STORY about Solidaritypublié le Octobre 27, 2010 by Greg Dean
Arundhati Roy Threatened with Arrest for 'Sedition'
BJP leader calls for her arrest. New Delhi police sources report its legal wing backs arrest.
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Arundhati Roy is reporting that Indian newspapers are writing she may be charged with sedition today (now Wednesday in India) for her speech given on October 21st, 2010, at a conference on Kashmir at the LTG (Little Theatre Group) auditorium in New Delhi ("Freedom –The Only Way"). The conference also hosted Kashmiri separatist Syed Ali Geelani, who drew Hindu activist who interrupted the conference by shouting slogans in the auditorium like “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (“Victory for Mother India”) and “Vande Mataram” (nationalist Anthem).
Her remarks at the conference attracted criticism from the BJP leader Arun Jaitley that she was promoting secession of the Union of India.
On Tuesday (yesterday in India), the Times of India reported that it’s “sources said that Delhi Police's legal wing has, after examining the contents of the anti-India speeches of Geelani and Roy, recommended that cases under section 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code can be registered against the duo.”
However, major Indian media outlets are ‘speculating’ in the last few hours that such a charge is unlikely, with the Daily News & Analysis adding to the unlikelihood by noting the upcoming international attention due with Barrack Obama’ visit to India. British Prime Minister, David Cameron’ visit at the beginning of this month is likely to also have U.K. pundits still plugged into India.
At the conference, Roy recounted a quote she gave to a reporter from the Times of India while she was in Kashmir – “Right now India needs azadi (freedom) from Kashmir, as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India.” She went on… “For us, the people of India to tolerate that occupation, [the most militarized zone in the world], is like allowing a kind of moral corrosion to drip into our blood stream.”
In her defense, Ms. Roy offered “Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice,” Roy said in a statement. She added, a line that is spreading quickly as a phrase in these times of globalized repression, “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.”
At the conference, Arundhati Roy reported her experiences in her recent travels in Kashmir and called India a colonizing state – “that country became a country because of the imagination of its colonizer… The British drew the map in 1899, so that country became a colonizing power from the moment it became independent. And the Indian state has militarily intervened in Manipur, in Nagaland in Midurai, in Kashmir, in Telangana, during the Naxalite uprising, Punjab, in Hyderabad, in Goa, [etc]. So, often the Indian government the Indian state, the Indian elite, they accuse the Naxalite of believing in protracted war. But actually you see the Indian state that wages protracted war against its own people, or what it calls its own people, relentlessly since 1947.”
Arundhati Roy reports herself as writing from Srinagar, Kashmir today on her zcommunications.org blog. Her travels yesterday to Shopian in Southern 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.”
The Booker prize winner goes on “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.”
Watch the speech in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXG_VNaQn0
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