Dear Paresh Rawal, You Deserve A Crash-Course In Arundhati Roy's Writings. Here Are Four Articles By Her.

Member of Parliament when he’s not acting, @SirPareshRawal as he calls himself on Twitter, wants author and activist Arundhati Roy tied to an army jeep instead of the stone-pelters.

In a shocking video which had emerged from Kashmir, the Indian army had tied a civilian to the bonnet of an army jeep, trying to use him as a shield. The violence of the image seems to have normalised to such an extent that Rawal had an interesting take on it: ‘Tie all the anti-nationals and use them as examples and human shields’.

Since nuance and an opinion different from his irks Mr. Rawal, we decided to put together a nice little package of stories by Arundhati Roy that may play a little part in changing his mind about her. 

1.)    Azadi: Written in the wake of Hizb commander Burhan Wani’s killing by the security forces last year. The Kashmir problem has rumbled on, despite demonetisation: ‘It’s no use pretending that what the Indian government has on its hands is a fleeting law and order problem created from time to time by a fickle, volatile people. What is happening is a dangerous, spiralling crisis of unmanageable proportions in a region that is sandwiched between two hostile nuclear powers.'

2.)    Dead Men Talking: On the hounding of journalists and activists by the state:  ‘So why does the world’s largest democracy fear this lone, sitar-playing, Urdu-speaking, left-leaning radio producer? Here is how Barsamian himself explains it: “It’s all about Kashmir. I’ve done work on Jharkand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Narmada dams, farmer suicides, the Gujarat pogrom and the Binayak Sen case. But it’s Kashmir that is at the heart of the Indian state’s concerns. The official narrative must not be contested.”’

3.)    Walking With The Comrades: In May 2010, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had called the Naxal threat as the greatest security threat that the country was facing at the time. In March, the same year, Roy visited the Gondi people in search of answers: ‘Each time it needed to displace a large population—for dams, irrigation projects, mines—it talked of “bringing tribals into the mainstream” or of giving them “the fruits of modern development”. Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone), refugees of India’s ‘progress’, the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it’s time to worry.’

4.)    The End Of Imagination: Written after the former PM, BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee oversaw the India’s first successful attempt at a nuclear bomb explosion: ‘Here we are, all of us in India and in Pakistan, discussing the finer points of politics, and foreign policy, behaving for all the world as though our governments have just devised a newer, bigger bomb, a sort of immense hand grenade with which they will annihilate the enemy (each other) and protect us from all harm. How desperately we want to believe that. What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be’.

Here Sir Rawal. We're not sure the Queen would approve though.