Before I start my slamming of Arundhati Roy’s worldview, let me start off by saying that I do not endorse Hindu extremism. Let me first make it a point to rebut the Hindu extremists’ worldview, lest this article of mine slamming Roy be misused by them.
We should only be glad that we opted
for being a modern, inclusive state, rather than defining our nationalism based
on religious identity, as Pakistan and Uganda did, and we all know the havoc
that religious extremism has wreaked for even the majority Muslim and Christian
communities respectively in those two countries by the TTP and Lord’s
Resistance Army respectively.
As much as some tend to level
baseless allegations against and float nonsensical conspiracy theories about
Gandhi and Nehru (to clarify any misconceptions you have about them,
see this article and this one), these two personalities, while certainly not being above criticism,
undoubtedly have great legacies, and one should not fall prey to the Hindu right trying to appropriate
the legacies of Sardar Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose either. (I am not a supporter of the Congress party of today
if anyone inferred that, and I am a supporter, though not uncritical admirer,
of the AAP, though I respect everyone’s political preferences in a democracy.)
It is wonderful to identify with the heritage of one’s civilization, which has
also evolved, but to imagine scientific or artistic creativity or valid notions
of morality to be the sole preserve of one’s own version of Indian culture,
imagining other influences as necessarily being pollutants, is nothing but
intolerance (which the Rigved opposes, saying one should accept noble thoughts
from all directions), and one must guard against chauvinistic notions of
tolerance that can and indeed do also produce very lethal intolerance.
I personally know several Muslims who
are unprejudiced and are strongly patriotic Indians, and I see no reason to see
Indian Muslims loyal to their country as being exceptions to the general norm.
In fact, a Hindu acquaintance of mine, who studied at Aligarh Muslim University
(AMU), told me that while those cheering for Pakistan were quite a vocal lot
there, most Muslims cheered for India, and this was in a Muslim-majority
setting where the apparently pro-India majority did not have to conceal its
true feelings, and another friend of mine, who is an Assamese Hindu from
Guwahati and who is very resentful of the Bangladeshi Muslim influx in his state,
told me that on a train journey, he overheard a conversation between two
Muslims from AMU bashing the students who cheer for Pakistan. Also, another
friend of mine whose father is an Indian Army officer once told me that he
loves the entire Muslim community (though I don’t support any stereotyping,
positive or negative!), for once, his father was fired at by militants in
Kashmir and his father’s driver, a Muslim, rushed to bear the bullet to save
his father’s life! He also narrated another anecdote of how a Muslim once
donated blood to save his father’s life and asserted that he was not in the
least ashamed of the fact that “Muslim blood” (whatever that is supposed to
mean!) runs through his veins!
Terrorism, and even terrorism citing
a theological basis, is not a Muslim monopoly. As you can see here, very many instances of terrorism globally, even in the name of
religion, have been carried out by those identifying themselves as Christians,
Jews, Sikhs, Hindus and even Buddhists, the victims of the acts of terrorists
from each of these religious groupings not always being Muslims. However, just
like most people of these religious groupings are not terrorists or supporters
of terrorism, and they do not believe that their religion preaches terrorism,
the same is the case with most Muslims (and not supporting terrorism applies to
even most of those Muslims with other regressive and not-so-liberal attitudes
on issues like gender and homosexuality).
It is possible to quote any scripture
(allegedly out of context according to its liberal adherents) to justify
malpractices, like some verses in the Bible namely Deuteronomy 13:12-15, Samuel
15:3, Leviticus 24:16 and Matthew 10:34 seemingly advocate violence against
“non-believers” and the Purusha Sukta of the Rigved, an ancient Hindu
scripture, is taken by some to justify caste discrimination, but these verses
do not define the entire religion. This article mentioning an anecdote from the British parliament does make an
interesting read in this regard, as does this video make an interesting watch in this connection. There are Quranic
verses like 2:256, 5:2, 5:8, 5:32, 6:108, 6:151, 10:99, 49:13, 60:8 and 109:6 preaching peace, religious tolerance and human brotherhood, as
does the letter from Prophet
Muhammad to the Christian monks of St Catherine’s monastery and there are episodes from Prophet Muhammad’s life, as per
Islamic lore, indicative of such an approach too, such as his allowing a woman
to throw garbage at him daily and his succeeding in ideologically, winning over
her by way of humanitarian affection. Those suggesting that peaceful verses in
the Quran are superseded by violent verses (which the vast majority of
practising Muslims globally regard as contextual) would do well to note that verse 109:6 appears towards the end of the
book, and preaches nothing but peace.
