As ideas go, anarchism is a worthy one. Though the name has a bit of negative connotation, all it says is that the state is a nasty construct that is bound to give rise to inequalities and exploitation of its citizens. Tolstoy, Gandhi and Chomsky are proto-anarchists in one sense or other. If Arundhati Roy imagines herself as an independent mobile republic outside the Indian state, there’s nothing wrong in it, there’s nothing to get worked up about. Up to 75 percent people living within the boundaries of India (that’s one poverty estimate) are very much mobile republics themselves except that they don’t know this and the state does not care.

If Roy is speaking up on behalf of people in Kashmir, there’s nothing wrong in it either. Much has been written about the injustices they have faced and why they are throwing stones and so on. (For example, see a Governance Now cover story: Conceived in Conflict)

The trouble, however, is that Roy is taking up causes that are internally statist: ‘Freedom’ will only replace one state authority with another, which in itself is not going to make an iota of change in the day-to-day (mis)governance. If their partners from across the borders are any indication, the separatists have in mind a state that is far less liberal than India: it will have no place for an Arundhati Roy just as in the Maoists’ dream state. And it will be a state, after all. She is yet to articulate how that state will be benevolent.

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Since ‘End of Imagination’ (1998), Roy has been writing on matters that concern us all. Given her gift of language and penchant for research, she has crafted for herself a role that few could have taken up. In the process, she has revived several debates ranging from Narmada to leftwing radicalism. Ironically, those who strongly disagree with her (“Send her to Pakistan”) only end up paying a tribute to her skills as agent provocateur.

But, just as ironically, her work too ends up paying a tribute to the idea of India. All said and done, this republic has a space for many mobile republics like her. May her tribe increase!

The only downside with this tribe of activists or public intellectuals (notable exceptions apart) is their disconnect from people they supposedly represent. Sixty-four years ago, a man could say a lot of things we would not like to hear and got away with it because he had worked hard to earn the goodwill of all. He could stand between two murderous mobs during communal riots and ask them to go back, and they did because he had the moral power.

Roy has every right to criticise the Indian state, and if such critics didn’t exist they should have been invented. But the people at large have a right to ask (as the Congress has) “who is she” because she never joined villagers in cleaning up roads picking up excrement along the way.