'Sonia has tough road ahead'

While happy that Gandhi humbled those who berated her, she warned that Sonia will face a 'blatant game' from corporates.

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.

HT Image

Roy said she had been "exhaling slowly" since Gandhi triumphed over all polls and a smear campaign by the ruling party to become the frontrunner as prime minister heading a left-of-centre coalition.

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

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

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

"It's almost like a set-up," Roy 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," Roy said.

Gandhi travelled more than 60,000 kilometres since the end of last year in a bid to prove wrong the government's slogan that India was "shining".

Awkward with the media and speaking in still stilted Hindi, Gandhi endured ferocious personal insults during the campaign by right-wing firebrands such as Gujarat state's leader 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," 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?"

Roy said she once considered Gandhi "God's gift to the BJP", the defeated Bharatiya Janata Party which rose to prominence on a platform of Hindutva, or "Hinduness."

"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."

Roy has been prolific in her criticism of past governments' policies, particularly their crackdowns on separatists in Kashmir and northeast 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, Roy described Vajpayee's decision to turn India into a nuclear power as "the end of the imagination".

Reacting to Vajpayee's fall, 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.

Roy took heart in statements by Gandhi's leftist allies that they are not interested in privatising profit-making state-run companies or essential infrastructure.

"To hear mainstream politicians saying that. A few years ago anyone who said it would be derided and treated like they're from the nuthouse.

"On the whole, what has happened is very exciting and reason to celebrate, but it's very important to know that it might just go up in smoke."