Arundati Roy EXPOSED

[Guest guest]

FROM SULEKHA.COM

 

 

Writing>about the Gujarat riots, Arundhati Roy had this to say

(Outlook, May

>6,2002). "A mob surrounded the house of ex-Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan

Jaffri. His

>phone calls to the director-general of police, the police

>commissioner, the chief secretary, the additional chief secretary

>(home) were ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did not

>intervene. The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters

>and burnt them alive. Then they beheaded Jaffri and dismembered

him."

> The description is graphic; the veracity of the incident taken

almost

>for granted coming from a writer of Arundhati Roy's reputation. But,

>alas, that's where we make the mistake. Fame and honesty are not

>interlinked as the following paragraph clearly indicates.

> Jaffri was killed in the riots but his daughters were

>neither 'stripped' nor 'burnt alive.' T.A. Jafri, his son, in a

front-

>page interview titled Nobody knew my father's house was the target

>(Asian Age, May 2, Delhi edition), says, "among my brothers and

>sisters, I am the only one living in India. And I am the eldest in

>the family. My sister and brother live in the US. I am 40 years old

>and I have been born and brought up in Ahmedabad."

> So if Ehsan Jaffri had only one daughter (singular) who was safe

and

>sound in the US, where did Roy get her facts about not one, but

>daughters (plural) being stripped and burnt? Was it the fantasy of a

>writer's mind? Or was it willful deceit aimed at maligning her

>ideological adversaries?

>

>

>Arundhati Roy did apologise for her mistake in a letter published in

Outlook May 27, 2002. Could this have been a genuine mistake, one is

tempted to ask? But when such 'mistakes' occur periodically, the

>chances of them being accidental appear remote. They appear to be in

>fact calculated machinations aimed at achieving a specific goal as

>the following incident further proves.

> In the same article, Roy claims. Last night a friend from Baroda

called. Weeping. It took her fifteen

>minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn't very complicated.

>Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only

>that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags.

>Only that after she died, someone carved 'OM' on her forehead."

>Disturbed by the thought of such a ghastly act, Balbir Punj (a BJP

>MP) had this matter investigated. In Outlook (Jul 08, 2002) he

wrote.

> Shocked by this despicable 'incident,' I got in touch with the

>Gujarat Government. The police investigations revealed that no such

>case, involving someone called Sayeeda, had been reported either in

>urban or rural Baroda. Subsequently, the police sought Roy's help to

>identify the victim and seek access to witnesses who could lead them

>to those guilty of this crime. But the police got no cooperation.

>Instead, Roy, through her lawyer, replied that the police had no

>power to issue summons. Why is she hedging behind technical

excuses?"

> So when asked to prove her allegations, Arundhati Roy developed

cold

>feet; definitely not the attitude of a crusader for truth.

> Similarly you must have read some accounts of what preceded Godhra.

>There were wild accounts of an altercation between Ram sevaks and

>Muslim stall-owners, and of the abduction of a Muslim girl by Ram

>sevaks. All this emanated on the basis of a fictitious e-mail as

>revealed by Prem Shankar Jha (Outlook, March 25)

>

>