I viewed Dantewada killings as tragic: Arundhati

Author activist Arundhati Roy has said that she viewed the death of 76 CRPF personnel in Dantewada as "tragic", rejecting suggestions that she had saluted the "people of Dantewada" after these killings by Maoists.
Taking exception to a report from Mumbai based on her speech at a public meeting organised on June 2 by the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), the writer said in a communication, "I have made it quite clear that I viewed the death of the CRPF men as tragic, and that I thought they were pawns in a war of the rich against the poor.
"What I said at the meeting in Mumbai was that I was contemptuous of the hollow condemnation industry the media has created and that as the war went on and the violence spiraled, it was becoming impossible to extract any kind of morality from the atrocities committed by both sides."
Roy said "I made it clear that I was not not there to defend the killing of ordinary people by anybody, neither the Maoists nor the government. My reaction to the killing of the CRPF men as well as to other recent incidents of violence by the Maoists are a matter of public record."
The earlier report had quoted Roy as having said that she would continue to back the Maoist armed struggle even if she was put behind bars and that "it ought to be an armed movement".
Denying that she had said anything like "it ought to be an armed movement", Roy said her exact words were "I think it is much more interesting to interrogate the resistance to which we belong.
"I am on this side of the line. I am very clear about that. I don't care, pick me up, put me in jail. I am on this side of the line. But on this side of the line, we must turnaround and ask our comrades questions."

Arundhati Roy may lay her sympathies wherever she wishes. It is her democratic right. But does democracy flow from the barrel of a gun? How long would she or anyone else have their democratic rights if forces like the Maoists succeed in their revolution? Those who come to power by the gun will rule by the gun and poor tribals, whose cause they claim to be fighting for, do not have the culture of the gun (except those trained by the Maoists) and therefore it will be an all out rule not of the tribals but by those who wield the gun. The guns of a democratic state like India are not used to bring in gun culture but ensure that there is no gun culture so that democracy can flow through the buttons of a voting machine. Arundhati's equating the gun culture of the Maoists with the gun culture of the state is misleading. The surgeon's knife and the murderer's knives, though both are knives, are not alike.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/i-viewed-dantewada-killings-as-tragic-arundhati/633187/0