An evening with Ms Aruna Roy

Introduction

On February 13, 2025, we had an engaging session by Ms Aruna Roy, a social and political activist and a founder member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), and the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information (NCPRI). Ms Roy’s work has focused on women’s rights, corruption, transparency and accountability.

Ms Roy is a member of the National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM), the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), and the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG), and similar campaigns. Ms Roy was a member of the National Advisory Council, set up by the UPA Government to monitor promises made in the National Common Minimum Programme.

Ms Roy was conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 2000. In 2011 she was named one of the Hundred Most Influential People in The World by TIME Magazine. In 2010 she received the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for Excellence in Public Administration, Academia and Management, and the Nani Palkhivala Award for Civil Liberties in 2009.

About Ms Aruna Roy

Ms Roy was born in a progressive family in Chennai in 1946. She went to various schools known for their innovative approach to education. She married her classmate in Delhi University, Sanjit (Bunker) Roy in 1970 who founded the well-known Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) in Tilonia, Ajmer District, Rajasthan. Over the 9 years (1975-83) she spent in the SWRC in Tilonia, Ms Roy learnt about rural realities.

The MKSS has worked to strengthen processes and build platforms through which the marginalized, can participate in political activities and reclaim democratic institutions to meaningfully impact governance. This led to the campaigns for transparency and the peoples’ Right to Information, which began in the early 1990s and the Right to Work Campaign. These campaigns helped ensure the passage of the Right to Information Law and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, now MGNREGA).

Apart from her involvement with campaigns for the rights to information and work Ms Roy has spoken out against attacks on religious minorities. She was a member of the “Concerned Citizens Tribunal”, which investigated the organized violence and killing of innocent people in Gujarat in 2002.

Ms Roy has published extensively on subjects close to her heart. Currently, she is working on two books --‘A Chronicle on RTI’ to be published by Roli Book, India; and another titled ‘Personal: Political ’to be published by Harper & Collins, India.

On why she left the IAS and gave up power

We don’t have to give up anything to be anything. We should be clear about what we are giving up.

When leaving the IAS, Ms Roy gave up her chair. But she also gave up the need to behave in ways which she did not like. As an IAS officer, she would sign files without often understanding the ground realities. Ms Roy recalled that being in notional power was not very comfortable. As an IAS officer, she only had the power to command respect of a sort she might not have got otherwise. This illusion of power made Ms Roy feel uncomfortable all the time.

Ms Roy feels that the IAS is a place from which we can do a lot of harm. How much good we can do is not clear. To do good we have to fight the system. There are so many vested interests. We must fight senior bureaucrats, politicians and people with money who pay to get their way through.

The bureaucracy can also be a frustrating place for people driven by idealism. No bureaucracy was ever made to transfer power. No bureaucracy ever worked for anything but the status quo. This is a universal truth that applies to bureaucracies within kingdoms, in republics, with dictators, in genuine democracies.

For Ms Roy, leaving the IAS was freedom from fear and from the anxiety of thinking she might be doing something wrong.

On the slogan, Personal is political

Whenever a woman takes any issue up in the public domain, she is told that it is personal. She should not discuss it in public. She would be intruding on the privacy of her family and friends.

But what women want are legitimate, simple and basic things: work, employment, equality, food, education, intellectual pursuits to develop their mind. They also want the right to disagree. But they are told that if they discuss these issues openly, they would betray the family.

Why cannot the husband and wife hold different ideologies? For example, JB. Kriplani was a Socialist. Sucheta Kriplani was a Communist. We had so many people at the time of our independence who had political differences but still stayed married. Why didn't we follow the extraordinary examples of Indian women who had the courage to stand up to their husbands and say: We don't agree with you. We won't impose on you our point of view. But please have the courtesy not to do it for us either.

The slogan, personal is political could be interpreted in very many ways to suit the plight of inequality in the life of a woman. That's why it was so important.

The custom of dowry, ill treatment of the girl child and women’s right to inherit property are all good examples to illustrate the plight of women. Even in daily life, women are stratified in various ways. For example, if Ms Roy went to a computer shop even with a small boy, the shopkeeper would talk to the boy rather than her though she is quite adept at using computers.

