“So, is there life after democracy?” -Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy starts her collection of essays ”Listening to the grasshoppers” with a remarkable and intriguing question that makes us stick with her way of thinking and look forward to startling revelations throughout the book. To her the democracy that’s been lauded as the largest democracy of the world, is a hoax, a sham. She draws reference in the earlier part of the book to the tagline in one of the posters of a Kashmiri protestant stating ‘Democracy without Justice = Demon-Crazy’, skilfully setting the tone for the detailed description of the ‘cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound and apply-through-proper-channels’ style of governance.
“Right now we’re sipping from a poisoned chalice- a flawed democracy laced with religious facism. Pure arsenic”
The raw description and writing by Roy is the blatant truth or at least her version of the truth of the failure of India’s democracy. She sounds the warning bugle of the rise of the so called Hindu nationalism that’s trying to cast Islam as our national enemy. The most important example that she puts forward to support her claims is the massacre of perhaps 2000 muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state government was allegedly complicit. She provides a shocking analysis of the riots of Gujarat and the fact of it being orchestrated by Hindu nationalist stalwart, Mr. Narendra Modi.
In three nifty articles, she cuts open all the questioning method the police had used in securing the conviction of Muhammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri resident and the mastermind of the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament.She describes the conviction to be a result of alleged evidence planting and torturing him to confession. She poses a set of arguments and even proof of police torture that makes us in turn question the version of the story we common Indians know and normally come across. She states that these incidents are all for creating confusion and direct the common mass belief towards the communal lines. But neither India's self-righteous judiciary nor its self-proclaimed daring journalists show much interest in reinvestigating his case.
She even narrates in her essays revolving around G.W. Bush’s India visit a political satire on how blind we are to the West influences and how the hypocrites of the West has taken over us , the developing nations.
Ms. Roy states the involvement of judiciary in our lives, how they now not only uphold the law but micromanage our lives. But the failure of the judiciary system to provide the much needed justice has left us with little option of but almost accepting the Indian Judiciaries as divine beings.
“India needs Azadi from Kashmir just as much- if not more – than Kashmir needs Azadi from India.” She makes a controversial yet humane stance in the issue of the uprising in Kashmir against the military oppression and the practices followed there. She rightly questions the large sums of money that’s been spent on the military occupation of Kashmir, which could have successfully and effectively spent on the betterment of the impoverished community. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will in the end have its consequences of which India is not thinking about.
In her belief, what the world is facing is the after effect of its past wrong doings and before planning to curtail these after effects the world needs to look into the mirror and understand the monster within.