Arundhati Roy

"Time to be serious now, but here is something that has to receive attention. Make it viral, make people know. Arundhati Roy is a writer, a beautiful humanist who sees the pain in people, and conveys it with such grace, and empathy, you cannot but feel you have been tranplanted into her world. As painful as that would be. " David SA Essay

Dear all of you,
I am sending this from Srinagar. This is my statement in response to the news that I may be arrested soon on charges of sedition. It would be lovely if the whole statement is carried— which is why I am not sending it to the wire services.
All the best
Arundhati

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

Now I'm not in the habit of copying from other blogs but a friend posted this, this morning and it's one of those things that just, actually no I'm not going to tell you what it should or shouldn't do. Read it for yourself, Google her, and judge for yourself and then you decide.

What I will say though is this.

There is so much wrong with the thought of someone who is acting out of love for their fellow man being persecuted by the powers that be.
It scares me that in this day and age we still condone this type of behavior all be it by our simply doing nothing.
Yes, this is a situation that many of us can't get directly involved in but we can do is raise awareness, what we can do is get this story out there, what we can do is give her an audience and raise her profile and maybe, just maybe these people who persist in persecuting people like Arundhati Roy will be seen for what they are COWARDS