Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy’s line works like a victory lap with teeth: it doesn’t just mark an election result, it indicts the atmosphere that made the result seem impossible. The key move is her framing of surprise as a symptom. If “many people were surprised,” the problem isn’t simply that analysts misread the numbers; it’s that public perception had been actively engineered.

“Haze of hatred” is doing heavy lifting. Haze suggests something particulate and immersive, not a single slogan you can fact-check and discard. You breathe it in. You squint. You stop trusting your own vision. By choosing a sensory metaphor instead of policy language, Roy argues that Hindu nationalism’s power isn’t limited to institutions; it colonizes the imagination, making alternatives feel unreal. “Spreading” sharpens the accusation: hatred isn’t incidental fallout, it’s a deliberate campaign, communicable and strategic.

The sentence also smuggles in Roy’s larger political ethic: liberal-secular victories are fragile when they’re defined only as electoral events. Congress’s win (in the period when Hindu nationalist politics had been ascendant and street-level polarization intense) becomes less a celebration of Congress and more a reminder of how propaganda warps the baseline of what citizens expect. Roy isn’t praising a party so much as exposing the psychological victory Hindu nationalism had already claimed: it made itself look inevitable. Her intent is to puncture that inevitability narrative while warning that a cleared sky can return to smog fast if the source remains.