Interview with Arundhati Roy |Â We have to endure
What Can You Do, Except Congratulate the Fascists?
A handsome complete edition of Arundhati Roy's polemical essays, pointedly titled My Seditious Heart, was released on June 11. In this exclusive interview, she tells Shougat Dasgupta that May's general election was a race up a steep rockface, in which only one of the contestants was equipped with professional climbing gear.
Given all that has come to pass in the 20 years since you wrote some of these essays, do you despair? Or do you have some fight and anger left?
In a sense it's immaterial whether I, personally, despair or not- or even whether there is fight and anger left in me or not. I am not the point. The question is whether we-all of us, collectively-feel things are going well or not. Do we feel that we live in a real democracy in which peoples' rights are protected regardless of what caste, class, religion or ethnicity they belong to? If not, is justice at least an ideal? Are we moving in that direction? Are we making the right decisions with regard to the environment? The rivers? The forests? The wildlife? Have the great dams we've built delivered what they promised they would? Are the institutions in our country-the courts, the schools and universities, the hospitals and clinics, the banks-working for the good of our people? Are they within reach of the poorest of the poor? How
