Arundhati Roy's famous spat with historian Ram Guha is well known. Now even anti-Hindutva champion Harsh Mander has spoken out against Roy's openly batting for Naxals. One could easily see the discomfiture of TV personalities when they recently interviewed Roy. In an interview segment, CNN-IBN's Suhasini Haider called Roy out on her bald faced lie that Naxals never kill civilians - however it appeared Rajdeep Sardesai restrained Haider before it got too heated.
The same TV channels that happily endorsed and echoed Roy's views on Kashmir seem to be chickening out as far as the Naxals are concerned.
The answer can be found in the genesis of India's intellectual class and a key point where Roy differs from them.
The TV personalities, intellectuals who adorn the pages of The Outlook India and hog most of the editorial space mostly have domestic aspirations. Even if they do have international aspiration, it is strictly in the context of reporting for the country - maybe a Pulitzer or a Magsaysay etc. Roy on the other hand wants to break out into the international arena - she wants to play with the big dogs.
Thus, while Roy still favors the secular party, she is not under the inertial and territorial compulsion of the rest of the intellectual class. A Harsh Mander, for instance, will still bat for NREGA at the end of the day, although the program has done nothing for the most dispossessed of the tribals - the kind usually within the firing range of Naxals.
The second problem with India's opinion makers is accidental - you see, being concerned about poverty and misery was never part of the program. It is by sheer accident that BJP came to power and all the fake obsession with Human Development Index etc. started then. Otherwise, India would be a fully feudal single party society and according to TV channels, a land of milk and honey. The poverty part would be swept under the rugs like it was under Nehru. CNN-IBN and NDTV would be extensions of Door Darshan - running fancy ads on NREGA.
Anyone wishing to contest this view should check out the textbooks of the 70s and the 80s. They all but lamented that India is destined to be poor for lack of natural resources. As a matter of fact, even now the consensus view is that people actually want to be farmers. A quick recent example: Shekhar Gupta wrote a scorching article about Maharashtra (The Maha Crater) - a massive indictment of the ruling coalition - after the Maharashtra assembly elections.
So the line the media was almost forced to adopt is that India still remains poor but Government is doing "something". Now, doing "something" is simply not cool enough for the type of international anti-establishment street-cred Roy covets.
There is a reason the extended family feels nervous about the war on Naxals - after the first war, West Bengal completely switched over to the communists. This is also the reason they feel nervous about Roy. So, don't they care about the violence? Let's just say the set we have been talking about do not bring work to the cocktail parties.
