Arundhati Roy’s lies on Kashmir

The Left-liberal establishment all over the world is increasingly getting confined to its own echo chamber. The voices are getting shriller and reason being relegated to oblivion. Arundhati Roy’s article, ‘The silence is the loudest sound,’ in The New York Times (August 15, 2019) on the abrogation of Article 370 is a testimony to this fact (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opinion/sunday/kashmir-siege-modi.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_190816?campaign_id=2&instance_id=11589&segment_id=16211&user_id=7af7e3fe097e3b5b453b198d5584a224&regi_id=545272450816).

The very second paragraph makes her stand clear: “it looks very much as though our government has gone rogue.” Now Narendra Modi is not the greatest Prime Minister India has seen, and his government can be accused of several bad decisions, but it going rogue? What has it done to deserve this slur? Modi’s India doesn’t export terror, like Pakistan does; it doesn’t harbor, aid, and pamper jihadists like Hafiz Saeed. It doesn’t defy the verdict of the international court as China does.

In fact, India is among the most decent nations in the world; it has been so for decades. We defeated Pakistan in 1971, dismembered it, held over 90,000 Pakistani soldiers as prisoners, and had East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) under our control. But we didn’t trade Pakistani PoWs for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK); neither did we stay in Bangladesh as an occupation army. We handed over Dhaka to Bangla leaders as fast as it was possible and walked out—victorious but empty-handed. In none of the wars that Independent India has fought, our military has been accused of a single war crime, whereas the history of Pakistani Army is the history of genocide, massacres, rape, and pillage.

And yet, Roy doesn’t find anything good or decent about India’s handling of Kashmir and its people: “In India the project of assimilation, which goes under the banner of nation-building, has meant that there has not been a single year since 1947 when the Indian Army has not been deployed within India’s borders against its ‘own people.’ The list is long—Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Hyderabad, Assam.” So, India is not the world’s largest democracy; it is under military rule!

The denouement? “The business of assimilation has been complicated and painful and has cost tens of thousands of lives.” Evidently, the Indian Army has slaughtered “tens of thousands” citizens. Now, nobody says that there have not been any human rights violations in Kashmir; there have been violations, and there have been brought to book. But alluding to massacres in the Valley by the security forces is an exercise in mendacity.

But Roy doesn’t just spread falsehoods; she also indulged in moral equivalence: that is, putting wrong acts of varying degrees of turpitude on the same moral place, e.g., equating a tasteless, sexist remark with rape. She wrote, “What is unfolding today on both sides of the border of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir is the unfinished business of assimilation.” For “both sides of the border” implies that India and Pakistan have similarly mistreated their citizens.

This is a white lie. Anybody who knows anything about the Indian subcontinent knows that, but not Roy. She lives in the world in which discredited pinkish theories are the ruling dogmas, the postmodern fantasies are regarded as real, moral relativism is of absolute value—and facts are held in contempt.

Roy’s loud protestation has just made the echo chamber a little more grating.

Picture courtesy: Wikipedia