This is very iconic standard of thinking. Arundhanti Roy has always stood out as a crusader for human rights, intellectual freedom and cultural dignity .Her thoughts on social freedom are so revolutionary. She is a living testimony that India is still an impeccable home for great thinking. The way she has presented her arguments here makes much of sense , especially to those of us who have in one way or another been discriminated for being black, poor, African, women, gay, disabled, old ,young ,aged, Muslims, jews, migrants or albino.

“…because in the free market you can trade a little mass-rape and lynching or a spot of ethnic cleansing or some serious financial corruption”
How dreadful to believe such idiocy.

Which is the author's point, of course. Good spotting!

No, the author is blaming the free market for things that are anti-freedom. She makes many good points, but has a blind spot when it comes to understanding that government controls on the economy and restrictions on how people choose to engage in voluntary economic exchange with each other make things worse, not better.

Not so much a blind spot, I think, as an emphasis on the other extreme: i.e., when power and wealth, concentrated in the hands of a few, unbalance the exchange.

Well, government tends to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few. Where a strong centralized power structure exists, it is typically controlled by the wealthy, who use it to further their own interests. Even revolutions carried out in the name of the poor, if they do not abolish powerful centralized government, tend to wind up with that government being run by the wealthy (see e.g. China).

Why did I think "USA" every time Arundhati wrote "India"?
All is lost, I'm afraid.

Because Americans like to make everything about themselves. It's not a great habit.

Nationalism is a problem in many places around the world. Many in both the United States and India are afflicted by it, and people suffer as a result.

All very heavy questions, but beyond them a call to action few can resist.

I'm not happy with the echo of Werner Herzog on the matter of "appropriations", but perhaps the idea could be better expressed by words to the effect that literature, myth, legend, history, and narrative of all kinds (as well as all arts and sciences) are the universal heritage of all human beings, and the exclusive possession of no person, or set of persons.

Arundhati Roy has an important message here for those on the left who've embraced anti-liberal group identity politics:

"Today censorship has turned into a battle of all against all. The fine art of taking offense has become a global industry...

In India, like in other countries, the weaponization of identity as a
form of resistance has become the dominant response to the weaponization of identity as a form of oppression. Those who have historically been oppressed, enslaved, colonized, stereotyped, erased, unheard and unseen precisely because of our identities—our race, caste, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference—are now defiantly doubling down on those very identities to face off against that oppression...

In the politics of identity there is all too often an important
pivot, a hinge, which when it turns upon itself begins to reinforce as well as replicate the very thing it wishes to resist. That happens when identity is disaggregated and atomized into micro-categories...

Even these micro-identities then develop a power hierarchy and a
micro-elite, usually located in big cities, big universities, with
social media capital, which inevitably mimics the same kind of
exclusion, erasure and hierarchy that is being challenged in the first place.

If we lock ourselves into the prison cells of the very labels and
identities that we have been given by those who have always had power over us, we can at best stage a prison revolt. Not a revolution. And the prison guards will appear soon enough to restore order. In fact, they’re already on their way...

Sealing ourselves into communities, religious and caste groups,
ethnicities and genders, reducing and flattening our identities and
pressing them into silos precludes solidarity."

The world needs to stop seeing India as a secular, colourful, sexy, Bollywood country. The reality is harsh: it's a country where a majority community has genocidal fantasy of killings/maiming minorities and hoodwink the world with the old, worn out facade of liberalism.

The reality is nuanced. Not all Hindus have that perspective, any more than all Muslims support terrorism or all Christians are colonialist, all Buddhists support the persecution of minorities in Myanmar, or all atheists support genocidal Marxist regimes. Many voices in the Bollywood community have spoken out against the bigotry among some Hindus that has grown under Modi.

Writers since they are all leftists and socialist believe that all right leaning leaders are dictators and against democracy. Miss Roy is exaggerating off course and she would have no idea on how t run a country of 1.4 billion people.

The real divide is not between left-wing and right-wing, but between those who value freedom and those who prefer to expand State power. The Modi administration in India sadly appears to fall more into the latter category.

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