Arundhati Roy overlooks deadly poison admiring killer viper

One of India’s finest journalists crashes headlong on values ethical and moral

By Durga Velautham in New Delhi

(March 31, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The well known and much acclaimed Indian journalist Arundhati Roy and who has to her most deserving credit many literary accomplishments certainly went berserk like a lone elephant in musk in her feature on the current tragic events in Sri Lanka. In her very opening lines she skates on slick and slimy grounds determined to do for Velupillai Prabhakaran who appears to be her folk hero, a kind of parting gift as if for favours done to her. It was like a eulogy for the dead who never deserved such in life.

In so doing, she tarnished her image she has created for herself of which people of India were proud with one stroke of material that poured out of her laptop which can in no way be justified as coming from a writer of her skill, foresight and ability. Her integrity has crashed and such is the material she has indulged in, she can ever never redeem herself. The world cannot have one good word for Velupillai Prabhakaran and in history he has already earned for himself a place in the international gallery of tyrants.

What did the Tamils of Sri Lanka do to have such a brigand dominate their history for over three decades and the consequences of which will continue to hurt them for some decades more? How come a journalist of great repute was prepared to twist realities and place her integrity on the block ignoring the fate of the very people Prabhakaran has determined as their destiny of doom? How could she have done this to humanity in anguish with terrorism becoming such a terrible scourge worldwide and a pestilence in India?

Has she ever heard that a former Prime Minister of India was assassinated on the orders of Prabhakaran for which a young teenager who understood hardly any politics was sacrificed as a suicide bomber? It was this Prime Minister who was able to wrench out of the wily President of Sri Lanka at that time, Junius Jayawardene an excellent solution for the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka. Prabhakaran wanted a mafia state for himself and not a solution to the ethnic problem.

Why is this Arundhati Roy adulation for a monster? This indeed is a very disturbing factor, so much so Arundhati Roy must hang her head in shame. If this is her view, would she have been a suicide bomber herself because it has been claimed that the girls who have taken to this sacrificial monstrosity are full of admiration for Prabhakaran and will undertake any of his bidding?

Her opening lines were self-destructive to her and cast a terrible cloud over her entire feature. They are as follows:

“The horror that is unfolding in Sri Lanka becomes possible because of the silence that surrounds it. There is almost no reporting in the mainstream Indian media — or indeed in the international press — about what is happening there. Why this should be so is a matter of serious concern.

“From the little information that is filtering through it looks as though the Sri Lankan government is using the propaganda of the ‘war on terror’ as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country, and commit unspeakable crimes against the Tamil people. Working on the principle that every Tamil is a terrorist unless he or she can prove otherwise, civilian areas, hospitals and shelters are being bombed and turned into a war zone. Reliable estimates put the number of civilians trapped at over 200,000. The Sri Lankan Army is advancing, armed with tanks and aircraft.”

After all she too is basing her feature “from the little information that is filtering through” and then rushes to the conclusion “it looks as though the Sri Lankan government is using the propaganda of the ‘war on terror’ as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country.”

She also falls heavily into the trap of claiming that over 200,000 civilians are helpless but without saying why they are in such a state, utters the terrible lie that the “Sri Lankan Army is advancing around with tanks and aircraft” in a manner to give a very mischievous twist to what actually is happening on the ground in Wanni.

The fact that the Sri Lankan Government declared the ‘No Fire Zones’, ceased aerial bombing and also heavy artillery fire and instead opted for ground and virtual door to door operations were conveniently overlooked by Arundhati Roy.

Even more she has overlooked that the LTTE abused the No Fire Zones facilities and on account of that several hundreds of civilians have escaped and that the LTTE has been firing at escapees, children grabbed from the civilians and forced into cadre activities and even grabbing food by Tiger cadres meant for the civilians did not interest this famed journalist.

Shame on her for her to write from such great distance to pay her obvious tribute to the most brutal terrorist since Cambodia’s Pol Pot and a man who made killing his means for terror ascendancy to claim to be the sole voice of the Tamils which was never in any form granted to him.

Perhaps Arundhati Roy was enamoured by the power of revolvers Prabhakaran wore on either side of his gun belt and the awesome muscle and clout with which he inducted himself but without any political ideology whatsoever.

Did she see in him the dominant male that she, perhaps adulated as a role model and in that admiration, lost track of the thousands of deaths he was responsible for directly and indirectly and even risked the survival of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka?

The Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps are not 5-Star Hiltons. They are emergency arrangements and facilities the government provided under extremely hazardous conditions. Schools were commandeered, tents were put up and security was secured and all these in very quick order.

While the government has to ensure food and medical care and other urgent essential needs, it had to ensure that Tiger cadres and suicide bombers did not use this as a conduit to continue their terrorist attacks. And there was also the possibility of suicide bombers attacking the camps as indeed it happened in one case and three others were detected in time by the security forces.

Ever since 1983 there are similar camps in Rameshawaram, Tamilnadu where thousands of refugees from Sri Lanka are still in camps nearly all of them having fled from Tiger terror. Had only Arundhati Roy visited them she would have known that in relation to those camps, the IDP camps in Wanni and around it are 5-Star Hiltons.

So here is a writer of great repute, winner of several international awards and some of them prestigious who falls heavily on all the standards she has achieved in the field of journalism. This is all because, perhaps, she saw in Velupillai Prabhakaran a magical charm that enraptured her.

She has shown with her feature that she is not able to shake this off from her; in her estimation she admires the beauty of the viper to such an extent that she has ignored the deadly poison of its sting. Her feature is a tragedy in the field of journalism that seeks the truth and fights for a cause that serves humanity.

ENDS

-Sri Lanka Guardian