There is a fairly well-known website
run by an apostate and basher of Islam who has even offered a cash prize to
anyone who can disprove his allegations against Prophet Muhammad (but there are
books by apostates of other religions criticizing their former religions too,
the most famous one being ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ by Bertrand Russell, and
there’s also ‘Why I am Not a Hindu’ by Kancha Ilaiah, levelling very strong
allegations), but practically, he is the judge of the debate, or to go by what
he is saying, the “readership” of the website, a rather non-defined entity. In
fact, he has acknowledged that he came across a Muslim who “intelligently
argued his case and never descended to logical fallacies or insults” and while
that Islam-basher “did not manage to convince him to leave Islam”, that Muslim
earned his “utmost respect”, which implies that practically, the Islam-basher
is the judge of the debate. Likewise, that Islam-basher has mentioned with
reference to a scholar of Islam he debated with, that the latter was “a learned
man, a moderate Muslim and a good human being” and someone he (the
Islam-basher) has “utmost respect for”. So, that Islam-basher’s critique of
Islam, whether valid or invalid, has no relevance in terms of making blanket
stereotypes about the people we know as Muslims or even practising Muslims. By
the way, that Islam-basher bashes Judaism too. And it is worth mentioning that
I have encountered several practising Muslims on discussion groups on the
social media, who have, in a very calm and composed fashion, logically refuted
the allegations against Islam on such websites. Indeed, as you can
see here and here, there are several other apostates of Islam who have stated that while
they personally left Islam thinking that the extremist interpretations are
correct and moderate ones wrong (as is the case with apostates of many other
religions), they have equally explicitly emphasized that that does not in the
least mean that they believe that most people identifying themselves as
practising Muslims support violence against innocent people.
And in fact, even speaking of the
West, a report submitted by Europol, the criminal intelligence agency of
the European Union, showed that only 3 out of the 249 terrorist attacks (amounting to
about 1.2%) carried out in Europe in 2010 were carried out by
Muslims. Even in the United States, most terrorist attacks from 1980 to
2005 were not carried out by Muslims. And no, I am not in the least seeking to undermine the heinousness of
the crimes committed by some in the name of Islam by pointing to others having
committed similar crimes under other ideological banners, for a more
highlighted wrongdoing is no less of a wrongdoing than a less highlighted
wrongdoing, but only to point out that viewing only Muslims as villains, and
that too, all or even most of them, would indeed be grossly incorrect. However,
despite jihadist terrorists being a microscopic minority of Muslims, Islamist
terrorism has become a bigger global threat for its well-coordinated
international network since the 1990s, with the US-backed Islamist resistance
to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan having signaled its rise. And, let us not
forget that when we had the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, the victims
included Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim police officer who died fighting the
terrorists (and by the way, there are more French Muslims in the local
police, including those who have died fighting jihadist terrorists, than in the
Al Qaeda unit in their country), Mustapha
Ourad, a Muslim who was one of the magazine staff members killed in that
attack and there was Lassana Bathily, a Muslim shopkeeper who gave
sanctuary to many innocent civilians during the hostage crisis in Paris that
followed. Even in the context of the more recent attacks in Paris, a Muslim security guard Zouheir,
risking his own life, prevented one suicide bomber from entering a packed
football stadium. More recently, Kenyan Muslims very laudably
protected fellow bus commuters, who were Christians, from jihadist terrorists,
and Kurdish, Emirati, Iraqi and Syrian Muslims have also been fighting the
ISIS. In India too, most of the terrorism is not by Muslims, as you can
see here and here.
