The writer Arundhati Roy, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, will be prosecuted under the laws antiterrorists
of India for a speech provocative
on Kashmir pronounced in 2010, in which he expressed his desire for independence for the region and denounced its occupation by the armed forces of that country, he announced The Independent.
Permission to prosecute the novelist, related to sedition charges, was granted by Vinai Kumar Saxena, a senior official in the Delhi administration, who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Indian People’s Party (BJP), under the Prevention of Illegal Activities.
The controversial law allows authorities to detain suspects for up to 180 days without filing charges. The Modi administration amended it in 2019 so that people could be classified as terrorists without necessarily being linked to such a group. A total of 1,948 people were arrested in 2019 after the change went into effect, marking an increase of almost 37 percent from the previous year.
At the aforementioned event, Roy, along with prominent separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, expressed firmly that Kashmir has never been part of India and was occupied by the Indian armed forces. All possible efforts should be made for the independence of the state of Jammu and Kashmir
according to the official.
While Roy, 62, is one of India’s most famous living authors, her activism and outspoken criticism of the Modi government, including over laws targeting minorities, have made her a figure not without controversy in the country. .
▲ Arundhati Roy at a resistance forum in Mumbai, 2004.Afp’s photo
Recently, in his book of essays Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (2020), the author recounted the history of Kashmir and mentions that Article 370 of the Instrument of Accession, signed in 1947, granted autonomy to the region, allowing it to have its own Magna Carta, a legislative assembly and certain executive powers. independent of the central government of India.
Roy questioned the Modi government’s policies against Kashmir, pointing out that the revocation of Article 370, which the Modi government pushed in August 2019, was a move to forcibly assimilate the region.
Furthermore, the author highlighted the resistance of the Kashmiris, centered on the concept of azadi (freedom), which manifests itself in protests, literary expressions and a deep sense of identity and struggle for self-determination in the face of oppression by both the Indian state and external forces.
At the age of 37, the writer won the Booker Prize, the highest literary award in the English language, for her novel The god of small things, published in Spanish by the Anagrama label. This award has also been awarded to authors such as William Golding and Salman Rushdie, among others.
In that novel, Roy tells the story of twins Estha and Rahel, who grow up in the small town of Ayemenem, in the state of Kerala, India, and highlights the crucial role that India’s caste system and its oppressive social structures play in that country, in addition to portraying the brutality of the State and social injustices, including the repression of women.
With information from The Independent