[Reader-list] Statement by Arundhati Roy

[Tapas Ray [Gmail]]

Pheeta,

Thanks for this. I think it would be good if we gave the links along
with any material from online sources that we might be posting. This
one's is <http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/arundhati-roys-statement-on-possible-sedition-case-62566>.
As for offline sources (e.g., printed books, etc.), a mention of the
source, as complete as possible, would be very helpful.

Thanks again.

Tapas


On 27 October 2010 02:10, Pheeta Ram <pheeta.ram at gmail.com> wrote:
> STATEMENT BY ARUNDHATI ROY
>
> 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
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