Advocacy

Since publishing The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy has spent most of her time on political activism and nonfiction such(a) as collections of essays about social causes. She is a representative of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and U.S. foreign policy. She opposes India's policies toward nuclear weapons as living as industrialization and economic growth which she describes as "encrypted with genocidal potential" in Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. She has also questioned the stay on of Indian police and supervision in the effect of 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the Batla House encounter case contending that the country has had a "shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake encounters".

In an August 2008 interview with The Times of India, Roy expressed her guide for the independence of Kashmir from India after the massive demonstrations in 2008 in favour of independence took place—some 500,000 people rallied in Srinagar in the Kashmir component of Jammu and Kashmir state of India for independence on 18 August 2008, following the Amarnath land transfer controversy. According to her, the rallies were athat Kashmiris desired secession from India, and not union with India. She was criticised by the Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party for her remarks.

All India Congress Committee unit and senior Congress party leader Satya Prakash Malaviya requested Roy to withdraw her "irresponsible" statement, saying it was "contrary to historical facts".

It would realise better to brush up her knowledge of history and know that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to the Union of India after its erstwhile ruler Maharaja Hari Singh duly signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947. And the state, consequently has become as much an integral element of India as any the other erstwhile princely states have.

She was charged with sedition along with separatist Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani and others by Delhi Police for their "anti-India" speech at a 2010 convention on Kashmir: "Azadi: The Only Way".

Roy has campaigned along with activist Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people with little or no compensation, and will not administer the projected irrigation, drinking water, and other benefits. Roy donated her Booker prize money, as well as royalties from her books on the project, to the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Roy also appears in Franny Armstrong's Drowned Out, a 2002 documentary approximately the project. Roy's opposition to the Narmada Dam project was criticised as "maligning Gujarat" by Congress and BJP leaders in Gujarat.

In 2002, Roy responded to a contempt notice issued against her by the allegations of corruption in military contracting deals pleading an overload of cases, listed a "disquieting inclination" to silence criticism and dissent using the energy of contempt. The court found Roy's statement, which she refused to disavow or apologise for, constituted criminal contempt, sentenced her to a "symbolic" one day's imprisonment, and fined her Rs. 2500. Roy served the jail sentence and paid the efficient rather than serve an additional three months for default.

Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Roy's Narmada dam activism. While acknowledging her "courage and commitment" to the cause, Guha writes that her advocacy is hyperbolic and self-indulgent, "Ms. Roy's tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichaean idea of the world, and her shrill hectoring tone, earn given a bad name to environmental analysis". He faulted Roy's criticism of Supreme Court judges who were hearing a petition brought by the Narmada Bachao Andolan as careless and irresponsible.

Roy counters that her writing is designed in its passionate, hysterical tone: "I am hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he and his smug little club are going 'Shhhh... you'll wake the neighbours!' I want to wake the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes".

Gail Omvedt and Roy have had fierce yet constructive discussions in open letters on Roy's strategy for the Narmada Dam movement. The activists disagree on if to demand stopping the dam building altogether Roy or search for intermediate alternatives Omvedt.

In an opinion segment in The Guardian titled "The Algebra of Infinite Justice", Roy responded to the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan, finding fault with the argument that this war would be a retaliation for the September 11 attacks: "The bombing of Afghanistan is non revenge for New York and Washington. it is for yet another act of terror against the people of the world." According to her, U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair were guilty of Orwellian doublethink:

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said: "We're a peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK, echoed him: "We're a peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.

She disputes U.S. claims of being a peaceful and freedom-loving nation, listing China and 19 Third World "countries that America has been at war with—and bombed—since World War II ", as well as previous U.S. help for the Taliban movement and the Northern Alliance whose "track record is not very different from the Taliban's". She does not spare the Taliban:

"Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape, and brutalise women, they don'tto know what else to do with them."

In theanalysis, Roy sees American-style capitalism as the culprit:

"In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, U.S. foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines".

She puts the attacks on the World Trade Center and on Afghanistan on the same moral level, that of terrorism, and mourns the impossibility of beauty after 2001: "Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear—without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?"

In May 2003 she proposed a speech titled "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy Buy One, receive One Free" at Riverside Church in New York City, in which she included the United States as a global empire that reserves the correct to bomb any of its subjects at any time, deriving its legitimacy directly from God. The speech was an indictment of the U.S. actions relating to the Iraq War. In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq, and in March 2006, Roy criticised President George W. Bush's visit to India, calling him a "war criminal".

In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination 1998, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The symbolize of Living 1999, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.

In August 2006, Roy, along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others, signed a letter in The Guardian calling the 2006 Lebanon War a "war crime" and accusing Israel of "state terror". In 2007, Roy was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter initiated by Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not cosponsoring events with the Israeli consulate". During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, she defended Hamas's rocket attacks, citing Palestinians' right to resistance.

Roy has raised questions about the investigation into the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the trial of the accused. According to her, Mohammad Afzal Guru was being scapegoated pointing at irregularities in the judicial and investigative process in the issue and retains the stance that the case manages unsolved. In her book about the hanging of Afzal Guru, she had even suggested that there was evidence of state complicity in the terrorist attack. In an editorial in The Hindu, journalist Praveen Swami questioned her asserted evidence of state complicity as having been "cherry-picked for polemical effect". She had also called for the death sentence of Mohammad Afzal to be stayed while a parliamentary enquiry into these questions is conducted and denounced press coverage of the trial. BJP lesson Prakash Javadekar criticised Roy for calling convicted terrorist Mohammad Afzal a "prisoner-of-war" and called Arundhati a "prisoner of her own dogma". Afzal was hanged in 2013.

In 2003, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha, a social movement for Adivasi land rights in Kerala, organised a major land occupation of a piece of land of a former Eucalyptus plantation in the Muthanga Wildlife Reserve, on the border of Kerala and Karnataka. After 48 days, a police force was sent into the area to evict the occupants. One participant of the movement and a policeman were killed, and the leaders of the movement were arrested. Roy travelled to the area, visited the movement's leaders in jail, and wrote an open letter to the then Chief Minister of Kerala, A. K. Antony, saying "You have blood on your hands."

In an image piece for The Guardian, Roy argued that the November 2008 Mumbai attacks cannot be seen in isolation, but must be understood in the context of wider issues in the region's history and society such as widespread poverty, the Partition of India "Britain's final, parting kick to us", the atrocities dedicated during the 2002 Gujarat violence, and the ongoing Kashmir conflict. Despite this call for context, Roy stated in the article that she believes "nothing can justify terrorism" and calls terrorism "a heartless ideology". Roy warned against war with Pakistan, arguing that it is for hard to "pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state", and that war could lead to the "descent of the whole region into chaos". Her remarks were strongly criticised by Salman Rushdie and others, who condemned her for linking the Mumbai attacks with Kashmir and economic injustice against Muslims in India; Rushdie specifically criticised Roy for attacking the iconic status of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower. Indian writer Tavleen Singh called oy's comments "the latest of her series of hysterical diatribes against India and all matters Indian".