Arundhati Roy exposes authoritarian turn in Modi’s regime

No freedom of expression in India

ISLAMABAD: Arundhati Roy, a renowned Indian author and activist, has exposed authoritarian turn in Modi’s India.

On 10 February 2026, Arundhati Roy inside the Emile Boutmy Amphitheatre in Paris, stood before students at Sciences Po to launch her book “Roy Mon Refuge et Mon Orage” or “My Refuge and My Storm.”

The event was meant to be a literary conversation about her new book but it turned into an indictment of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Indian state.

Arundhati Roy, a renowned Indian author and activist,  born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, has long spoken on human rights, caste discrimination, environmental destruction and the suffering of tribal and poor communities. Her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things once exposed social injustice. Now, she argues, the injustice is structural and state-driven.

She described how the government allegedly approached the Supreme Court to block her book over a cover image of her smoking, branding it immoral. She spoke of hundreds of false court cases, of friends apprehended and of a climate of intimidation. According to her, minorities are being systematically targeted and Hindu supremacy is no longer fringe rhetoric but policy direction.

In Modi’s India, dissent is treated as sedition and criticism as crime. A globally respected writer must defend her book in foreign halls while her own democracy shrinks at home. Monitoring Desk