I am not even suggesting that it is so
much as possible to classify any religious grouping into watertight
compartments of ‘communal’ or ‘secular’, and communalism among those we
identify as communal does vary in degree. I would even assert that not every
instance of Muslim communalism in India necessarily, in the conventional sense,
amounts to affinity with Pakistan or hostility to India, and while communalism,
Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or any other, strikes at what Tagore called the “idea of
India”, any communal statement from a Muslim, like Azam Khan’s ridiculous
statement attributing India’s victory in the Kargil war only to Muslim soldiers
(but he did indeed explicitly glorify these Muslim soldiers serving India’s
national cause in the same speech), should not be seen as “anti-national” in the
conventional sense of the term if Hindu communal statements are not seen in the
same vein, and even Asaduddin Owaisi has ridiculed Pakistan for the partition
dividing the Muslims of the subcontinent as also for being backward as compared
to India but bearing animosity towards India, making life difficult for Indian
Muslims. Also, I do not believe that communalists under any banner, except
arguably those actually resorting to killing innocent civilians, should be
dehumanized or can never be logically made to modify their views, as the
must-watch movie Road to Sangam, based on a true story,
demonstrates, and to draw an analogy, you can see this
video of a Muslim who initially wanted to
become a terrorist wanting to blow up Jewish civilians but changed his
standpoint about Israel for the better after visiting that country. It is not
as though Muslims are another species that can’t be rationally engaged
with, the way some extreme anti-Muslim rightists almost make them out to be,
portraying Muslims in general as cruel, slimy, backstabbing and aggressive
(many Muslims whom the non-Muslim readers would know personally would not
exhibit such traits if the non-Muslim readers were to analyze dispassionately,
rather than making baseless presumptions, and indeed, most Indian Muslims are
of Hindu ancestry and so, they share the same genes as the Hindus – Hindu
religious lore also refers to treacherous human beings like the Kauravas
wanting to burn the Pandavas in a wax palace; so, treachery was not unknown to
India before the advent of Islam, as royal family feuds among the Nanda and
Gupta rulers also demonstrate, and some of the worst atrocities in history have
been committed by the likes of Hitler and Stalin, who were not Muslims, nor was
Chengiz Khan who was an animist), but like many people in other communities in
different contexts, some (not all) Muslims are in the stranglehold of
anachronistic ideas like a global pan-Muslim fraternity and the upholding of
Islamic law, other than having prejudiced notions of an exaggerated sense of
victimhood, and I have dealt with how to ideologically combat Muslim extremism
in some depth in this article.
Sacrificing animals as a religious
ritual is indeed not exclusive to Muslims, and ‘bali’ has existed among Hindus
too, something Gautam Buddha (who lived centuries before Jesus and Muhammad)
had opposed (and even Emperor Ashok the Great consumed meat of peacocks, which
he stopped after embracing Buddhism, though interestingly, Buddhists in China,
Japan, Bhutan etc. do consume meat, as do most Sikhs, Christians, Jews and
Parsis, and what is halal for Muslims in terms of dietary
regulations and the mode of slaughtering some animals is almost identical to
what is kosher for Jews and several sects of Christians, and
that is true for the practice of circumcision for males as well, which even has
health benefits), and still continues in many Hindu temples across India,
especially in West Bengal during the Navratri season. Also, it may interest
some to know that the story of Prophet Abraham associated with Id-ul-Zuha is
found in the Old Testament of the Bible too, which the Jews and Christians also
believe in (those regarded as prophets by the Jews are regarded as prophets by
the Christians too, with the addition of Jesus, and those regarded as prophets
by the Christians are regarded as prophets by the Muslims as well, with the
addition of Muhammad). And obviously, not all of Arab cuisine is non-vegetarian
either, with Arab vegetarian dishes like strained yogurt using labneh cheese
and sweet dishes like zlabia, popular in South Asia as jalebi!
And yes, all those resorting to
whataboutism misusing the tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits or other such
episodes should read this article and this one, and as far as the rhetoric of love jihad goes, please see this article. And yes, I, for one, do not, in the least, shy away from calling
the MIM a communal party which should be rejected, as you can see here. For all residual resentment against Muslims, I’d request you to
peruse (not skim through and judge based on one’s preconceived notions) this e-book of mine available for
free download.
And also, while some Hindus may not
have had the opportunity to make many Indian Christian friends, I have, and can
assertively state that all claims of them being ultra-westernized and
unpatriotic are completely fabricated generalizations, and a certain Malayali
Christian friend of mine knows the Hindu epics better than many of my Hindu
friends, and it would be interesting for some to know that Malayali Muslims and
Malayali Christians observe the harvest festival of Onam, in spite of its Hindu
religious connotation, as being their own, some Malayali Muslims preparing the
Onam feast even when Onam falls in Ramzan.
