…The single line answer to why I do not like her is that Arundhati Roy is that she is a fundamentalist. And I have an aversion to fundamentalists. Of all forms.

…For one, fundamentalists like Ms. Roy are guided by a very rigid, unyielding ideology that becomes the prism through which they interpret all events. Anything that the prism does not illuminate is assumed not to exist.

The ideology of a fundamentalist is typically simple. Of course the fundamentalist, especially if he/she is also an intellectual, would like you to think that there are many subtle nuances and complications in his/her world view and it has been arrived after much deliberation, but that alas is all part of the game of delusion. The simplicity arises from a black-and-white identification of villains —-for the religious fundamentalist the villain is anyone who does not accept his God(s) as their savior(s). For Roy, the principal evil agents are the “oppressors”—— USA, UK, Israel ,India, and corporations (not specifically in that order) with her animus being directed specifically towards upper-class so-called “Brahminical” Hindus and the party that she thinks represents them—the BJP.

She does recognize other agents of malevolence like Islamic fundamentalists but their actions are implicitly justified as “reactions” to the depredations wrought by the oppressors. So the massacre at Mumbai is regrettable but is an inevitable result of “partition” (a legacy of the West–one of the “bad men” in her pantheon of villains), the oppression of minorities in Kashmir, Gujarat 2002 and supposed institutionalized prejudice against minorities in India. (things for which another of her “bad men” India can be blamed for)

In making this argument, she betrays another defining characteristic of the fundamentalist—–violence that damages the “evil men”/the “other” always has a justification, typically of the sort “The evil men through their evilness brought it upon themselves”.

A fundamentalist has tunnel vision in that he/she can only see the sins of those he/she hates. There is no concept of applying the same standards fairly to everyone. So while India is castigated ad nauseum as having suppressed and discriminated against its minorities , almost no attention is given to the far more egregious and unapologetic genocide of Hindus in neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh and in Kashmir (though if left to her, that would also be a neighboring country). If a few Hindus mirrored the crime of the Kasabs and sailed to Bangladesh to take “revenge” for the government-sanctioned rapes and murders of Hindus by killing innocents in Dhaka would Ms. Roy be so accepting of their motivations as she has been for the Pakistanis? Would she then just make a passing condemnation of Hindu fundamentalists and keep the lion’s share of her wrath for the government of Bangladesh for their treatment of Hindus?

…A fundamentalist finds sinister conspiracies everywhere. According to some, the Mumbai incidents were Zionist-Hindu plots to discredit Muslims. So was 9/11 except there the stupid Hindus were not part of the plan. According to another class of loony fundamentalists, there is a grand conspiracy to alter the demographics of India by Muslims with every member of the community working in perfect synchrony to attain this objective.

…Fundamentalists are typically hysterical. Not for them sober debate and reasoning. They like the sensationalism, the sweeping generalizations. A fundamentalist will never accept that their hysteria is an inevitable consequence of the fact that what they say often does not stand the test of reason. Which is why they have to take recourse to shrillness of tone and the thumping of chests to transfer the hysteria to the audience.

Ms. Roy, in the true fundamentalist tradition, is hysterical. And she is proud of it.

…And the final characteristic of the fundamentalist is that he/she will have two standards—one for the self and one for everyone else.

…Many of you would be wondering why are we devoting so much time to Arundhuti Roy, whose influence in India is marginal at best and non-existent at worst. The problem is that what she says does have an influence on the “foreign” audience because Ms. Roy, through clever marketing, has positioned herself as “India’s voice of dissent” helped no doubt by her undoubted ability to string together sentences into an entertaining paragraph, a quality that the Mullahs and the Saffron crazies sorely lack. [She currently is on the front page of Huffington Post]. While it may be argued that so extreme are her positions that much of her propaganda has marginal effect as she mostly “preaches to the choir”, some of her bluster does get into the international mainstream, gets quoted and then becomes part of “general knowledge” about India.

The battle for “international opinion” is a critical one in today’s world and Ms. Roy works long and hard to make sure that India is always on the wrong side of it. Hence the need to devote some time to deconstruct her methods if for nothing else but to provide a clean answer to the question “What do you find objectionable about Arundhati Roy” next time a good friend comes asking.

http://satyameva-jayate.org/