[Reader-list] land and freedom : by Arundhati Roy

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Inder,

Thank you for posting this text which appeared in the Guardian today.  
As it says at the end

> A longer version of this article will be
> available tomorrow at outlookindia.com.

It will be interesting to see what the longer version contains, as I  
am sure that some of the nuances in Roy's text have had to be dropped  
(in this version) for reasons of brevity in the newspaper format of  
the Guardian.

regards

Shuddha

On 22-Aug-08, at 6:33 PM, inder salim wrote:

> LAND AND FREEDOM BY ARUNDHATI ROY IN  THE GUARDIAN.
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/22/kashmir.india
>
>
>
> For the past 60 days or so, since about the end of June, the people of
> Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have
> shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of
> half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarised
> zone in the world.
>
> After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian
> government's worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the
> militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent
> mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one is
> nourished by people's memory of years of repression in which tens of
> thousands have been killed, thousands have been "disappeared",
> hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, and humiliated. That kind of
> rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and
> sent back to where it came from.
>
>

Shuddhabrata Sengupta