After they unexpectedly lost their parliamentary majority in this year’s election and were forced to enter into a coalition government, I predicted that India’s governing Hindu nationalists would scale up their attacks on their critics to try and reassert their hegemony over Indian politics.
Regrettably, it did not take long for my prediction to be realised.
Just days after the election, an official from the new BJP-led government allowed the Booker prize-winning Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy to be prosecuted for remarks she made at a panel discussion back in 2010 suggesting that Kashmir was never an integral part of India.
The prosecution was granted under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which is often used against individuals the Hindu Nationalist government deems antinational, unpatriotic and sympathetic to terror groups.
This latest attack on Roy is indicative of the growing insecurities of the BJP leadership after a less-than-stellar election performance. But the acclaimed author is not being punished simply because she happened to say or do something that challenged the BJP’s authority. She is not just an ordinary critic who spoke her mind and happened to upset a party heavyweight.
Roy is being targeted because she has an inherent ability to speak to some of the most foundational corruptions that underlie the socioeconomic and political pillars of the Indian state. And while it is on the back foot electorally, this ability deeply frightens the BJP.
It is no coincidence that the comments Roy is being prosecuted over are related to Kashmir. The vehement denial of Kashmiri rights as well as the violent suppression of the Kashmiri liberation movement has long been the hallmark of muscular Indian nationalism. As Nazia Amin wrote recently, “Kashmir is one of the sites where the tyrannical core at the heart of Indian nationalism gets expressed in its most blatant and persistent form.”
This tyranny has been on display for decades. Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, for example, the Indian........