Three weeks is a long time in politics. Author Arundhati Roy is savouring the distance now, having swung from jolt to joy against the backdrop of the Karnataka election results.

“When I heard the results of the Karnataka election yesterday (Saturday), I didn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep the whole night; how happy I was!” Roy told a lit fest in Kerala on Sunday. “Because I felt like Kerala cannot be the only place standing.”

Roy also warned those in Kerala who might be tempted by the BJP’s pleas to be “given a chance” that the state would burn if the saffron party came to power there.

“It’s like a lit match asking firewood, ‘Give us a chance’. Kerala will burn down if you give them a chance,” she said. Not once but thrice. First in Malayalam, then in Hindi and then in English.

Roy was speaking at the Yuvadhara Youth Literature Festival in Fort Kochi, organised by the CPM’s youth wing DYFI and named after its magazine Yuvadhara.

The BJP has won just one Assembly seat in Kerala in its history, with O. Rajagopal bagging Nemom in Thiruvananthapuram in 2016.

Roy, whose Booker-winning The God of Small Things is set in Kerala, recalled how she had felt when the state denied even that one seat to the BJP in the 2021 Assembly polls.

“I had said at a similar literature festival in Wayanad about my favourite SMS message... my sister-in-law, who is sitting here, sent me after the Kerala elections: ‘BJP equals anamutta’,” Roy said, drawing cheers.

“Anamutta” — made up of “ana” (elephant) and “mutta” (egg) — connotes “a big zero”.

“We always need anamutta; we need ana and anamutta. But we don’t need the BJP,” she said.

The mood was not the same three weeks ago when Prime Minister Narendra Modi had swept into Kerala to flag off a Vande Bharat train and sections of the media had played it up as a potential game-changer.

“I felt very sad when Modi came here. So many people came and were throwing flowers on him (during a road show),” Roy said. “Worst of all, sections of the Christian Church were going and meeting him.”

Mar George Alencherry, Major Archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church, and six other archbishops had met Modi in Kochi.

Faced with criticism from the Christian clergy and laity as well as others, Alencherry later said the objective of the visit was to discuss farmers’ and fisherfolk’s issues and reservations for the poor.

Some political observers have been saying the issue is complex and has many dimensions, including economic, but Roy has posed her questions with remarkable clarity.

The author asked: “How is this (the meeting) even possible unless you don’t know what’s going on? Do you know what’s going on in Manipur? Do you know what’s going on in Chhattisgarh? Do you know what’s happening in Jharkhand with Christians?

“Do you know that in the last two years, there have been 300 attacks on Christian churches? How can you even have a conversation with these people?”

The author said that winning Kerala, a state that has always rejected the BJP, had become an “ego issue” for the party.