I’m not sure I agree with everything Arundhati Roy says, or every campaign she fronts, but I am sure that the Booker Prize-winning Indian author of The God of Small Things and outspoken human rights activist personifies the phrase “Speak truth to power”.
A leader in today’s Guardian rightly heaps praise on her.
Some of you may have read her recent essay in the New Statesman warning that once-socialist India is rushing towards tyranny in its desire to become a capitalist superpower. If not, you can read it here.
Others may have spotted this blog post on The Staggers noting that Roy has been threatened with arrest by the Indian government “after claiming that the disputed territory of Kashmir is not an integral part of India. India’s home ministry is reported to have told the police in Delhi that a case of sedition may be registered against Roy and the Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani for remarks they made over the past weekend, in a seminar entitled ‘Whither Kashmir? Freedom or Enslavement’.”
Here, however, is her brilliant and poignant statement in response to the so-called sedition controversy:
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. 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 travelled 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 stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I travelled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag District, had been taken into custody and had their fingernails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones.
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 fingernails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. 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.
Hat-tip: Tariq Ali/LRB blog
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