Excerpts from the Conversation on Kashmir with Arundhati Roy

Here are some excerpts from the "Conversation on Kashmir with Arundhati Roy", an interview aired on February 4, 2009.

"I don't know if I need to keep on saying this because everyone knows it now, but still, for the record-more than half a million soldiers in the valley of Kashmir, which somebody in America wrote saying it was the equivalent of the entire U.S. Army and the entire Marine Corps deployed in Minnesota, sort of like that; 165,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Between 500,000 and 700,000 Indian security personnel in the valley of Kashmir."

"A lot of even liberal Indians say that the polls were free and fair. First of all, the first question you have to ask yourself is, when you have that kind of a densely deployed army, can you have free and fair elections? Is it at all possible?"

"In fact, the day I left Kashmir all these defeated independent candidates were having a press conference in this restaurant called Ahdoo's talking about how they had all been paid by the Intelligence Bureau sums of money to stand for election, and then some of them weren't given that money, so now they are disgruntled."

"But, then again, I don't think that it will always be possible to manage it, because eventually I do think that the price of holding down the Kashmir valley, which was being paid mostly by Indian soldiers, who are mostly poor people from India who don't count, was suddenly being paid by the Indian elite in five-star hotels in Bombay. That puts a totally different spin on things."

"It makes us complicit in the holding down by military force of a people, it makes us complicit in the propaganda, it makes us complicit in the lies. And eventually it makes us people who are unable to look things in the eye."

"So if you were to question the average Indian, the only thing they know is that there are terrorists in Kashmir. They wouldn't be able to tell you that 60,000 or 70,000 people have died in this war. They wouldn't be able to tell you about the dubious morality of India holding on to this place. They say Kashmir is an atut ang, which means an inseparable limb of India."

"And I did sense that there wasn't any possibility of the Indian state-and it's wrong for me to just say the Indian state, because Indian society in places like Gujarat and Maharashtra or even in Bombay-to continue to marginalize such a vast majority-only in India can 150 million people be a minority, 150 million Muslims in India-and to continue to bulldoze this population in Kashmir. Eventually all that can come out of it is destruction. All that come out of it is people wanting to take you down with them. If you push them to a stage where there is no possibility of any access to justice, even if 99% of them decide to put their heads down and suffer, 1% is enough to destroy life as you knew it."

Conversation on Kashmir with Arundhati Roy and David Barsamian
http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2009/0509.html

Full transcript:
http://www.radioproject.org/transcript/2009/0509.html

Audio:
http://www.radioproject.org/sound/MakingCon_090204.mp3