As a novelist, Arundhati Roy warned us about the power of the police to enforce the injustice of mobs. Her best-selling 1997 novel, The God of Small Things tells of the love story between Ammu, a single mother who has fled her abusive husband to return to her wealthy family’s estate, and Velutha, an Untouchable servant.
At its climax – and yes, this is a spoiler – the affair is exposed, Velutha is blamed for the unrelated death of a female cousin, and he is beaten to death by the police, his death covered up by the chief of police and the family’s demonic aunt, who has incited the town against him.
Now the mob has come for Arundhati Roy in real life, backed up by the police. Perhaps she was always too vocal about India’s injustices. In more recent years, she has become a particular critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose cartoonish brand of Hindu-nationalist demagoguery could have come right from the pages of one of her sardonic novels.
Last week, permission was granted by Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor to try Roy for speech crimes under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. This is a 1967 law, updated by Modi in 2019, which is termed “UAPA” in shorthand, “the anti-terror law” by Modi supporters, and “repressive”, “authoritarian” and “draconian” in the press releases of international human rights organisations.
Suspects arrested under UAPA are rarely offered bail, and often face years in jail without trial. Consider the case of Gulfisha Fatima, who has been held without trial since April 2020. Modi’s government accuses her of taking part in “anti-Hindu” riots; her supporters say that she merely protested against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslims from a new pathway to citizenship. But without a fair or open trial, nothing has been proved against her.
Other Muslim protesters arrested with Fatima have been reportedly denied access to essentials like spectacles and medical aid. The overwhelming majority of people known to have died in these “anti-Hindu” riots were Muslims, following clashes with the police.
Roy’s own arrest has been long predicted by Indian human rights watchers. She has regularly spoken out against Modi’s attempt to exclude dissident voices from India’s history and culture, notably leading the criticism of Penguin India’s decision to cave to Hindu nationalist forces (known as Hindutva) and to pulp a book by the decorated US cultural historian Wendy Doniger. (Doniger’s crime was, as the academic Pratap Kumar puts it, to attempt “a dispassionate secular critique” of the origin of Hindu mythology.)
Yet Roy’s opponents have had to reach back to 2010 to find a legal excuse to target her. This week’s charges refer to a speech she gave at a literary seminar in October of that year, when she expressed her opinion that “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India”. The subject of Kashmir was then particularly fraught; at least 100 demonstrators had been killed in the region in protests following the death of Tufail Ahmad Mattoo, a Muslim teenager killed at a previous demonstration. A Kashmiri university professor named Sheikh Showkat Hussain, who spoke at the seminar alongside Roy, has been charged with her.
Last October, charges were brought against Roy under a range of sections of the Indian Penal Code, which are considered less open to abuse than the UAPA, and carry less extreme sentences. The decision to up the stakes this week, charging her under a more wide-reaching and controversial law, is understood to be a signal that Modi has no intention of letting the recent loss of his parliamentary majority soften his approach towards dissent. This should worry all of us.
What should worry us even more, as readers of an British newspaper, is our own impotence as we observe yet another clampdown on freedom of expression. We are reduced to watching another step in the erosion of values once held to be universal, in a nation so populous that governments across the world depend on it as a trading partner. As elected autocrats arrest dissident after dissident around the world – and are given political cover by a former US president who regularly says he’d like to do the same – is there anything the liberal international community can do?
We know how British reprimands are received by Modi’s India: as imperialistic and interfering, hangovers from a colonialist past. And we do wrong to be insensitive to this. Arundhati Roy’s comments on Kashmir are, to most of us, clearly an act of speech which should be protected; nonetheless, those of us wading in to criticise her treatment should at least recognise that when it comes to the definition of a nation, speech acts have the power to shape reality. When SNP politicians try to persuade voters that Scotland is in heart a separate nation, we in England let them get on with it – but we don’t pretend their words are consequence-free. When we are advocates for freedom of expression abroad, we should be clear about the difference between supporting the rights of thinkers like Arundhati Roy to criticise their governments, and endorsing the substance of her politics.
What we know, however, is that we have little influence over Modi’s government. And if Britain’s economy continues to shrink, the political capital our leaders are able to spend on human rights issues will shrink with it. Our soft power remains, as long as English remains the world’s dominant language – and as long as writers such as Arundhati Roy write in English, there is a community of English language authors who can and should stand with her.
But if there is any Western challenge to Narenda Modi’s assaults on freedom of expression, it must come from America. Whether America’s leadership prefers to confront or rather to mimic Modi’s approach will depend on their own election, in November.