On moving from the city to the village

A very good article in the New York Times about a year ago mentioned that the worst enemy of real sharing, equality and development is convenience and comfort. Urban life is looked upon as a kind of comfort and convenience by many people. They wonder whether they would have the same convenience in the villages. Interestingly, migration from villages to cities also creates problems for the villagers. The migrants live in appalling conditions. Ms Roy has fought for MNREGA. Ms Roy is happy that due to MNREGA, at least women’s migration has stopped.

On Feminism

Feminism consists of three important slogans.

The first is: Personal is political.

The second is: For a woman, everything is a revolution, the ability to get food, clothing, education, get her father to listen to her, get her mother to agree that she won’t get married at 18 and so on.

And the third one is the intimate enemy. A woman must fight the very men she loves: her father, her brother, her son. Even if she does not exactly fight with them, she must struggle for their understanding and for being granted equality.

So, we see many manifestations of feminism in these three slogans. But there is also one very important feminist overlay on all this. Feminism is always for peace. Feminism is against violence. Now that has somehow been removed from our vocabulary. Everywhere these days, war mongering has become such an important thing.

And we must also understand that feminists fight for equality in every sphere. They want equality not only in the constitution but also in representation, visibility, empowerment, and in recognition.

Girls and women who fight for equality, decency, and dignity are usually called aggressive. But is this not understandable? To fight for their rights, women must be strong, expressive, and be able to win the argument and be different from the stereotypical women of the conservative male imagination. Sometimes women may look aggressive, but we must understand why they are aggressive.

But Ms Roy does not believe that it is necessary for women to be rude or violent. They need to confront but with dignity. Of course, they must take a position and persist with it.

On what she would do today if she started all over again

Ms Roy would take a different path. First, she would look at electoral democracy. The promise of “our vote speaking to power” has been vitiated. Our vote has become either a manipulation for someone else to get into power to do what they want, or it has become a tool to reinforce the mindless use of that vote for power. Or we have become indifferent to voting.

And within electoral democracy, the use of EVMs would be a focus area for Ms Roy. The government is maintaining that fixing is not possible with EVMs. But why can’t we validate this? As we vote by pressing the EVM machine, there is a slip of paper that comes out. Why can’t we count those slips? Why is the Supreme court not insisting on this?

When Ms Roy was an electoral officer in the IAS, during counting, people would be locked into a room, for 12 hours. They were not allowed to go outside that building. There was a toilet, and they were supplied with food and refreshments, but they could not leave the room. Thus, the sanctity of the election process was safeguarded.

The blind use of technology today is a matter of concern. Technology has become the master, and we are the servants. We are at the receiving end, whether it is the misuse of the Aadhar card, whether it's all the swindles that are happening through transferred OTPs and through our phones.

Information must be available for all people. There is a saying that information is power. So, if information is power, that distribution of information is important. In a democratic system if we don't distribute information, we're using a modern technology to corner all power. And that would be against democracy.

Governance is what delivers services to the people. If governance is corrupt, people will suffer. Ms Roy would look at governance very seriously. Under the Constitution, the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive should oversee each other and ensure that all of them work honestly. Instead, what we see today is all three joining hands to destroy the democratic rights of common citizens. That's not what the Constitution imagined.

On the RTI Act and MNREGA

No struggle finishes at a point. The passing of laws like RTI Act and MNREGA was a great achievement. But equally there were people determined to see that these Acts would not be successful. Because if they were successful, then their power diminished. The Right to Information Act today is under threat today because of one clause in The Data Protection Act.

So, today's generation must protect and enhance the use of the rights that they have because of because of previous battles. They must protect the Constitution. They must protect the right to information and the MNREGA.

We must also look at the spirt in which these laws are implemented. About 30 to 40% of people benefit from MNREGA. What percentage of the budget are we giving them? Not even 1% of the GDP. Is it fair? We have a right to food, but the allocation is decreasing. There is genuine malnutrition amongst families and people.

On the DPDP Act

The RTI Act strikes a balance between transparency and the right to privacy. This delicate equilibrium would be disrupted by the DPDP Act, which not only overrides the RTI Act but also utilises the right to privacy as a rationale to conceal the utilisation or misuse of public resources by identifiable individuals, including public officials. Exemptions to data processing by the State on grounds such as national security may lead to data collection, processing, and retention beyond what is necessary. This may violate the fundamental right to privacy.

