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<h1><b>Tehelka Interview</b></h1><font size=3>October 30, 2010 <br><br>
By <b>Arundhati Roy</b> <br>
Source: Tehelka Magazine <br><br>
As a section of the political class and the media bays for her blood,
author<b> Arundhati Roy</b> tells <b>SHOMA CHAUDHURY</b> why her opinions
do not amount to sedition.<br><br>
<b>The State has been contemplating charges of sedition against you for
your speeches in Delhi and Kashmir. How do you understand sedition? Did
you see yourself as being seditious? What was your intention in speaking
from those two platforms in Delhi and Srinagar under the rubric Azadi:
The only way.<br><br>
</b>Sedition is an archaic, obsolete idea revived for us by Times Now, a
channel that seems to have hysterically dedicated itself to hunting me
down and putting me in the way of mob anger. Who am I anyway? Small fry
for a whole TV channel. It’s not hard to get a writer lynched in this
climate, and that’s what it seems to want to do. It is literally stalking
me. I almost sense psychosis here. If I was the Government of India I
would take a step back from the chess board of this recent morass and ask
how a TV channel managed to whip up this frenzy using moth-eaten,
discredited old ideas, and goad everybody into a blind alley of
international embarrassment. All this has gone a long way towards
internationalising the ‘Kashmir issue’, something the Indian government
was trying to avoid.<br><br>
One of the reasons it happened was because the BJP desperately needed to
divert attention from the chargesheeting of Indresh Kumar, a key RSS
leader in the Ajmer blast. This was a perfect opportunity, the media,
forever in search of sensation, led by Times Now, obliged. It never
occurred to me that I was being seditious. I had agreed to speak at the
seminar in Delhi way before it was titled “Azadi: The only way”. The
title was provocative, I guess, to people who are longing to be provoked.
I don’t think it is such a big deal frankly, given what has been going on
in Kashmir for more than half a century.<br><br>
The Srinagar seminar was called ‘Whither Kashmir? Enslavement or
Freedom?’ It was really meant for young Kashmiris to deepen the debate on
what they meant by and what they wanted from <i>azadi</i>. Contrary to
the idea that it was some fire-breathing call to arms, it was really the
opposite it was about contemplation, about deepening the debate, about
asking uncomfortable questions.<br><br>
<b>You have always been fiercely individualistic. Why did you choose to
share a platform or look aligned with Syed Shah Geelani and Varavara
Rao, who are both very doctrinaire and represent very specific political
positions? (Your statements might have been received differently if you
had made them from an individual platform as a writer/ thinker or a civil
society platform.)<br><br>
</b>It was a civil society platform! A platform of people who hold no
public office, who have a range of different views. After all, Varavara
Rao and Geelani have very different ideologies. That in itself should
tell you that here was a platform of people who have diverse views and
yet have something in common. I expressed my views, as they did theirs. I
did not stand up and say I was joining the Hurriyat (G) or the
CPI(Maoist). I said what I think.<br><br>
<b>Geelani, in particular, is not just pro-<i>azadi</i> or anti-India. He
is very vocally pro-Pakistan, pro-sharia, pro-Jamaat, and has had an
ambiguous past with the Hizb and violent internecine battles within the
Kashmiri leadership itself. While you were perfectly right to voice your
perspective on Kashmir, why did you choose to do it in conjunction with
him? Why would you not be as critical of him as you are of the Indian
State?<br><br>
</b>There are many Kashmiris who seriously disagree with Geelani’s views
and still respect him for not having sold out to the Indian State.
Speaking for myself, I disagree with many of his views, and I’ve written
about it. I made that clear when I spoke. If he was the head of a state I
lived in and he forced those views on me, I would do everything in my
power to resist those ideas.<br><br>
However, things being what they are in Kashmir, to equate him with the
Indian State and expect an even-handed critique of both is ridiculous.
Even the Indian government, it’s all-party delegation and the new
‘interlocutors’ know that Geelani is a vital part of what is happening in
Kashmir. As for him being involved in the internecine battles within the
Kashmiri leadership yes that’s true. Terrible things happened in the
nineties, fratricidal killings and Geelani has been implicated in some
of them. But internecine battles are a part of many resistance movements.
