Published on Sunday, March 10, 2002 in the Sunday Herald (Scotland)
Days after walking out of Asia's biggest prison to the cheers of her supporters, writer and activist Arundhati Roy yesterday said she would continue her battle with India's judiciary by appealing against her conviction for criminal contempt.
Supreme Court judges sentenced her to a symbolic night in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail on Wednesday and fined her 2000 rupees because she criticized their judgment in the Sardar Sarovar case, in which she has long campaigned about plans to raise the height of a dam.
The week's events in court put another dent in democratic India's battered international image. Just days earlier, vengeful mobs had run amok, murdering hundreds of Muslim families in their homes in Gujarat as police stood by. More trouble seemed imminent because of a row over building a temple in what, to the outside world, looks like an episode from the Middle Ages.
Then the country's finest legal minds put India in the same league as the tawdry Third World dictatorships that jail intellectual opponents, drawing howls of protest from Italian legislators, Hollywood stars, and Indian peasants battling the impending flooding of their homes. Probably no contempt could have caused greater damage to the reputation of the court, but the judges may have thought that at least they had defended their dignity from their high-profile tormentor.
They may have thought too soon. Last night, with growing backing from Indian intellectuals and social activists, Roy made it clear that she would lodge an appeal in the next few weeks because she wants to defend freedom of speech in India.
She said: 'This judgment sets a precedent, now it can be quoted. It says clearly that citizens are not allowed to criticize the court, only specialists like the law minister can do that.
'Angry is too mild a word to describe how I feel about it. It's not about me and the court, it's an issue of freedom of speech. The Indian press didn't carry much of my comments afterwards -- that's how much fear there is over this issue.'
Many of her supporters had expected the famously combative Roy to refuse to pay after Wednesday's judgment and serve three months in prison instead. But, speaking to the Sunday Herald from her Delhi home, she revealed why she had taken her decision during her night behind prison bars.
'I did think about staying in jail, I certainly wasn't afraid of it,' she said. 'It's never been a case of me not accepting the jurisdiction of the court, but I did not want to become a martyr to this cause. I didn't see why I should bring further suffering on myself. I think it would have been stupid.
'One has to be combative in an intelligent way.'
Unbowed by the week's events -- which she admitted left her feeling exhausted and spaced-out -- she again poured criticism on the judges. In particular she singled out the patronizing way they had dealt with her as a woman, saying they were sentencing her to just one day because of her sex. She ridiculed their advice that she should in future stick to 'the path of art and literature'.
The complex legal case has dragged on since December 2000, when lawyers attached to the court claimed she had shouted filthy slogans against it and threatened to kill them. Their credibility was undermined by the amateurish petition they filed, full of mis-spellings and mangled English.
Roy said she had never expected the judges to send her to Tihar -- although she had a bag ready packed -- but afterwards proclaimed that her prison experience had been 'amazing'.
The jail is Asia's biggest and houses 20,000 inmates, including Islamic terrorists. But Roy said she had been impressed at how clean it was and praised the jail authorities. She also enjoyed meeting prisoners, one of whom innocently asked her if she had killed her husband.
'I explained that he was still alive and told her why I was there,' she said.
The best-selling author, who won the Booker Prize for her first novel, The God of Small Things, mingled freely with other prisoners and slept on a blanket on the floor in a tiny cell with two other women inmates.
'There wasn't a threatening atmosphere where you have to watch your back or anything like that,' Roy said. 'The other prisoners were in for killing their husbands, drugs, prostitution, things like that. Some of them were in for 15 years or more and it was sad to hear what some of them were going through.
'But it seemed quite egalitarian in there. I didn't get any special treatment, which is fine. I would have felt embarrassed.'
The Narmada project to build around 3000 big and small dams, flooding a series of river valleys in central India, is still being fought by Roy and by the protest group Narmada Bachao Andolan. The author said she expects to visit the area later this month. Campaigners have used the Indian courts to try to prevent dams being heightened, which increases the area of land that requires to be flooded.
Roy said: 'We have to fight these dams inch by inch. For the people who live there it's a choice between fighting and destitution.'
Many of the worst affected by the project are tribal people and poor, low-caste farmers called Dalits, many of whom have already been forced out of ancestral lands into refugee camps with little compensation.
The writer also contrasted her tough treatment by the court with its role in the Ayodhya controversy. The explosive task of making a long-delayed final decision on whether a Hindu temple can be built on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by bigots 10 years ago rests with the Supreme Court. 'They haven't shown much focus there,' she said.
She condemned the current 'fascistic atmosphere' in India after the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat by mobs angered at an attack on Hindu extremists on a train. She blames the Hindu nationalist government of the BJP party.
She said: 'They have tried to make out that it was a small lapse, that the army wasn't called out in time, but they have been planting the seeds of frenzy for years'.