Ms Roy is leading a campaign to stop the DPDPA from imposing restraints on asking for information under the third-party fiduciary clause. There are 40 to 60 lakh users every year in this country. She feels they are missing the woods for the tree. They must come together to protest.

On protecting the environment

If we really believe pollution, the environment and climate change are important things, then placing cans or bins for collecting rubbish are not enough. We must look beyond to see who is destroying the forest. The Amazon forest, the lungs of the world, is still burning. It was set on fire, many years ago. And why is it being destroyed? Because someone wants to make money? Are we willing to question such business ventures?

On the role of big money

Big money is financing elections, whether it's the U.S.A. or India. When that is so, how will we ever get democracy to work for the common man? This is a vital agenda for all of us.

There's a beautiful saying by a South African poet called Jeremy Cronin: What is democracy? It's speaking truth to power: making truth powerful and power truthful. We must learn to talk truth to power. If we don’t do that, there is really no democracy.

On higher education

There is a difference between formal instruction and education. Today we don't get knowledge from our schooling systems. Instead, we get information. We also get put into boxes: IAS, IIT, etc.

We must get rid of the coaching centres. They are not educational institutions. They are just preparing students to enter a system in which they can earn a lot of money. They do not mould our thinking or teach ethics/philosophy.

Ms Roy didn’t go to Oxford, or Cambridge, or Harvard, or Princeton, or Yale, or any of these institutions that are now called the great institutions of learning. She went to Delhi University. She paid only ₹16 towards college fees and ₹12 towards bus fare. But the learning she got was equivalent to any great university in the world. She was taught how to learn, understand, question, read and correlate. There was exposure to the liberal arts. Today there is no liberal arts. If we don't understand liberal arts, we cannot understand politics, democracy, or life. At the same time, we must know technology. The different streams are so separate that students grow up in one without knowing the other.

India may be having many students and educational institutions, but the standards have dramatically fallen. Ms Roy’s mother studied Physics and Maths. She could see the number plate of a car and mentally calculate the square root. Ms Roy does not have that skill. Ms Roy’s mother had great knowledge of physics. What she could do, a physics student in the next generation could not do. Ms Roy’s father studied law, and economics, but his knowledge of Shakespeare was much greater and more complete than hers though she was a student of literature.

We have reduced knowledge to skills and education to rote learning. We have forgotten that the principal aim of learning is to learn to train our mind to seek knowledge.

It is a loss for this wonderful country, which has produced so many great minds and in which many great enquiries have taken place. Many mathematicians have come from this country. Mathematics is not about learning by rote. It comes from questioning. In our educational system today, we do not allow any questions. This way, we will produce good workmen, but we are not going to produce great people anymore.

If we do not get rid of these educational loans and privatised education, young people will not go into any kind of creative offbeat activities. The loan hangs on their head like a huge rock unless they pay back the loan. They're not free human beings. We have built this vicious cycle. Somehow, we must get rid of it.

On the importance of humanity, kindness and compassion

Humanitarian kindness and compassion cannot be forsaken for anything. That is the bottom line. We should condemn people for violating the laws of human humanity and compassion. But we must also try and educate them and change them. If we merely condemn them, they will look for revenge.

A few groups talk about caste, others about class and some others about gender. Ms Roy’s organization has looked at all the three variables and tried to work towards a greater justice. We must be humane, kind and compassionate. There are so many examples of harmony in rural India.

In Bilawar, Ms Roy and her associates have set up an RTI Museum at the place where the original right to information campaign began. The BJP run municipality provided land even though the BJP does not like Ms Roy and her group because they campaign for secularism and communal harmony and against casteism. Yet the BJP Municipality realized that Bilawar had given the right to information law to the country. So, they provided the land for the RTI Transparency Museum.

During the inauguration, all the four major religious leaders in Bilawar were invited to come and bless the Constitution. They were requested to emphasise that the Constitution gives us the right to freedom of worship. Ms Roy is a great believer in the Indian Constitution and an admirer of Dr BR Ambedkar. It is the only just way in which a multi-religious, multiracial, multilinguistic country like India can survive as one political unity.

The moment we say you are terribly bad, and I'm good, there is a big problem. All of us have a right to survive, with equal rights and expect basic compassion and humanity. So, if we want India as one political entity to continue with the dream that we were born with in 1947, we must be compassionate, kind, and tolerant. If we remove these words from our constitution, India is finished.

