Arundhati Roy was discovered by the world as a novelist of great sensitivity and skill after her work of fiction, The God of Small Things, won the Booker prize. Then she turned inward with her non-fiction and began puncturing ‘official India’ with her scalpel of a pen. What inflicted the most intense pain among Indians who live by the textbook was when she began questioning India’s occupation of Kashmir and brutalisation of the Kashmiri people. After a scathing piece on Kashmir, she had to say the following:

“I wasn’t arrested that night. Instead, in what is becoming a common political strategy, officials outsourced their displeasure to the mob. A few days after I returned home, the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu nationalist opposition) staged a demonstration outside my house, calling for my arrest. Television vans arrived in advance to broadcast the event live. The murderous Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group that, in 2002, spearheaded attacks against Muslims in Gujarat in which more than a thousand people were killed, have announced that they are going to ‘fix’ me with all the means at their disposal”.

People like Roy are antidotes to the poison that nationalism spreads in a nation, creating a lethal organism that will ultimately die of its own internal pathologies. She evokes scorn from the religious right in India because she questions their will to regional dominance, and from the free- marketers who think her left-leaning politics is obstructive.

In Broken Republic, a collection of three essays, Roy offers a variant point of view of the Maoist uprising in India. In 2006 Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, called this insurgency the country’s “biggest internal security threat”. At the time, his words seemed shocking. But the Maoists, known as Naxalites, after the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal where the movement started four decades ago, have since expanded their reach. They are now active in 22 of India’s 28 states, up from nine in 2004. They have the run of a “red corridor” through much of the eastern and central part of the country. They speak of surrounding the cities and someday overthrowing the government in Delhi.

Maoists are not like Al Qaeda, and Pakistanis should abstain from triumphalism over the uprising in India.

Roy explains who the Maoists are and what their political stance is: “They are members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by an equitable Indian State. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, more than a million people attended their rally in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh)”.

Roy speaks for the poor of India who don’t stand a chance in the trickle-down capitalist model India has adopted. So she talks about “trickle-down revolution” as the opposing force. She knows that the ragged, malnutritioned army of the Maoists, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, is fighting only for survival.

In 2008 an expert group appointed by the Indian Planning Commission submitted a report called Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas. It said: “The Naxalite Maoist movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis (natives). Its emergence and growth needs to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions”. So Roy is not alone in her thinking; but her stance is opposed by overwhelming corporate interests and the newly discovered free market model in India favouring only the middle class with high growth rates.

Roy claims that mining companies are supported by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Nothing has been done for the 50 million people who have been so far displaced by ‘development’ projects.

She writes: “When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency at midnight on 25 June 1975, she did it to crush a revolution. As grim as they were, those were days when people still allowed themselves to dream of bettering their lot, to dream of justice. The Naxalite uprising in Bengal had been more or less decimated. But ten millions of people rallied to Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for ‘Sampoorna Kranti’ (Total Revolution). At the heart of all the unrest was the demand for land to the tiller. (Even back then it was no different: you needed a revolution to implement land redistribution, which is one of the directive principles of the Constitution”.

The reviewer is a political analyst

Broken Republic: Three Essays (POLITICS) By Arundhati Roy Ushba Publishing International, Karachi ISBN 978-969-9154-21-8 220pp. Rs1,000