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Arundhati Roy apologized in August 2019 for confusion caused by a resurfaced clip from a 2011 discussion, while saying the clip did not represent her beliefs or her writing. Her reported comparison concerned the use of the Indian and Pakistani armies against their own populations; it was not simply praise for the Pakistani Army.
What Roy said in the 2011 discussion
Contemporary reports identify the clip as coming from a University of Westminster panel discussion with Professor Dibyesh Anand. They report that Roy was discussing Indian military deployments in regions including Kashmir and India’s northeast, and said Pakistan had not deployed its army against its own people in the way India had. The wording and provenance here are based on those reports, rather than an independent review of the full recording.
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The comparison was about the armies’ use against their own populations. It should not be compressed into a claim that Roy praised the Pakistani Army generally, or treated as a settled assessment of the historical record.
Why the clip resurfaced in 2019
The discussion took place in 2011, but a short clip circulated online again in August 2019. Contemporary coverage on 28 and 29 August reported Roy’s response. The video was therefore an old recording attracting renewed attention, not a new 2019 statement.
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What Roy said in her apology
Roy said the clip did not represent her beliefs or the positions she had expressed in her writing. Her statement, as reported by ThePrint and Scroll.in, said: “This tiny clip of video in no way represents what I believe, or indeed what I have written over the years.”
She characterized the remark as thoughtless or stupid and said it had been made inadvertently. She also wrote: “Still, It is a matter of enormous consequence and I apologize for any momentary confusion the clip may have caused.” The capitalization and punctuation are reproduced from the reported transcription.
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Did Roy retract the comparison?
Her reported statement apologized for the clip and for confusion it caused, and said it did not represent her beliefs or writing. It was not an unqualified retraction of every political position she had taken, nor did the statement establish a separate, detailed correction of the comparison’s historical claims.
Roy pointed readers to her writing on Pakistan’s conduct in Balochistan and the Pakistan Army’s actions in East Pakistan in 1971. She cited her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published in 2017, and her essay Walking with the Comrades as examples of views she had expressed in writing.
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Timeline
- 2011: The University of Westminster discussion was recorded, according to contemporary reporting.
- 2017: Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was published.
- 28–29 August 2019: Reports quoted Roy’s apology after the clip resurfaced online.
- 5 October 2026: Al Jazeera published a new interview about Roy’s work and political views. It was not a new statement about the 2019 video.
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