'A Fearfulness in the Air'.(Arundhati Roy)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Arundhati Roy emerged from jail last week unbowed. The Booker Prize- winning author of "The God of Small Things" had spent 24 hours in a crowded cell after India's Supreme Court sentenced her to a "symbolic" term for contempt as a result of a protest over the controversial Narmada dam in central India. Never shy of passionate debate, Roy sat down with NEWSWEEK's Ian MacKinnon in her Delhi apartment. The elfin novelist, 42, railed against the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, its failure to curb sectarian violence that claimed 500 lives in Gujarat in five days and the renewed crisis at Ayodhya, where Hindus want to build a temple on the ruins of a mosque destroyed a decade ago. Excerpts:

MACKINNON: How did you feel when you saw Gujarat burning?

ROY: The worst thing was that BJP governments in New Delhi and Gujarat tried to say it was an administration problem: how to get the police and Army in. But they've been assiduously working up this feeling for years, stoking these ugly passions. If it was an uncontrolled communal frenzy, why wasn't it repeated in other states? It's because Gujarat's the only state where the BJP's in power. Any Indian citizen who's had a run-in with police or the state knows that if the authorities want to control the situation they can do so in one hour flat. There's no excuse for what happened.

Surely communal tensions existed there before?

The people who burned that train in Godhra [when 58 Hindu activists died] and the people who are burning people alive in Gujarat all worship [God]. To present it as communal violence is very wrong. The seeds of hatred were sown.

How?

This government indulges in political brinkmanship with the voters. You raise the specter of "Hindutva" [Hindu price]; you come to Ayodhya and gather mobs. You bring the pot to the boil then hold up your hands in horror and say it's boiling over. In Gujarat the communal temperature has always been high--the fascism is just below the skin. It's chilling. There's a letter being circulated saying people should boycott Muslim businesses. It's like what the Nazis did against the Jews. It must be terrifying to be a Muslim in this country today. And the farther down the social scale you go, the more terrifying it must be. But it's not a class ...