Hold unconditional talks with Maoists: Arundhati

Supporting unconditional talks with Maoists, Booker Prize winner and activist Arundhati Roy has alleged that “economic interests” in mineral-rich States have driven the government and establishment to launch action against them.

“My fear is that because of this economic interest the government and establishment actually needs a war. It needs to militarise. For that it needs an enemy. And so in a way what the Muslims were to the BJP, the Maoists are to the Congress ... ,” Ms. Roy said in an interview with Karan Thapar in his Devil’s Advocate programme for CNN-IBN channel.

“If I was a person who is being dispossessed, whose wife has been raped, who is being pushed [out] of his land and who is being faced with this ‘police force,’ I would say that I am justified in taking up arms. If that is the only way I have to defend myself,” she said when asked whether the armed struggle was justified.

“We should stop thinking about who is justified ... You have an army of very poor people being faced down by an army of the rich that are corporate-backed. I am sorry but it is like that. So you can’t extract morality from the heinous act of violence that each commits against the other,” she said.