New Delhi: A cockroach has become an unlikely symbol in India’s political debate, and now author Salman Rushdie and filmmaker Mira Nair have joined the conversation. Rushdie called India’s young protesters the country’s “most hopeful moment” in a long time, while Nair described herself as a “cockroach mom”, expressing solidarity with those fighting for democracy.
Their remarks at a New York fundraising dinner have sparked contrasting reactions online, with some accusing the two of being hostile to India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while others have highlighted the irony of the Hindu right’s response to Rushdie.
“There is something going on in India right now. India is boiling. And I would feel wrong not to say, maybe not the thing to say in a restaurant, to celebrate the cockroach. Young people of India have given us the most hopeful moment for a very long time,” Rushdie said at a fundraising dinner for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York, according to writer Amitava Kumar.
Kumar recounted the event in a post on his Substack, writing that the dinner was also a build-up to Diwali. The gathering included a celebration of Nair’s birthday, where the filmmaker expressed pride in the “cockroaches” fighting for democracy in India.
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Hindu right vs anglicised Indian elite
Rupa Subramanya, a staff writer at The Free Press, said Indian protesters had legitimate grievances and defended their right to peaceful protest. However, she questioned the political alignment between Rushdie, Nair and the protesters, arguing that both figures belonged to an Anglicised Indian elite that had long regarded Modi with disdain.
“Maybe that’s not so strange when you consider they are both upper-class anglicized Indian elite who have long regarded Modi with derision,” Subramanya wrote on X.
She also pointed to Rushdie’s history of facing threats from Islamist extremists. The author spent decades under an Iranian fatwa issued after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and was stabbed onstage at an event in New York in 2022.
Other users took a more critical view of Rushdie’s remarks. One accused the author of wanting India to be destroyed, arguing that Indians had stood by him. Another post described Rushdie and Nair as people who “hate Bharat”, framing their comments against the backdrop of India’s history of Islamic rule and colonialism.
An independent journalist wrote on X that the Hindu right had celebrated Rushdie for taking on Muslim fundamentalism for decades, but was now struggling to respond when he criticised Hindu fundamentalism.
“They can’t even say, ‘What about…’,” the post read.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)