Special to WorldTribune.com

By Sumantra Maitra, Freepressers.com

NEW DELHI — Remember Arundhati Roy? Booker prize winner, posh South Delhi resident, Kohl eyed beauty who sympathizes with the global proletariat?

She once termed Maoists as “Gandhians with guns“, ironically a few days before they massacred 76 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in one of the single deadliest day of peacetime casualty of Indian security forces.

Well … she is back. Supporting the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd. In a recent speech in New York she said, among many other strange and naive things, that “Children of the rich cannot inherit their parent’s wealth.”

Shocked? Stunned silence? There’s more. Her demands came out in an article in Guardian, which by the way, is increasingly reminding me of Soviet Pravda these days. These are some of them.

• An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.

• Natural resources and essential infrastructure — water supply, electricity, health, and education — cannot be privatized.

• Everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.

She also rants about inequalities and the military-industrial complex of India and USA, etc, providing a lot of funny imaginary stats without citing any source whatsoever. The usual.

So there. The worst case of ideological lunacy is here. People who have no idea about economics, who have no respect for freedom and choice, who value nothing but state subsidies regardless of quality, and who openly support Socialism. Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky would be ecstatic.

She once said in an interview, that we are not democratic. She denounced it by saying our democracy is flawed. Admittedly no one can claim any system to be sound. But the fact that she can come, sit in a studio and openly preach her puerile ideas of plebiscitary democracy, without being dragged and shot at the back of her head like Anna Politkovskaya, proves that our democracy is quite healthy and robust.

I guess the West, as well as our decadent middle class here, forgot the freedom that they so richly enjoy and abuse by criticizing the very system of life and society that gave them those freedoms.

Which is sad. And hypocritical.

  Arundhati Roy, Jetsetters at Occupy: Guess who’s back preaching communism?, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Occupy Wall Street