Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

It lands like an accusation disguised as a diagnosis: not that Indian politics is messy, but that the mess has been engineered. Roy’s phrasing is doing two kinds of work at once. “Historically” and “covert” signal a long game and a hidden hand, pushing the listener to see communal conflict not as spontaneous social fracture but as a managed technology of power. She isn’t merely blaming the Congress for opportunism; she’s indicting it for turning identity into infrastructure.

The key term is “vote banks,” a piece of Indian political slang that sounds almost bureaucratic, like a savings account. Roy uses that coldness to sharpen the moral contrast: communities are treated as deposits to be harvested, not citizens to be represented. “Pit one community against another” is blunt, almost mechanical, reducing what is often narrated as ancient grievance into something closer to electoral design. The subtext is that secularism, as performed by a party that has long marketed itself as the secular bulwark, can be less principle than strategy.

Context matters: Roy has spent decades critiquing India’s post-Independence consensus, including the Congress-led state’s comforts with majoritarian pressure, patronage politics, and selective outrage. By naming Congress specifically, she also needles a familiar liberal reflex to treat communalism as the monopoly of the Hindu right. The intent is to widen culpability: if polarization is profitable, it won’t stay confined to one ideology. It becomes a shared political grammar, with voters trained to read elections as demographic arithmetic rather than a contest over governance.