[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy is dangerously wrong on Kashmir

[Bipin Trivedi]

Arundhati Roy is dangerously wrong on Kashmir - by Venkatesan Vembu

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_arundhati-roy-is-dangerously-wrong-on
-kashmir_1458329

There's a mesmeric, seductive quality to Arundhati Roy's prose. For all its
verbiage, it teases, tempts and torments the mind and lures it into the
parlour of a contrarian world; it then persuades it, with the sheer power of
its eloquence that the natural order of things in the 'real' world as we
know it is wholly unnatural and completely flawed.

"So you think India is a superpower in the making?" it says, and marshals
compelling arguments for why India is more in the "bhookey-nangey" category.
"So you think big dams are great for development?" it asks. "Perhaps you'll
feel differently if it were your home and your livelihood that needed to be
sacrificed for the greater good".

A fair-minded person might concede that Roy has at least half a point, even
if, once the seductive power of her prose has worn off, her polemical
pounding of that half-point is grating in the extreme. Heck, she's not even
the only one who holds an unflattering mirror to Indian society and forces
us to reflect on our failings. 

The social historian Ramachandra Guha does it no less trenchantly, no less
controversially and no less eloquently; but he does it with a far greater
sensitivity to the burden of history, and he at least has the intellectual
honesty - and the good grace - to acknowledge the merits, such as they are,
of India's democracy, flawed though it is.

But whereas the soundbite-savvy Roy's polemics were once merely
infuriatingly dishonest (even when they had half a point), her most recent
public articulations on Kashmir, coming on top of her unvarnished defence of
Maoist resort to violence, cross the threshold of what any self-respecting,
law-bound nation-state can tolerate. Roy may have declared herself an
'independent mobile republic', as she did after the 1998 Pokhran nuclear
tests in order to dissociate herself from the BJP's nuclear jingoism; but
she's still bound by the sedition laws of the decidedly immobile republic
she inhabits.

Apart from being historically inaccurate, Roy's words also betray an
inadequate sensitivity to the enormous gravity of any loose talk of azaadi
or self-determination at a time when the separatist campaign in Kashmir
finally stands exposed before the world as having been propelled all along
by Pakistan-backed jihadis who are playing for much larger stakes: the
disintegration of secular India. 

Perhaps in parlour room polemics, among calm and politically sanitised
minds, there may be little risk from intellectual explorations of the merits
of Kashmiri self-determination. But the Kashmir mind today is in a fevered
state as a result of years of hot-headed jihadi indoctrination; only when
that fever subsides can other cures be contemplated. Right now, given that
inflamed state, Roy's words have the potency to bestir indoctrinated minds
into extreme action.

History doesn't flow in straight lines, but in contours, and in Kashmir's
tortured history there are many contours to negotiate. The Indian state may
not always have got it right in Kashmir, but Roy's black-and-white
delineation represents a colossal and intellectually dishonest
oversimplification of the problem without sufficient appreciation of the
fanatical geopolitical forces at work. It also takes her farther down the
slippery slope of shrill and decidedly dangerous sloganeering which has
enormous lethal consequences in the real world. Perhaps she should break the
spell that her own hypnotic prose appears to have on herself and her
increasingly fanatical flock of followers.