View and Counterview

Actual History: http://www.dismalworld.com/disputes/kashmir.php

Noted writer Arundhati Roy Tuesday said her speeches supporting the call for azadi were what "millions" in Kashmir say every day and were "fundamentally a call for justice". Following is the full text of the statement that she has issued.

"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."

COUNTERVIEW:

Sunny N. says:

October 28, 2010 at 12:09 PM

Well the freedom movement did not ask the British to get all of us together on the same platform. If Kashmiris want all of J&K to be freed why don’t they first talk to each other. The Valley Sunnis , the Bakarwals and Gujjars , the Pandits , the Jammu Dogras and try and form an informal body that has one common aim. It is the easiest thing in the world to throw stones , any boy who throws them on dogs knows it. The problem is taking the dog for a walk , to the vet and feeding it. Arundhati Roy and her ilk are hysterical abstractionists who refuse to see strategic realities.Arundhati Roy is a “gutter-inspector” . She and many others like her float on the slick they form on India and the garbage they endlessly chuck on her.I pity the Nation that has an intellectual class that has no love , passion or understanding for the land – they either want to be somewhere else or want us to be someone else . If they knew the soul of this land and sang in its languages they might still have a chance to experience “Azadi” . They are brides of Angst . These Perpetually Self-flagellating Endlessly Unhappy and Despairing Oracles – P.S.E.U.D.O.People like Arundhati Roy are town-criers who have no patience with solid-detailing. They live in a fantasy land where either revolutionaries will find answers or you keep screaming blue till the day of judgement happens. They have no experience of running any income generating project or the managing of any business/farm or administering/governing a village . So called “creative” people are free from the daily logistics of running a society so they can easily like big consultants keep setting unreal parameters. I know people who have done solid path-breaking work on local solutions and without much hoo-haa.

Arundhati Roy , if she was not a sensationalist would have seen thousands of such experiments where people have thought through on how to create sustainable communities . Like that soldier-villager Anna Hazare who transformed a village Ralegaon Siddhi and now runs a Village Planning Institute in Maharshtra.

People like Arundhati make violence fashionable and run from one movement to another because they have no staying power. She can stay on course with Narmada or Kashmir or Chattisgarh. She dreams of being the voice of all oppressed everywhere. There are many better representatives in all those areas and as for strategic or seminal thought , she has not given a single one. She is the disease of our age , all packaging.