Arundhati Roy

Citing “news reports from India,” a report on English PEN says that Arundhati Roy, the author of the Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things, “will be arrested and charged with ‘sedition’ over comments she made on Kashmir.” Strangely, and frustratingly, however, the PEN report does not say what those comments were.

A report from the Times of India clarifies things somewhat: Roy gave a speech in which she apparently urged India to listen to separatists’ demands, saying “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this.” She spoke as part of an event featuring “pro-Maoist leader Vara Vara Rao” and Syed Ali Shah Geelani, “who harped on independence for Kashmir.” Geelani is the leader of the Hurriyat political faction, which is seen by many as a front for the Pakistani secret service, working against India’s interest in Kashmir.

As a result of the speech, Roy apparently faces sedition charges from the Indian government.

The PEN report quotes Hari Kunzru, among others, issuing statements of support for Roy:

I’m concerned to hear that Arundhati Roy may face sedition charges. India trumpets its status as the world’s largest democracy, but the  Indian establishment is notoriously unwilling to listen to dissident  voices. Whether or not one agrees with Roy’s positions on Kashmir or the  Maoist insurgency in Central India, the issues she raises are important  and deserve to be debated. The willingness by elements of the Indian  establishment to use the legal system to intimidate critics is  lamentable. India’s writers are an important part of the nation’s  identity on the international stage. Supporting their right to free  speech goes hand in hand with applauding them when they win the Booker prize. One is meaningless without the other.

Roy herself has issued a statement of clarification, which Kunzru posts on his own website:

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 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 stone pelters 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.

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. 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.

Arundhati Roy
October 26 2010