Manipur is witnessing a kind of ethnic cleansing. The Centre is complicit, the State is partisan, and the security forces are split. The Manipur issue is not an isolated one. Reverberations are clear in other places like Haryana. It’s burning down everywhere, writer and activist Arundhati Roy has said.
She was in Thrissur on Sunday to receive the Navamalayali Cultural Prize instituted by Navamalayali Magazine at Kerala Sahitya Akademi Hall.
The country is in a different phase. In Kerala you may not be able to understand it. You are in a place, where you are still relatively politically literate. But in the rest of the country, things had gone very wrong, she said.
“Rape has been used as a tool of violence. Today, we are in a situation where women are justifying rapes. Where women are telling men to rape other women. Not the case of only Manipur. Irrespective of who is raping who, women stand for the community. They have gone psychotic. Today, we have a situation where the police are handing over women to a mob to get raped. Something has gone wrong. In Haryana, people who are accused of burning two Muslim men alive, are leading religious processions. A railway protection officer shooting Muslims saying you must vote for Modi. The man has actually absorbed the propaganda going on in the country.”
When there was a kind of war in the country, where women were being paraded naked and raped; and Muslims were fleeing for life, the PM is tweeting “I have Appam for dinner“, she said.
Alerting people in Kerala she said, “ There is no doubt about what is waiting on the border. The fire is burning so close.”
“You have a greater responsibility to respond to the situation if you are in a relatively better position. How will history remember us if we don’t speak? If you don’t do anything for the country in this situation, your children and their children will be ashamed of you.”
Ms. Roy asked the Kerala government to be a role model and release activist Grow Vasu.
