“I still don’t flinch when I write”
Meena Kandasamy on the unsettling reality of writing under the threat of homegrown fascism.
Last Word by Meena Kandasamy | Originally published in the print edition, October 11th 2024
How does it feel to write under the shadow of fascism? When you stare at a blank screen, what paralyses you is not the writer’s block or the poverty of the imagination, but the endlessly escalating fear about the consequences one will have to face. If you are lucky, you will pay the price of some light trolling; if you are on hard times you could face litigation. If you are doomed, you could be arrested, if cursed with outrageous courage, someone will sign your death warrant.
When I discuss the atmosphere here in India, there is always this offhand attempt to dismiss the panic as scare-mongering. Some choose to remain conveniently ignorant of writers like Narendra Dabholkar, Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh, who have been assassinated, or the many writers who languish in jail without trial under terrorism charges, and the many more who suffer widespread intimidation. I remain hopeful that as things worsen, writers and journalists will not take this lying down – that eventually there will be a pushback that valourises resistance and free expression.
In the 2024 General Election, the BJP won the game of numbers, but lost the ideological battleground. They no longer have the crushing absolute majority, they lost massively in the Hindu heartland, and in the unkindest cut of all, they lost their seat in the temple-city of Ayodhya. The people’s mandate, which overwhelmingly rejected hate, may not have succeeded in disarming the far-right, but it has blunted their bite.
The Hindutva right-wing political response to their electoral showdown has come through a series of scare tactics. They threatened legal action against Arundhati Roy over a remark made about Kashmir some fourteen years ago. In doing so they signalled to all other writers in the country: if we can get someone of her global celebrity, work out your miserable fate for yourselves. The Broadcast Bill regulates online digital content thereby treating everyone posting on social media as a broadcaster. It was only widespread opposition from online creators (publicly) and tech companies (privately) that forced the government to back down. In Uttar Pradesh (a North Indian state governed by the BJP), life imprisonment is imposed for those posting “anti-national, obscene or objectionable content” even as the influencers who promote the government are rewarded with schemes ranging from £3000-£8000
per month. Such a carrot-and-stick model is not just deeply anti-intellectual but dangerous to the foundational principles of democracy.
In such an inflammatory ecosystem, writers have been at the receiving end of smear campaigns. In a concerted effort to stigmatise and rob them of legitimacy – they are labelled anti-national, andolan jeevi (those who subsist on revolution), foreign agents, and ‘presstitutes’. This name-calling is as much a blanket activity intended to reduce integrity and credibility as it is a targeted campaign to silence specific voices. Rabid IT cells aligned or employed with the ruling dispensation are also pressed into action to carry out propaganda on behalf of Israel and defend the genocide against the Palestinians, as well as rushing into action whenever conglomerates come under fire for corruption, corporate loot or land-grab. This creates an online landscape of intimidation where the fear of facing these threats and abuses counters the freedom to hold governments to account.
Nothing online remains online, there is a sad spillover into the real world. Online troll armies publish Excel sheets titled Anti-Hindu Media and dox everyone who has been remotely critical of the regime. Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi and Bahujan writers face great vulnerability. Throwing writers and journalists to the wolves through an incitement of the fringe forces dissenters to live with the constant fear of never knowing which deranged trigger-hungry fanatic might take the law into his own hands or at what point in time. When the threat is assassination, silence becomes a shield.
Some of us are battling on. There is no forgiving my peers who have turned rank careerists shamelessly carrying out the regime’s propaganda — every Hitler requires and recruits an army of Goebbelsian minions. Some of them strike a cunning balance making it impossible to call them out—they flirt with the most dangerous Islamophobic ideology, even as they lament India’s marginalised.
Publishers fawn over me during chance encounters at book festivals, but behind closed doors, bully their subordinates against bidding for my novel. Someone I have never met vetoed my name from being considered for a job, saying I was controversial. This is despite my academic qualifications and the fact that my work is on the syllabus of no less than two dozen universities; I am simply deemed unemployable for fear of offending the regime. When I am invited to college campuses for a public lecture, the local police force the principals to write a letter taking responsibility for anything I might say. There are many writers who face the same fate because they call out the injustices and atrocities of this regime. The fear and clampdown unleashed upon those who dissent makes everyone think twice before they engage. Such systematic ostracisation means that your alienation multiplies multifold.
When I was younger, I would have worn these rejections as badges of honour. Now, as a writer in her late 30s who has to pay the rent and bills and send two children to school, I think of the Tamil words vaaithula adikkuraanga (they are hitting at our stomachs). To make noise against fascism is in many ways to lose the opportunity to make a living. Where they cannot kill you, they will slowly starve you – of attention, of opportunity, of having your skin in the game.
I moved back to India after nearly a decade of living in London. Four years later, after what I’ve faced firsthand in my homeland, I still don’t flinch when I write. Writing is a form of madness in that sense – it comes with a courage and defiance no logic can explain.
We are suffering from a silence of isolation, we are suffering from pessimism. And to that extent, I can understand the cowardice of some of my contemporaries. Things will change, however, because people will overthrow tyrannical fascist regimes. As writers, we have an urgent responsibility to play a vital role in forging that change.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic based in India.
