Pandemic Is a Portal: Arundhati Roy on COVID-19 in India, Imagining Another World & Fighting for It – Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh inerviews Arundhati Roy
…on the 24th of March, with four hours’ notice, which ran between 8:00 at night and 12 midnight, Modi locked down this nation of 1.38 billion people without warning. And the crisis that that has created, the lack of planning, the lack of thinking forward,… the crisis has been exacerbated into something that might — might really become even more serious than the epidemic that it’s planning for.
You have a situation where you have millions of workers and migrant workers under a lockdown, which is supposed to enforce social distancing, but it only enforces physical compression. People are crammed together. People are separated from their families. In many places, they have no food. They have no access to money even. They’ve sold their phones. You have the sense that you’re sitting on some kind of explosive substance.
And yet, at the same time,… arrests have been made, not just the people who you mentioned. Siddharth Varadarajan has not been arrested, the editor of Wire, but he has a case filed against him. Senior lawyers who speak out against Modi have had FIRs filed against them. Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde have been arrested. Young students and people, a lot of Muslims, who are now being accused of being part of the massacre that took place against Muslims in northeast Delhi, are being arrested. You know, the circles are closing in.…
SEE ALSO
India Is Scapegoating Muslims for the Spread of the Coronavirus – By Sameer Yasir (Apr 22, 2020, Foreign Policy)
Coronavirus conspiracy theories targeting Muslims spread in India – By Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman (Apr 13, 2020, The Guardian)
INSIGHT-In Modi’s India, virus fallout inflames divisions between Muslims and Hindus – By Alexandra Ulmer, Shilpa Jamkhandikar (Apr 17, 2020, Reuters)
Blamed For Coronavirus Outbreak, Muslims In India Come Under Attack – By Lauran Frayer (Apr 23, 2020, NPR)
