I am a eunuch, I said, when I was asked recently if I had an agenda.

Agendas bog you down; they make you into a spokesperson when you merely want to express an opinion. Why can a libertarian not be a bit of fascist? Why must an ‘ism’ be seen as a destination, when it could only be a way to journey?

Is it any wonder, then, that I admire Arundhati Roy?

Earlier they would comment on her delicate features, her quivering voice, and her money. Then she got rid of her curls, she spoke out loud on almost anything that moved (and did not), and she donated the moolah for a cause. There was a hush.

Is this to be the fate of every woman activist? The problem is that no one wants to believe that Arundhati Roy can be Everywoman; she has to be Somebody and Somebodies are not supposed to do what Everybody does or wants to do. From blasé bohemian to missionary mama, they thought they had brought her round full circle.

False morality?

Now they think the mama is becoming demonic. She is not merely cooking a warm meal for malnourished minds; she is lighting the fire out in the open. So, what do they do?

One of them has used the Leninist term for her: ‘Useful idiot’. Amulya Ganguli applies this analogy for, according to him, the Russian leader believed that such people were on the margins of radical politics. “But he didn’t mind them tagging along, for it helped to convey the impression that the cause had a wide base of support because of its ‘moral’ appeal.”

I wonder who the idiot here is. Roy is hardly ever moralistic.

The writer’s grouse is that she gave a speech in New Delhi recently where she called for the withdrawal of the army from Kashmir. “We as Indians have no right to talk about whatever is happening in Palestine and Iraq unless we … highlight the atrocities being committed in the (Kashmir) Valley… Indian occupation in Jammu and Kashmir has surpassed the excesses of Pinochet in Chile,” she reportedly said.

This might qualify as exaggeration – a necessary tool to wake people up – but moralistic it is not. The person being moralistic is the accuser when he says that “she could make the charge at a public meeting in New Delhi and then retire to her comfortable home to read of her exploits in favour of the oppressed in the newspapers the next day. But she cannot be unaware that such a denouement wouldn’t have been possible in a genuine tin pot dictatorship with which she has tried compare the situation in India.”

Haven’t we heard this before? Don’t leaders make pronouncements and return to their comfortable homes? It is disgusting to read such comments that prop up the theory of acceptance and tolerance levels that permit an opinion at all. If India allows people to express their opinion, then it is granted in the Constitution. It is a part of our democracy. It is a necessity, for we elect leaders and it is our job to tell them how they must run this country. And we cannot assume they are always right.

The least we can do is to ask inconvenient questions. Roy has done this effectively: “Why is non-violence always addressed towards resistance movements not states? It’s easy to talk about people in the Valley caught between bullet and ballot… There are about eight lakh soldiers and there are supposedly 4000 militants. Isn’t it a curious mismatch or isn’t it that it’s an army of an occupation?”

The gripe people have against those who do raise their voice is that there is no “holistic attitude…They are so obsessed with a particular problem that they forget that it is related to a host of others”. Wrong. When Roy speaks about the Army it is in fact related to several other issues – human rights, terrorism, the role of the state, defence deals, peace initiatives.

But these critics have no vision to see beyond their own blinkers. Ganguli thought he had a trump card when he stated that Roy should have instead talked about the women’s militant group, Dukhtaran-e-Millat, that has been trying to reinforce “medieval” Islamic values. He believes, rather naively I think, that the departure of the Army would strengthen these organisations.

If the Army were so effective, how did these organisations made up of a few women come into being at all? How do they manage to target women? They are not operating from hideouts; they are holding press conferences – why have they not been subdued?

We must understand that this is not the first time women have been told to follow a dress code. These groups only have nuisance value, but are not legitimate. The Army and the State have governmental backing. To dissect what is outside of the System is less important than to scrutinise the Establishment with its complete hold.

If it takes hyperbole and rhetoric to get the message across, then so be it. It does not follow that they are replacing dedication.

Fake commitment?

Roy’s espousal of the anti-dam cause might have been for "the greater common good", as her eponymous essay on the subject stated, but the question posed to her was not restricted to the issues involved.

Would she oust Medha Patkar, whose fight this had been all along?

It is easy to see that even if people grudgingly accept Roy’s genuineness, they cannot shake off the belief that there has to be a catch somewhere. And if they can pit two prominent women against each other, then there is nothing quite like it. But it hasn’t worked, for even while Patkar and her colleagues in the Andolan were on a fast for the families whose lands were likely to be submerged, the ‘other woman’ dedicated her essay to them. "These are the people who give me hope," she said.

It is not hope for her own person that she is seeking; all she has to do in her capacity as truly deserving celebrity is to dash off a line to some publisher, get a fat advance in dollars, and recreate rehearsed moments. It is easier than touring villages and fighting for a cause not your own.

We must remember that she came into it much later and there is no gain for her personally. In that respect she may be removed from the issues, which is precisely why she wants to forge a link between people like herself who believe they understand and the ground realities. "Instinct took me to the Narmada Valley," she said in an interview, "but you have got to know the facts...I am not doing something new, only restating it."

