Arundhati Roy quoted to slam Sushma’s UN speech

new york — Pakistan has invoked acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy to attack External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s UN General Assembly speech where she denounced Islamabad as the “world’s greatest exporter of havoc, death and inhumanity”.

“Much of what is in the air in India now is pure terror, in Kashmir, in other places,” Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi quoted a statement made by Roy.

Delving into Indian politics, Lodhi also borrowed the standard lines of a section of Indian secularists who describe Prime Minister Narendra and his government as “fascist” and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath as a “fanatic”.

Lodhi repeated the secularist line in India that “a racist and fascist ideology is firmly embedded in Modi’s government and that its leadership is drawn from the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) which is accused of assassinating Mahatma Gandhi”.

She went on to quote from Roy’s November 2015 statement: “These horrific murders are only a symptom. Life is hell for the living too. Whole populations of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and Christians are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where the assault would come.”

Roy, who won the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel, The God of Small Things, recently published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which unlike her first is political.

Lodhi took particular objection to Swaraj’s observation about Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who, Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had said, bequeathed a foreign policy based on peace and friendship.

Swaraj said it “remains open to question whether Jinnah Sahab actually advocated such principles.” —