 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today is a very special day. We have with us Harun Dati Roy, the author of two luminous novels, The God of Small Things and the Ministry of Atmost Happiness. Last year she published her collection of non-fiction with a very great title, My Sadicious Heart, a title that I think is not only very clever but very opposite. Recently, during the midst of the COVID-19 great lockdown, she's written two pieces in the Financial Times. First, the pandemic is a portal and now after the lockdown we need a reckoning. Harun Dati Roy, welcome to NewsClick. Thank you. Well, let's start with the first article, The Pandemic is a Portal, which the Financial Times ran and I know this article circulated enormously. Could you tell us a little bit, firstly it's written in your phenomenal style, it's really lovely, but could you tell us just a little bit about this idea of the pandemic as a portal? I think when I was writing it, I had just come back from actually walking to the border of UP and speaking to the people who were the great reverse migration, the great exodus from India cities and I realized that something was tectonically shifting. The power of the entire world now over people, I don't think there's been a time in history where the whole world could be locked down. For good or for bad, it was a very frightening idea for me that people, governments, states, authoritarian, democratic, communist, whoever could exercise such power. And then when you exercise that power, the chemical experiment of people who were outside the purview, outside the imagination, outside the calculations of these states were these millions of people who started to walk. And then as the lockdown even went on for a few days, you saw in a city like Delhi the sky is clear, the peacocks come, the birds sing, the snow disappears. And I thought, is this, are we dying or are we being born? Because as individuals we don't have a choice about when we are being born and when we are dying, but perhaps as a species we do. Some control we could exercise on this. And so I thought we are in a portal between worlds. I used to think of this world as a graveyard full of people who are alive but the light has faded, the stars have died and we're just pretending to be alive and we know we've destroyed this planet. But then suddenly when you saw the potential of healing, the show that the Earth put on, we thought okay, maybe there is a moment of hope in the midst of this despair or maybe it's just greater despair. But certainly it's a moment of rupture, a moment of choosing. So that's why I thought of it as a portal. There's a very powerful protection here where you talk about the Prime Minister and you say in that his methods, because after all he announced the lockdown and said you have four hours to shelter in place essentially. And you write the Prime Minister's methods definitely give the impression that he thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted. When I read this, I thought also of the way demonetization was rolled out. It's demonetization, it's the great lockdown, it's the Prime Minister who thinks of citizens as a hostile force. Can you reflect some more on this? Well, I too was thinking of demonetization and I was thinking of how in India, the minute it is announced that the Prime Minister will address the nation, there are these memes that go around with people's hair standing on end and it's always terrified because it's in people's minds associated with some catastrophic event, whatever is going to come. So the idea of appearing on TV at eight o'clock at night and giving people until midnight a nation of 1.38 billion people to lockdown and to me that sentence connects to another sentence in this piece where I was talking with some of the small group of people as I walked to them and he said, he might not know about us. The idea that here you have an administration, very cunning, very good at willing elections with understanding of caste and religion and boost by boost data of how to win an election but an ignorance of history, of economics, of how people work, where they work, where they come from, where they go. So to just ambush a nation of this complexity with that announcement is why I said that. Yeah, because this entire thing, the way it took place, I mean you mentioned in the next article about the 16 people run over by the train and so on, this entire policy seems like a crime against humanity. It doesn't just seem like a failed policy. I'm glad that you're the first person that said it because that's what I was thinking too. But if you look at how the whole thing is being covered, I remember in 2011, I wrote an introduction to a collection of essays in a book called Broken Republic and I was talking about how people like Chigambaram who was the finance minister and the home minister, they had an overt policy of changing the population patterns of India. They wanted people to move out from the villages into cities and it was something that they planned and did which is why you had this massive displacement. Of course there's the fragmentation of land and the kind of unsustainability of the Indian village that was being encouraged more or less and you have this huge population moving into cities. In the cities, there was no place for them. So what I've been saying for so many years is that in fact, in the imagination of the state, these people don't have a place and if you notice they don't have a place anymore in literature. They don't have a place in poetry. They don't have a place in cinema. You know the cinema, even up to the 70s, there was a great dignified presence of the poor. There was the anger of the poor. But when cinemas became multiplexes, Bollywood also pushed the poor away from it. So the only place where they'd figure perhaps are NGO brochures to raise funds or something. And it is this erasure from the imagination that has created the situation today where you just pack them into the crevices of cities. You pretend they don't exist and the situations in which they live, we know. I mean, the outlying farmlands turn into tenements where ten people share a room, where the landlords force them to buy groceries and rations at rates much higher than the market. There's a kind of the breakup of the factory floor, the breakup of unions, the dismantling of labour laws. And now the disaster is upon us and the solution is the further dissolution, the further dissolving of protection labour laws and so on. It is really a failure of the imagination, a failure to understand that this is a very unique country in a unique time with a unique population. You cannot cut and paste what is done in Italy or in the US or in Spain onto India. And what was done was a cut and paste and the result is a disaster. And as you said, I would