Arundhati Roy rubbishes POTA-like law

Interview by Rupashree Nanda / CNN-IBN
Published on Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 12:34 in Nation section

New Delhi: Booker Prize winning author and activist Arundhati Roy has expressed a strong disapproval for the call for POTA and says following the American model on homeland security isn't a real option.

In an exclusive interview with CNN-IBN, she says the country needs to introspect and not look at the terror attacks in isolation.

Making sense of the attacks?

It’s easy to go along the path and say that there is no reason, it’s complete insanity but I just want to say that if that’s the path we are going to take, we will have to ask ourselves if it is at all possible with any amount of intelligence, and any, any amount of security. If we want to follow the American model, their Homeland Security is twice our GDP. I don't think we have that option.

We have to think about the Pakistan-America relationship. Pakistan is stuck in a war with Afghanistan, it is a war that we are stuck in, it is a part of that war and we are getting a blow back. We have half a million troops just for Kashmir. How many do you need for the whole of India?

On the call for need for stronger laws

The call for POTA seems odd to me. You are up against men who are prepared to die, they are not worried about bailable and non-bailable warrents. What did TADA achieve? Has it been efficient? It was used against trade union leaders. POTA and TADA are being used to criminalise the democratic space. more

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The Amarnath land transfer row, Intelligentia and BJP

Saffron brigade dividing Hindus, Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir (Commentary)
August 23rd, 2008 - 12:11 pm ICT by IANS - Email This Post Email This Post

The Amarnath land transfer row has come as a godsend to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was looking for an emotive issue after the Ayodhya temple movement fizzled out. The party now hopes to recapture the mood of the “awakening” of Hindus, which was associated with Ayodhya, to consolidate its position in the run-up to the next round of assembly elections.However, there is a catch. The BJP’s encouragement of the temple issue came to be associated with communal tension and riots in the early 1990s. That was why the party decided to shelve the matter in 1996 so as not to antagonise its “secular” allies like the Janata Dal-United (JD-U), the Telugu Desam and others.
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The matter has been further complicated by the call for Kashmir’s “azadi” (freedom) given not only by maverick leftist social activist and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy but also by well-known media personalities like Vir Sanghvi and Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar.

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Rajamohan Gandhi also aired views similar to Roy and others