The 'Azadi' Convention: When Geelani and Arundhati Roy Shared a Stage in Delhi

In October 2010, a convention titled "Azadi — The Only Way" was held in Delhi's LTG Auditorium, organized by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners. On the stage: Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the hardline Hurriyat leader, and Arundhati Roy, the Booker-winning author turned activist. Their demand was "azadi" — freedom — for Kashmir, argued in the capital of the country they said was occupying it.

The irony was not lost on anyone: secession argued freely, in Delhi, under the protection of the very state's laws the speakers condemned.

What followed was predictable and revealing. The BJP demanded sedition charges; television studios filled with outrage; complaints were filed with the Delhi Police. Roy's remark that "Kashmir has never been an integral part of India" — a historical claim as much as a political one — became the most quoted and most attacked line of the event. Geelani drew the familiar parallel with India's own freedom struggle against the British, a comparison his critics found grotesque given the militancy his politics had long been associated with.

What struck this publication at the time was the asymmetry of coverage. A BJP leader demanding action against the convention was treated in much of the national media as a fringe spectacle; the convention itself — separatists demanding secession in the national capital — received comparatively scant attention. Readers were left to find the speeches on YouTube and make up their own minds, which is what the original version of this article invited them to do.

Fifteen years on, the episode reads as a marker of a particular moment: when a certain section of Delhi's intellectual class treated the Kashmir question as an abstract debating exercise, and when the Indian state's response — loud condemnation, little prosecution — reflected a democracy unsure how much dissent it could absorb without cracking. The underlying question the convention raised, stripped of the theatre, remains the one India has never fully answered: what does it mean to argue for secession inside a democracy, and where does argument end and something else begin?