Arundhati Roy speaking to Democracy Now Image Credit: Screenshot
In her latest denunciation of India’s crackdown in Kashmir, acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has said the level of horror in the region – annexed by New Delhi since August 5 – is not known and that silence is the loudest sound as political voices have been stifled.
Appearing on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now channel, Roy said Kashmiris fear that the Indians will run over them now that its autonomy is gone under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi has defended the decision to abolish the disputed region’s autonomous status, arguing it would bring development and economic integration to the people.
But Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, explained how the Kashmiris see it completely different way.
“Kashmiris are refusing to accept a sort of normalcy” because what happened on the 5th of August was the striking down of what was known as Section 370, which really incorporated in the Indian Constitution the special conditions, she said.
“Kashmir can be overrun by Indians.That’s the way they see it,” she said of Kashmirs’ suffering.
Prime Minister “Modi belongs to the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is a sort of the mothership of the — the cultural mothership of which the BJP is a political arm. And the striking down of this section has always been on the agenda of the RSS.”
“There’s nothing impulsive or sudden about it. It’s just unconstitutional and probably illegal, but it’s not impulsive,” Roy said while referring to August 5 actions of New Delhi, which also did away with Article 35 that gave Kashmiris sovereignty over their land.
She said that since 1947, there has been a continuous process, a military process, to assimilate these the princely states including Jammu and Kashmir. It also happened in e northeastern states of Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur,
“Whether it was the princely state of Junagadh or Hyderabad or what happened in Nagaland, hundreds, maybe tens of thousands — they don’t do body counts, but thousands of people have been killed. Just in Hyderabad alone, it was 40,000, a new report says, In Nagaland, it’s been more than that. In Kashmir, it’s 70,000 people that have died in this conflict.
“So, the numbers are huge and hidden by the sort of noise and music and sounds of democracy. But, so, these battles, like in Kashmir, the struggle has been — for freedom has been militant since 1990. And today it’s the densest military occupation in the world, made more dense in August, on the 5th of August, by another 50,000 troops that were flown in to deal with the possible fallout of what would happen after this abrogation,” the writer explained.
Thousands of people have been arrested. The remarkable thing was that the leaders across the spectrum have been arrested, including three chief ministers, all pro-India politicians, she added.
“What has happened is now there is no voice that’s coming out of Kashmir. That’s why I said the silence is the loudest sound””
Slamming New Delhi’s Kashmir policy, Arundhati Roy said, . Everyone, whether it’s the major politicians, whether it’s boys who throw stones on the street, whether it’s businessmen, lawyers — everyone is in jail, even now.
“You know, then they cut off phones. They cut off the internet. I mean, can you imagine? When has it been done before, 7 million people, communication lockdown? People don’t know whether their children have died, whether they’re alive. At night, police and soldiers are going into people’s houses, arresting them.”
“You know, so the — we actually don’t even know the level of horror that has happened. And now the fact is that some lines — some phone lines have been restored, but still the internet has not been restored, in a country where, until now, they were boasting about Digital India. Everything works on the internet, you know, whether you’re — I mean, whether it’s hospitals or medicine supplies or — you know, the Kashmiri media is completely censored.”
