Once again, Arundhati Roy's heart bleeds for the Kashmir issue and she pours out her feelings in a strongly worded statement. My advice to the readers before they read the statement:
1. As usual, its an outburst of feelings, you may try to find logic, reason in any those statements at your own risk!
2. The statement may not have anything to do with actual facts as she is very fond of using total hyperboles especially during such moments of intense media limelight!
3. Inspite of 1 and 2, you're still supposed to take all the conclusions seriously! because she is an "eminent" activist.
A small incident which happened during the 2002 Godhra and Gujarat riots, to prove the points made above (reproduced from the Editor's Guild Report of Hindu Viveka Kendra):
In her article "Democracy: Who's She When She's at Home?", Arundhati Roy begins with the following: "Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn't very complicated. Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died, someone carved "OM" on her forehead." And then she asks: "Precisely which Hindu scripture preaches this?" (Outlook, May 6, 2002)
Fine words indeed. Also very moving. But what is the truth in this incident? Balbir Punj, a journalist and presently a Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP, wanted to find it out. In his article "Dissimulation in Words", he writes: "Shocked by this despicable "incident", I got in touch with the Gujarat government. The police investigations revealed that no such case, involving someone called Sayeeda, had been reported either in urban or rural Baroda. Subsequently, the police sought Roy's help to identify the victim and seek access to witnesses who could lead them to those guilty of this crime. But the police got no cooperation. Instead, Roy, through her lawyer, replied that the police had no power to issue summons. Why is she hedging behind technical excuses?" (Outlook, July 8, 2002)
Punj further writes: "But this sort of sophism is not new for Gujarat. The people decrying Gujarat as a "fascist state in the making" are the ones who spun stories about alleged attacks on Christians in Gujarat, Karnataka and Andhra."
In the subsequent issue of Outlook (July 15, 2002) Roy has responded to Punj's article in her usual flippant manner. However, all that she needed to do was give the name and address of the friend in Vadodara who was weeping on the phone for fifteen minutes, and also the full name of the victim identified by only the first name as Sayeeda, as well as the address. There the matter would have rested as far as Roy was concerned.
In the May 6 essay, Roy reports about the daughters of Ehsan Jaffri, the ex-Member of Parliament from the Congress Party, being killed along with him in Ahmedabad. The Jaffri family wrote saying that his children were not in the city at the time, and in fact one of them is living in the USA.
When the discrepancy was pointed out she says that she got the information from two other sources one a report in the Time magazine of the USA, and another an "independent fact-finding mission" which consisted of a former Inspector General of Police of Tripura and a former Finance Secretary, Government of India. Roy admitted her mistake in a letter to Outlook dated May 27, 2002. The amazing part of the apology letter is as follows: "This and other genuine errors in recounting the details of the violence in Gujarat in no way alters the substance of what journalists, fact-finding missions, or writers like myself are saying." Which means that one can have the facts wrong, but still hold on to the conclusion that is arrived at on the basis of the wrong facts. Or is it a case that one arrives at a conclusion and then find the facts that would fit the conclusion? This is a standard practice for the English media in India.
