Delhi Stories

The absurd battle between India's Supreme Court and the country's best-known writer

Last week it rained here. It was Delhi's first rain since the end of the monsoon, months back. Standing on the verandah of the Supreme Court, I had the rare pleasure of watching it splash down, gearing up from quasi-British drizzle to a proper subcontinental downpour .

The reason I was passing my time in so unprofitable a manner was that, for the third time in under a year, I and all the other journalists trying to cover the Supreme Court trial of the writer Arundhati Roy (below) on charges of criminal contempt found ourselves locked out. Courts in India are public; never before in the Supreme Court's history has a case been barred to reporters. But each time we got to the courtroom we were refused entry. No explanation was given.

It was only one of several very odd aspects of a case that concludes on 6 March, and may well see India's most successful writer (she won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel The God of Small Things) sent to prison for up to six months.

The contempt charge derives from Ms Roy's support for the popular resistance to a massive government project to build a series of dams on the Narmada river in central India. Construction of the biggest of them, Sardar Sarovar, was frozen for several years while the Supreme Court deliberated on its merits. Finally, in October 2000, the judges dismissed the objections and construction was resumed.

A couple of months later the group opposed to the dams, Narmada Bachao Andolan, staged a demonstration at the gates of the court to denounce the judgement. Ms Roy was a silent participant in the rally. Then, in February 2001, five lawyers issued notices to Ms Roy and two others at the demonstration, alleging that she had led the protest and in the process had assaulted the petitioners and threatened to have them killed.

The allegations were startling, but a glance at the petition in which they were presented was even more so. It was littered with grammatical and factual errors, improbable assertions and language of comic-book violence. "Arundhati Roy," said the First Information Report filed by the lawyers, "commanded the crow [sic] that Supreme Court of India is the thief and all these are this touts. Kill them." And much more of the same.

In August last year the court acknowledged the feebleness of the petition and threw it out. But even though the substance of the charges had been tossed in the bin, the court decided that the language of the affidavit in which Ms Roy denied the charges – she wrote of a "disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent" – was grounds for a new charge of contempt.

It seems clear that India's Supreme Court has resolved to make her grovel, and to do so within the privacy of four walls, where there will be no one to report the pettiness and squalor of what is being perpetrated. Ms Roy has, however, refused to apologise. Instead she has filed a second affidavit, as infuriatingly acute as the first one. So it looks like she is headed for the slammer.

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It is sad to see the Supreme Court make such an ugly spectacle of itself, because it is a campaigning court. Five years ago, one of India's most dynamic environmentalists, Anil Agarwal, published Slow Murder, a study of how dirty engines, adulterated fuel and corrupt politicians had conspired to make the air in India's cities unbreathable.

The Supreme Court responded by ordering Delhi's entire bus, taxi and auto-rickshaw fleet to switch to compressed natural gas, CNG. The filthy little "tuk-tuks" turned green by the hundred. Taxis and buses began to go the same way. The only sign that all was not well were queues outside the capital's handful of CNG stations. For some reason the Minister for Petroleum had miscalculated the amount of CNG the city would need.

Last week a government committee recommended the whole experiment be killed off. The Supreme Court, however, is not expected to back off. The battle continues.