Arundhati Roy faces arrest over Kashmir remark - Guardian/UK

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

Silencing people like Arundhati Roy and Julian Assange seems to have become chic among alleged "democracies" of late.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/26/arundhati-roy-kashmir-india

The Booker prize-winning novelist and human rights campaigner Arundhati Roy is facing the threat of arrest after claiming that the disputed territory of Kashmir is not an integral part of India.

India's home ministry is reported to have told police in Delhi that a case of sedition may be registered against Roy and the Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani for remarks they made at the weekend.

After describing her meetings with people caught up in the Kashmir violence, she said: "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 fingernails 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."

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Seeing as how Kashmir was an idependent kingdom before the Brits

showed up, why the insistence that it remain part of either India OR Pakistan today? Why not rid both of them of that problem and reorganize it as an independent nation once again?

The same could be said of most places where the British Empire drew arbitrary, but very deliberate, border lines to split ethnic communities - the Pashtun lands of Pakistan and Afghanistan should be a separate nation; Kurdistan should be an entity separate from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey; and there are numerous African nations where they did it as well - carve out an ethnic minority, put them in charge of the ethnic majority and thus make them dependent upon the Empire to keep control. The endless wars that plagued the former British Empire in Africa and South Asia and the Midde-East are the direct result of the empire's "divide and conquer" policy.