On Monday morning, a day after education minister Dharmendra Pradhan quit the Modi government, writer and activist Arundhati Roy gamely agreed to come with us to Jantar Mantar.

For 36 days, hundreds of young people had camped there to demand Pradhan’s resignation. The protest had escalated last week after a police crackdown brought thousands into the streets, many of whom openly mocked and ridiculed Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Apart from the one time she publicly showed up to support the protestors, Roy told us she made several trips to Jantar Mantar in disguise. The jokes, memes, slogans targeting Modi, she said, left her cheeks “aching from smiling so much”.

The young protestors, she noted, “said the quiet part out loud”. “All of us thought those things, but were not able to say it. You can’t say it as an individual, but in a crowd, what’s going to stop them.”

“To me, the greatest achievement of this movement,” she said, “is that a person who confected his image so carefully over literally 24 years, starting from 2002, a person who’s never deigned to address a press conference, a person who’s going around speaking with either a teleprompter or a little parchi [note] in his hand, and is still called Vishwa Guru and avatar of Vishnu and all that, suddenly gets stripped bare in two weeks by these kids.”

Here is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity:

When were you last here?

I was here the day before the end. I mean, the day before the guy resigned.

What was it like then?

Well, I couldn’t get into the main place because there was such a long queue. So I was just circulating on the outside, and obviously I was masked up. It was delightfully profane, you know. I always think that humour is the distillation of politics.

For 24 years, he’s been in my crosshairs, the prime minister, so to hear this was just so cathartic. I thought I would die before you saw something like this happen, and it was wonderful, wonderful. But it's a bit chilling now. The silence, like it never happened or something.

It does seem quite unreal. It all happened in the course of a week. It was building up from before, but it's the last week where it really peaked. Had you been here in the early days?

I came in the early days. Then I didn’t come for a bit because you know it is complicated for me – I didn’t want what are considered my more radical writings to be pinned on what is obviously a movement with, at least on the surface, a very limited demand, which is why it was so broad-based and so on. So I was careful about not, you know, just allowing me to be pinned onto it.

You wrote a piece last week in which you said you were initially wary of what was happening, of the Cockroach Janta Party, but then something changed.

Yeah, I was wary of it because of the Anna Hazare movement and how it was penetrated by the right. And I knew that some of the kids involved had been sort of trained in that ground, so I just wanted to see, you know, what would happen, what were the slogans, what were the symbols, and I really got reassured when I heard [Abhijeet] Dipke say, “Agar mera naam Khalid hota, to ye sab mujhe karne nahi dete” [If my name had been Khalid, they would not have allowed me to protest]. And I thought that was a profound thing, simply said. You did see a direct addressing of this horrible nationalist, Hindu nationalist rhetoric that all of us are swimming around in. That was reassuring, and that's when I decided to come.

It all started with a joke, which makes it more incredible. I mean, it started as a social media parody with an AI-generated image of a cockroach with sunglasses.

I think for all of us who’ve been somewhere, in this huge debate, pretty marginalised in certain ways, or at least marginalised by the mainstream media and demonised, this was something new, and the ways in which it was organised were new. And I think people have a lot to learn from it and from them.

They’ve given us a gift. I don’t know what’s to become of it. I’d say that it’s achieved already much more than what it set out to achieve because the resignation of the education minister was a sort of formal demand and they won that. But as we know, I mean, I was just watching a video of the new education minister, who was just informed, like, “Hey, boss, you’re the education minister”. This is how they function. It’s like a little symbol sitting on a bloody mountain of shit was flicked off, and another one has put been put there, but the mountain of shit remains, which is even if you’re just considering education itself, you know the privatisation, the exam paper leaks, but you know NEET is a top level exam, but just look at the fact that they are privatising education.

All the sections of disadvantaged students, Dalits, OBCs [Other Backward Classes] are gradually being left out of it. The whole curriculum has been revised into some kind of cretinism. They are trying to create morons, but clearly not succeeding because you have this young generation which just showed itself to be blindingly funny and incredible. But there is so much just in the ministry, in the system of education itself, that remains unaddressed. And even look at the BJP handles pouring praise on this minister who resigned, as if he’s just martyred himself to the cause of students and not been shamed and forced to step down. The games are just beginning, I think, on both sides. At least I hope so.

You spoke about how this generation is blindingly funny. It’s a generation that’s been fed so much propaganda through the media, movies, even textbooks. How do they see through this all?

