New Delhi: Maoists are “justified in taking up arms” because the government has been unjust to them and is waging a war on them, says writer and activist Arundhati Roy.
"My fear is that because of this economic interest the government and establishment actually needs a war. It needs to militarise. For that it needs an enemy. And so in a way what the Muslims were to BJP, the Maoists are to Congress," Roy said in an interview with Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN’s show Devil's Advocate.
"If I was a person who is being dispossessed, whose wife has been raped, who is being pushed of their land and who is being faced with this 'police force', I would say that I am justified in taking up arms. If that is the only way I have to defend myself," said the Booker Prize-winning novelist. "There should be unconditional talks with the Maoists.”
"We should stop thinking about who is justified. You have an army of very poor people being faced down by an army of rich that are corporate-backed. I am sorry but it is like that. So you can't extract morality from the heinous act of violence that each commits against the other," she said.
Roy, in a debate on CNN-IBN last week, had alleged that the government was a planning a war on Maoists to take away their resources on behalf of the multi-national companies.
“The real fact is--and I believe this--that it is the Government that wants a war to clear out the forest areas because there is a huge backlog of MoUs in Jharkhand as well as Chhattisgarh that are not being activated,” she had said.
(Watch the full interview and read transcript at 2030 hrs IST on CNN-IBN and IBNLive. )
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