Opinion | Arundhati Roy’s prosecution reveals Modi’s faltering power

Almost 14 years ago, in 2010, one of India’s most prominent writers — Arundhati Roy — spoke at a public conference in New Delhi. Her subject was the disputed territory of Kashmir and India’s increasingly brutal methods — torture, extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, imprisonment and the suspension of civil liberties — for keeping in check the restrictive population of the country’s only Muslim-majority state. Roy, along with four other activists, was forthright on what she saw as India’s appalling record in Kashmir, especially that year, when 118 Kashmiris had been killed by security forces in protests against the government.

For those familiar with Roy, her comments came as no surprise. The author of Booker Prize-winning “The God of Small Things” has long used her prominence to openly critique human rights violations in Kashmir and the Modi government’s policies. Nevertheless, a week after the event, a Kashmiri Hindu activist lodged a complaint with the Delhi police against Roy and other speakers at the conference.

The array of charges was extensive and fanciful, running from “challenging the territorial integrity of India” to “disturbing public peace” and “promoting enmity between social groups.” Similar cases were simultaneously filed against Roy in Chandigarh and Bangalore, and India’s rabidly nationalist media arrived outside her home to film the stone-throwing mob that had been shown up there.

Nothing further came of the complaint until last October, when VK Saxena, the lieutenant governor of Delhi, resurrected the charges and ordered government agencies to move forward with the case. Saxena again resurfaced on June 14 when his office leaked a note to the media declaring that he had asked for Roy to be charged under the Unlawful Activities and Prevention Act. This is the most draconian of India’s arsenal of anti-terror laws, a law so feral and contorted that it amounts to a kind of anti-law.

The clues lie in the timing. In October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were seeking reelection, hoping for a third term with an absolute majority of 400 seats. This month, they returned to power, but with only 240 seats, forced to rely on other political parties to form a government. The loss of more than 60 seats — despite the suppression of political opponents, completecontrol over the media and conveniently malfunctioning voting machines — has left the Hindu right in disarray.

Roy’s sudden prosecution appears to be a blatant show of force by a weakened BJP — which only reveals the party’s faltering attempt to cling to its power.

Over two consecutive terms, Modi has transformed India into a violently majoritarian state shoring up the ruins of a broken economy. Under his leadership, the Hindu right has lynched people; assassinated the writer Gauri Lankesh; disenfranchised more than 1 million Muslims in the northeastern state of Assam; stripped Kashmir of its notional autonomy; introduced a Nuremberg-style citizenship law targeting Muslims; and used the courts and police against activists and critics, who are made to languish in foul prisons for years on the basis of false evidence apparently planted on them by government agencies. In the case of the octogenarian Jesuit priest and activist Stan Swamy, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, the combination of false evidence and imprisonment resulted in his death.

This toxic majoritarianism has, in the past, worked wonders for the prime minister. But even in Ayodhya, where Modi inaugurated a garish temple to signal Hindu dominance earlier this year, the BJP candidate lost. Indian voters seem to have finally noticed that the BJP’s achievements have been limited to enriching a coterie of oligarchs even as employment opportunities, food security, public health and public infrastructure are run into the ground. India under the Hindu right appears, by some measures, more unequal than it was under British colonialism.

The announcement targeting Roy is clearly meant to rally the faltering spirits of Hindu nationalism and to bury any conversation about Modi’s failures under a manufactured narrative about anti-national writers. It is significant that neither Roy nor her lawyers has received any official document about the purported charges and that the vilification campaign is being conducted entirely on media.

These are old, tested tactics from the Hindu-right playbook, part of a long-standing and antidemocratic history of targeting critics and journalists alike.

The message is simple: The big man is unfazed, everything is under control and the hate machine rolls on. What is a writer, or an entire electorate, against such grandiose assertions? Yet if we have learned anything about India in recent weeks, it is that people have begun to realize that majoritarian hatred provides little sustenance for starved bodies and frustrated minds.