The conference, titled “Freedom — the Only Way,” was held in New Delhi on Oct. 21, 2010. At the time, protesters in Muslim-majority Kashmir were seething after the death of a 17-year-old boy who was hit by a tear-gas canister fired from close range by Indian forces as he returned from a tutoring center.
A cycle of unrest in Kashmir that year ended in the deaths of about 120 demonstrators.
Ms. Roy described the strife in a guest essay that fall in The Times, writing: “Since April, when the army killed three civilians and then passed them off as ‘terrorists,’ masked stone throwers, most of them students, have brought life in Kashmir to a grinding halt. The Indian government has retaliated with bullets, curfew and censorship.”
In the complaint filed by the Kashmiri Hindu activist, he said that several of the speeches, including the one by Ms. Roy, had “jeopardized public peace and security,” adding that speakers had promoted “separation of Kashmir from India.”
During her speech, Ms. Roy, who won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 for her novel “The God of Small Things,” recalled an incident in which she had been ambushed by a television reporter who asked her repeatedly, “Is Kashmir an integral part of India?”
“So, I said, look, Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. However aggressively and however often you want to ask me that, even the Indian government has accepted that it is not an integral part of India,” Ms. Roy is heard saying in video of the seminar.
The Modi government, which took power four years later, has moved to bring the region under its direct control, revoking its limited autonomy and suppressing democracy and dissent.
