Newest book from Arundhati Roy

[eridani]

Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy

Arundhati Roy

http://living.scotsman.com/books/Book-review-Listening-to-Grasshoppers.5428352.jp

Review: Marc Lambert
LAUDED as the world's biggest democracy, with an economy growing at 10% a year, India appears to be well on its way to a prosperous modernity. But, Arundhati Roy argues in her third searing collection of essays, it's all a sham.

India is no idea of what can be achieved in Asia by adopting Western-style politics and business practice. Nor does its recent progress represent a long awaited coming of age. Instead it's the graveyard of democracy, the point at which an old, tired and discredited notion has finally run into the buffers, surrendering to a new fascism built on sectarian politics and a predatory capitalism. Who's to blame? India surely. But just as certainly the West.

Rarely has political writing been so raw. Resisting the urge to update these pieces penned since 2002, Roy presents them as unvarnished examples of an immediate fury, written in the white heat of a magisterial disdain. Marvel at the Indian economic miracle if you will, she tells us. But remember that, in this country of over a billion people, half of all children under three suffer from malnutrition while millions of tons of grain lies rotting in warehouses. If this is democracy, we can keep it. Congress and its allies might have won the last election by what's called a comfortable majority, but this represents just 10.3% of the vote. Meanwhile, what amounts to civil war rages in states such as Orissa, West Bengal, and Kashmir, where more than 70,000 people have lost their lives in the most heavily militarised zone in the world.

Turning her formidable intelligence on recent events, armed with an iron grip of the facts, Roy exposes the putrid underbelly of progress. Recalling the defeat of communism in Afghanistan and Europe, she demonstrates how the new geopolitical alignment with America adopted by India after 1989 enabled the rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism by casting Islam as the new enemy. In 1984, the BJP had just two seats in Parliament. By 1998 it was in power, and one of the first things it did was to conduct nuclear tests. Roy does not mince her words. The Indian state is hypnotised by the twin pillars of Union and Progress – for which we should read Hindu nationalism and economic growth, to be achieved whatever the social cost. In this, she argues, it is animated by the same drivers that gave rise to the worst