Biden gushed over him most embarrassingly. There is nothing about the man they are embracing that they would not have known.
NGOs like Oxfam India and Amnesty International were raided by central Indian agencies for financial irregularities and violations of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) Rules, which angered Arundhati Roy.
They would have been aware of the persecution of opposition politicians, students, human rights activists, lawyers, and journalists—some of whom received lengthy prison terms—as well as the police and suspected Hindu nationalists’ attacks on universities, the revision of history textbooks, the outlawing of certain films, the closure of Amnesty International India, the BBC raid on its India offices, the placement of activists, journalists, and critics of the government on mysterious no-fly lists
The far-left ‘author’ also launched into a hysterical tirade against the Modi administration for repealing Article 370 and passing the Citizenship Amendment Act.
If we carefully examine the law [pdf], we can deduce that the CAA’s goal is to expedite the citizenship of religious minorities from the three bordering countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who entered India illegally before December 31, 2014.
The Muslim population is exempt from the rule because they are not considered minorities in the aforementioned nations. This law neither stops noncitizens from requesting citizenship nor revokes citizenship from any person. As a result, it in no way represents discrimination.
“They would have been aware of the situation in Kashmir, where journalists face harassment, detention, and interrogation, and where there has been a communication blackout for months starting in 2019 which is the longest internet shutdown in a democracy. Nobody should have to live like they do in the 21st century, with a boot on their throat. They would have been aware of the flagrantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act that was passed in 2019, the widespread protests it sparked, and the fact that those protests didn’t end until after dozens of Muslims were murdered by Hindu mobs in Delhi the following year (which, incidentally, occurred while President Donald Trump was in town on a state visit and about which he said nothing),” she said.
Arundhati Roy highlighted that the foreign powers should isolate India and meddle in its domestic issues.
“Yet, the world’s superpowers continue to support Modi by providing him with all the oxygen he needs to burn away India’s social structure. This seems like a sort of racism to me. Although they identify as Democrats, they are racists. They don’t think the “values” they claim to uphold should apply to non-white nations. It’s a well-known tale, of course. It is irrelevant. We’ll fight our struggle, and in the end, we’ll take back our nation. They must be seriously delusional, though, if they think that the collapse of democracy in India won’t have an impact on the entire world.
False information regarding the Nuh riots and a widely shared video of corporal punishment
Even though Gaurakshak Monu Manesar was not even in Nuh when Islamists allegedly committed mayhem on the streets in his name, the propaganda artist blamed “a hugely popular Hindu vigilante” for the Islamist carnage in the Nuh district (Mewat area).
Roy also cleverly downplayed the five persons who were killed, the majority of whom were Hindus, and portrayed Islamists as the victims who had to protect themselves. She stated, “The town of Nuh is adjacent to Gurgaon, which is home to several large international firms. Swords and machine guns were carried by the marching Hindus. The Muslims stood their ground. Violence marked the march’s unfortunate conclusion.
Her whole emphasis was the execution of an Islamic cleric as a kind of counter-violence, which did not even occur in Nuh but rather in distant Gurugram. Additionally, she brazenly gave the iconic “corporal punishment video from Muzaffarnagar” a communal spin.
“I just finished watching a spooky little video that was shot in a classroom at a tiny school. The teacher orders the other kids, all Hindu guys, to approach the Muslim child one at a time and hit him. She chastises the people who didn’t strike him hard enough. The Muslim family has been pressured not to file charges thus far by the Hindus in the hamlet and the police. The Muslim boy’s school fees were reimbursed, and she said he had been expelled.
On August 24, 2023, the tragedy happened at the Neha Public School in Khubbapur village, Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh. The victim’s father firmly asserted that there was no religious or Hindu-Muslim component to the incident when it first came to light.
The police and the kid’s cousin Nadeem, who recorded the video, both denied that there was a community angle. This did not, however, prevent the leftist-Islamist ecosystem from repeating the lies and fomenting unrest within the community.
After her address, which was laced with propaganda, Arundhati Roy declared, “If Modi wins in 2024, all channels of criticism will be closed. We are preparing for greater violence, mass slaughter, false-flag assaults, pretend wars, and whatever to further polarise an already-polarized country. No one in this room may act as if they were unaware of what was happening.
We cannot forget, she is the same person holding hands with Yasin Malik.