This is the first in a 2 -part series on "Arundhati Roy- bashing " , who is a typical instance of the malaise which afflicts journalism in India.
The title may be misleading to the discerning reader, Mrs.Roy is not really the founder of this genre of reporting , but is quite a champion at it. Well i have been inspired and i will continue to give her credit , even when it is not due ,in keeping with her kind of journalism .
Here is a excerpt from a piece about the Godhra carnage in 2002 and the subsequent riots where a French columnist Nicole Elfi really hits the nail on the head when she anoints Arundhati Roy as " fiction-writer ".
" Among the most morbid canards, the novelist Arundhati Roy’s vitriolic article (Out look magazine, May 6th, 2002). She describes the event which precedes Ehsan Jaffri’s death (extract):
… A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the Director-General of Police, the Police Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) were ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did not intervene. The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burned them alive. Then they beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him …
Wait a minute. Jaffri was burned alive in the house, true — is it not awful enough? Along with some other 41 people. Not enough? But his daughters were neither “stripped” nor “burnt alive.” T. A. Jafri, his son, in a front-page interview titled “Nobody knew my father’s house was the target” (Asian Age, May 2nd, Delhi ed.), felt obliged to rectify:
Among my brothers and sisters, I am the only one living in India. And I am the eldest in the family. My sister and brother live in the US. I am 40 years old and I have been born and brought up in Ahmedabad.
There we are, reassured as regards Ehsan Jaffri’s children. He had only one daughter, who was living abroad. No one was raped in the course of this tragedy, and no evidence was given to the police to that effect.
The Gujarat Government sued Outlook magazine. In its May 27th issue, Outlook published an apology to save its face. But in the course of its apology, the magazine’s editors quoted a “clarification” from Roy, who withdrew her lie by planting an even bigger one: the MP’s daughters “were not among the 10 women who were raped and killed in Chamanpura that day”! From Smita Narula to Arundhati Roy, “four or five girls” had swollen to “ten women,” equally anonymous and elusive.
Roy begins theatrically:
Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn’t very complicated. Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died, someone carved ‘OM’ on her forehead.
Balbir Punj, Rajya Sabha MP and journalist, shocked by this “despicable incident” which allegedly occurred in Baroda, decided to investigate it. He got in touch with the Gujarat government.
The police investigations revealed that no such case, involving someone called Sayeeda, had been reported either in urban or rural Baroda. Subsequently, the police sought Roy’s help to identify the victim and seek access to witnesses who could lead them to those guilty of this crime. But the police got no cooperation. Instead, Roy, through her lawyer, replied that the police had no power to issue summons.[6]
This redefines the term “fiction writer.”
"
You can find the whole piece here http://www.jaia-bharati.org/nicole-elfi/ni-godhra-ang.htm.
Well I would focus on a more recent gaffe on part of our esteemed novelist in my next post and would follow it with a critical analysis of the larger problem of which ,Mrs.Roy is ,but a glaring microcosm .I will provide some solutions ,most of which will be more suited to the country called Utopia (off the coast of the continent of Atlantis , for those who want a geographical location , like Rikin) than to India.
CHEERS TO ALL , 3 cheers to lonely souls who read my blog ! Adios .
