Amy Goodman: I'm just looking at a newswire story from May 23 which says, "Human rights activist and prominent Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, has said India is not a democratic state." Can you talk about that idea?
Arundhati Roy: Well, I do think that we are really suffering a crisis of democracy, you know? And the simplest way I can explain it is that in 2004, when the general elections took place in India, we were reeling from five years of rightwing communal BJP politics, the rightwing Hindu party.
AG: Would you make any parallels to political parties in the United States?
AR: Very, very much so. I mean, it was very similar to the Republicans versus the Democrats, and in fact %u2013
AG: The Congress Party being the Democrats.
AR: The Congress Party being the Democrats, and the Republicans being the rightwing Hindu BJP. And, of course, in a country%u2014like in America, their politics, apart from affecting Americans to a great deal, also affects the rest of the world. But in India, India not being a world power, however much it wants to claim it is, turns those energies on its own people.
So in Gujarat, you had in 2002 this mass killing of Muslims on the streets, a bloodbath where people were burnt alive, women were raped on the streets, dismembered, killed in full public view.
What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the elections. So you're thinking, "Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist Democrat who
