From: Blunderov (squooker@mweb.co.za)
Date: Wed May 19 2004 - 05:42:10 MDT
[Blunderov] I like this lady a lot.
Best Regards
http://www.timesofoman.com/newsdetails.asp?newsid=56832
<q>
Arundhati: Tough days ahead for Sonia
NEW DELHI - 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.
Arundhati said she had been "exhaling slowly" since Sonia triumphed over all
polls and a smear campaign by the ruling BJP 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," Arundhati said. "She doesn't play the princess."
But Arundhati, a leading activist and the only non-expatriate Indian to win
the Booker Prize, warned that Sonia had a tough road ahead against an
establishment which the novelist believes firmly sided with the right-wing.
Arundhati 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," Arundhati 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," Arundhati said.
Awkward with the media and speaking in still stilted Hindi, Sonia endured
ferocious personal insults during the campaign by right-wing firebrands such
as Gujarat state's leader Narendra Modi, who questioned how a foreigner by
birth could understand India. "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?"
Arundhati said she once considered Sonia "God's gift to the BJP", the
defeated Bharatiya Janata Party which rose to prominence on a platform of
Hindutva, or "Hinduness."
"I used to think she was such a soft target, that in this whole climate of
nationalism, Indianism and Hindutva, she was such an unlikely leader of the
opposition. But just imagine, even being such a soft target it's come to
this."
Arundhati has been prolific in her criticism of past governments' policies,
particularly their crackdowns on separatists in Kashmir and northeast India,
their growing alignment with the United States and the 13-year push to leave
the predominantly agriculture economy to market forces. In a celebrated 1998
essay, Arundhati described Vajpayee's decision to turn India into a nuclear
power as "the end of the imagination".
Reacting to Vajpayee's fall, Arundhati said the nuclear tests "were the
beginning of the poison in the body politic".
"The whole business of Hindutva and nationalism, it all started there. We
have to accept that the poison has been injected and it will take a lot to
purge it," she said.
Arundhati took heart in statements by Sonia's leftist allies that they are
not interested in privatising profit-making state-run companies or essential
infrastructure.
"To hear mainstream politicians saying that. A few years ago anyone who said
it would be derided and treated like they're from the nuthouse.
"On the whole, what has happened is very exciting and reason to celebrate,
but it's very important to know that it might just go up in smoke."
On the Gujarat riots "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," Arundhati said.
"And it must not be done in a cheap manner of political revenge. It must be
done properly," said Arundhati.
The Congress party in its election platform called for the "strictest
possible action" against anyone who encourages hatred.
"They (the new government) must set up a commission - and I don't mean that
in the tired governmental sense - and they have to be very clear to those
people who were involved in the killing and in the rape and in the burning
alive, in Godhra and the rest, that it's just not acceptable," Arundhati
said.</q>
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