"Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the actions...?"

“Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this.”

“A train full of pilgrims coming back from the destruction of this Ayodhya mosque which was disputed. The train caught fire; nobody knows who set fire to the train and 57 pilgrims were burnt...”

“Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link -- the understanding-- between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.”

“Modern democracies have been around long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy—the 'independent' judiciary, the 'free' press, the parliament—and moulding them to their purpose.”

“But nothing beats the mischief and arrogance of Arundhati Roy's blood and gore reporting of the same story on the basis of hearsay.... Disturbed by this account, Balbir Punj, BJP Rajya Sabha MP personally contacted the Gujarat police and asked them to verify the story. Clearly, no such case had been reported to the Gujarat police. Therefore, they asked Roy to provide leads that could help them reach the victim's family and book those who were guilty of the crime. She responded through her lawyer, Prashant Bhushan, to say that the police had no right to issue summons to her. In the same lengthy article in Outlook, Roy had reported that the daughters of Ehsan Jafri, the ex-MP from the Congress Party who was done to death in Gulberg Society, were also raped and killed along with him. In this case, Roy got caught spinning gory tales by none other than Jafri's son who issued a clarification that his sisters were not in the city at the time of the riots. In fact, one of them was living in the United States. Unfazed, Roy replied that she had got the information from two other sources, one a report in Time magazine and another, a supposedly independent fact-finding mission. Incidentally, this “fact finding” team had actually been organised by Teesta Setalvad and Shabnam Hashmi with one of the most corrupt and compromised retired IG of Police as a lead member of the pack. The much-venerated Retired Supreme Court Judge Justice Krishna Iyer was used as a figurehead but the report was put together by professional BJP baiters.... Since the then Outlook Editor Vinod Mehta is a die-hard fan of Roy's writings, she got away with her bloody fantasies without having to offer a half-decent apology.”

“Arundhati Roy risked the international fame she so clearly cherishes by going public with blatant lies about atrocities against named Gujarati Muslim women who turned out to be either non-existent or abroad at the time of the riots. Perhaps a fiction writer can afford this, but the news media with their deontology of accuracy and objectivity made themselves guilty of similar howlers.”