Stressing the need to work together to thwart the designs of political annihilations, she said the proposed delimitation exercise in 2026 is likely to disempower all of South India by reducing the number of lawmakers to be sent to Parliament.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — Our country has lost the moral conscience to speak against heinous crimes as crimes like “genocide and ethnic cleansing are now greeted with applause and political rewards,” said celebrated writer-activist Arundhati Roy.
Lamenting the silence of the country in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, she said that all over the world, millions of people, including Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Communists, and so on, are holding marches calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. “But our country, which once was a true friend of colonised people, is silent today. Most of the public intellectuals and writers, all but a very few, are also silent today,” she rued, while stating that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza is a crime against humanity.
The writer was speaking in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala on Wednesday after receiving the third P. Govinda Pillai Memorial national award instituted by the P.G. Samskrithi Kendram to perpetuate the memory of Marxist ideologue P. Govinda Pillai, a report in The Hindu said.
Stressing the need to work together to thwart the designs of political annihilations, she said the proposed delimitation exercise in 2026 is likely to disempower all of South India by reducing the number of lawmakers to be sent to Parliament.
“The delimitation is not the only threat people face now. Federalism, the lifeblood of our diverse country, is also under serious threat. The elected chief ministers of the opposition-ruled states have to literally beg to get their due share from the Centre. The latest blow to the federalism of the country is the recent Supreme Court verdict upholding the striking down of Article 370, special status given to Jammu and Kashmir. This is not the issue of Kashmir alone; it affects the fundamental structure of our polity, Ms. Roy said.
Taking cudgels on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden segments of society, the writer said wealth is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, impoverishing the poor further. “The most bewildering conundrum of our times is that in all of the world, people seem to be voting to disempower themselves,” she said.
Talking about the upper hand technology enjoys these days, she said one who controls technology controls the world. Ms. Roy exuded the hope that the new generation will ultimately rise to the occasion to save the country.
N. Ram, Director, The Hindu Group Publishing Private Limited, who presented the award to Ms. Roy, said that the defining feature of the regime that came to power in 2014 and emerged with a strengthened majority in 2019 is the coalescence of Hindutva communalism and big capital.
It is evident that the policies and programmes of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government are now tightly interlocked with this corporate sector, something that was not witnessed in the independent history of the country, Ram said.
