Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy is doing something deliberately inflammatory here: downgrading hypocrisy, that most middle-class political sin, once you put it next to the blunt instrument of fascism. The provocation isn’t a defense of duplicity so much as a recalibration of threat. Hypocrisy, in her framing, is the lubricant of India’s centrist “consensus” politics - everyone performs secularism while quietly servicing caste blocs, religious majorities, and regional patronage. It’s rotten, but it’s also a kind of disguise that concedes, however cynically, that certain norms still have to be paid lip service.

Overt fascism, by contrast, is politics that no longer bothers with the costume. It doesn’t negotiate with shame; it abolishes it. Roy’s bite comes from making “hypocrisy” sound almost like a regrettable civic virtue: at least the hypocrite still recognizes a standard worth faking. The subtext is that when a society stops demanding the performance of pluralism and minority protection, it has crossed a line more dangerous than corruption or “vote-bank” maneuvering.

Her swipe at the Congress party tightens the screw. Congress is positioned as the original sinner in communal calculation - not an innocent alternative to Hindu majoritarianism, but an enabler that normalized sectarian arithmetic while claiming the moral high ground. The context is India’s long arc from Congress-led secular rhetoric to a political climate where majoritarian ideology can speak openly, legislate boldly, and dare critics to call it what it is. Roy’s intent is to deny liberals the comfort of nostalgia: if you helped build the covert machinery, don’t be shocked when someone weaponizes it without pretenses.