[Peace] Author Arundhati Roy in peace trip to Pakistan

[Kranich, Kimberlie]

> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: Seema Hossain <seema_hossain at yahoo.com>
> To: asata at yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [asata] Author Roy in peace trip to Pakistan
> Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:40:29 -0700 (PDT)
> 
> Below is an article from the website
> bangladeshinfo.com
> 
> Author Roy in peace trip to Pakistan
> 
> Award-winning writer and activist Arundhati Roy sees
> herself as an "insect" burrowing into established
> institutions to force social change.
> 
> Her campaigns have got her into trouble with the
> authorities in her native India, but have caught the
> public imagination.
> 
> This week, in one of her most radical steps yet, she
> has made her first trip to Pakistan, a country locked
> in a tense, nuclear-armed stand- off with India that
> has threatened at times this year to degenerate into
> all- out war.
> 
> If she has a message for the peoples of both
> countries, it is simple: "Don't listen to your
> governments."
> 
> The 41-year-old author shot to fame when her 1997
> novel "The God of Small Things" won the Booker Prize,
> one of the world's top literary awards.
> 
> It was translated into 40 languages and sold six
> million copies, but she has written no fiction since,
> concentrating on activism instead.
> 
> Speaking to Reuters late on Wednesday after addressing
> a peace seminar in Islamabad organised by Pakistan's
> Daily Times newspaper, Roy said ordinary Indians and
> Pakistanis must stand up for themselves.
> 
> "We are all members of an ancient civilisation, not a
> recent nation. We have so many things in common and
> there is absolutely no reason to point nuclear weapons
> at each other.
> 
> "Eventually we have to ally ourselves with each other
> and we have to blow a hole in this huge dam between us
> -- civil society.
> 
> "Bigots, fundamentalists on both sides can twist
> things to suit their own needs. I am terrified of that
> happening both in India and Pakistan... It is not
> about Muslims, Hindus. It's about fascism,
> majoritarianism, bigotry, these things."
> 
> GOVERNMENTS TO BLAME
> 
> Roy puts the blame firmly on the governments of India
> and Pakistan, which she accuses of manipulating the
> tensions and fanning nationalism to cover up their own
> failings.
> 
> "The governments raise the rhetoric whenever it suits
> them, and now they are sulking because people are
> taking their rhetoric seriously and saying: 'how can
> they think that we will probably have a war?'"
> 
> Her comments came as leaders of both countries traded
> insults over Kashmir, using some of their strongest
> language on the emotive issue since stepping back from
> the brink of war in May.
> 
> Roy said she did not think the Indian and Pakistan
> governments could do without their dispute over
> Kashmir, the divided Himalayan region at the heart of
> their stand-off.
> 
> "When we talk about the Indo- Pak problem or the
> Kashmir problem, we are assuming they are problems and
> people are unsuccessfully looking for solutions.
> 
> "But I don't think this is the case. I think for the
> government of India and Pakistan...Kashmir is the
> solution -- for them it is the rabbit they pull out of
> the hat every time they face domestic issues."
> 
> Reading from one of her essays at the seminar, Roy
> called India's development of nuclear weapons "the
> final act of betrayal of a ruling class that has
> failed its people" and added:
> 
> "The truth is, it's far easier to make a bomb than to
> educate 400 million people."
> 
> She had no position on Kashmir, as whether it was
> ruled by one side, the other or neither had no impact
> on social justice.
> 
> INSTITUTIONALISED INJUSTICE
> 
> "In this talk of war, in this pointing of missiles at
> each other...what are we being distracted from?
> Talking and fighting for human rights for people who
> live in our lands," she said.
> 
> "This issue of social justice in both our countries is
> the fundamental issue, and as long as these issues are
> not addressed, we are going to be very, very weak
> tinpot countries."
> 
> Roy was jailed for a day earlier this year and fined
> over her campaign in India to halt a huge dam project.
> 
> 
> She said she was constantly accused by the government
> at home of being "anti-national", when what she
> opposed was nationalism.
> 
> "To be an anti-national suggests that you are against
> that nation and therefore pro some other nation.
> 
> "I am deeply suspicious of nationalism. I am terribly
> worried about flags. I see them as bits of cloth that
> shrinkwrap people's brains and then are used as a
> shroud to bury the willing dead."
> 
> At the Islamabad seminar Roy clearly struck a chord,
> being warmly applauded throughout by 200 people
> including journalists, academics, students and
> businessmen.
> 
> -- Reuters
> 
> 
> =====
> "I didn't trust it for a moment, but I drank it anyway, the 
> wine of my own 
> poetry. It gave me the daring to take hold of the darkness, 
> tear it down and 
> cut it into little pieces."-Lalla Ded/Lalleshwari (1320-1389)
>