There is an understanding that has dawned, even in the US, where you thought it’s never going to happen. You have Bernie Sanders out there, who you would not have had a while ago. Things that were not allowed to be said are being said. Today people are talking about the 99% and the 1%. I think in the US, the Occupy movement changed the language. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The ObserverĪR: Yes, there is solidarity. Villagers from the Narmada valley living in a resettlement site in Baroda, Gujarat, 1999. The anti-war protests, all those people who lined up as Syrians were coming into Germany and handed them water, Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter. GY: Every now and then though, there is a response, isn’t there? From progressives, from that broad swathe of people who find this reactionary moment very difficult. Similarly, what I see happening now with this rabid fear of immigrants, it gains traction.
To say: “This happened, these people were killed.” But people just turn around and say: “So what? They deserve it.” And you realise that compassion is never going to be a major guiding rule in this. I wrote about it and I thought that just describing what happened was a form of politics. Is that a failure of political education, or a failure of an agenda? What are we doing wrong?ĪR: I learned a lesson soon after the massacre in 2002 of Muslims, when 2,000 people were slaughtered on the streets. We create this space, we build badly on it and then someone comes in with a wrecking ball. GY: In a sense, while all of the situations are different, one can think of the same model being replicated in a range of ways: Trump comes after Obama, Bolsonaro comes after the Workers’ party. You can’t just get away in India with saying “Caste is class, comrade”. Because caste is the engine that runs modern India. All my writing from The God of Small Things onwards has a lot to do with that. I suppose in the US it’s to have not been able to deal with race. And here, the great failure of the left has been to not be able to deal with caste. Caste is the engine that runs modern IndiaĪR: In India, when they say left, they mean communist parties. There’s a conundrum in this moment where America can have four of the largest demonstrations in its history in the last two years and yet Trump is still politically viable.
GY: Yet despite our methods of resistance, while the left can get larger numbers of people on the streets, we don’t seem to be able to make it cohere into something effective.
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