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| Tuesday, 18 May 2004 |
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Arundhati Roy warns Sonia the campaign against her is not over Novelist Arundhati Roy rejoices that Sonia Gandhi, who "doesn't play the princess," humbled the men who berated her and warns she will face a "blatant game" from a corporate world unmoved by the electoral verdict of India's poor. Roy said she had been "exhaling slowly" since Gandhi triumphed over all polls and a smear campaign by the ruling Hindu nationalists to become the frontrunner as India's prime minister heading a left-of-centre coalition. "I'm always very happy with people who are slightly unsure of themselves. She has taken so many risks, and yet she's so unsure of herself and careful," Roy told AFP. "She doesn't play the princess." But Roy, a leading activist and the only non-expatriate Indian to win the Booker Prize, warned that Gandhi had a tough road ahead against an establishment which the novelist believes firmly sided with the right-wing. Roy noted that much of the media attention since Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's shock defeat had focused on the wild fluctuations of the Sensex, the benchmark index of the Bombay Stock Exchange. "It's almost like a set-up," Roy said. "It's as though you're mocking the electorate and bludgeoning this government by saying, 'Are you aware that the Sensex has fallen? Are you going to pull back on reforms?' So they're forced to say no." "It's a blatant game. If you look at the television coverage, I keep on seeing them calling people from the stock market. But I haven't seen one farmer asked, 'Why did you vote for this government?' "The kind of inequality between rural and urban areas was higher than it has been in the past 50 years or more, and obviously it was a vote to change those economic policies which the corporate world including the corporate media simply doesn't want to see," Roy said. "There's something as a writer and a novelist that one likes about this narrative," Roy said. "You have bloodthirsty people like (far-right Shiv Sena leader) Bal Thackeray and Modi and had on the opposite end a person who was just the antithesis of everything. And yet even still, people preferred that to them. "I must say perversely I even like the idea that having run this absolutely venal campaign against her personally as a 'foreigner', people ignored it. "Especially coming from this country and from Gujarat - Gujaratis in England are fighting to be called English, all over the world Indians are demanding citizenship. So how can you behave in such a jingoistic manner here?" Meanwhile Roy, hopes the new left-leaning government puts on trial the Hindu nationalist leader of Gujarat state who is accused of abetting bloody anti-Muslim riots. Human rights groups accuse Modi's administration of doing little - and at times actively encouraging - vigilante violence that killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, in his state in 2002. "From the chief minister downwards they must be tried, and it must be made public. That would do an immense amount of good to the public psyche. It would be just the most wonderful thing," Roy told AFP. |
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