Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy (author of The God of Small Things) is being authorized by the Indian government to be arrested for "sedition" because of statements she made about the territory of Kashmir.
From an article in the Los Angeles Times about the issue...
This summer, tensions in Kashmir were inflamed after a number of incidents involving security forces: It came to light that Indian security forces killed three civilians, then staged a firefight to make it appear as though the killings had been committed by militants; two officers were suspended. Three teenagers were killed in June when security forces fired on a demonstration calling for independence. Another died in early July when he used a drainage canal to flee from security forces and drowned.
"Politicians, academics and human rights groups have long cited a culture of impunity among security forces in Kashmir," Magnier reports, "epitomized by a controversial 1990 national law granting soldiers the right to detain or eliminate all suspected terrorists and destroy their property without fear of prosecution. Critics have called the provision, which doesn't clearly define 'terrorists,' as a license to kill."
Arundhati Roy's Tuesday statement reflects on these issues. "Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice," she wrote. "I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; 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."
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