Arundhati Roy: Serenading the secessionists

[MdArif]

Serenading the secessionists​

Chandan Mitra

Those who spewed venom and espoused secession at a seminar on azadi in Delhi last week are criminals who must pay for their treasonable act

It can no longer be ignored as self-seeking antics of a publicity hound. Social celebrity and political busybody Arundhati Roy has truly crossed the line this time. Encouraged by the prominent publication of a despicable article that claimed India too needed azadi from Kashmir some months ago, she went overboard at a secessionist gathering in Delhi last Thursday, saying Kashmir ought to get azadi from “bhookhey-nangey (starving and naked)” India. She went on to repeat her earlier disparaging remarks on the country of her birth, calling India a “hollow superpower” from which “I dissociate”.

If so, Ms Roy, the only honourable course left for you is to renounce Indian citizenship and migrate to whichever country will take you. I doubt if too many would enthusiastically lap up someone who is an avowed traitor. If she can do this to India, they would think, it must speak volumes for her moral fabric (if she has any in the first place). And nobody loves traitors and spies; they remain suspect, often despised, even if given shelter in another country for reasons of political expediency.

Despite her celebrity status, I have repeatedly taken up cudgels against Roy and her ilk for their brazenly seditious activities — be it over the 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament House which she alleged was a plot hatched by the Vajpayee Government to build up hysteria for going to war with Pakistan, or her championship of bloodthirsty Maoist insurgents, or Pakistan-sponsored, pro-Taliban secessionists in Jammu & Kashmir. As side-shows, her coterie also supports sundry separatists in the North-East. Anybody who seeks to dismember India or promote a civil war in this country, receives full-throated moral (and probably also material) encouragement from motley groups that go into orgasms at the thought of India being ravished by AK-47 wielding insurgents.

I have a serious issue in this regard with my friend and predecessor as Pioneer Editor, Vinod Mehta, who has been Roy’s principal sponsor through the columns of Outlook magazine. I know Vinod loves iconoclasts and, contrary to his amiable persona, has an anarchist streak, but he has done great disservice to the country by allowing her to spew venom against India by repeatedly publishing her voluminous, rambling essays oozing hate. This is not the first time I am saying this; nor is this behind Vinod’s back as I have conveyed my feelings upfront on occasion. Criminals do not deserve a respectable platform; denying traitors the ‘oxygen of publicity’ is the only way to snuff out their diabolical machinations.

Arundhati Roy was not the only hardline India-basher and secessionist at Thursday’s Delhi seminar. A man who is proud to say he wants Kashmir to merge with Pakistan was the main draw at the gathering, presided over by SAR Geelani, acquitted by the Supreme Court in the Parliament House attack case after being initially sentenced to death. Incidentally, the acquittal order specifically noted the Court’s regret at not finding clinching evidence against him. They also collected an assortment of other secessionists, including a few ageing but vitriolic wannabes from Punjab, Nagaland and Manipur.

Arguably in a democracy everyone has the right to express his or her view, but is this right absolute and without reasonable restraints? If so, why are sections relating to sedition, creating communal disharmony, making inflammatory speeches and so on still in the statute books? The Constitution, not only in India but all mature democracies, guarantees free speech “within reasonable limits”. But what happens when these limits are crossed?

A pusillanimous Indian state has watched helplessly as determined separatists repeatedly violated the Laxman-rekha and got away with it. Nobody, not even the otherwise stentorian judiciary, is prepared to enforce the law when it comes to these rabble-rousers. Arundhati Roy plunged into the Narmada Bachao Andolan once she realised the huge publicity potential it had. She deviously attempted to steal the limelight from Medha Patkar, who may be misguided, but is not a self-seeker of Roy’s calibre. When the Supreme Court, in which they repeatedly professed full faith, gave its verdict against them, the entire lot turned rebellious. They demonstrated outside the court premises, hurled abusive slogans at judges and indulged in rampant contempt of court. But they were let off with a mild censure by their lordships for offences for which lesser people would have been sentenced to jail for at least six months.

I doubt if our namby-pamby Government will have the guts even to lodge FIRs against the criminals who blasphemed India sitting in the heart of the national capital. I am even more distressed that Friday’s newspapers largely ignored Roy’s and Geelani’s outrageous sermonising and reported only that a shoe was thrown at Geelani and that Kashmiri Pandits tried unsuccessfully to disrupt the seminar. A strident critic of vandalism by goonda groups in newspaper/television channel offices, for once I regret the demonstrators failed in their mission on Thursday.

Attempts at forcible disruption would not have been necessary had the Government acted in time and denied permission to these traitors to hold a public meeting to promote India’s dismemberment. Could the Government have been unaware that Syed Ali Shah Geelani, billed as the star of the show, had flown in from Srinagar with the express intent of fomenting sedition? Even in the Valley, where limits of the law are often stretched to allow separatists space, local authorities are compelled to put him under house arrest almost every other day. Thus, his views are no secret. So, should the Government have allowed him to mock the authority of the state and outrage the sentiment of Indians by holding court on Copernicus Marg?

