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Arundhati Roy Says 'Dead In Delhi Violence Are Victims Of Modi's Regime'

Calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi "nakedly fascist", Roy said what happened in Delhi wasn't just "a riot or a danga".
Arundhati Roy in a file photo.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Arundhati Roy in a file photo.

Author Arundhati Roy on Sunday said at a writer’s protest in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar that the sole responsibility of the violence that ensued in Delhi last week, leaving both Hindus and Muslims dead, lies in the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “fascist regime”.

“All the dead, wounded and devastated, Muslim as well as Hindu are victims of this regime headed by Narendra Modi, our nakedly fascist Prime Minister who himself is no stranger to being at the helm of affairs in a state when 18 years ago a massacre on a much larger scale went on for weeks,” Scroll.in quoted her as saying.

Roy spoke about how leaders of the BJP like Anurag Thakur, Kapil Mishra and Parvesh Verma had, in the run up to the Delhi elections, incited people to attack and kill anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and had called them “traitors”.

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Roy said, “It is a manifestation of the ongoing battle between fascists and anti-fascists – in which Muslims are the first among the Fascists’ “enemies”. To call it a riot or a “danga”, or “Left” versus “Right” or even “Right” versus “Wrong” as many are doing, is dangerous and obfuscatory.”

The discriminatory CAA offers to give citizenship to “minorities” from neighbouring countries but conspicuously leaves out Muslims. If implemented along with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which aims to make a list of the citizens of this country, Muslims who get left out don’t have legal recourse to register their citizneship.

Warning against it’s evils, Roy said, “The sole purpose of the NPR-NRC-CAA is to destabilise and divide people not just in India but across the whole subcontinent. If they do indeed exist, these phantom millions of human beings who India’s current Home Minister calls Bangladeshi “termites”, cannot be kept in detention centres and cannot be deported. By using such terminology and by thinking up such a ridiculous, diabolic scheme, this government is actually endangering the tens of millions of Hindus who live in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who they pretend to be concerned about, but who could suffer the backlash of this bigotry emanating from New Delhi.”

Roy, who has been a vocal critic of the Modi government, has been attacked repeatedly by BJP leaders for her remarks against the CAA, NRC and NPR.

Umar Bharti had called her “anti-women” and “anti-humanity” for saying, “Whenever the officials come to collect your information for NPR, you can give wrong names like Ranga-Billa or Kungfu-Kutta and also give wrong address like 7, Race Course Road.”

BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra had called her the “goddess of controversies”.

Read Roy’s entire speech on Scroll.in.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.