Author slates governments over Kashmir

Roy was recently released from a jail sentence for her anti-dam protests

Booker prize-winning author Arundhati Roy has lashed out at the governments of India and Pakistan for their stance over disputed Kashmir.

Speaking in Islamabad on her first trip to Pakistan, the 41-year-old Indian author said the peoples of the two countries had to solve the problem, rather than their governments.

It's far easier to make a bomb than to educate 400 million people

Arundhati Roy

"My position on Kashmir is that I don't have one," she told an audience of by 200 journalists, academics, students and businessmen.

"I don't have inflexible policies, I'm not part of the state.

"It's the people that really want - and need - to solve the problem."

The author, who won the Booker prize for her 1997 novel The God Of Small Things, has become known for her radical political stances.

She was briefly jailed in India earlier this year after a campaign of opposition to India's Narmada Dam project.

Arundhati Roy: "Deeply suspicious of nationalism"

Speaking at a peace seminar organised by the Daily Times in Islamabad on Wednesday, she said she was not "anti-national", but against nationalism.

"To be an anti-national suggests that you are against that nation and therefore pro some other nation," she said.

"I am deeply suspicious of nationalism. I am terribly worried about flags.

"I see them as bits of cloth that shrinkwrap people's brains and then are used as a shroud to bury the willing dead."

And she added that both Indian and Pakistani governments used the Kashmir issue to deflect attention from domestic concerns.

"When we talk about the Indo-Pakistan or Kashmir problem, we are assuming they are problems and that people are searching for solutions," she said.

"I don't think this is the case. I think that for the governments of both Pakistan and India, Kashmir is the solution - it is the rabbit they pull out of the hat every time they face domestic problems."

'Betrayal'

The author said she has not written any fiction since God Of Small Things, which sold six million copies in 40 languages, but has concentrated her energies on political activism.

At the Islamabad seminar she called India's development of nuclear weapons "the final act of betrayal of a ruling class that has failed its people".

"The truth is, it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate 400 million people," she said.

The criticisms came after renewed tension along the territory's line of control, where India and Pakistani forces are massed.

The two countries have gone to war three times over Kashmir since their independence from the UK in 1947.