Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

Privatized torture is Roy's poisoned shorthand for a larger moral hack: when the state outsources violence, it also outsources blame. The line is built like a trapdoor. She begins with "now", a casual timestamp that pretends this is just the latest administrative tweak, then drops "obviously" as a dare - if you don't see the scandal, you're already part of the fog. Her target isn't only the abuse itself but the architecture that makes abuse functionally deniable.

The context is the post-9/11 security boom - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, black sites, and the sprawling contractor ecosystem that turned war into a logistics-and-services industry. Roy needles the familiar ritual of accountability: low-ranking "army people" can be punished, photographed, court-martialed. That visibility is precisely the point. It reassures the public that the system works while leaving the system's authors and beneficiaries intact.

Her most loaded move is grammatical: "accountable too?" isn't a typo so much as a deliberate stumble. The sentence frays where oversight frays. It's a small enactment of institutional confusion - whose jurisdiction, whose court, whose paper trail? Privatization becomes a technique of legal laundering, shifting acts once clearly attributable to the state into a gray zone of contracts, NDAs, and "plausible deniability."

Roy's intent is to make readers feel how modern power protects itself: not by refusing cruelty, but by reorganizing it into a supply chain. In that model, torture isn't an aberration; it's a procurement problem.