NEW DELHI, May 17: Novelist Arundhati Roy rejoices that Sonia Gandhi, who "doesn't play the princess", humbled the men who berated her and warns she will face a "blatant game" from a corporate world unmoved by the electoral verdict of India's poor.

Ms Roy said she had been "exhaling slowly" since Sonia Gandhi triumphed over all polls and a smear campaign by the Bharatiya Janata Party to stake a claim to India's premiership.

"I'm always very happy with people who are slightly unsure of themselves. She (Sonia) has taken so many risks, and yet she's so unsure of herself and careful," Mr Roy said. "She doesn't play the princess."

But Arundhati Roy, a leading activist and the only non-expatriate Indian to win the Booker Prize, warned that Sonia Gandhi had a tough road ahead against an establishment that the novelist believes firmly sided with the right-wing.

Ms Roy noted that much of the media attention since Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's shock defeat had focused on the wild fluctuations of the Sensex, the benchmark index of the Mumbai Stock Exchange.

"It's almost like a set-up," she said. "It's as though you're mocking the electorate and bludgeoning this government by saying, 'Are you aware that the Sensex has fallen? Are you going to pull back on reforms?' So they're forced to say no."

"It's a blatant game. If you look at the television coverage, I keep on seeing them calling people from the stock market. But I haven't seen one farmer asked, 'Why did you vote for this government?'

"The kind of inequality between rural and urban areas was higher than it has been in the past 50 years or more, and obviously it was a vote to change those economic policies which the corporate world including the corporate media simply doesn't want to see," Ms Roy said.

Sonia Gandhi has travelled 60,000kms in a bid to prove wrong the BJP-led government's slogan that India was "shining". Awkward with the media and speaking in still stilted Hindi, she endured ferocious personal insults during the campaign by right-wing firebrands such as Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who questioned how a foreigner by birth could understand India.

"There's something as a writer and a novelist that one likes about this narrative," Ms Roy said. "You have bloodthirsty people like (far-right Shiv Sena leader) Bal Thackeray and Modi and had on the opposite end a person who was just the antithesis of everything. And yet even still, people preferred that to them.

"I must say perversely I even like the idea that having run this absolutely venal campaign against her personally as a 'foreigner', people ignored it. "Especially coming from this country and from Gujarat - Gujaratis in England are fighting to be called English, all over the world Indians are demanding citizenship. So how can you behave in such a jingoistic manner here?"

Ms Roy said she once considered Sonia Gandhi "God's gift to the BJP". "I used to think she was such a soft target, that in this whole climate of nationalism, Indianism and Hindutva, she was such an unlikely leader of the opposition. But just imagine, even being such a soft target it's come to this."

Ms Roy has been prolific in her criticism of past governments' policies, particularly their crackdowns on separatists in occupied Kashmir and north eastern India, their growing alignment with the United States and the 13-year push to leave the predominantly agriculture economy to market forces.

In a celebrated 1998 essay, Arundhati Roy described Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's decision to turn India into a nuclear power as "the end of the imagination". Reacting to Mr Vajpayee's fall, Ms Roy said the nuclear tests "were the beginning of the poison in the body politic".

"The whole business of Hindutva and nationalism, it all started there. We have to accept that the poison has been injected and it will take a lot to purge it," she said. She took heart in statements by Sonia Gandhi's leftist allies that they are not interested in privatizing profit-making state-run companies or essential infrastructure. -AFP

Modi's trial