Arundhati Roy: Govt an event management firm

The festival, recently concluded, was hosted by the Kolkata People’s Collective, and Roy was speaking at a session titled ‘The Assault on Meaning: The Challenges of Being a Writer Today’.

The present dispensation is an “event management company,” Arundhati Roy, well-known writer and activist, said at the 10th edition of Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF).

The festival, recently concluded, was hosted by the Kolkata People’s Collective, and she was speaking at a session titled ‘The Assault on Meaning: The Challenges of Being a Writer Today’.

Talking of Kashmir, she said, “If we think that none of what’s happening there is going to affect us, we are being completely ignorant. They say that what happens in Kashmir yesterday happens in India today. They are practicing the silencing and bulldozing of people…. This is also a kind of spectacle, right? I don’t think we have a government, we just have an event management company now, staging one event after another. Bulldozing is also an event… and here there’s an orchestra of complicit stakeholders,” she said.

When KPFF co-founder Kasturi Basu, who helmed the conversation, asked her about the consecration of the temple in Ayodhya, she said: “I think it is going to take all of us, including me, a little time to really know what has happened to us and what will happen to us and how we are to live in this new era. What happened on January 22 was also — like what is happening politically everywhere else — a centralisation of Hinduism… Obviously, it was the culmination of a political campaign which has not very much intrinsically to do with religion, but we cannot minimise, and we mustn’t minimise, the impact that it is having psychologically on people.”

On the conflict in Gaza, she said India should have been like South Africa, questioning the violence there, “Instead, we don’t even join them. In America, England and France, people are protesting despite the fact that their governments are pro-Israel. But here, morality has collapsed,” she said.

Academic circles are being attacked, and qualified scholars are being replaced by ideologues, “those with a loudspeaker for a brain,” she said. “The whole idea of students growing up without knowing what their history was, growing up without questioning or resistance is terrible.”

With only competing fake narratives, perpetrators of offences are claiming victim hood. “If the media—print, electronics and social media–had not been genuflecting before the government, it would not have lasted more than 10 minutes. But now there is a complete capture and dissemination of fake narratives,” she remarked.

The most bewildering conundrum of our times is that all over the world people seem to be voting to dis-empower themselves, she said. In her words: “But eventually, I believe that people cannot and will not be controlled. I believe that a new generation will rise in revolt. There will be a revolution. Sorry, let me rephrase that. There will be revolutions. Plural.”

Arundhati also quoted from a 2020 talk she had given at Trinity College, Cambridge:

Unseeing caste

The politics of Hindu majoritarianism and the persecution of minorities is also intricately intertwined with the question of caste... Yet so many celebrated writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists and filmmakers collectively produce a formidable body of work on India — work that either turns caste into a footnote or completely eludes the issue. I would call that fake history, The great Project of Unseeing.

The ‘great slide’

The state machinery has been captured...... all gubernatorial wings have been compromised. The opposition is also not what we think it is. There’s no ground to believe that electoral victory is going to save us.”

On social media

AI wraps us like a warm blanket to usher us into a space in which we are comfortable. It is further impossible in this world to have debates because there are
no set of agreed upon facts, there are only competing fake narratives. So, he who conquers and owns technology controls the narrative.

Silencing of journalists

The most number of journalists killed has been in Gaza. It is for a reason. Real journalists are the most endangered species on the earth — the better you are, the worse are the consequences.