The Verbal Terrorist seems to be smitten with a new affliction lately. I wrote about it at some length. The malady can be reduced to a mantra, a chant: India is not a democracy (repeat 7639203410 times, rinse repeat it again for the same number of times… and so on). She chanted it as recently as last Thursday in support of a Commie comrade.
Writer Arundhati Roy on Thursday said democracy in India was “only for the rich and the elite.” She accused the Government of not lending an ear to mass movements in the country.
“The concept of Indian democracy is the biggest publicity scam of this century. Holding elections every five years does not necessarily mean that our country enjoys a democracy,” Ms. Roy said here.
Imprint those italicized lines deeply in your mind, gentle reader for she has, perhaps inadvertently, dropped the boulder on her own toes. In other words, she’s forgotten the proverb about people staying in glass houses and landed herself in a pretty mess.
The families of two of India’s best-known authors, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth, have been issued notices by a local Madhya Pradesh court for allegedly encroaching on a tribal’s land. Forest officials Nishikant Jadhav and JC Sharma are the other two parties in the case who have allegedly built cottages on land belonging to Vijay Singh Desh in Hoshangabad’s Pipariya district, 200 km from Bhopal.
I guess her definition of environment and tribal rights doesn’t include illegal encroachment of land notified as a sanctuary.
Acting on a complaint, the local tehsildar court in Pipariya on Friday issued notices to all four occupants and asked them to remove the encroachments by July 7.
According to the complaint, all four are said to have built their cottages on Desh’s land despite his objection.
Later, they also got a road constructed on another portion of the land with the result that the tribal was left with only that bit on which his house was standing.
“First, they constructed their houses on my land and then the road. When we pointed out that the place they were using for constructing their house and road was ours, they didn’t pay any attention because we are poor people,” said Vijay Singh’s wife Sukhdevi.
Again, embed the italicized words in your mind, gentle reader.
Roy & co have done the precise thing they protest so vociferously against. I guess the Verbal Terrorist takes up cudgels only if the government buys land–mind you, after compensating the owners–from the “poor.” However, it’s okay if she steals land from the selfsame poor she claims to represent, in whose name she has milked zillions of dollars from the blind-and-deaf West. Shouldn’t she at least shut up, or at the least think, before uttering crap like “democracy is for the rich” given how her mask has been stripped off time and again? If there’s substance in “democracy is for the rich,” then Arundhati Roy eminently qualifies.
Poverty is definitely rewarding.
Tags: Commentary, Indian Politics, International Politics, Pseudo Secularism Hall of Shame, Society & Culture, War on Communism
On 06.28.06 Alka says:
Kya Sandeep, kahan uske peeche panne kale karte rahte ho. She doesn’t have mass fallowing. And where she is invited to attend lecture, people’s vision are already coloured.She is the biggest coward. I remember reading in India Today, when India had gone for nuclear explosion during Bajpai’s reign. As usual she was crying peace!peace!peace. She was invited at Channel V function. She took the stage. And probably thought that this hip hop crowd would worship her. They booed her asking, “Where is peace?” Ultimately Cyrus or Rakhshanda Khan took the mike and came to her rescue, she was so toungue tied.
On 06.28.06 Sandeep says:
alka,
Thanks for that wake-up call. But I persist because there’re plenty who’re smitten with her writing.
