“It's an undeclared emergency we are living in today and its far worse than that imposed in 1975,” writer and activist Arundhati Roy said here today.  

She was addressing an audience of writers, activists, lawyers, researchers and students gathered at the Nehru Memorial Library auditorium to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the declaration of the Emergency.

“Today the very understanding of democracy is being threatened. During and after the 1975 Emergency, the fight was on issues of justice and freedom, the right to speak and for land reform. Today battles over land involve SEZs. People are now fighting on the back foot, to keep their land from being taken away,” she said.

Roy also made a sharp critique of the media’s role today. “Where a blank editorial represented a straightforward protest against state repression, today’s newspapers are bought by corporates with their advertising revenue. If newspapers are mirrors to society, then a blank face is better than the manufactured image presented,” she said.

Talking about the “huge corporate assault on this country”, Roy said that the Maoists are merely one end of the spectrum of a “spectacular resistance… It is fragmented, and cannot be controlled. In no other country have the poorest people been holding off the rich corporate for so long,” she said.

Commenting on the Maoists' use of violence she said they resorted to violence because they have no other choice.

Roy also pointed out the need to critique the motives of the Maoists. “We need to ask the Maoists – will they leave the bauxite in the mountains?” she said.

Talking of the ‘endless bloodthirstiness’ of the middle class, Roy mentioned the talk-shows and debates held by news channels. On the issue of parliament terrorist attack convict Afzal Guru, where the Supreme Court verdict for death penalty read, “to satisfy the collective consciousness of the society”, Roy said that this society and this consciousness are nurtured by the strident media that has appointed itself the arbiter of middle-class opinion. “The most dangerous internal threat,” she said, “is the middle class.”

Social activist Ashok Chaudhury talked about how the governments today are not certain of their political support, and use force to face down dissidence. “No party is ready to fight for the common people’s issues, not even to stand for it. All of them are united on the idea of neo-liberal ‘development’ today – the politics nurtured by the middle class.”

Nandita Haksar, noted human rights activist and lawyer, observed that whereas the emergency in 1975 had brought into existence a fierce democratic resistance in form of the human rights movement, today the movement had become co-opted. The institutionalisation of the movement had created NGOs which carry out welfare functions of the state, and get funding from corporate bodies. “Sometime in our fight against the state, we forgot what we were fighting for,” she said.