ABSTRACT
Arundhati Roy writes seductively. Recently, the author picked up her new book, Listening to Grasshoppers, and was mesmerised by her luminous prose but the author disagreed profoundly with her conclusion. Roy thinks that India pretends to be a democracy in order to impress the world. Like many in the 1960s, the author was a Leftist and admired Charu Mazumdar who had founded the Naxalbari movement. Perhaps, it was because the author lived in sensible Bombay rather than Calcutta. The Naxalite movement died in the 1970s but it revived subsequently and today it operates in over 200 districts across 20 states and controls huge Indian territory. The Naxalite movement has always found sympathy in the people influential, leftish upper middle class. It is pathetic that P. Chidambaram should be slowed by endless debate on development versus police action; or whether helicopters should fire on rebels and risk civilian casualties.
