One writer, fourth estate

In nonfiction turn, acclaimed novelist takes India to task for nuclear arsenal, civil rights, tribal policy

NEW DELHI -- In a new book, the award-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy takes aim at India's self-image -- and reputation -- as the world's largest and most vibrant democracy. Indian democracy, she asserts, is not only not working, it is "used up" and "hollowed out and emptied of meaning."

Such candor is guaranteed to upset the politicians, businessmen and ambitious professionals here who see India well on its way to becoming an economic and political powerhouse, commanding global respect. But the petite 48-year-old writer with the thin, childlike voice makes it her business these days to say things that upset people.

"My political writing is about absorbing all the anger at what is going on and giving it an expression," she said in a recent interview about the book, a collection of essays titled "Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers."

It is about "shattering the show window," she said.

In 1997, Roy won Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, for her semiautobiographical, politically freighted novel "The God of Small Things." Since then, however, Roy -- who trained as an architect, has written screenplays and acted in art-house movies -- has expressed her passion for political causes largely through nonfiction.

In more than seven books and numerous articles, she has portrayed a darker side of the country, denouncing its big dams, nuclear weapons, Hindu nationalist politics, counterterrorism measures that undermine civil rights and, most recently, the plight of its tribal people.

She accuses the New Delhi government of sacrificing people's welfare for the benefit of big corporations, driving people out of their homes to make way for factories and humiliating advocates of nonviolent protest.

"Are we going to drop the pretence that we are a democracy and openly accept that people's rights are not valid anymore?" she said in the interview. "There is a mutual incompatibility between democratic principles and forcibly displacing millions of people for corporate sharks and mining cartels."

Roy's critics, among them people who have praised her novel, say her polemics shut out the possibility of a dialogue.

"It is ironic that with her undoubted mastery over the language, she has virtually given up on the attempt to persuade and engage with those who might have a different perspective. Rather than appealing to the head, she has picked up the hammer," said Barun Mitra, director of the New Delhi-based Liberty Institute, a pro-free-market think tank. "She is completely off the mark on Indian democracy. It is the only miracle we can truly be proud of."

Her essays draw plenty of hate mail, and she has been called an "anti-Hindu" and an "anti-national" who denigrates India with her "poisoned pen." During the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year, an Indian television channel called her "disgusting," recalling campaigns in which she had questioned the integrity of India's counterterrorism police.

But there are many who tell her that thousands of unheard Indians are counting on her.