Novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy is again back in controversy. And this time, for blaming the government for ‘exploiting’ the COVID19 pandemic to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
#Arundhati Roy is trending on social media platforms on Sunday because right-wing activists have pulled up socks to bombard the novelist for ‘defaming’ India.
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Roy on Friday had told DW.com that the alleged strategy on the part of the ‘Hindu nationalist government’ would “dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on.”
She had also said that that the situation in India was approaching “genocidal”.
Arundhati Roy is best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997.
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She is also a political activist, involved in human rights and environmental causes.
“We are suffering, not just from COVID, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger,” Roy had told in the interview.
She had said the “crisis of hatred” against Muslims was the result of people protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
Under the cover of COVID-19, Roy said, the government arrested young students, to fight cases against lawyers, against senior editors, against activists and intellectuals.
Roy claimed the government was exploiting the Coronavirus in a “tactic” reminiscent of one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
She claimed that the COVID19 pandemic has been used as an opportunity to maginalize Muslims in India.
Arundhati Roy has always been in controversies.
In an August 2008 interview with The Times of India, Roy had expressed her support for the independence of Kashmir from India.
A large number of leaders of the Congress, which was in power in 2008, had asked Roy to withdraw her “irresponsible” statement on Kashmir, claiming that it was contrary to historical facts.
In 2010, she was also charged with sedition by Delhi Police for their anti-India speech at a 2010 convention on Kashmir: Azadi: The Only Way.