They are NOT the same thing as State sponsored killings. In South Africa,
the African National Congress (ANC) and Black Consciousness had vicious
fights in which many hundreds were killed, including Steve Biko. Would
you say then, that sitting on the same platform as Nelson Mandela is a
crime?<br><br>
By talking at seminars, by writing and questioning what he says, Geelani
is being persuaded to change there is a world of difference between
what he says now and what he used to say only a few years ago. But what I
find so strange about your question is this how many people questioned
Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani when they accepted Gujarat Garima awards
from Narendra Modi, and embraced him in public? It wasn’t a seminar, was
it? They didn’t question him, they didn’t express their views as
individuals, they did not criticise the mass killing he presided over…
they backed him. They said he would make a great Prime Minister. That’s
okay, is it?<br><br>
<b>Ditto for Varavara Rao. While their concern for social justice and
critique of the Indian State as it stands may overlap with your own
critique, the Maoists philosophically espouse armed revolution as the
central path to change. In all your writings, that is not your position.
So why choose to share a dais with Geelani and Varavara Rao at a
particularly volatile moment in Kashmir?<br><br>
</b>I have written at length on my views about the Maoists and am not
going to squeeze them into a sentence here. I admire Varavara Rao in many
ways, even if we don’t agree about everything. But I speak about the
Maoists and about what is happening in Kashmir precisely because it’s
important to do so during critical times such as these, when the media is
acting for the most part like a blood-thirsty propaganda machine, busy
trying to drum the last intelligent thought out of everybody’s head. This
is not theoretical stuff, it’s about peoples’ lives and safety and
dignity. It doesn’t get more crucial than this.<br>
<img src="http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/173330/http://tehelka.com/channels/News/2010/Nov/06/images/guard.jpg" alt="Stamp of authority Paramilitary forces on guard in downtown Sri">
<br><br>
<b>Stamp of authority</b> Paramilitary forces on guard in downtown
Srinagar<br><br>
PHOTO: <b>TARIQ MIR<br><br>
Again, you are critical of the concept of nation states and the power
they wield over people’s lives. Why support a man who wants to wrest
Kashmir from India and merge with Pakistan another extremely (and
perhaps more) flawed nation state?<br><br>
</b>Who is this man I am supposed to be supporting? Geelani? Are you, of
all people, seriously asking this? Could you produce one thing that I
have said that supports the idea of ‘wresting’ Kashmir from India and
merging it with Pakistan? Is Geelani the only man asking for <i>azadi</i>
in Kashmir? I support the Kashmiri peoples’ right to self-determination.
That is different from supporting Geelani.<br><br>
The second part of the question yes, I am among those who are very
uncomfortable with the idea of a nation state, but that questioning has
to start from those who live in the secure heart of powerful states, not
from those struggling to overthrow the yoke of a brutal occupation. Sure,
an independent Kashmiri nation may be a flawed entity, but is independent
India perfect? Are we not asking Kashmiris the same question that our old
colonial masters asked us: are the natives ready for freedom?<br><br>
<b>The controversy over your speeches arises largely out of one point you
made: “Kashmir is not an integral part of India. That is a historical
fact.” Would you like to elaborate on why you said that? (Historical fact
being different from legitimate sentiment arising out of ill
treatment.)<br><br>
</b>The history is well known. I’m not going to give people a primary
grade history lesson here. But isn’t the dubious history of Kashmir’s
“accession” borne out by the present turmoil? Why does the Indian
government have 700,000 soldiers there? Why are the interlocutors saying
“draw up a road map for <i>azadi</i>”, or calling it a “disputed”
territory? Why do we squeeze our eyes shut every time we have to look at
the reality of the streets in Kashmir?<br><br>
<b>Even among those who defend your right to voice your views no matter
what they are there are some people who say you could have framed your
statement a bit differently to say “Kashmiris don’t feel they are an
integral part of India,” or that “they want the right to
self-determination and they should have that right”. Can you elaborate on
why you wanted to be more categorical than that?<br><br>
</b>What if the British had said “Indians may not feel they are an
integral part of the British Empire, but India is an integral part of the
Empire?” Would that have gone down well with us? Are these
well-intentioned “defenders” of my views unaware of what links people to
their land? Does this well-intentioned “defence” apply to the Adivasis of
Bastar that the Adivasis are free to feel that they are not an integral
part of India, but their land (with all its riches) certainly is! So the
Adivasis should translocate their rituals and traditions to urban slums
and leave their lands to the mining corporations, yes?<br><br>
<b>How do you interpret <i>azadi</i>? Going back to the earlier question
about your critique of nation states, why would you be advocating the
