Listening to Grasshoppers
By Arundhati Roy
Hamish Hamilton (£14.99)

India is the up-and-coming superpower that much of the world loves to love. But not, of course, everyone. Not environmentalists pushing for stronger climate change treaties. Not India’s smaller neighbours. Not Burmese democracy activists, appalled by New Delhi’s embrace of their country’s military rulers.

But by and large India is seen as a “good” emerging power – in implicit contrast to China – by virtue of its noisy democracy, which through largely credible elections has repeatedly allocated and transferred national and state power.

India’s global image also trades on its deep reserves of soft power, especially its export of charismatic gurus and yoga masters preaching peace, love, tolerance and harmony – values that the political establishment often manages to portray as intrinsic to society at large and the state itself.

Yet India has a dark underbelly in which state and society often fall dreadfully short of the liberal, democratic ideals they profess; where law shields the powerful and persecutes the weak. It is this that Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning novelist and prominent social activist, seeks to draw attention to in her provocative new book, Listening to Grasshoppers.

The book is an uneven collection of essays, opinion pieces, speeches and other writings published between 2002 – when an estimated 2,000 Muslims were massacred in the western state of Gujarat – and the aftermath of last November’s terror attacks in Mumbai. Roy calls the collection “a detailed under-view” of the darker side of the world’s largest democracy – or what she describes as “the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound ‘apply-through-through-the-proper channels’ nature of governance and subjugation in India.”

Roy paints a grim picture of India as a society of unaccountable political elites, a malevolent law-enforcement system, a rapacious emerging middle-class and a deeply-alienated impoverished mass, battling to avoid dispossession from their land.

She points accusing fingers at corporate India for its greed and for its silence about human rights atrocities, at the media for ignoring the crisis she sees unfolding in the country, and at right-wing Hindus for channelling public anger into religious intolerance.

The main essays focus on the Gujarat riots, the arrests and trial of Muslim suspects after the 2001 attacks on the Indian Parliament, the de facto military occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir, and the Mumbai attacks.

And although Roy, who sits firmly within India’s radical left tradition, claims she has no Big Theory – no overview – of modern India, she does offer up one big idea. In a strand running through several essays, which suffer from repetitiveness, she argues that the rise of Hindu nationalist extremism was inextricably linked to India’s market-oriented economic development project of the past two decades.

“While one arm is busy selling off the nation’s assets in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is arranging a baying, howling deranged chorus of cultural nationalism,” she proclaims in the transcript of a 2004 lecture about the then-ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The essays were written before the recent Congress party victory over the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party’s second consecutive electoral defeat – and its worst electoral performance in years. But Roy’s introduction makes clear she takes little comfort from that, given her gloomy view of Congress, most other arms of the Indian state – and Indian society.

She rightly points to India’s persistently high rates of malnutrition, and rising tension over land, raising the question of whether India has either the capacity or will to improve the lives of its poorest citizens.

Yet her sweeping denunciations of India’s privatisation efforts make it seem as though New Delhi was callously dismantling the Swedish welfare state.

She dismisses the economic boom as having merely created “a vast middle class punch drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it – and a much, much vaster desperate under class”.

There is little doubt that Roy, with her eloquence, concern for the poor, and personal magnetism, is an important voice in the Indian public sphere.

But the danger is that her extreme views – and her fierce hostility to a liberalisation programme that many Indians credit with dramatic improvements in their own lives – will alienate those whose support will be essential in India’s struggle for social justice in the years ahead.

The writer is the FT’s South Asia correspondent