Deconstructing Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, India, Foundation, Pp 40
ARUNDHATI Roy’s open support to Maoists and her anti-India hatred has received strong reaction from across the country. Her 32 page article ‘Walking with the Comrades’ appeared in March 29 issue of Outlook, is a document which shows the real mentality of Maoists and their supporters. At first sight the article confuses the readers to be a travelogue or an intellectual argument to convince anyone, but it is a wilful fight ‘with poisoned weapons to finish the opponent’, using Lenin’s phrase.
India Foundation has come out with a 40 page booklet, Deconstructing Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, exposing Roy’s anti-India plot with solid arguments. The booklet contains two articles by eminent scholar Shri Shankar Sharan and an Open Letter by retired IPS officer Shri Abhinav Kumar. Critically analysing the writings of Arundhati Roy in support of the Maoist movement in India, Shri Sharan based his critique on her article in Outlook. One of the articles, ‘A Chekhovian Darling of Maoists’ is in English while the other is in Hindi. The forward of the booklet has been written by Dr Parakala Prabhakar who is director of Centre for Policy Studies, Hyderabad and is also on the board of Management of India Foundation.
“In effect Roy is no doubt helping the Maoist strategists, visible and invisible, sitting here as well as pulling strings from abroad, to use innocent tribal Chhattisgarh girls and Telugu boys as cannon fodders. Or, as “cheap fuel to ignite revolution”, to use Maxim Gorky’s words depicting what Lenin did to the innocent workers of Russia. Given the known history of Leninist, Maoist horrors in political transformation, this is an unpardonable misdeed on the part of Arundhati Roy to encourage uneducated, innocent boys and girls to embrace Maoism. Perhaps, to satisfy her hatred towards India she has become a blind supporter of the Maoist movement,” writes Shri Shankar Sharan in the booklet.
Shri Sharan further says that in 20,000 words article not a single paragraph is allocated to critical examination of a Maoist belief or a believing cadre. “Only glorifying them by all means is there. If this is not pure propaganda writing, what is? Playing on the unawareness of common readers, especially the young readers who don’t know much about the Mao phenomenon in totality, Roy has tried to win them in favour of the Maoist politics,” Shri Sharan said adding that Roy proved in the article that she stands for India’s destruction and endless killings for a so-called revolution.
(India Foundation, New Delhi, Email: [email protected])
(By Pramod Kumar)