Well, I suppose that propaganda is for the first part, not sophisticated. It is so dumb that even someone with an average IQ can see through it. A lot of people assumed that the kids couldn't, but clearly they could. And the other thing is that propaganda has a shelf life, and when you have a situation where people whose houses and jhuggis are being bulldozed in Delhi are saying, “Phir bhi, Modi ji ko vote denge” (We will still vote for Modi), but on the other hand, there’s reality – when the rubber meets the road, as they say. Even the parents who are Modi bhakts are seeing the futures of their children snuffed out. I mean, here you are protesting about NEET paper leaks or other exam paper leaks, but even after you go through five years of studying medicine or engineering or anything, there are no jobs.

And so you think, what are your prospects?

Yes, what are your prospects? Some of us have been writing about the Adivasi being pushed off their lands, people being displaced. Now the water – Narmada ka doobwala pani, the rising water level of Narmada – has reached the middle class. It’s come up there, you know, and even business people [are affected] by the centralisation of privatisation – that only Adani and Ambani matter, and everyone else is marginalised. So, at different levels, everybody is watching this happen.

You know that saying, I think someone in the kisan movement said it: “Desh ko chaar log chalate hain, do khareedte hain, do bechate, aur charo Gujarati hain. Four people run the government, two of them buy, the other two sell, and all four are Gujarati – [Narendra] Modi, [Amit] Shah, [Gautam] Adani, [Mukesh] Ambani.” It’s not a metaphor. It’s reality.

So, the rot is everywhere, and even the statistics are lies, and they begin to believe their own lies, and they begin to believe their own propaganda. I mean, the question that I have in my mind is: Does Modi know what was being said by him, or is he protected from it? Which is worse? That you’re the prime minister and everyone around you knows how you’re being mocked, and you don’t know, or you know, which is worse.

I don’t know, but to me, the greatest achievement of this movement is that a person who confected his image so carefully over literally 24 years, starting from 2002, a person who’s never deigned to address a press conference, a person who’s going around speaking with either a teleprompter or a little parchi [note] in his hand, and is still called Vishwa Guru and avatar of Vishnu and all that, suddenly gets stripped bare in two weeks by these kids.

I’m trying to think. I mean, Instagram didn’t exist a long time ago, but I do not believe that any human being, let alone a head of state, has been derided and mocked so much in the history of time ever.

So how is he going to come out and face people and say those stupid things all over again? Because even the old speeches were being taken out and mocked and picked apart, and the kids were just rolling about laughing, you know. It even makes the previous generation look a bit idiotic because you really swallowed this shit, you know? Are you sure your IQ is okay? Or have we all been terribly damaged?

I don’t know, but to me, in some ways, that’s bigger than winning an election, stripping away that wall of crap around a person who’s clearly not even averagely intelligent, who is our prime minister.

Well, he is now trying to connect with the young people. You must have seen his Instagram videos.

Not only was that funny, but then they [the BJP] started to boast about how many views it had.

A world record.

Have you heard of hate watching? And even little tiny tots were [making videos] telling this is not how you do it, this is how you do it.

You know, there’s a Russian writer that I love called Vasily Grossman, and he wrote a novel, an amazing novel called Stalingrad, which begins with a German general who’s been posted on the Russian front lines, who realises that invading Russia is going to be the end of Germany, and so he comes back to Berlin to tell Hitler that this is a bad idea. But when he meets Hitler, he’s so frightened and overwhelmed by the aura that he can’t bring himself to say… to bring the bad news. He just doesn’t do it, and then we know what happened.

So you feel like, is there nobody telling this man that something has turned, not just domestically but internationally. Everyone has got it. People in Australia were laughing, [people] in Indonesia were laughing. Donald Trump, your great friend has pushed you into a hole. So you’re humiliating India. Not just humiliating, all these agreements and treaties are selling the farmers down the river. It’s a huge thing. Obviously this protest of young people was not taking apart and analysing everything that needs to be addressed. But I think just the stripping down of the person at the head of this all was a huge service to the country.

For all of us who’ve been to Jantar Mantar, what was also incredible was that this was a protest movement where the primary emotion wasn’t rage, it was humour.

I don’t think that there is such a brick wall between rage and humour. Like I said, I think that humour is the distillation of politics, the most sophisticated distillation of politics. So, of course, it was rage, but it was described as laughing and described as expletives.

Yes, a lot of unprintable stuff.

All of us were just smiling. I mean, my cheeks were aching from smiling so much, you know. I sometimes think they said the quiet part out loud. All of us thought those things, but were not able to say it. You can’t say it as an individual, but in a crowd, you know what’s going to stop them.

Having said that, I’m really worried because I’m hearing stories of the police now picking off Muslims who are here, like Muhammad Junaid [a volunteer who was] feeding people, they arrested his family. I saw him saying they blindfolded him and beat him up. I mean, how are they going to pick off people on the edges? And I hear from you there are huge detentions in Bihar.

