Book description
This series of essays examines the dark side of democracy in
contemporary India. It looks closely at how religious majoritarianism,
cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of
a country that projects itself as the world's largest democracy.
Beginning with the state-backed pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in
2002, Arundhati Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu
Nationalism and India's Neo-liberal economic reforms which began their
journey together in the early 1990s are now turning India into a
police state. She describes the systematic marginalization of
religious and ethnic minorities - Muslim, Christian, Adivasi and
Dalit, the rise of terrorism and the massive scale of displacement and
dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. The collection
ends with an account of the of the August 2008 uprising of the people
of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the
November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
The Dark Side of Democracy tracks the fault-lines that
threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves
through the region and beyond.
Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel
The God of Small Things
, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997, and two
collections of essays:
The Algebra of Infinite Justice
and
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire
. She lives in New Delhi, India.