say yes, it's a crime against humanity. I mean, what's really powerful about the most recent piece in the financial times, it's called after the lockdown, we need a reckoning. You know, most people after the lockdown ends are going to, you know, go to the park or visit people and so on. But Arundhati Roy is going to spend her time organising the COVID trials, as you call them. You said at the end, we need COVID trials in an international court at the very least. That's my post-lockdown reverie. Could you talk a little about the COVID trials? So actually the financial times, really what they did was they asked me, can you write 150 words for us about what you're most looking forward to doing when the lockdown ends, like meeting your friend or going to a place in the city that you missed. So I said, listen, sorry, I don't have these 150 happy words, so just ask someone else. And the editor said, no, come on, just write whatever you want. So I wrote this little piece. And I mean, I was talking about the fact that you have a situation where there were 545 COVID trials and 545 COVID positive cases, the 10 deaths when they announced the sudden lockdown, after Delhi Dali for two months, and then this punitive lockdown at the end of which, even by the own fake government figures, now you have more than 125,000 cases and it's spread all over because of the exodus and so on. And then you have this stigmatization that took place. You had the stigmatization of Muslims as the spreaders of disease. You had killings. And then now you have a situation where you created this exodus, people jammed into sort of labour camps which were known as quarantine camps and people jammed in bus stops, people jammed on highways, no social distancing, that audible term that people use who don't understand caste. But then you've created a situation where this labour force has now gone home in these traumatic conditions and is spreading the virus in the countryside. Meanwhile, you have the elite and we have TV shows about how planes are being sanitized and airports are being sanitized for them. And I said, so what are we thinking now? Are we going to hermit in the age of COVID? Doing this means you have plans to hermetically seal the flying classes off from the walking classes. So I said, so apart from caste, apartheid, you're going to have religious apartheid with your new citizenship law and the lynchings and the detention camps. And you're going to have a kind of class apartheid where one class, their bodies are a biohazard to the other class. So in this context, I said that this kind of havoc that has been created, we need an accounting. And when I say COVID trials, obviously, I would have liked to say revolution, you know, but the point is when I say COVID trials, it comes from me as a person who has lived so many years in this country where you stop expecting any result from a trial, but you know that the documentation that it creates is in itself an act, a revolutionary act. And we really need to know what the hell happened. You know, you had this media, you had weird sort of virologists and epidemiologists just throwing out whatever theories they wanted. Everyone has been terrorized. Everyone is stigmatized. Nobody knows what to believe. You really led us into a horror show. So somehow to unravel this, you need some kind of systematic information. That's what I meant, you know. I can't bloody well go and have a walk in the park when all of us are just... It's been harrowing, you know, for those who are walking, it's been harrowing, for those who are thinking it's been harrowing for everybody. I think this is a very good idea, and I look forward to the international tribunal. It's like the Russell Tribunal for COVID trials and I think starting in India and Brazil may be a good idea. Like the Iraq War tribunal, you know, I was on the jury there and I saw how much work happened because unless we can unpack this thing, it will be done to us again. And this moment of panic, it's a panic-demic. It is being used to control us more and more. All kinds of things are happening, even now, you know, fake news, fake videos, scared videos, fake phone calls, you know, it's a state that's preparing to kind of steal our oxygen forever. And we've got to break out. I just want to ask one little question. In the middle of all this, there was a poll release. I'm sure you saw it because the media made a lot of it, which showed the prime minister's popularity has risen. What are we to make of these kind of polls? The strike media is more propaganda than actual evidence of anything. And yet, here it is, it's a poll. Well, you know, first of all, I don't know, like in this situation, who could they have pulled, you know, those people who have phone numbers or on the internet or something. So this particular poll, I wouldn't pay much mind to. However, I think that we have to be prepared to understand. And I think quite often the left in its rationality doesn't understand. There's a massive game of psychology, of aspiration and imagination going on. Like one of the things that's going around is, you know, saying that Modi is Abhimanyu. He's alone. He's caught in the Chakra view. People are ghrowing him. So the Hindus, you must come to his rescue. So the man who effed up like a million people is now the victim of, you know, everybody else, including those people. But then one cannot minimize the appeal or something like this, you know. So I think people are psychologically fragile, frightened. So I actually don't, I don't know what's going to come out of this. All I know for sure is that if there's a breakdown, you know, now you can see the seams coming apart at the edges. You can see rioting. You can see people fighting for food. It's not political, it's sporadic right now. But if there were some kind of massive unrest, it will be immediately sought to be managed with more Hindutva, more Communalism, more trying to blame a particular community or particular, you know, kind of politics or particular people, you know. So we can expect more of the same in a heightened situation of fear and control. I mean, as you know, while everyone's locked down, these people are moving their chessmen very fast. People are being arrested. Muslim students, young people being arrested under draconian under the UAPA. Even today, two young students again were arrested. Everything is being put into place in the hope that when things reopen, the old protests against CAA and all don't rise up again. So while we are locked up, they are doing everything to consolidate their positions. Including the arrests, including our friend, a news click friend, Gautam Navlaka, and a leftward author Anand Teltum, they picked up in the middle of this lock up. Arun Dati Roy, thank you so much for joining us at NewsClick. You're welcome. Thank you.