AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, you said that you actually lived with these communities, these
resistance groups, in Delhi, outside your home.
You live in Delhi also.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you mean, spending days there, and also your times going to Kashmir.
ARUNDHATI ROY: You know, the thing is that Delhi is a place where all these groups from
all over India come, to Jantar Mantar, this place called Jantar Mantar, where, in the
past, they were allowed to stay there.
So, many people would be on hunger strike—the people from Bhopal, the people from the Narmada
Valley resisting the dam, people who are, you know, resisting displacement for some
mining project, just dreamers who are on fast for everybody and for the, you know, world
peace.
And a lot of these movements shelter, you know, people who are just idealists who have
kind of gone over the edge but who dream of a better world in the most charming and beautiful
ways.
And sometimes it’s—there’s a lot of violence.
The police will come and beat up people.
So, I—I mean, obviously, because I was, you know, closely involved with the anti-dam
movement and—I just would just go there, and I found it a very—you know, a place—though
it’s a place of resistance, it’s also a place of peace, where you think—you know,
people who are just not—who just don’t agree to allow things to roll on.
So, it was also a place where I felt at home and a place where I talked to a lot of people.
I mean, many of them are characters in the book—pamphleteers, you know, art installations,
whatever.
So—and, of course, Kashmir is—you know, the mothers of the disappeared in Kashmir
are also in the book and in that place.
And the baby appears actually right next to them, and so there’s this whole thing about
how the mothers of the disappeared don’t know what to do with a baby that has appeared,
you know?
And then, one of—Tilottama is a character who actually just picks up the baby and runs,
you know, because the police have come.
And Anjum wants her, the baby, and that’s how kind of it gets connected.
And Tilo has a long connection with Kashmir.
And the thing about Kashmir is that, yes, I’ve been going there for many years, and
my dearest friends are Kashmiri, actually.
And I realized long ago, when I started visiting it, that you cannot tell anything that remotely
resembles the truth about Kashmir in reportage, in human rights reports, in the documentation
of the dead or the torture or the atrocities, because it’s not just that.
You know, what do you do when a people have lived under the most—under the densest military
occupation in the world for 25 years?
What does it do to the air?
What does it do to the soldiers?
What does it do to the army?
What does it do to the collaborators?
What does it do to the intelligence people?
What does it do to people who don’t know when their children will come home?
Now you see schoolgirls throwing stones at the army.
You know, last year, they blinded people with pellet guns.
And, crucially, what does it do to Indians, who are not protected from this war?
They are fed these atrocities as—you know, with a soundtrack of applause, and we are
supposed to swallow this absolute cruelty and keep it in our stomachs, much as you are
expected to celebrate every time the U.S. government goes and destroys a country, you
know, and you’re all supposed to stand up and applaud.
But what does it do to us to hold that in our stomachs?
How do we—
AMY GOODMAN: For people—
ARUNDHATI ROY: How do—
AMY GOODMAN: For people who aren’t familiar with Kashmir, here in the United States, who
are watching or listening now or who will read this, explain.
Put that struggle in context, where it is and why it’s happening.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Kashmir was—at the time of independence, in 1947, Kashmir was
one—Jammu and Kashmir was one of the independent princely kingdoms, one of the 500-and-something
princely kingdoms, who were all required to decide whether they wanted to be with India
or Pakistan.
And Kashmir, of course, had a majority-Muslim population but a Hindu king.
And it’s called the "unfinished business of [partition]," because, you know, initially,
the king didn’t decide while partition and bloodshed was happening—also in Jammu, which
is part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
And then, eventually, he fled to India and signed a secession based on the fact that
there would be a referendum, which there never was.
And so it’s, as I said, called the unfinished business of Pakistan [sic], but—I mean,
of partition.
But so, India and Pakistan have been fighting over it, and it’s become a toxic situation,
a flashpoint.
The Indian Muslim population is, of course, held hostage to all the debates between India
and Pakistan in Kashmir.
And we’re talking about two nuclear powers.
So, you’re talking about a place with—proliferating with graveyards.
In the '90s, the struggle turned militant.
The army was fighting militants.
Now the population has turned militant.
Recently, the army general said that he wished the people who are throwing stones were actually
firing at them, so he could do what he liked with them.
Just last month, they tied a Kashmiri civilian to a tank, used him as a human shield, and
the officer who did that was rewarded, was honored, and many people in India applauded
it.
And that's by no means the worst thing that has happened there.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Kashmir and Kashmiri is just one of the languages—I mean, in
the literal sense—that appear in this novel.
You also cite a number of Urdu literary and poetic traditions and sources in the book—lyrics,
poetry, songs.
And what do you think the importance is to all of these references—Muslim, Dalit, Kashmiri—at
a time when India’s image often is projected as much more homogenous?
ARUNDHATI ROY: So, I mean, I have written about this in nonfiction a lot, but right
now what we are seeing is a very, very dangerous moment in India, because, since 1925, the
forces—the organizations that—I mean, mostly an organization called the RSS, to
which Modi belongs, to which many prime ministers and ministers belong, and which is really
the cultural guild that controls the political party, the BJP, has always said that it wants
India to be declared a Hindu nation, just as Pakistan is known as an Islamic republic.
But India’s constitution calls it a secular socialist republic.
So, right now, the people in power are almost in a position to be able to change the constitution.
History is being rewritten.
School textbooks are being rewritten.
People who believe that India should be a Hindu nation are being placed in all the institutions
of democracy in positions of power.
And as you know, every day you’re hearing stories about lynchings, about killings, about
vigilante groups.
So you have minority populations—and by minority, I’m still talking about millions
of people—being forced to live in terror, being pushed to the bottom of the food chain,
being unrepresented in the media, unrepresented in the judiciary, unrepresented in the bureaucracy,
unrepresented in any way, you know.
The moment of the big Dalit parties, like the BSP, led by Mayawati or Lalu or Mulayam
Singh Yadav, which seemed to be bringing some sort of representation, have also been pushed
out.
And the idea is, and always has been, to create this constituency called the Hindu constituency.
And now the difficulty is that if you’re going to celebrate the idea of the Hindu nation,
you’re turning what is pain into pleasure, when things like the demonetization happen,
when jobs are being lost, when people are being displaced, and you’re told you are
doing this for the Hindu nation.
So, all your pain is being turned into some kind of yearning, like some kind of religious
sacrifice, and all your anger is being directed downward to the most vulnerable communities.
And so, it’s a psychological muddle, you know, which analysis and numbers and figures
and facts don’t seem to help, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back.
Prime Minister Modi will be meeting with President Trump next Monday at the White House.
We want to ask you about that, also ask you about your trip to Russia to see Edward Snowden,
with John Cusack and the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and continue talking about
your great work.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy’s second fiction book.
Her first, The God of Small Things, she wrote 20 years ago.
For it, she won the Booker Prize.
It catapulted her into the, what, literary stratosphere.
This is Democracy Now!
We’ll be back in a minute.