India on verge of totalitarianism, Arundhati Roy cites signs of fascism

Hyderabad: Writer and activist Arundhati Roy said the country is in a situation where all state institutions are being conflated with a political party, showing signs of it turning into a totalitarian.

Speaking at a function organised in the memory of Human Rights Activist Balagopal in Hyderabad, she said the trend in the country where all institutions irrespective of their constitutional, and social commitments are working together for a political party clearly shows signs of fascism.

"We are at the stage where the state and its institutions themselves have conflated with the political party. There is no separation between the party, the state and its institutions. Whether it is the media, whether it is the courts, whether it is educational institutions, all of them function as one thing. It is fused together into a single organism and that is fascism," Roy said.

She said that by crying for the total removal of the Congress party from the political arena, the BJP wants to build a totalitarian government where no opposition remains to take on them.

"When you have a Prime Minister who openly campaigns saying thefascismfascismy want a Congress-mukt bharat, which is the only other national party, you are saying that you want an Opposition-mukt bharat. You are not willing to tolerate any form of opposition," she said.

India which accommodates different languages, cultures, religions, ethnicities and castes is more like a continent than a country where everyone is a minority, now is being moulded into an imaginary majoritarian country by violence, she said.

"We are a country of minorities, there isn't actually any majority. And all the violence that we are seeing today of Hindutva, fascism, is an attempt to create an artificial majority, which actually does not exist. They are trying to create it and it isn't new. It started long ago when the representative government began to replace imperial power," Roy said.

Referring to the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's concern over the population on the basis of religion, Roy said the RSS was not well concerned about the conversions of millions of caste people into Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism and Christianity after being endured the oppression of upper caste Hindu back the British ruled the country.

"Until then it did not matter to them that millions of people oppressed by the Hindu caste system were converting to Islam, to Sikhism, to Christianity. It didn't matter that caste followed them into those religions. These conversions didn't matter to them then because the numbers didn't matter. Then it was alright to be an exclusive Brahmanical society where very few people control everything," she said.

"Then began the idea of this political religion. Then began the anxiety of conversions. Then began the meetings of Jat Pat Todak Mandal and Arya Samaj especially to woo the millions of Dalits back into the 'Hindu' fold. This was the beginning of modern fascism," Roy added.