Arundhati Roy: Will Booker Prize-winner face jail for 14-year-old remark?

Over the past two decades, Ms Roy has written several non-fiction books and numerous essays on topics like nuclear weapons, Kashmir, big dams, globalisation, Dalit icon BR Ambedkar, meetings with Maoist rebels, and conversations with Edward Snowden and John Cusack.

The God of Small Things, a riveting family saga inspired by her family childhood, picked up the 1997 Man Booker Prize – a “Tiger Woodesian debut” gushed John Updike – and made Roy a celebrity writer at 35.

The 62-year-old author is also a polarising figure in India.

Admirers see her as a leading voice for liberal values and a champion of the marginalised.

Critics, however, have burned her effigies, disrupted her events, and she has faced charges of sedition and contempt, even spending a day in jail for protesting against big dams.

They find a lot of her non-fiction writings shrill, naïve, adolescent, self-indulgent and simplistic, peddling “picturesque poverty”. One critic wrote that so often in her essays Ms Roy “never really gets to grips with the evidence”.

Since Ms Roy’s 2010 remarks, significant changes have occurred.

In 2019, Mr Modi’s government revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, dividing the region and reducing its political autonomy under direct federal control.

Many believe freedom of expression has also declined: since 2014, India has fallen from 150th to 161st in media freedom rankings by Reporters Without Borders, out of 180 countries.

Ms Roy has declined to comment on the latest development.

It is unclear if the police have investigated the allegations or have evidence against her and the other accused.

Two individuals named in the original complaint have passed away. But one thing is certain. If one of India’s most celebrated writers faces imprisonment under a draconian anti-terror law, it will ignite global condemnation and outrage.