birth of a new nation state? Why not intellectually urge the dilution of
nation states instead more porous borders, less masculine constructs
based on power and identity</b>.<br><br>
It doesn’t matter how I interpret <i>azadi</i>. It matters how the people
of Kashmir interpret <i>azadi</i>. About my critique of the nation state
as I said, if we are keen to dilute its masculinity, let’s begin the
process at home. Let’s dismantle the nuclear arsenal, roll up the flags,
stand down the army and stop the crazed nationalistic rhetoric… then we
can preach to others.<br><br>
<b>There is an allegation and heated anger that you urged people not to
join the army and become “rapists”. This sounds as if it is tarring a big
institution in broad brushstrokes. As hoary as its track record has been,
I guess the story about the Indian Army is not a black and white one. Is
this a mutilation of what you said ? Could you put on record what you
said about the army in your speech?<br><br>
</b>The mutilation of what I say, and not just about this, is legion. I
watched words I never ever said being attributed to me in TV debate after
TV debate. It’s lazy, it’s convenient and it’s vicious. In many cases, it
is deliberate. <i>The Pioneer</i> reported in banner headlines that I
advocated Kashmir’s secession from <i>“Bhooka Nanga Hindustan”.</i> Many
have pounced on this as an illustration of my “hate-speech”. What I
actually said, and have written about in some detail, is the opposite:
how angry and upset I was when I heard the slogan <i>“Bhooka Nanga
Hindustan, Jaan se pyaara Pakistan”</i> on the streets of Srinagar during
the 2008 uprising. I said it shocked me that Kashmiris were mocking the
very people who were victims of the same State that was brutalising them.
I said that to me this was blinkered, shallow politics. Of course, I know
that this clarification will not make The Pioneer apologise. It will
carry on lying. It has done it before. I have never called the Indian
Army an institution of rapists. I am not a moron. What I said was that
all colonial powers actually establish their power by creating and
working through a native elite. It has done this in Kashmir. It is
Kashmiris themselves, who, among other things, by joining the police and
the CRPF and army are collaborating with what they see as an occupying
power. So I said that perhaps if they were keen on dismantling the
occupation, they should stop joining the police! This kind of idiotic
conflation and absurdity is getting truly dangerous. I sometimes feel
that my real campaign is against stupidity (talk of lost causes!) If what
emanates from our TV channels is a measure of the nation’s intelligence,
then we really are in deep trouble the decibel level of the debates is
in inverse proportion to the IQ. Fortunately, I travel around and speak
to enough real people to know that things are not so bad.<br><br>
<b>‘The media is acting like a blood-thirsty propaganda machine, busy
trying to drum out the last intelligent thing out of everyone’s
head’<br><br>
Your critics are accusing you of not being sensitive to the plight of
Kashmiri Pandits</b>.<br><br>
Well my critics should read what I write and hear what I say. But for the
record: I think what has happened to the Kashmiri Pandits is a terrible
tragedy. I think that the story of the Pandits is one that still remains
to be told in all its complexity. Everyone was at fault, the militancy,
the Islamist upsurge in the Valley, and the Indian government, which
encouraged (even helped) the Pandits to flee when it should have done
everything it could to protect them. Apart from losing everything they
had and the only home they really knew, the poorest Pandits are still
living in camps in Jammu in the worst conditions, and have had their
voices hijacked by some well-heeled and noisy charlatans who feed off the
destitution of their own people to get a lot of cheap political mileage.
They have a vested interest in keeping them poor, so they can show them
off, like animals in a zoo. Do you think that if the government really
cared it could not have helped those poor people to better their lot? In
all my visits to Kashmir I have sensed that ordinary Kashmiri Muslims
feel a terrible sense of loss at the departure of the Pandits. If that is
true, it is the duty of the leaders of Kashmir’s present struggle to get
the Pandits to return. That needs more than rhetoric. Apart from it being
the right thing to do, it would give them enormous moral capital. It
would also help shape their vision of what kind of Kashmir they are
fighting for. Let’s also not forget that there are a few thousand Pandits
who have lived in the Valley through these troubled years, and
unharmed.<br><br>
<b>Your critics see you as disloyal and unappreciative of India and its
strengths, even as you enjoy its freedoms. Could you explain how you see
and understand your relationship with India?<br><br>
</b>I’m bored of my critics! They can work it out for themselves: I’m not
going to explain my relationship with this country and its people. I am
not a politician looking for brownie points.<br>
<hr>
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives <br>
URL:
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/173330/http://www.zcommunications.org/tehelka-interview-by-arundhati-roy">
http://www.zcommunications.org/tehelka-interview-by-arundhati-roy</a>
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