"Take care, Arundhati Roy warns Sonia"

NEW DELHI: Indian novelist Arundhati Roy rejoices that Sonia Gandhi, who "doesn't play the princess", humbled the men who berated her and warns she will face a "blatant game" from a corporate world unmoved by the electoral verdict of India's poor. Roy said she had been "exhaling slowly" since Gandhi triumphed over all polls and a smear campaign by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to become the frontrunner as India's prime minister heading a left-of-centre coalition.

"I'm always very happy with people who are slightly unsure of themselves. She has taken so many risks, and yet she's so unsure of herself and careful," Roy said. "She doesn't play the princess." But Roy, a leading activist and the only non-expatriate Indian to win the Booker Prize for her novel "God of Small Things", warned that Gandhi had a tough road ahead against an establishment which the novelist believes firmly sided with the right-wing. www.dailytimes.com.pk

Replies: 2 Comments

Wednesday, May 19th, News Update posted:

Uproar as Gandhi says: I won't be PM

Randeep Ramesh in Delhi
Wednesday May 19, 2004
The Guardian

Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India's Congress party, yesterday abandoned the race to become prime minister days after winning a general election, saying that leading the nation had not been her aim.

Mrs Gandhi's decision stunned her supporters, who demonstrated in Delhi last night, and came after Hindu nationalists vowed to launch a national campaign against the prospect of a foreign-born woman leading India's 1bn people.

"The post of prime minister has not been my aim," Mrs Gandhi told Congress MPs in the central hall of the Indian parliament. "I was always certain that if ever I found myself in the position I am in today I would follow my inner voice. I humbly decline the post." www.guardian.co.uk

Wednesday, May 19th, News Update posted:

Arundhati Roy On the Indian Elections

www.democracynow.org

"What has happened is that as soon as the election results were announced, the BJP., the hard-right wing members of the B.J.P. and its goon squads started saying we'll shave our heads. We'll eat green gram and make a revolution in this country against this foreign woman on the one hand, and on the other hand, equally hard core corporate groups were acting -- they were out on the streets

They were yelling like fundamentalists would, and all of these corporate television channels had split screens where on the one hand, you saw what is happening in Sonia Gandhi's house and on the other half, you just had what the stockbrokers are saying

And the whole of the one billion people who had voted had just been forgotten. They had been given their photo opportunity, their journeys on elephant back and camel and whatever it was to the election booth. Now they were just forgotten. The only comments you get are what the industrialists think... and what the centrists think about Sonia Gandhi

It is an absolutely absurd kind of blackmail by fascists on the one hand and corporate fascists on the other." Full Article