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LAW: ARUNDHATI ROY CASE
Diva Of Contempt
The celebrity novelist has crossed the path of the
judiciary by imputing motives, and has invited contempt action
By Sumit Mitra
 As
you come to my house," the famous novelist chirped in a high, almost
girlish note, "you may as well park the car near the market, for
the road in front has been dug up recently and is quite dangerous after
last night's downpour. As you start walking, take the second turn to the
right after the sweet shop. That's a service lane. You'll find the house.
Yeah, I'm on the second floor."
BASHING THE BENCH
From the 2001 affidavit
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"The people of the Narmada valley have the constitutional
right to protest peacefully against what they consider as an unjust
judgement ... I have every right to participate in any peaceful
protest ... even outside the gates of the Supreme Court."
"I have every right to disagree with the court's views (on
the Narmada dam) and to express my disagreement in any publication
or forum that I choose to."
"Though this (the Tehelka tapes issue) ought to have been
considered prima facie evidence of corruption, yet the Delhi High
Court declined to entertain a petition (seeking inquiry)."
"On the ground that judges of the Supreme Court are busy
the Chief Justice of India refused to allow a sitting judge to head
the judicial inquiry into the Tehelka scandal."
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The impression about herself that Arundhati Roy,
the Booker Prize winner whose The God of Small Things has sold six million
copies, gives from the other end of the wire is that of living in a veritable
state of siege. On a road that is dug up and dangerous. In a house that
opens on the service lane, as if to guard a secret.
The world in which the 39-year-old novelist
has currently chosen to live is indeed full of malevolent figures conjured
up in a bad dream, and allowed to invade real life. Like the Darth Vader
of Big Dams and nuclear bombs. "They are both weapons of mass destruction,
both weapons governments use to control their own people." And there
are the new mutants. Enron. WTO. Globalisation. "A judicial dictatorship".
The frail writer's words and actions are driven
by the single passion to raise a bulwark against these encircling demons.
To protect the Narmada, her river-child-as if it were reborn from Meenachal,
the river of her novel, and of her own childhood in Kerala's Ayemenem
village. To save the homes and the cultural-ecological Lebensraum of half
a million people who may be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam project.
To chase away-by the stroke of the computer keyboard, if possible-the
spectre of a nuclear holocaust in the subcontinent. And, above all, to
fight again a judicial onslaught on writer's freedom, as seen by her,
in the form of contempt proceedings pending in the apex court against
her and her two Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) compatriots, social activist
Medha Patkar and lawyer Prashant Bhushan.
Last week, when the two-judge bench of Justice
G.B. Pattanaik and Justice Ruma Pal asked her why she wrote in her affidavit
(in response to the contempt petition) that the court's earlier interim
order on her conduct (in the NBA case) was "insulting", she
said, with a verbal shrug, "Because I was insulted." She argued
her own case, she says, because no lawyer agreed to represent her. The
judges asked her if she knew that her affidavit could be held as contemptuous.
"If you (the court) think it is contemptuous, please proceed against
me."
Insult. Counter-insult. Contempt of the court.
These have a long cycle in the novelist-guerrilla's encounters with the
Supreme Court. The contempt moves against Roy originated from a demonstration
that the NBA staged at gate C of the court on December 13 last year, which
was found fit for a petition under the Contempt of Court Act, 1971, by
five advocates. The petitioners' fir in the Tilak Marg police station
reads: "We came out from the Supreme Court premises from other path
(than Gate C) and inquired why the gate is close (sic). The (...) were
surrounded by Prasant Bhusan (sic), Medha Patekar (sic) and Arundhanti
(sic) Roy along with their companion (sic) and they told Supreme Court
your father's property (sic)." The main petition is drafted in as
unorthodox a fashion as the fir. Nevertheless, it was admitted by the
apex court, and the alleged contemners were directed to attend the court
personally at the first hearing on April 23, and to continue to attend
the court on all the days thereafter to which "the case against them
stands", until final orders are passed on the charges. "Wherein
fail not." It was during the second hearing, held last week, that
she dared their lordships.
Could Arundha(n)ti (the petition is as brazen
about name-spelling as the fir), a wordsmith of international fame, have
bawled out slogans like "Supreme Court ke judge chor hain" and
"Supreme Court bika hua hai"? Could Patkar, a Magsaysay Award-winning
dam-basher, have screamed like someone out of the Bollywood movies: "Saale
ko jaan se maar do"? Could Bhushan, a prominent senior counsel respected
for his court manners, have pulled a petitioner "by my hair".
That it put a strain on the imagination of the bench is obvious from one
of the judgement options it indicated: If the court finds the allegations
made by the petitioner-advocates to be false, it may send them to jail.
For Roy, however, the contempt petition is the
"plot" on which hangs the big "story"-her own affidavit.
Written with the snicker-snack of a political tract-a genetically modified
J'Accuse-it is an unabashed contempt of contempt. "If the court uses
the contempt of court law, and allows citizens to abuse its process to
intimidate and harass writers," she wrote, "it will have the
chilling effect of interfering with a writer's imagination and the creative
act itself." The tempo of the prose rises with each break in paragraph,
the words slugging, first, the judges who dismissed the NBA petition last
October for staying the Sardar Sarovar project, and later, the entire
judiciary. From the specific outburst-"I have every right to disagree
with the court's views on the subject (the Narmada issue) and to express
my disagreement in any publication or forum that I choose to"-she
puts her gun on a free-wheeling swivel. There is a grim reference to "judicial
dictatorship," which is "as fearsome a prospect as military
dictatorship". The Tehelka issue too comes in the line of fire. "The
Delhi High Court declined to entertain a petition seeking an enquiry into
the defence deals that were referred to in the tapes." The final
shot is reserved for the chief justice of India, who had presided over
the three-judge bench on the NBA petition. "On the ground that judges
of the Supreme Court were too busy, the chief justice of India refused
to allow a sitting judge to head the enquiry into the Tehelka scandal."
She says that the affidavit is "a distillation
of a way of thinking, as I was very clear that the reading public should
know what was going on in the Supreme Court". Fine, but is she aware
of the price she may be made to pay, which is a good six months in Tihar?
"Oh yes." Has she read the Contempt of Court Act? "Certainly
not. I don't believe in contempt of court. I believe that every institution,
be it the court or the judiciary, must earn respect. They can't demand
it."
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