Yes, both detentions and arrests.

This is hugely vindictive stuff. I mean, the Hindu Sena was on its way when Pradhan resigned. He got a standing ovation from the government. Nobody wagged a finger at him. Nobody has expressed any form of apology for these exam leaks, nobody has accepted any responsibility at all. You know, so like the game isn’t over, and of course the sad thing is that our opposition parties have not been able to support what happened with generosity. That these kids did what the opposition could not do. But there’s been a very mealy-mouthed sort of, you know, acknowledgement, which isn’t an acknowledgement, and I don’t know. Like today, Parliament opens, and what’s going to happen there? Because while this is happening, as I said in my piece, the [BJP’s] arrogance comes from the fact that they know they have gamed the elections. It’s hard for anyone to win elections. They have a media which is not media. It is not even a group of people worrying about censorship. It’s a group of people enthusiastically amplifying this fascist nationalist message.

[A policeman walks towards us.]

I think they are trying to get us out.

[The policeman asks us to leave. We ask him to show the order which says Jantar Mantar is not open to the public. He says there is no written order, but he is following the verbal instructions of his seniors. Arundhati points to his nameplate pinned on his shirt and says it is a relief he still has it, unlike the police personnel who beat up protestors. He says the nameplate is delicate and can fall off. He adds that he is simply requesting us to leave, not pronouncing an order. We tell him that we will leave soon. He thanks us and moves away.]

I think they [the police] also have these kids.

Well, they [the police personnel] were privately very sympathetic to the protest.

Honestly, like I think many years ago, I wrote a piece where I said India was going to become an integral part of Kashmir in these ways. You know, the pellet guns have come from Srinagar to here, and so it goes. What you were saying in the car. That they want to… What did you say?

They want to restore normalcy.

Restore normalcy. Remember, I say in Kashmir, they declare normalcy. It’s always a declaration, you know. So now, normalcy has to be.

Yeah, as part of that, they have painted the whole place over. All the graffiti is gone.

Yes, they do it in a second. Blood stains are removed. Walls are painted over. You know, but you can almost hear the slogans still, right? You can almost see those lovely faces still.

Getting back to what we were talking about – in your piece you said that this energy could dissipate if serious political work does not happen. Do you think there were any signs of that? I mean, the leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, showed up outside the prime minister’s house and was dragged away by the police. You think the opposition is capable of capitalising on this and posing a serious challenge to the government?

I really don’t know. I really don’t know because there should have been more solidarity shown as opposed to separation, but at the same time, we are in a terrible situation right now. Even the Opposition has shown itself to be pretty sad in its squabbling and in its jockeying for position, and in its inability to understand that it’s facing an existential threat, you know, tomorrow if the delimitation bill is passed… While it suffers some setbacks, and every time it suffers some setbacks, this BJP goes to work hard, whereas the Opposition goes to bed.

So I don’t know, but I think something amazing happened here in the last few days. And as I said, no election could have stripped the head of this country of everything that he had protected himself with. It was a miracle that a person with so little brain power, a lot of plotting, but very little ability to think, could have managed for so long to fool so many people, and the thing is that though there was terrible brutality, we know that if it were the farmers who have been who have been called Sikh terrorists, although even these kids were called Pakistanis and so on, but the farmers and the Citizenship protestors, and as we keep saying, Manipur, Kashmir, all these places, they have no hesitation opening fire, you know. That didn’t happen [against the youth protests in Delhi] because these are the children of his constituency.

Absolutely. They could not demonise them.

I mean, they did terrible things, but not as terrible things as they would have done if it was primarily Muslim or Sikh or Christian or poor or Adivasi or Dalit. I mean, one always had that hum of sadness that in this uprising of so many young people, one of the brightest of them all has been in jail without trial for five years. Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and you know the Opposition can’t bring itself to use the word Muslim, they have to say minority. If we could have some honesty from big politicians, it would be nice. They are so scared of mentioning his name, and that man was demonised by the media, and there was an assassination attempt on him before he was put into jail. He was a boy when he went in. He’s a man now. And so, we cannot forget Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam and the fact that in those anti-CAA movements, Muslims were killed and then accused of murder.

I cannot ever forget the image of those four Muslim boys being kicked and prodded by the police on the road and being forced to sing the national anthem. And Faizan, one of them, subsequently died. I cannot forget that. You know that

is burned into my mind, as is the murder of Ehsan Jafri and everybody else in the Gulberg Society and what happened in Gujarat. People tell me you’re angry. Yeah, I’m fucking angry. You know, I’ve been angry for a very, very long time, but I laugh with anger, as did those students.

