Tunku vs. Arundhati

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(from the tipline – thanks JT!) This sort of stuff is usually a tad too political for SM BUT, since it’s a desi-writer taking on another desi-writer, I figured it was well within Sepia Mutiny’s posting guidelines 😉

The fact that it’s by a WSJ staff writer I follow from time to time – Tunku Varadarajan – & that he provides a BEAUTIFUL skewering of Arundhati Roy was merely the icing on the cake –

When a friend learned that I was pondering a piece critical of Ms. Roy … he e-mailed me reprovingly to ask whether that would not be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But second thoughts can strike at the speed of light. No sooner had he hit the “send” button than he hit it again: “There are certain fish, however, in certain barrels, that cannot be ignored.” …A certain segment of the American intelligentsia connects gleefully with exotic leftists like Ms. Roy. In fact, the Ms. Roys of our age, and their fans and subsidy-givers in the West, enjoy a touching symbiosis. Arundhati Roy, I’d venture to say, is George Soros’s political poster girl. Ms. Roy and her type pay the ultimate compliment to America by holding that all world events occur at America’s behest and that the six billion non-Americans on the planet are but helpless pawns, incapable of doing anything–especially anything bad–without Uncle Sam’s imprimatur.

Those are just a few of the plentiful nuggets in a very well written & succinct piece.

9 thoughts on “Tunku vs. Arundhati”

  1. Whats up with all the arundhati bashing goin around off late??

    Cant a sista just speak her mind….gosh!

  2. I have to agree with Tunku on this one. I opposed the war and I have deep misgivings about the U.S. approach there — it started as a debacle, and is quickly becoming a fiasco.

    But I can’t even remotely sympathize with these ‘insurgents’. First, the Americans have stated clearly that they are leaving eventually, and I for one believe it.

    Second, the insurgents are doing pretty ghastly things. They are, for instance, killing 2-3 Iraqi citizens — many of them unarmed — for every American soldier they attack. Just a couple of days ago they killed 17 unarmed people when they shot up a civilian bus. What is their ideology? What is their purpose? So many of the killings seem tribal in some way (Sunni on Kurd, Sunni on Shia, etc.); it doesn’t at all seem like a credible “resistence.” (See Juan Cole for more on the tribal nature of many of the attacks)

    I’ve spoken out in defense of Roy before. On the dams issue, for instance, she makes good points about the flaws in the old World Bank approach to third world “development”. She also asks serious questions about whether big dams can deliver what is promised (water, electricity). She might still be wrong, but at least her contributions have been productive.

    Not so much in this case.

  3. A well-written piece. Varadarajan, towards the end, wonders at her sympathy for those who would gladly destroy all she values, including “…her own country, India.”

    A rhetorical question, I’m sure. Given her loathing for all things near to her, I suspect Ms. Roy would be delighted at India’s extinction.

    Kumar

  5. yeah! and ‘god of small things’ was an atrocious novel, too!

    the only booker she deserved is the one named after the character on ‘good times.’

  6. There’s a lot that’s irritating about Arundhati Roy. Her public comments about cutting her hair short so people would focus on her thoughts instead of her looks. Showing up in a Delhi court in a bright pink sari for her trial. Her usage of pseudo-scientific developmental and revolutionary jargon borrowed from academia. There’s a lot you could accuse her of. Yet I somehow doubt that she was advocating violence in her comments about joining the “Iraqi resistance”.

    She later clarified her comments to ABC radio:

    “One wasn’t urging them to join the Medhi army [in Iraq] but to become the resistance, to become part of what ought to be a non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation,” she said.

    “That is to redefine what resistance means, you know we can’t just assume that resistance means terrorism because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation.”

    c.f. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200411/s1233405.htm

    You can agree or disagree with the position or prescription, but her only proposition, i.e., that the “occupation” is violent, is true. Perhaps you could accuse her of being too loose with her comments.

    Conservatives, and especially editors of conservative newspapers, like to publicly espouse their views on How The World Works. When they attack earnest liberals like Roy who do the same, they do so at their own peril. Such attacks, as is the case here, are often as specious as their economic theories, a kind of supply-side editorializing: mild hysterics that serve as Trojan horse to spread underlying ideology by rustling up false dichotomies and forcing binary decision making.

    Tunku Varadarjan writes the occasional thought-provoking article, but this is a simpleminded attack piece that makes convenient assumptions to make the fish appear larger and more lethargic in the barrel. I find it ironic that the Opinions editor from The Wall Street Journal, a publication I happen to subscribe to, is maligning someone else for “sophistry masquerading as protest, rage unhinged from fact”. Even more so when it’s in an article that manages to take a swipe at both the evil “subsidy-givers” and capitaliste extraordinaire George Soros in the same sentence!

    And knocking someone for supposedly “deploring the very system that has furnished her with a cordon of comfort: freedom of speech, and respect for women’s views” is almost like asking Indians to be thankful for the British Raj which gave them the steam engine, railways, and the English language. Only those who are lazy and largely ignorant of history, especially the progress of human rights as a historical idea, could warm to this logic.

    I donÂ’t know, if I had to choose between an irritating, but nonetheless participating, “activist” trying to change the world for the better who I sometimes wish would just have a Coke and a smile, and a smug writer of editorials full of twee cod outrage, I would have to side with the person trying to make things better (and that despite my weariness of good intentions). Anyway, he’ll have to do better than this if he wants to skewer Roy (and she is a ripe target).

    For your reference:

    The Greater Common Good http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html

    Cheers, M.

  7. M – you rail against the “false dichotomies” used by Roy’s critics but give her a BIG PASS when she accuses the “occupation” of violence while almost completely ignoring the FAR more violent “insurgents”.

    And that’s precisely my problem (as well as Tunku’s) with Roy. An American doing something offends her a thousand times more than practically anyone else (e.g. Zarqawi) doing anything else (oh, how about a carbomb in a busy Shia shopping area?). To simply not care when a non-Westerner does something like this is a far worse “false dichotomy”.

    There’s a helluva difference between Wanton violence and the violence necessary to free a country from a tyrant (doubters need only consider the types of folks Zarqawi et. al. would target if he had a B52 and a bunch of JDAMs)

    And yet, Roy only seems capable of mustering moral outrage at the situation if / when some tenuous connection back to America can be made (e.g. Zarqawi and his ilks somehow being victims who were forced to carbomb by America).

    This is moral equivalence at its worst. Never mind that Zarqawi et. al. want to bring the Taliban to Iraq or the fact that >80% of Iraqi’s oppose him. Or, for that matter, the fact that sometimes, you need to use Force to stop folks like him. These opinions are on the other side of the “dichotomy” and thus she frankly considers them worthless.

    (fwiw, my comments on Roy’s “resistance” quote are here.)

  8. M: “…She later clarified her comments…”.

    Yes, underline the word ‘later’. Her original comments are not obscure, however. She spoke from her heart, I think, and her heart is with the (un-Gandhian) ‘resistance’ .

    The later comments are just CYA, and its amusing to watch her apologists gin up obscurity in her remarks. A scholastic exercise on her behalf, I’m tempted to say. But that would be dissin an honorable tradition.

    Kumar