Now, coming to Roy. Her silence on
many issues is loud, but selective activism/outrage, while being very
unhealthy, isn't a very sustainable argument beyond a point for the simple
reason that anyone can claim a different set of priorities inasmuch as what
they want to raise their voice against. Issues in the world or even India are
far too many and that way, all of us can be accused of not speaking up for
something or the other, and she has made a few token statements here and there
condemning the driving out of the Kashmiri Pandits and Maoist violence.
That said, I guess the larger problem
with Arundhati Roy is this-
Part 1 - Public Policy and Forms of
Government
(a) She wants the state to control
and regulate the economy, and detests private enterprise (read corporates), and
instead of lamenting the lack of stronger law-and-order mechanisms to check
exploitation by some corporates, has demonised corporates, many of whom offer
innovation, efficiency and employment-generating capacity, when even
non-corporate entities like small-time vegetable-vendors and milkmen engage in
unethical business practices. There is no disagreement on the point that
an MNC has much more money power to exert, and hence, more influence, but the
underlying dishonesty is the same - someone below the poverty line is a
different case, but a relatively non-rich guy too has no moral rationale to
engage in malpractice - the reason for both is greed, but not every corporate
executive or small-time shopkeeper engages in malpractice, and there are those
among both who do. Of course, the rule of law needs
to be strengthened so that no one gets away with wrongdoings, and that is
another matter.
(b) She sees the state and the media
as not being as she desires them to be and therefore, without much evidence,
makes baseless exaggerated claims that the state machinery and the media have
no human complexities and are completely sold out only to corporate interests,
as if every media outlet, every judge, every university is completely
dehumanised and is acting as an agent of vested interests (though she ironically
gets her articles published in the very same media and gives lectures in
government universities like JNU). Interestingly, as you can see here, when asked as to how she could claim that the entire Indian media was
on the payrolls of the Tatas, to prove her point, she cited a report by the
mainstream Indian magazine Outlook, perhaps not even realising the
self-contradictory nature of her argument! As noted social activist Harsh
Mander, who is far from being a right-winger, points out-
//I still find myself in fundamental and passionate disagreement with some of her major conclusions. The first is her rejection of what she describes as "the failing light" of democracy in India. She believes that India pretends to be a democracy: "it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning"; and each of its institutions - the judiciary, police, "free" press and elections - "have metastasized into something dangerous", designed to uphold the consensus of the elite for market growth.
Roy rejects "liberals" who
continue to have faith in a "tolerant, lumbering, colourful, somewhat
chaotic democracy" in India. I am afraid I am one such
"liberal". I am acutely aware of all the flaws in democracy in India,
and join battle on many - indeed most - of the issues that Roy so eloquently
dissects. And yet I do not share her terminal pessimism with the functioning of
democracy in India. Unlike her, I do not believe that secular democracy in
India is fake window dressing for the world to admire. With all its failings
and betrayals, the guarantees contained in India's secular democratic
constitution have made significant difference to the lives of its dispossessed
people. They would have been even far poorer than they are now, more insecure,
more oppressed without democracy. Of this, I am convinced.
Roy regards the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which creates a statutory right to 100 days employment in public works to every rural household as "crumbs". "It amounts to Rs. 8,000 (about $170) per family per year. Enough", she says, "for a good meal in a restaurant, with wine and dessert". I have observed how much NREGA, again with its flaws, has meant for millions of India's poorest people. Many live on less than one dollar a day, therefore 170 dollars is not a trifle for them. It has enabled them to survive, and that too without doles but instead with the dignity of (admittedly hard) labour. It has reduced distress migration and debt, brought more food to their plates and those of their children, and has raised agricultural wages. It is likely that this partly influenced the emphatic vote for the UPA government in 2009. To me, this is evidence of democracy delivering to its dispossessed people. Even flawed democracy.//
(c) By doing so, she undermines the
work of activists for social and ecological causes who work within the
democratic system with all its flaws, with PILs, agitations etc. to get better
laws (e.g. the RTI Act or the Forest Rights Act which has empowered Adivasis
more than Maoism) or implementation of existing laws, better policies etc. To
study the nuances of the system, to lobby for laws, to fight it out in the
judicial system, to work for the implementation of government schemes etc. is a
tedious process, which acknowledges the state as legitimate, and which can be
reformed democratically. Strongly left-leaning lawyer and civil rights agitator
Prashant Bhushan operating under the Indian constitution branded Roy as
downright jealous for her rejection of a popular
anti-corruption struggle that took India by storm.
