As India burns, a lone writer defies the might of her country's courts

India is suddenly in turmoil. As Arundhati Roy walks into court in Delhi this morning to learn whether she is to spend a term in jail, across the western state of Gujarat hundreds of torched homes and businesses are still smouldering while ordinary people are in shock, trying to come to terms with the frenzy of hatred that came out of nowhere last week and took the lives of more than 500 Muslims.

The northern town of Ayodhya, north of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, is stiff with soldiers and police, but Hindu fanatics creep through the fields and along byways to evade checkpoints, preparing to take their first big step towards building a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque demolished by a mob in 1992. That event precipitated communal clashes across the country that left 3,000 people dead.

Yesterday a compromise was announced. The World Hindu Council, which is pressing for the temple's construction, agreed for the first time to accept the Supreme Court's verdict on whether the temple should be built. But the deal has a crooked look to it: in return for this concession the council is demanding that the government allow it to cart pillars of the temple that have already been carved to a patch of land adjacent to the contested site. Ayodhya's crisis has only been deferred.

Meanwhile, the central government, a coalition dominated by the Hindu nationalist BJP, appears rudderless and desperate.

Only weeks ago India's leaders were standing tall, proud frontline partners in the West's war on terrorism. Suddenly all that has changed: yesterday a local leader of the ruling party in Gujarat was named in a leaked police report as a suspected mass murderer and terrorist. Deepak Patel of the BJP is said to have led a mob of Hindus who burnt 42 Muslims to death, including a former MP.

It is against this garish backdrop that the contempt case of India's most successful writer, whose Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things has sold more than six million copies around the world, culminates this morning in the Supreme Court in Delhi.

Although the case originated in alleged events that took place more than 14 months ago, the trial seems part of the feverish, hysterical, claustrophobic mood that has suddenly gripped the world's biggest democracy.

The train of events that landed Roy in the legal soup itself belongs in a novel, though perhaps not a very good one.

In October 2000, the Supreme Court, after years of deliberation, decided by a majority verdict that construction of a controversial dam on the Narmada river in central India could go ahead. Roy, who has campaigned with the people whom the dam would displace for more than two years, came to a protest rally held by these "oustees" outside the Supreme Court on 13 December 2000. It was an entirely peaceful event, but within two months she and two others found themselves facing contempt charges all-eging she and her co-accused had incited the protesters to kill certain lawyers who came on the scene, and who brought the charges.

It was bizarre and remains inexplicable to Roy that a court with a vast backlog of important cases should have entertained one so obviously full of lies and nonsense.

Nearly one year later, the Supreme Court bench agreed with her that the petition was worthless and threw it out. But by this time Roy had filed two affidavits to the court in which, among other things, she gave her views on the rights and wrongs of the court taking the case on. It indicates, she said in the first affidavit, "a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence, criticise and muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it".

Despite agreeing with Roy that the suit was worthless, the bench decided that the words in which she expressed her views, of which the above are about the strongest, were themselves contemptuous.

Roy found herself in a legal landscape straight out of Alice.

After numerous Carrollesque hearings, at which press observers, while formally admitted were consistently barred from entering the court, today the judges will pronounce verdict and sentence.

Yesterday in her flat in south Delhi the writer explained to The Independent how this bizarre, troubling case fits, in her view, into the bizarre and horrifying situation gripping the country as a whole.

"There is a change in the political climate just now," she said. "Because of the failure of the completely corrupt executive, the Supreme Court has been wading in to take decisions on huge issues. Whether there should be a dam or not, whether there should be polluting industries in Delhi.

"My feeling is, these are issues there are a number of views on. Some decisions are good and some are bad. But if they are going to wade into public life on this scale, they have to be prepared to be criticised."

Roy is not hostile to the Supreme Court as an institution. "One thing I'm very clear about is the danger of seeing this whole thing as one person versus an institution," she said.

"The Supreme Court has been a very important institution. In the past it has come out with some very enlightened judgments."

One of those was in 1986, when her mother, Mary Roy, a school principal in Kerala, won a landmark case granting the women of the Syrian Christian community equal heredity rights as men.

But the Supreme Court's wading in, as Roy puts it, into huge areas of public policy, combined with its increasingly morbid sensitivity to criticism, are both indicators of the mounting crisis within the Indian nation.

For Roy, one word sums up the way things are moving: dispossession.

The Supreme Court approved the Sardar Sarovar dam, even when there is no provision for resettlement of those it will displace. Yet the displaced who drift into the cities get short shrift, too. "One judgment says that slum dwellers are like pickpockets, stealing public land."

Privatisation and globalisation go weirdly hand in hand with violent bigotry, she says.

"With one hand you're selling your place in chunks, selling rivers and selling mines and selling forests and selling power, selling all that off.

"And on the other, to shore up your flagging self esteem, you're orchestrating this howling mob of nationalism and bigotry and fundamentalism, and book burning and missionary burning and mosque breaking.

"I feel the two march hand in hand into the 21st century."

Meanwhile, the diversity for which India is famous begins to wither away, the tolerance of the Hindu mind starts to close down. But perhaps there is an end to the process.

"What's going on is ghastly, but I hope the BJP is in its death throes," said Roy.

"I feel that in India at some point people get repulsed by what's happening. I hope they do. But I don't know. So it's a very frightening time.

"Inside the court, it's terrifying. You feel so powerless. And to be that powerless is not a pleasant thing.

"It's dangerous to be a tall poppy in India today."

Arundhati Roy on Indian justice:

"Some [Supreme Court]decisions are good and some are bad. But if they are going to wade into public life on this scale, they have to be prepared to be criticised."

On India's government:

"With one hand they're selling the place off in chunks, selling rivers and selling mines and selling forests and selling power, selling all that off. And on the other, to shore up their flagging self-esteem, they're orchestrating this howling mob of nationalism and bigotry and fundamentalism."

On treatment of the poor:

"One judgement says slum dwellers are like pickpockets, stealing public land ... They [the authorities] are sealing the exits. And they're saying you can't criticise."