New Delhi: Indian writer with known pro-Maoist links, Arundhati Roy has said that India now has a “democratically elected totalitarian government”.
Speaking to Pakistani newspaper Dawn reporter Tahir Mehdi, Roy said: “Now, we have a democratically elected totalitarian government.
“Technically and legally, there is no party with enough seats to constitute an opposition. But many of us have maintained for several years that there never was a real opposition.
“The two main parties agreed on most policies, and each had the skeleton of a mass pogrom against a minority community in its cupboard. So now, it's all out in the open. The system lies exposed.”
“The 2014 elections have thrown up some strange conundrums,” she said. “For example, the BSP, Mayawati's party, which got the third largest vote share in the country, has won no seats. The mathematics of elections are such that even if every Dalit in India voted for her, she could have still not won a single seat.”
Roy says, elections have become “a massive corporate project and the media is owned and operated by the same corporations too.”
She said, “some amount of democracy” in India is reserved for its middle classes alone and through that they are co-opted by the state and become loyal consumers of the state narrative of people's resistances.