And I didn’t know about that Channel V fiasco. Thanks, LOL
On 06.29.06 Shushub says:
Dotty Arundhati - A peace prize winner makes war on America : TUNKU VARADARAJAN
“But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He’s the American president’s dark doppelganger. . . . He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy . . . [and] its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.” –Arundhati Roy, Sept. 29, 2001
When a friend learned that I was pondering a piece critical of Ms. Roy–the Indian author of “The God of Small Things” and, subsequently, of numerous pamphlets whose leftist politics is so utterly devoid of nuance that they make Eric Alterman’s columns read like David Brooks’s–he e-mailed me reprovingly to ask whether that would not be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But second thoughts can strike at the speed of light. No sooner had he hit the “send” button than he hit it again: “There are certain fish, however, in certain barrels, that cannot be ignored.” Ms. Roy has just been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Of course, that is not a big deal except in Sydney–and maybe, more broadly, in liberal Australian circles. And the $50,000 she received (Aussie not Yankee) is chump change so far as prizes of this sort go, slightly less than $40,000 in U.S. currency. Besides, she isn’t keeping the money but donating it to aboriginal survivors of the Australian Genocide. The reason I thrust Ms. Roy before you is not to dwell on a picayune peace prize but to draw your attention to remarks she made on television while she was in Australia, a country whose soldiers are fighting–and dying–in Iraq. Ms. Roy made an appeal to people to “become the Iraqi resistance,” adding that activists “need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance.” Now it cannot have escaped Ms. Roy’s attention that the “resistance” of which she speaks–and which she exhorts the world to “become”–kills innocent Iraqis daily, by bomb, by gun and by cutlass. Beheading people–Iraqi and Western, Muslim and infidel–is the macabre signature of this “resistance.” Yet she persists in her refusal to condemn their evil and attacks, instead, the very side that allows her to flourish, to opine, to Be Important. A certain segment of the American intelligentsia connects gleefully with exotic leftists like Ms. Roy. In fact, the Ms. Roys of our age, and their fans and subsidy-givers in the West, enjoy a touching symbiosis. Arundhati Roy, I’d venture to say, is George Soros’s political poster girl. The real epicenter of outrage for Ms. Roy lies not in Iraq but in Washington. The whole world is a stage for a morality play that casts the U.S., and all who support it, as diabolical. Ms. Roy and her type pay the ultimate compliment to America by holding that all world events occur at America’s behest and that the six billion non-Americans on the planet are but helpless pawns, incapable of doing anything–especially anything bad–without Uncle Sam’s imprimatur. Accepting her Sydney prize, Ms Roy frothed up like a cappuccino laced with arsenic: “As the battle to control the world’s resources intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback. Iraq is the logical culmination of the process of corporate globalization in which neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism have fused. If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions taking place backstage.” This is sophistry masquerading as protest, rage unhinged from fact. In her mind there is no history in Iraq, no Saddam, no context; there’s just one more chapter of America doing down brown people. Third-Worldism, preachy nonalignment: They had both become so outdated. But American action abroad–in Iraq, in Afghanistan–has, alas, given Ms. Roy and her kind the chance to dust off the discarded manuals. What a joy for her–the old verities again! Never mind that the present battle is against those who would extinguish everything she values, and extinguish her own country–India–to boot. The system Ms. Roy deplores has furnished her with a cordon of comfort: freedom of speech, and respect for women’s views (not, by the way, Osama’s strongest suit). Hers is a kind of infantile rebellion against the structure that houses her. Ms. Roy’s celebrated book, her lavish claim to fame, told us of “small things.” Now one marvels only at the smallness of her mind–and wishes, prays, that she would grow up. Just a teeny bit.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. .
On 06.29.06 Shushub says:
Dotty Arundhati - A peace prize winner makes war on America : TUNKU VARADARAJAN
“But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He’s the American president’s dark doppelganger. . . . He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy . . . [and] its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.” –Arundhati Roy, Sept. 29, 2001
…………. Never mind that the present battle is against those who would extinguish everything she values, and extinguish her own country–India–to boot. The system Ms. Roy deplores has furnished her with a cordon of comfort: freedom of speech, and respect for women’s views (not, by the way, Osama’s strongest suit). Hers is a kind of infantile rebellion against the structure that houses her. Ms. Roy’s celebrated book, her lavish claim to fame, told us of “small things.” Now one marvels only at the smallness of her mind–and wishes, prays, that she would grow up. Just a teeny bit.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of WSJ .
On 06.29.06 Shushub says:
Dotty Arundhati - A peace prize winner makes war on America TUNKU VARADARAJAN
………….. The system Ms. Roy deplores has furnished her with a cordon of comfort: freedom of speech, and respect for women’s views (not, by the way, Osama’s strongest suit). Hers is a kind of infantile rebellion against the structure that houses her. Ms. Roy’s celebrated book, her lavish claim to fame, told us of “small things.” Now one marvels only at the smallness of her mind–and wishes, prays, that she would grow up. Just a teeny bit.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of WSJ .
On 07.07.06 interim thoughts... says:
a hundred odd years of British occupation. There are also a bunch of beyond-expiry-date politicians who are trying their best to turn the clock back. We also have leftists, corruption, communists and terrorists (verbal and others) who are trying their best in their own way to see to it that India remains retarded, ignorant and illiterate. Progress is about where you look. In India you can see the gutter as much as you can see telephone towers. If you chose to see