(d) She is not interested in doing
what I stated above and even practically sabotaged a negotiated settlement of
the Narmada issue, as Ramachandra Guha pointed out. She subtly almost questions the legitimacy of the state, and
romanticizes Maoists but falls short of supporting them. By being so strongly
anti-establishment and making sweeping claims, she impresses impressionable
people with her rhetoric, who even overlook the falsehood in her claims like
tracing Naxalism/Maoism, which started in the 1960s, and went strong in the
1970s and 1980s, to have emerged from the economic reforms of 1991!
Interestingly, it was big development projects by government undertakings or misplaced
environmentalism that kept the tribals disempowered even before liberalisation.
The jobs created by liberalisation for those who managed some high school or
college education, in call centres or even further up the success ladder in
many private companies, or by being entrepreneurial, that have reduced poverty
in very many cases, after liberalisation, are ignored by her, even if
left-leaning economists like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and others have
appreciated this development, albeit with some reservations. She chooses to
believe statistics that suit her, reject those that don’t and base her
contentions, which do have an element of truth (but then, all bigots engaging
in sweeping generalisations do base their contentions by citing some valid
examples of wrongdoing by some from the set of folks they seek to bash), into
sentimental bombast with hyperbole, as discussed here, here, here and here.
(e) What alternatives/solutions does
she have to offer on the table? Does she suggest doing away with democracy? No.
Would even that guarantee a better human rights scenario? China and North Korea
suggest otherwise, and China has made economic progress by moving away from the
communist model! The Indian Maoists bombing election booths and their kangaroo
courts don't inspire any confidence either. In fact, after a lot of ranting,
when asked for a solution, she shied away citing time constraints, as you can
see here! As Mander points out-
//I find it ironical that people who would stoutly - and I believe rightly - oppose the death penalty, are prepared to endorse the murder by insurgents who combine in themselves the roles of self-appointed judge, prosecutor and executioner, of people they deem to be guilty of myriad crimes like exploitation, informing the police or joining rival militant factions. Or worse, the slaughter of complete innocents in bomb explosions or missile attacks.//
//I find it ironical that people who would stoutly - and I believe rightly - oppose the death penalty, are prepared to endorse the murder by insurgents who combine in themselves the roles of self-appointed judge, prosecutor and executioner, of people they deem to be guilty of myriad crimes like exploitation, informing the police or joining rival militant factions. Or worse, the slaughter of complete innocents in bomb explosions or missile attacks.//
(a) She rightly sees Hindu
majoritarianism as a problem.
(b) She sees Muslim extremism as
borne out of Hindu extremism, which is partly true but overlooks its larger
genesis in the concepts of 'ummah' and 'sharia' as an international problem (if
jihadist terrorism is only a product of victimhood, then who is being
victimised by a Malala going to school or the tiny Yazidi minority of Iraq?),
or even the movement that led to the partition of India in the first place.
Also, what is to one make of her argument of Pakistanis feeling victimised by
the Gujarat riots (as you can see here)? This is like suggesting that Indian Hindus should feel victimised by
Buddhists because of the atrocities of the Sri Lankan army against Tamils and
by that token, it would understandable if the Hindus engage in mass murders!
Likewise, the problem of global jihadist terrorism affecting countries as
diverse as Bangladesh and Sweden is relegated only to a reaction against US
neo-imperialism, with little acknowledgement of genuine regressive (by
Universal Declaration of Human Rights standards) and even nihilistic
theological ideas that have existed among Muslims, and her reluctance to praise
even Muslims standing up to the same, like Malala Yousufzai, is something for
which she has drawn criticism from liberal Muslim intellectuals, like scientist
Parvez Hoodhboy from Pakistan, as you can see here.
(c) She treats the Indian state as an
extension of the Hindu majority, which is why she once declared India as a
militaristic Hindu state, as if it actually mirrors Pakistan, which is a joke.