On the cultural barriers today and yesterday

There are more cultural barriers today than in the past. There was far greater acceptance of human beings in the past than there is today. The kind of acceptance that has made Ms Roy a part of many rural families in Rajasthan will not happen today with the same facility and felicity that it happened in the past.

Ms Roy recalls the first time she came to live in a village. Some of the women in the village remarked that these women who had come from the city were staying with the men and therefore, were not of good character. But an elderly woman, who had never seen outsiders before, stood up for them. She told the villagers that they should be ashamed of themselves. These young women were willing to give up their lives for making the lives of the villagers better. What right did they have to condemn them like this? They had to be treated as their own children, younger sisters and brothers.

Today, no one will stand up for Ms Roy if she goes to a village. They close their doors and watch television. So, there is a cultural change in rural India which has made them less of a community and less interested in the larger well-being of people.

And instead of all this, there is just religion. In the past also there was religion and caste. But there was also kindness and understanding based on the tenet of the connectedness of human beings. To a very large extent, this has disappeared.

But still, there is more connectedness in rural India than in urban India. In urban India, nobody could care less. In cities like Delhi, people staying in one flat may not know who is residing next to them. We may think this is privacy but it's also loneliness. In a village, people are more connected and interested in each other.

Not that everything is rosy in rural India. There are violent fights over land rights between different castes. Dalits have been killed recently in Dangavas, very near Ajmer, where Ms Roy partly lives.

Note: On May 15, 2015, over 200 members from Jat Community attacked and killed six persons including five Dalits over a land dispute in Dangawas village in Rajasthan's Nagaur district. After the intervention of NGOs, civil society and political parties, the issue came to spotlight that year. The land conflict was over 3.77 hectares of land in Dangawas.

On building toilets

It is a good idea to build toilets but there are prerequisites.

Land is needed next to the house to dig the septic tank. Otherwise, the waste will run into the nala outside. Are we giving land to the villagers to build toilets? There is so much land in the village. Are we allocating land to the landless?

Ms Roy has a very good friend, the honest sarpanch of a village. One day she came to Ms Roy and said she was breaking down her kitchen to build a toilet. If she did not make the toilet, she would lose all the benefits.

Toilets also need water. We need tanks to store water. And for building these tanks, land is needed. So, where is the water to come from? Many of the women already fetch 6 pitchers of water for drinking and cooking. They are not willing to bring another 20 pitchers of water for the toilet.

So, we must be practical. We must give people water and land. Then only the toilet will be possible. If poor people do not have toilets, it is not because they don't want toilets, but because they can't have toilets.

On the Language of women

The emotive language of girls is different from that of men. Men use hard facts while women use their intuition. Compare the beauty of a picture vs an atomic explosion.

The syllogism of Aristotle (All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal" is an example of Aristotle's syllogism.) is not the only way to describe the world. Women sometimes use colourful, multilayered language that provides a social narrative. Ms Roy recalls asking a woman how much money she earned. The woman narrated a story and meandered around the question. While it took some time to get the exact answer, it was rich in its narrative and provided a detailed context and social history.

On whether things have improved for the better in the past 10 years

The last 10 years have not been good for the poor and for women. They have not been good for the right to freedom of expression, free speech, free expression of religion, criticism and critique of our government. If we criticize the government, we are called anti national. But there are some people who have made a lot of money. For them, the past 10 years would have been good.

The life of poor people today is dominated by debt and EMIs. And these EMIs are a heavy burden if we consider the earnings and expenditures of people. Today the common people are always worried, because if they don't pay the EMI, they will lose their motorcycles, houses, etc. So, what we have created is a debt economy. To falsify all this and proclaim that we are a very progressive economy, this debt is misrepresented as assets in public projections.

On educational institutions run by religious groups

We need not condemn religion. But we must differentiate between being religious and being communal. Being religious means we believe in God. Being communal means our God is the only God and superior to other gods.

Education must be broad based, aligned with the constitutional norms, and in a language which will facilitate the child to carry on with higher education. Different religious groups can teach in Urdu or Sanskrit or English or based on the Bible, the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita. The important thing is we should not tell the child that one religion is superior because we believe in it. All the religions essentially say the same thing. There are many ways to practise religion. Ours may not be the only way.