There is a country and there is a country’s conscience. When we witness India going through times comparable with Pakistan’s Zia era — institutionalisation of bigotry and attempts to transform democracy into majoritarianism — there are some such as Amartya Sen and Arundhati Roy who continue to speak and write. This week, Sen delivered the first Asma Jahangir Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. But he lives abroad and, although absorbing and accessible, he has a cautious, academic style of writing. Roy continues to live in Delhi and campaigns daringly for the causes she espouses, ranging from the freedom movement in India-held Kashmir to the displacement of indigenous communities at the hands of large transnational and Indian corporates, to ecological concerns caused by building large dams to caste barriers in education and employment.

According to Roy, her fiction is a universe and her nonfiction is an argument. She continues to create both with equal facility and a rigour matched by few. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, came after a gap of 20 years since the 1997 publication of her Man Booker Prize-winning debut The God of Small Things. The latest novel is a history of the Indian present written with compassion and courage. It is laced with a complexity of characters and emotions that run through the hearts and minds of the wretched in her country.

In a recent dialogue with her fans and fellow writers published in The Guardian, Roy raised some pertinent concerns and questions about how writing is viewed in the world of today which is dominated by commercialism and populism. She also offered her views on how the role of writers has changed or is being seen to be acceptable by the market and subsequently the readers. Besides, the way Roy spoke about the social and political condition in India resonates with what we continue to face in Pakistan since decades unending. In a response to a question by author Lionel Shriver, Roy said that majoritarianism is taking root in India and it is not just the government, but individuals who are becoming micro-fascists. There are mobs and vigilantes going after and lynching people. This feels so close to home in Pakistan, doesn’t it?

The way Muslims, in particular, and other minorities including Christians are systematically discriminated against in India, compares with the treatment meted out to citizens of minority faiths in Pakistan. A brief video clip received from a friend in India some time ago continues to haunt me. It shows a group of hooligans grabbing a poor-looking Muslim man by his beard. He is threatened and abused, asked to raise Hindu religious slogans and curse Muslims and Pakistan. The video reminds me of a picture of a Christian girl that has stayed in my mind since I first saw it a couple of years ago. There is infinite grief and helplessness in the eyes of this girl embracing a younger child after they survived a bomb attack on a church in Peshawar where scores of worshippers were killed.

Roy worries that most writers have become frightened of being political. Perhaps there is a greater fright among writers from troubled countries and societies marred by violence and xenophobia. All is not quiet on our front in Pakistan, as it were, but there are fewer voices raised by poets and writers than before which challenge obscurantism and autocracy. Maybe some are frightened and some are psychologically hostage to the debate in our world of letters held in the last century — between those associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement and those who called themselves classicists or ones claiming to be modernists. These lines diminish for a major writer. It is artistic treatment and not thematic content that makes a work of literature both powerful and sublime. Therefore, content that subverts conformity with authority — whether totalitarian or majoritarian — often captures a major writer’s imagination. When the majority celebrated Pakistan becoming a nuclear power, none other than Intizar Husain wrote Mor Nama [The Peacock Tale] against the nuclearisation of South Asia.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 24th, 2018