Letters: A rejoinder

Uttaran Dasgupta's "review" of my book Sri Lanka: The New Country (Business Standard, March 28), was by an ill-informed and verbose "critic" who has obviously never set foot in Sri Lanka and is wholly clueless about its past, present and future. He has shamed your otherwise scrupulous daily by misquoting my work, stringing random sentences from all over the book chiefly to "showcase" his own tedious pomposity and, more gravely, by attributing claims I make nowhere, to me. The review was a disdainful violation of the tenets of the very profession your "critic" claims to be "proud" of.

Examples:

1. He refers to "camps for former LTTE woman cadres". There are none: neither in Sri Lanka, nor in the book.
    
2. The longest chapters are confrontations of army generals and politicians with the widely-known allegations of human rights abuse. He did not read them. Instead, he asks the idiotic question: "But what about human rights'?" And then slanders me by claiming that I, the author, "answer", by "dismissing human rights as little more than propaganda".
    
3. He draws a garbled comparison between the Sri Lankan civil war and the Indian army in J&K by hooking it to a random quote by me in the book, entirely out of context. Most seriously, his claim that the Indian army is engaged in an "armed conflict" within J&K is plain sedition.
    
4. Ignoring both the preface and remarks by the late Vinod Mehta (who read the entire book and found it uniquely showcased the "other side", i.e., people within post-war Sri Lanka), he asks why there are no "interviews with the vast and powerful Tamil diaspora".
    
5. Finally and embarrassingly, he exposes his own hilarious shortcomings in the English language by giving both the publisher and me some "lessons" in "sub-editing" and the use of the adjective.

I care two hoots for his personal opinion of my book, a few pages of which he may have speed-read. But I am appalled at the lowering of standards at Business Standard by getting a sub-editor, who reportedly writes poems in his spare time, instead of a professional journalist with knowledge of Sri Lanka to review a book by a professional who has cut her teeth on that story for the past 25 years.

Padma Rao Sundarji New Delhi

Uttaran Dasgupta replies:
I shall not dignify the personal attacks Ms Sundarji makes because they do not really have anything to do with the review, and whether or not I write poetry is of little consequence in this context.

About the misrepresentation of facts:

1. In chapter four ("Samba Dancers, A Gunrunner And A Fallen Lion"), Ms Sundarji writes about a visit to a camp of the Sri Lankan Army Women's Corps in Wanni, with only former LTTE women cadres (besides the officers, of course.).
    
2. On confronting generals and senior politicians: Asking serving generals if their armies have committed human rights violation does not really address the subject.
    
3. About the armed conflict in Kashmir: Ms Sundarji would have heard of the debate over the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and its misuse.

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