By NM Sampathkumar Iyangar
According to a respected magazine, 75 per cent of the people of India (definition of India, not clarified!) want Mohammed Afzal hanged without delay. “I really wish LK Advani becomes India’s next prime minister; he is the only one who can take a decision and hang me. At least, my pain and daily suffering would ease then!” said easily the most prized VIP ‘culprit’ of India recently.
Afzal is supposed to be the kingpin behind the 2001 attack on Indian Parliament, which left nine innocents and all five (or six) terrorists dead. The prisoner has been languishing in Delhi’s high security Tihar prison, waiting to be hanged, since three years. Two more ‘kingpins’, including Delhi University lecturer Geelani, were acquitted after they were found amateurishly framed up. All terrorist charges against another were dropped and his death sentence was reduced to 10 years’ rigourous imprisonment, only under provisions of Indian Criminal Code (IPC). Unable to secure proper legal defence, Afzal is the lone fall guy for the incident.
It’s okay to not just hang him but to lynch him for his ‘guilt’, if he was really guilty of the charges levelled against him. Every ‘patriotic’ Indian, willing to contribute Re 1 to the Ram temple in Ayodhya, right from Advani, may deliver one lash. But, before that, it will be necessary to ponder over the double-death plus triple-life sentence awarded to the ‘surrendered militant’ by the honourable judges of India’s Supreme Court. There has been a deafening silence on some posers by author Arundhati Roy in this context.
Let the lynch-persons honestly answer whether the least dignified judge of the most tyrannical country would condemn an accused, based on unsubstantiated primary evidence, admitted by the court itself as only ‘circumstantial’. As per the prosecution, records discovered from the handsets and SIM cards on the suicide attackers were, what it claimed to be, Afzal’s records. His cellphone number was allegedly found written on the back of unsealed paper IDs that each one of them had. (They were written in identical hand and the policeman who catalogued evidences said later that he had not found any such thing written!) A confession by Afzal had to be set aside by the Supreme Court as fake. The Special Cell sleuths had feigned to have discovered him in a sewage gutter just a day after the attack. They had a ‘media event’ organised, where he implicated himself completely. The POTA judge had no qualms to accept that; but, when the circumstances under which this “confession” was made were revealed, the higher court accepted that the police had violated legal safeguards.
Afzal had surrendered to BSF at the age of 24 before enrolling himself in Delhi University. Kashmir’s STF has been in routine touch with him for close to ten years, when he planned and got such a grave conspiracy executed! Will the most idiotic person believe that, in a country where high officers of security forces are routinely convicted of mowing down innocents to get awards and promotions? The victims usually happen to be ‘culprits’, unfortunate enough to have been caught in their net for some ordinary infractions. Weirdly enough, none of the victims in the “most heinous assault on the very seat of Indian democracy” was an MP or minister.
No Kashmiri resident can be comfortable with this type of Indian ‘justice’ to a fellow Kashmiri. By calling for the death of Afzal, Saffron zealots are giving fodder to Kashmiri separatists.