Corona and conspiracy nonsense are known to be blood siblings. This fact is also confirmed when looking at a very distant variant, the Indian one. Covid was invented by Muslims, many Hindus believe that the pandemic is spreading through a superspreader event organized by the Islamic missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat. The virus is an instrument of biological jihad.
Far-fetched? Bizarre? Naturally. Other reservations, let us express it: other prejudices against Muslims, who are attached to Hindu rights in India and thus also to the government and many media, are much more compatible in Europe. Right-wing Hindus see Muslims as “women-hating, terrorist jihadists”, writes the Indian writer and publicist Arundhati Roy in her new volume of essays “Azadi means freedom”. They even stylized themselves as the “savior” of Muslim women. That sounds very familiar again.
The difference “between what India could have become and what it has become” makes it the “most tragic” country in the world for Roy
Roy’s book contains ten texts from the years 2018 to 2021, acceptance speeches, newspaper articles, lectures, and lectures. Sometimes she delves into the domestic politics of this or that state, but basically “Azadi means freedom” is one big text, a settlement with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
At this point a request to the world’s publicists. Please avoid making comparisons with fascism if possible. German readers will certainly share your horror if you expose the persecution of minorities in your country, in this case: India, if you write about massacres like the murder of 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, about repression against Lawyers, journalists and activists, on laws that make people second-class citizens like India’s new Citizenship Law. It is not necessary and even counterproductive to bring the Nuremberg Race Laws into play, for example. Every fascism comparison triggers strong, but almost always the wrong reactions in Germany, because in the end it is only about Germany.
This is a book about India, which, as Roy writes, is not just a country, but an entire continent with 780 languages and more religions and nationalities than in Europe. There were once great hopes on this continent. To this day, India lives on its reputation as the largest democracy in the world and on the glamor of romanticizing films such as Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi”, which the Indian government co-financed, according to Roy. For geopolitical reasons alone, it is not advisable to fall out with a country with 1.4 billion inhabitants. But the difference “between what India could have become and what it has become” makes it the “most tragic” country in the world for Roy.
Arundhati Roy: Azadi means freedom. Translated from the English by Jan Wilm. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2021. 254 pages, 24 euros.
Arundhati Roy, the daughter of a Syrian Christian from the Indian state of Kerala and a Hindu tea plantation owner from Bengal, is a creature of the cultural richness of her homeland and its contradictions, as a writer she is even more so. She describes how as a child she could quote Shakespeare, sing Christian hymns and imitate Tamil cabaret, then was forced by her mother to speak English and only then learned Hindi. For writers in this area, language can “never be taken for granted”: “It has to be prepared. Like a slowly braised dish.”
She doesn’t have that much time today. She writes in English to be heard by many; she is aimed at audiences in Cambridge and New York, the readers of the Guardian and the Financial Times. Since her sensational debut novel “The God of Little Things”, which brought her breakthrough in 1997, she has only written one more novel, “The Ministry of Extreme Happiness”. Everything else is political, non-fiction. For Roy, both complement each other, she quotes extensively in her essays from her novels. Sometimes, however, it seems as if she completely trusts neither the effects of her political writings nor that of her literary ones.
Possession of Roy’s texts is used as evidence in the arrest of activists
If you took the anger of the authorities as a yardstick, they wouldn’t have to worry. The police now classify her texts as dangerous written material, she writes, and when activists are arrested they are an indication of national unreliability. Only with a half-sentence does she indicate that this could become her own doom at some point. Especially since she not only writes about the survival of the caste system, Brahmanism, which has meanwhile been praised by white American racists, but also about India’s anathema – Kashmir. “The land of the living dead and speaking graves” with its majority Muslim population has been a source of conflict between the two states since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, an open wound, a danger for the whole world. When the Modi government revoked Kashmir’s special status as a semi-autonomous area two years ago, Pakistan and India were on the verge of war, once again. Both states have nuclear weapons.
Arundhati Roy writes powerfully and without fear of repetition. The tone of the highest urgency, the incessant jolting may sometimes tire you, but your instinct compensates for coincidences. In January 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro visited Delhi, followed shortly afterwards by US President Donald Trump. In the meantime, the first corona case in India became known. Modi recorded a yoga video to train people in lockdown; India was still exporting protective clothing and ventilators when millions of migrant workers had already made their way home. Many of them were infected.
The migrant workers knew about Covid, writes Roy. But not all considered it the greatest calamity that had ever befallen them. Unemployment, hunger, and police violence were tied for them. The shrill German Corona debate, in which arguments without defamation barely appear and which often no longer wants to do anything other than freak up or go crazy, suddenly works like a luxury banter, self-indulgent and vain, acts against this lifelong hardship.