Was the Government unaware that a coalition of secessionists was being cobbled together with Arundhati Roy providing the glamour component? I am really waiting for the day when she renounces Indian citizenship and, hopefully, migrates to Taliban-held parts of Afghanistan, dons a burqa and is compelled not to step out of her house except in the company of a male relative! From the way she has been gunning for India while embracing secessionists that is probably the only way she can redeem herself in her own eyes.

Wishful desires apart, enough is now enough. The Government and civil society cannot take this open espousal of secession any longer. Unless action is taken against the organisers and speakers at Thursday’s treasonable gathering we will never manage to stem the torrent of seditious ideas. With what face can the Government invoke laws like waging war against the state or promoting sedition against small-fry in the North-East if it can’t act against the big fish?

Civil society too has a role in isolating, boycotting and eventually excising these rabid elements and their promoters from our midst. I appeal to Editors like Vinod Mehta and those of various English language news channels (on many of which I appear regularly) to please introspect the impact of providing secessionists a platform to launch diatribes against the country. I know nationalism is not in fashion with our elite nowadays, but must we make secession and sedition fashionable instead?

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[MdArif]

Privilege of being Arundhati Roy​

Kanchan Gupta

If consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, as was famously (and tad bitchily) declared by the flamboyant Irish writer Oscar Wilde, then Arundhati Roy qualifies as an author-activist-anarchist lacking in imagination. For she has been consistent in denouncing the Indian nation, questioning the quality of democracy in this country, casting aspersions on the judiciary, promoting secessionism and justifying the murderous campaign by Maoists to capture state power. Outraged as most people are by her passionate espousal of azadi for Kashmir at a convention in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi last Thursday, they appear to have forgotten her previous assertion of the Kashmiris’ “right to secede” from the Union of India, not once or twice, but many times over. Similarly, this is not the first time that she has ridiculed the nation and the state or poured scorn over India’s democratic credentials which are universally acknowledged as among the best in the world.

“India needs azadi from Kashmir and Kashmir needs azadi from India,” she told an appreciative crowd of secessionists and their supporters, carted in from Aligarh Muslim University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi University and other such taxpayer-funded institutions of learning that double up as fast-breeders of Muslim separatists and Left extremists for whom nationalism is as offensive as their nationality. But this is not the first time Arundhati Roy has outraged sensitivities. Two years ago, on August 19, 2008, after attending a rally organised by separatists in Srinagar, she had excitedly told mediapersons eager to record her pearls of wisdom: “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India.” She had then added with a flourish, as is by now her established style of exaggerating a point to sheer banality, “If no one is listening then it is because they don’t want to hear. Because this is a referendum… People don’t need anyone to represent them, they are representing themselves.”

Nor is this the first time that Arundhati Roy has questioned the quality of democracy in India; she has done so repeatedly. Invited for a book-reading session at New York’s Town Hall, she had stunned the gathering by suddenly launching a vitriolic attack on democracy in India. “The biggest PR myth of all times is that India is a democracy. In reality, it is not… There is no real democracy in India. Several States in India are on the verge of civil war… In Iraq, there are 1,50,000 military personnel, whereas in Kashmir Valley there are some 7,00,000,” she had said. Not surprisingly, she got a standing ovation. Who is to tell the Americans who applauded her that had India not been a democracy she would have been frog-marched to Tihar Jail immediately upon arriving at Indira Gandhi International Airport on her return?

On another occasion, while berating the police for arresting Maoists and charging them with murder, Arundhati Roy had lashed out at democracy in India for not tolerating terrorism in the name of Chairman Mao’s blood-stained ideology. “The concept of Indian democracy is the biggest publicity scam of this century. Holding elections every five years does not necessarily mean that our country enjoys democracy.” Her notion of democracy, presumably, is a system that allows unrestricted lawlessness so long as laws are being followed in the breach by her ilk — deracinated, English-speaking, cliché-mouthing ‘intellectuals’ who wax eloquent on the plight of the unwashed masses but recoil in horror at the very suggestion of being counted with those on whose behalf they claim to speak — and their rage boys who kill and maim, **** and loot, burn and destroy to satiate their perverse desire to see India suffer. It’s fashionable for them to intersperse their accented English with deliberately mispronounced words in Hindi. Hence Arundhati Roy’s description of India as “bhookhey-nangey Hindustan”; she, of course, has known neither dehumanising hunger nor the indignity suffered by a woman in tattered rags. India’s well-heeled radicals who own farm houses built on illegally ‘acquired’ tribal land are not expected to sully their manicured fingers with desi daal-roti.

