Arundhati Roy defends her Kashmir remarks

Controversial writer and activist Arundhati Roy on Tuesday said what she said about call for justice in Kashmir and invoked possible sedition charges were nothing new since they were spoken by millions of people every day.

In a statement issued on Tuesday from here, she said: “I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir. I said what millions of people here say every day.”

“I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years,” the statement said.

Arundhati Roy accused India of indulging “in one of the most brutal military occupations in the world”.

With clamour for action against the writer by the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the decision now rests with the union government on whether it would press sedition charges against Roy and separatist Kashmir leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani for their remarks in a New Delhi seminar.

But on Tuesday, Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily told a news channel that the government is under no pressure to prosecute Arundhati Roy though her statement that Kashmir is not an “integral part” of India is unfortunate.

Roy in her statement said: “Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state.”

“Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice.

“I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother. We sat in a circle of people crazed with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would ever get ‘insaf’—justice—from India, and now believed that Azadi—freedom— was their only hope.

“I met young stonepelters who had been shot through their eyes. I traveled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones,” said Arundhati.

She said her remarks come from love and pride and defended her speech at the New Delhi seminar on “Azadi”.
“In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians,” she said.

“It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free,” she said.