[A man appears on the street and sits down on his haunches to watch Arundhati. He tells her that she appears to be a very good person. She asks him how he knows that. He says from her body language. She sits down to speak to him. He says it would be great if this year Diwali can be celebrated without Modi. Arundhati laughs and says she would really like that. Both of them agree to meet at Jantar Mantar on Diwali and exchange sweets. Before leaving, he says people have had enough of Modi and that the prime minister is a big bore.]

In the past decade, dozens of people have been arrested for just sharing a joke about Modi.

Exactly, like a slightly off-grid joke, and suddenly there is nothing but jokes, and that’s what I loved about it the most. You know, I honestly felt like – as I started by saying in the piece I wrote for The Wire – that for the first time in years it felt wonderful to be Indian because most of the time I go about feeling so ashamed of the things people accept. You remember the CAA protests? Remember the way Muslims were being bloody well lynched, and people were applauding and putting up videos. So, for this climate to suddenly come upon us, I swear I can die in peace now. I will die smiling. You know all that happened, I didn’t think I’d see it in my lifetime, and I really have to give it to these young people. It is so great.

Even the most imaginative writer perhaps wouldn’t have been able to write a plot like this, right?

Like I said, the progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke. You know, and it happened. I feel that people who can’t celebrate it and start thinking ahead of, oh, this is going to happen, that is going to happen, you know I feel sorry, like we have we lost the ability to even celebrate a moment because happiness can’t last forever and politics changes fast but this was a huge blow from our side and it was done by the most beautiful kids. Someone like myself has been writing for 24 years about more than that, about all the things that concern me. But you know, I think this was wonderful, and we’ll see what happens. We’ll see what happens.

Since we are talking about jokes, there was just great humour all around. But this is any one thing you remember that really made you laugh out loud?

Well, I have a new national anthem, but I can’t sing it for you because it’s just too rude. It was hilarious that the most foul-mouthed kids were the girls, and the younger they were, the worse they were. You know, I was just amazed because in my book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, I talk about how I learnt language through gaalis [abuses]. You know, like when I came to Delhi, I didn’t know any Hindi, and me and a friend from Odisha, we learnt language through gaalis.

Even the first time… I didn’t know my father because my parents were separated when I was very young. The first time I met my dad was when I was 25, and the first thing he asked me was, “So, are you still, you know, foul-mouthed?” And I said, “But I was just two when you last met me”. He said, “Yeah, you were the worst. I brushed my cigarette against you, and you just looked at me and said, ‘chutiya’.”

So I can understand these, you know, the little kids who were just enjoying the expletive moment.

And they didn’t really bother masking up. There was a group of girls showing the finger to the prime minister, a kilometre from his house. Beyond a point, how do we even analyse why and how this happened.

I don’t want to analyse it, I just want to enjoy it.

What did you do to celebrate?

I came here and I just smiled and smiled.

Thank you so much for coming back here with us.

You’re welcome.

It is an extraordinary moment and none of us knows where it goes. But as you say…

Celebrate the moment. We laugh to fight another day.

In keeping with the moment, maybe we can ask you to record a reel.

(Laughs) What do you mean?

A vertical video. The prime minister is doing that now.

Thank god, I am not the prime minister. Everyone is upset about the quality of his teeth. Kids were brushing their teeth and being like “take care of your teeth”. I think we will leave the reels to young people and not try and be them and be whoever we are and put our arms around them.

There is a lot of talk about this disconnect between a 75-year-old prime minister and young people but this isn’t about biological age, right?

No.

It is about the youthful striving for freedom and openness clashing with an authoritarian regime which has not only stifled freedom but has not even delivered economic prosperity. One of the slogans on the walls here was “Modi ji, bure din waapis karo”. Give us back the bad days.

And [another slogan was] Simon come back, and so on. For those of us, especially like me, as soon as Godhra happened, knew what was coming. And a lot of people who are now against this regime used to vilify me, mock me, and call me all kinds of names for the things I was saying, including saying take her to a shrink, are now on the forefront of calling these people fascist.

But the point is, the lesson for me, is that it takes a long time for a population to shift. And for those of us who saw it early, there was a… I didn’t realise how guarded and wary as a person I had become until I was able to just let it go. Even my body feels different. I had not felt this kind of happiness. For some of us, what is happening publicly and politically is almost more personal than what is happening personally. Every day I felt like, when I open my eyes I have to move this block of concrete off my chest and say wake up, smile, get going, stop it. The last few days the concrete block has been in the other room, it is there but it is in the other room.

On that note, thank you so much. It was wonderful speaking with you. And I am glad we could do it here, in this wonderful space.

Yeah, yeah, and here come the police.

Thank you so much.

You are welcome.

Camera work and production by Priyali Dhingra and Raghav Kakkar.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.