She has been accused of self-righteousness. There was the celebrated newsprint war where B.G.Verghese lambasted her for getting emotional and stated, "Arundhati’s lifestyle reeks of glorification of the noble savage." She did give a spirited response, notably that it was insulting to call those tribals savages and also to assume that an emotional response was necessarily a faulty one.

True, in many ways her reactions have been what might be termed ‘feminine’, but you do need a woman’s sensibility to be able to see beyond figures. It takes a woman to understand that we are talking about people uprooted "from their forests and rivers, from lands and homes, where they and their ancestors have lived for thousand of years. They have lost everything. Everything. It is their children you see begging in the streets. It is they and their children who pay our food and electricity bills."

One would think that this is a woman still not quite in touch. But she is. And she wants us to be, too. "It is only after visiting the place you will realise that each of those people have a name, a dream to live in a house of their own, all the feelings which you could hear from their own mouths."

It is not about Roy, for those Dalits and Bhils and Nayaks do not know who she is. They attended rallies from far-off places to be there for their own survival.

There have been academics, workers’ unions, women’s groups, and the idea was not to get immediate gains but to sensitise themselves. Roy has said that one of the catalysts for her joining the movement was the film ‘Kaise Jeebo Re’ by Anurag Singh and Jharna Jhaveri. I had talked with Jharna at the time and asked her a typically urban question: What would be the level of commitment of the 300-400 people who would be joining in the rally, would there be any results?

"The fallout will only be seen in the time to come. We have to get these facts across. It is a question of trying to make sense of the power struggle, of looking outside the window, and asking questions. You then begin to understand what uprootment really is. For the city dweller it could well mean upliftment, moving out to better prospects. For a villager a tree is not just fruit and shelter, it is ancestry, a link with the past. We may want to look away but do we want to stamp on other people’s lives to light a lamp? By our ignorance and silence we will do just that."

Arundhati Roy has broken that silence. What does celebrity endorsement contribute to a cause? Said Jharna, "One has to distinguish between celebrities. There is a difference between an actor and a writer, who is thinking, using her mind. Why, as a professional it is her brief to comment, so I am not surprised she has joined in. Every new soldier fighting against the state is welcome. After a long time we have someone with clarity and independent thinking. Besides, this project gives her a lot; it makes the connection from being a celebrity to being a normal human being. Like the rest of us, she too has to try her best and hope like hell."

Which she does. When Roy was asked why she did not write fiction anymore, she had replied, “Because I have the strong feeling that we are living in a time in which writers have to take a position. I feel under a tremendous amount of pressure just now to respond to things.”

This is manna from heaven for her critics. They crow that, naturally, if she just has to respond, it would be knee-jerk reaction, and she needs to feed her ego by gaining media mileage.

Flaky mandarin?

The funny thing is that those who felt she was a media-propped celebrity were the same people who accused her of using her activism to get publicity. Why would that be necessary? If it is controversy she wants to court then all she has to do is remove her diamond nose-stud or be seen at some society do. It is a cake-walk for her.

When she went to a fancy hajaam in London, it became news. We were given the teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy details about the crew-cut she wanted and why. It could have become a sociological treatise.

She has rightfully earned her money and fame, but there is something inherently stupid for a bad hair day to be made into a public issue. She can enter Vidal Sassoon, that charges a minimum of 45 pounds for a haircut, but why the big noise regarding whether the style would suit her or not? In this instance they were trying to decide what a woman’s vanity should constitute of.

The good thing is that Roy does not care one way or the other about how the world perceives her tresses. She does not simper that she hates compliments. It is one thing to get a trifle uncomfortable about praise and quite another to make it into a cause celebre.

I am mentioning this because Arundhati Roy is a misunderstood person. Had she not made big money, no one would have accused her of short-selling Kerala in ‘God of Small Things’. It is not her agenda to write a tourist brochure. Everybody uses their past, or more appropriately their version of it, as a canvas on which to work their present and future. She had to dip into it (not dig it up) and she did so with great felicity. But, no, there had to be declamations of discontent.

A piece of literature was mauled out of shape. She was baited and, feisty as she is, she took up the challenge. She objected to ‘Bandit Queen’ as a subversive cinematic attempt. She spoke against nuclear weapons (ah, but she still supports those damn militants – I knew you would say that). She is a one-book wonder. So? She has not pledged her life at the altar of literature.

When the inquisitors run out of arguments, they ask the sort of questions a man passionate about a movement, any movement, would never be asked: Her heart may be in the right place, but what about her mind? Isn’t she romanticising issues? Is she not merely another salon-level sabre-rattler?

This is a convenient ploy for people to rubbish somebody and make them go on the defensive, so that they can convince themselves that their judgment is right.

Arundhati Roy is on a different trip. She is “just waiting for the noise in my head to stop”. She does not have the time to silence the feeble attempts of desperados composing a dirge.