She has gone on record to describe 150 million Indian Muslims in general as
persecuted and impoverished, and has even disgraced them by calling them in
general potential terrorists, as you can see here! Leave aside the super-rich and middle class among Indian Muslims, even
their disproportionate poverty as compared to other religious groupings is not
largely the fault of Hindus in general, as I’ve discussed in this article, which also differentiates between India and Pakistan on the nature and
extent of religious majoritarianism.
(d) She fails to acknowledge
separatist movements in Kashmir, Punjab or India's northeast as brute
majoritarian, non-pluralistic movements localised to those regions, or the
larger historical and legal issues
pertaining to Kashmir, and for her, it's about the
brute majority of the Hindu majority oppressing minorities through the state,
though let me also clarify that the neglect of the northeast culturally and
economically has indeed been shameful. On Kashmir, she has factually erred when it comes to
statistics of Indian soldiers deployed,
engaging in misleading exaggeration. That the insurgency started in the first
place, and the compulsions of giving statutory immunity to security personnel,
failing which they can be dragged to court over even false claims to disturb
their counter-insurgency work, are overlooked in her analysis. Also, that human
rights violations by elements in security forces are carried out in any
secessionist conflict zone even where the majority of the population isn't of a
different religion from the majority of the security personnel, as in Assam, Meitei
areas in Manipur, Balochistan or even the erstwhile East Pakistan (or even in the
counter-insurgency operations in Khyber Pakhtoonwa) is slyly never acknowledged
by her.
She often wrongly cites Goa as being
Christian-majority (though it was Hindu-majority even under Portuguese rule,
despite some forced conversions to Christianity by the Portuguese in the early
period of their rule in Goa) and refers to Nehru’s military operation against
the Portuguese in Goa as a sign of the Indian state's (read Nehru’s) fascist
design to subjugate Christians (when many Goan Christians and even Muslims,
with the support of left-leaning Indian nationalists like Lohia, had actually
been fighting the Portuguese and sought merger with India, as you can read
about
here, here, here
and here, and there has been no anti-India separatist movement there)! This can be seen
in her numerous videos. By the way, I acknowledge and condemn the human rights
violations that were carried out by some Indian soldiers in that operation, but
acknowledging and condemning those is a far cry from what Roy says time and
again.
(e) The usual harmonious coexistence
of minorities with the majority and huge achievements of those among the
minorities are to be seen as aberrations in her worldview, even though many
achievers from the minorities, like Shah Rukh Khan, Arshad Warsi, Nawazuddin
Siddiqui, Irfan Pathan, Yusuf Pathan and APJ Abdul Kalam have also come from
weak economic backgrounds.
(f) On casteism, its declining
relevance in social life, evident by how more and more castes are clamouring
for a ‘bavkward’ status and upper caste folks have been caught faking SC
certificates (showing how people regard reservation benefits as favourable, and
don’t imagine they would face hige social stigma) cannot be acknowledged in her
worldview, as if a Dalit can't be rich or a Brahmin can't be poor, and almost
every upper caste Hindu should be taken as casteist by default.
(g) Any upper caste Hindu who dares
to question her on facts, like even Ramachandra Guha, is branded as casteist
and asked to shut up!
(h) In her worldview, it is subtly
suggested that Muslims indeed have every right to assert their religious
identity, but Hindus should be ashamed of religiosity in the context of their
faith (even a man like Gandhi, who fought untouchability and died for
Hindi-Muslim unity, is to be branded mindlessly with negative labels), for
their religion is only about caste and patriarchy, as if it can't have multiple
interpretations as it actually does.
Tufail Ahmad (though better than Roy
when it comes to incisive analysis and concrete policy recommendations), Minhaz
Merchant, David Frawley and François Gautier are to the Hindu extremists what
Roy and her ilk to the Muslim extremists, and extremisms of both camps feed off
each other and indeed, both need to be rejected. Also, in fact, by
misrepresenting secularism in the Indian context as Hindu-bashing, the ilk of
Roy has only moved many Hindus away from secularism and has strengthened the
Hindu extremists.
By:
Karmanye Thadani
(The author would
like to thank his dear Kashmiri friend Khalid Baig, who is not a fan of Roy’s
the way many other Kashmiri Muslims are, for his valuable inputs.)
