An open letter to Arundhati Roy

This article was posted by Pagal Patrakar at his blog. The original rights to the article lie with him.

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Hey woman,

Congrats, you are back in news! You were trending on Twitter and featured in Google trends. And thanks, you made many guys look up dictionary.com to understand what sedition meant. You are really of some use!

Well, I read your statement, and I loved it because it was not a fucking 30,000 words essay! Anyway, I had some reactions, please find them below (in bold and in red, adjectives that you prefer?):

Kashmir, Oct. 26: I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. (Wonderful, you are going places woman, wished you had cared to write something from Bihar or UP; people are suffering due to neglect and bad politics there too, but wait, stay where you are.) 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. (LOL! You read and believe newspapers? But I guess that’s what you do when you wake up in the morning – take up a newspaper and find if your name appears anywhere. If not, you plan how it can.) I said what millions of people here say every day. (Millions of people say benc**d in India every day, that doesn’t sanction that term any “social acceptance”) I said what I, as well as other commentators, have written and said for years. (Absolutely, you have NEVER said or written anything NEW. You just pick up issues, after reading the morning newspapers, and join the bandwagon.) Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. (Sorry, I didn’t really care to read the transcript of your speeches. Can you make them a bit shorter? I’ve an attention span problem.) I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; (Oh, Kashmir is an area under military occupation? Thanks, will update my general knowledge and Wikimapia, but wait, how come you were allowed there? Don’t all democratic rights cease to exist in an area under military occupation? Or were you an “embedded activist” like those embedded journalists of CNN in Iraq during the Gulf War?) for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; (Really? Or are you fucking kidding me?) for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; (What the fuck is a “Dalit soldier” with a “grave”? I thought Dalits existed only within Hinduism and Sikhism, where there are no graves. Oh okay, next you are writing a 300,000 essay on why Dalits are neither Hindu/Sikh/Christian/Muslim nor Indian, and why the need justice and liberty from the tyrannous Brahminical Indian state?) 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. (Oh great, so this whole country is under some kind of occupation – police state – what the fuck, you opened my eyes, where is the red flag?)

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. (Yes, “last year”, and you are visiting the place “now” because your heart bleeds for a common Kashmiri.) I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother. (Wait a minute; you were also in Delhi a couple of weeks back. Did you meet any Kashmiri Pandit, for whom you claimed to be seeking justice in the earlier paragraph?) 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. (Have you seen the Bollywood movie Gulaal? You can sit in such circles almost in each part of this country and listen to cries of Azadi from imagined powers. There are Brahmins in this country, whom you think control everything, who feel “trapped” in the modern state that is implementing reservations for everyone except them.) I met young stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. (Did you meet that Indian policeman who lost his eye after a 5 kg stone hit his eye?) 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. (I once traveled with a Hindu in Ahmedabad, who told me how Muslims had created an “acid pool” in “their area” and used to throw Hindus in them during riots; there have been many riots in Ahmedabad, not just during 2002, for your kind information. Of course I didn’t believe him and went out to write an essay or even a fake news article. I don’t believe people easily and form opinions. If the state can’t be trusted blindly, that doesn’t mean I’d trust every other non-state actor blindly. Oh, non-state actor!)

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. (Yes, there are idiots who take you seriously.) On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. (ROFLMAO!) 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. (But you are fine and your conscience is not disturbed if someone does the same to people and force them to say that they are NOT Indians?) It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. (“just” one or “just one”? People like you are surely not going to let this society be “just one”. It would be broken into Dalits, Tribals, Muslims, Brahmins, Christians, Poor, Rich, Women, etc. I want my society and country to be “just one” for god’s sake!) Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. (Yes, yes, pity the nation that produces such writers. Today I’m proud of Chetan Bhagat, seriously.) 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. (Yes, I’d pity the nation only if you were “actually” jailed, and you won’t be, dear, because this is a country that doesn’t need your pity.)

Another Interesting read here!