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LAW: ARUNDHATI ROY CASE
Grave Charges In Offing
SWITCHING ROLES, CHANGING AUDIENCE
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ANNIE
Roy scripted the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones based on
her university experiences and played a radical left-wing student
in it.
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BOOKER PRIZE
The God of Small Things becomes the first novel by an Indian to win
the award in 1997, and tops the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. |
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GODDESS OF NARMADA
The novelist turns social activist, her passionate yet analytical
attacks on big dam projects finding non-elite support. |
That puts the lid
on further speculation about what lies between the lines of the seven-page
affidavit, and where it puts the novelist vis-a-vis the apex court, which
is given "the power to punish for contempt of itself" by the
Constitution. If it were a question of merely her right to criticise the
Sardar Sarovar case judgement, or any judgement for that matter, the court
would possibly have taken a lenient view, as it did on occasions in the
past. In the P. Shiv Shankar case (1988), the former law minister was
not proceeded against for alleged comments that judicial decisions were
elitist. In 1993, the Andhra Pradesh High Court did not punish the state
chief minister for criticising the court's decision on land acquisition.
But not all accusations of judicial bias go unpunished. In 1970, E.M.S.
Namboodiripad was held guilty of contempt because he said the judges were
"class biased". While giving the order, Justice M. Hidayatullah
felt Namboodiripad did not understand Marxism. Imputing bias of judges,
therefore, touches upon a grey area which many feel to be obsolete. Senior
counsel Rajeev Dhavan says it is no longer used in the United States,
and rarely in the English courts.
But Roy spoilt her case-unregrettingly though-by
imputing motive on the part of the judges, in a looping, if not forced,
reference to the chief justice of India's refusal to part with a sitting
judge to inquire into the Tehelka scandal. Her observation implies a judicial
motive, not merely a bias, to protect the Government of the day. Her obvious
inference is that the NBA was judged by the same motive.
Roy is unconcerned about law and legalese, often
mimicking the NBA benches' earlier admonition of her for her "vicious
stultification and vulgar debunking (which) cannot be permitted to pollute
the stream of justice". But she's too sharp to overlook that by imputing
motive to the chief justice of India in the Tehelka inquiry matter she
was inviting trouble.
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DOUBLE BILL: Patkar (left) and Roy at a Narmada
rally before the Supreme Court
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To her, it is not "trouble". It is
an opportunity to win a new constituency at home, and a domestic popularity
which is way beyond reach of a fiction writer, however acclaimed globally.
She nowadays calls herself a "communicator"-not novelist-and
preens as she describes the popularity of the translation of her anti-bomb
and anti-dam essays in three or four Indian languages. And the more she
wrestles with the Darth Vaders of her world, the more she feels persecuted.
Like in these lines in The End of Imagination, her anti-Pokhran essay:
"When I told my friends that I was writing this piece, they cautioned
me. 'Go ahead,' they said, 'but first make sure you're not vulnerable.
Make sure your papers are in order. Make sure your taxes are paid'."
The rumble of the 1998 Pokhran blast was, therefore, the birth of a police
state. But then, what was the muted bang that occurred in 1974? Did it
presage the ensuing Emergency raj? If so, why doesn't Roy remember that
at all? Unless her demonology is politically selective.
There is still a likelihood, though, that Roy
the gladiator is acting out the story of her next novel by perpetrating-not
just narrating-the "conflict" so essential to a plot. If she's
indeed looking for a story more epical than the Ayemenem saga, watch out
then for the Indian Cervantes, with the hidalgo and the windmills all
rolled into the author.
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