New Delhi, May 05, 2022 (PPI-OT):Noted Indian author and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy has compared “India of today” to a plane moving in reverse and said that it was headed for a crash. Arundhati Roy was speaking in New Delhi at the launch of the book “Why do you fear my way so much?”, a selection of poems and letters by jailed human rights activist GN Saibaba.
She said, “Recently, I asked a pilot friend of mine, ‘Can you fly a plane backwards?’ He laughed out loud. I said “this is exactly what is happening here [in India]”. The writer added, “The leaders of this country are flying the plane in reverse, everything is falling, and we are headed for a crash”. She described India as a land of “sophisticated jurisprudence”, but the one where laws are applied differently depending on your “caste, class, gender and ethnicity”.
Speaking about GN Saibaba, Arundhati Roy said, “What are we doing here today? We are meeting to talk about a professor who is paralysed 90 per cent and has been in jail for seven years. That is what we are doing. That is enough. We do not have to speak anymore. That is enough to tell you what kind of country we are living in. What shame is this.”
Pertinently, GN Saibaba, who has over 90 per cent physical disabilities and uses a wheelchair, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 by a sessions court in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district on the alleged charge of having Maoist links and engaging in activities amounting to “waging war against the country”. His services as an assistant professor at Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College were terminated from March 31 last year.
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