The issue, therefore, is not about Arundhati Roy trying to shock Indians who are proud of their nation and nationality, Hindustanis who are perfectly at ease with Hindustan, a billion people who wouldn’t want to swap their democracy with a Talibani social order and political system which she obviously admires because she was inconsolable and in unrestrained grief after Mullah Omar and his thugs were chased out of Kabul. Only the naïve and the uninitiated would be offended by her crudity which is designed to infuriate the most tolerant and liberal among us who believe free speech is one of the defining features of democracy. The real issue is the discriminatory attitude of our state which fosters a system where the law, in theory, is the same for all but privileges, in practice, are different. Nothing else explains why Chhatradhar Mahato, a flashily dressed, dimwitted blabbermouth from the boondocks of Lalgarh in West Bengal, should be in jail for aiding and assisting Maoists in waging war on the state and helping propagate their destructive ideology, charged under the amended Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, while Arundhati Roy, a sophisticated self-publicist and articulate propagandist of every conceivable anti-national ‘cause’, should remain untouched by the proverbial long arm of the law.

The UAPA says “secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union includes the assertion of any claim to determine whether such part will remain a part of the territory of India”. The offences listed under this law include any assertion or statement “which is intended, or supports any claim, to bring about, on any ground whatsoever, the cession of a part of the territory of India or the secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union, or which incites any individual or group of individuals to bring about such cession or secession”. Prima facie Arundhati Roy is guilty of these offences when she endorses the separatists call for azadi, incites Kashmiris to break away from India, and urges impressionable young men and women to get “involved in this cause which is their future”.

There’s more. Section 18 of the amended UAPA lays down that “Whoever conspires or attempts to commit, or advocates, abets, advises or incites knowingly facilitates the commission of, a terrorist act or any act preparatory to the commission of a terrorist act, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than five years but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.” Section 18B says, “Whoever recruits or causes to be recruited any person or persons for commission of a terrorist act shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than five years but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.”

If the law of the land were truly applicable to all, then Arundhati Roy would have been in jail by now. Or, if we were to put it another way, had India’s democracy been perfect and not flawed, she would have been denied the presumed right to undermine the Indian state in so brazen a manner. Ironically, what she so crudely berates also affords her the freedom to abuse the very system of which she is a privileged beneficiary. The elite that is India’s bane would be incomplete without Arundhati Roy.

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[SpArK]

 

[aristocrat]

^^^BADA WALA LOL

 

[Jade]

As Tavleen Singh says about Roy “the latest of her series of hysterical diatribes against India and all things Indian”. It aptly describes Ms Roy. Nobody, at least in India, should takes her diatribes seriously.

It is better that we ignore this self serving individual than react to her comments.

In this regards I certainly agree to what Chandan Mitra's has to say ….that ‘outlook’ is the bigger culprit

 

[jha]

An open letter to Arundhati Roy | Blog of Pagal Patrakar

 

[para-site]

Truth hurts (follow up to the Open Letter to Arundhati Roy) | Blog of Pagal Patrakar

 

[Trichy]

plz rewrite into english plz

 

[kish]

now she calling maoists are patriots ............ that laddy sucks

"Patriots of a kind, they (Maoists) are. But here patriotism is very complicated. So at the moment what people are fighting for is to keep this country from falling apart."



Maoists are 'patriots of a kind': Arundhati Roy - Rediff.com India News

 

[Mirza Jatt]

I think we are attaching too much importance to this lady....thats exactly whats she wants ..publicity. keep shooting the maoists, until theyr are finished,meanwhile let her keep saying whatever she wants..once the maoists are finished..she will automatically turn to some other subject for her bread and butter.

 

[Rafi]

Ms Roy is the conscience of india, future generations will build monuments to her, this courageous women, knew that fascist elements in india are ready to even kill her, but this brave women is like the lighthouse guiding ships in the dark.

One sincerely hopes that her, voice will not be strangled by the "deep state" in india

A Pakistani Jatt

 

[SpArK]

Ms Roy is the conscience of india, future generations will build monuments to her, this courageous women, knew that fascist elements in india are ready to even kill her, but this brave women is like the lighthouse guiding ships in the dark.

A Pakistani Jatt

Yes , she is from my state.. We are planning a monument in the memory of her soon, going by the ridiculous comments she is making around .

 

[foxbat]

^ and we all know what happens to monuments. There was a movie called KOHRAM. Those who have seen it, know what I mean

 

[Water Car Engineer]

Ms Roy is the conscience of india, future generations will build monuments to her, this courageous women, knew that fascist elements in india are ready to even kill her, but this brave women is like the lighthouse guiding ships in the dark.

One sincerely hopes that her, voice will not be strangled by the "deep state" in india

A Pakistani Jatt

If there was a Pakistani equivalent of her and that person talks about the Taliban, Baluchistan, etc insurgency in the same manner, you would not be saying(praising) these things about that person.

 

[temujin]

Has anyone in India considered lodging a PIL against this character? Sounds like she may have a case to answer and it would (perversely) bring the litigant some publicity