[By executing the Kashmiri in the way that it did, the Indian
government has decided to fuel the process of destabilization.]
By Arundhati Roy
 |
Supporters in in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-administrated Kashmir,
of various political religious parties, take part in a demonstration to condemn
the hanging of Mohammad Afzal Guru.
Photograph: Amiruddin Mughal/Reuters
|
The memo, in callous
bureaucratese, with every name insultingly misspelt, sent by the superintendent
of central jail number 3, Tihar, New Delhi to "Mrs Tabassum w/o Sh Afjal
Guru" reads:
"The mercy
petition of Sh Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been rejected by Hon'ble
President of India. Hence the execution of Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has
been fixed for 09/02/2013 at 8 AM in Central Jail No-3.
This is for your information and for further necessary action."
The memo arrived after
the execution had already taken place, denying Tabassum one last legal chance –
the right to challenge the rejection of the mercy petition. Both Afzal Guru and
his family, separately, had that right. Both were thwarted. Even though it is
mandatory in law, the memo to Tabassum ascribed no reason for the president's
rejection of the mercy petition. If no reason is given, on what basis do you
appeal? All the other prisoners on death row in India have been given that last
chance.
Since Tabassum was not
allowed to meet her husband before he was hanged, since her son was not allowed
to get a few last words of advice from his father, since she was not given his
body to bury and since there can be no funeral, what "further necessary
action" does the jail manual prescribe? Anger? Wild, irreparable grief?
Unquestioning acceptance? Complete integration?
After the hanging, there were unseemly celebrations on the
streets. The bereaved wives of the people who were killed in the attack were
displayed on TV, with the chairman of the All-India Anti-Terrorist Front,MS Bitta, and his ferocious moustache playing
the CEO of their sad little company. Will anybody tell them that the men who
shot their husbands were killed at the same time, in the same place, right
there and then. And that those who planned the attack will never be brought to
justice because we still don't know who they are.
Meanwhile, Kashmir is under curfew, once
again. Its people have been locked down like cattle in a pen, once again. They
have defied the curfew, once again. Three people have already been killed in
three days and 15 more grievously injured. Newspapers have been shut down, but
anybody who trawls the internet will see that this time the rage of young
Kashmiris is not defiant and exuberant like it was during the mass uprisings in
the summers of 2008, 2009 and 2010 – even though 180 people lost their lives on
those occasions. This time the anger is cold and corrosive. Unforgiving. Is
there any reason why it shouldn't be?
For more than 20 years Kashmiris have endured a military
occupation. The tens of thousands who lost their lives were killed in prisons,
in torture centres, and in "encounters", genuine as well as fake.
What sets the execution of Afzal Guru apart is that it has given the young, who
have never had any first-hand experience of democracy, a ringside seat to watch
the full majesty of Indian democracy at work.
They have watched the wheels turning, they have seen all its
hoary institutions, the government, police, courts, political parties and, yes,
the media, collude to hang a man, a
Kashmiri, who they do not believe received a fair trial, and whose guilt was by
no means established beyond reasonable doubt He went virtually unrepresented in the lower court during
the most crucial stage of the trial.
Not only did the
state-appointed counsel never visit his client in prison, he actually allowed
incriminating evidence to be admitted against him. In his statement of the
accused (which, unlike the confession, is made in court and not in police
custody) Afzal Guru said: "I had not identified any terrorist. Police told
me the names of terrorists and forced me to identify them." On the first
day of the trial, the lawyer, appointed by the trial court judge, agreed to
accept Afzal Guru's identification of the bodies (and the postmortem reports)
as undisputed evidence, without formal proof. This baffling move was to have
serious consequences for Afzal Guru. To quote from the supreme court judgment:
"The first circumstance against the accused Afzal is that Afzal knew who
the deceased terrorists were. He identified the dead bodies of the deceased
terrorists. On this aspect the evidence remains unshattered."
The supreme court
deliberated on that matter and decided it was OK. They have watched the
government pull him out of the death-row queue and execute him out of turn.
What direction, what form will their new cold, corrosive anger take? Will it
lead them to the blessed liberation they so yearn for and have sacrificed a
whole generation for, or will it lead to yet another cycle of cataclysmic
violence, of being beaten down, and then having "normalcy" imposed on
them under soldiers' boots?
All of us who live in
the region know that 2014 is going to be a watershed year. There will be
elections in Pakistan, in India and in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. We know
that when the US withdraws its troops from Afghanistan, the chaos from an
already seriously destabilised Pakistan will spill into Kashmir, as it has done
before. By executing Guru in the way that it did, the government of India has
taken a decision to fuel that process of destabilisation, to actually invite it
in (as it did before, by rigging the 1987 elections in Kashmir).
After three
consecutive years of mass protests in the valley ended in 2010, the government
invested a great deal in restoring its version of "normalcy" (happy
tourists, voting Kashmiris). The question is, why was it willing to reverse all
its own efforts? Leaving aside issues of the legality, the morality and the
venality of executing Guru in the way that it did, and looking at it just
politically and tactically, it is a dangerous and irresponsible thing to have
done. But it was done, clearly and knowingly. Why?
I used the word irresponsible advisedly. Look what happened the
last time around. In 2001, within a week of the parliament attack (and a few
days after Afzal Guru's arrest) the government recalled its ambassador from
Pakistan and dispatched half a million troops to the border. On what basis was
that done? The only thing the public was told was that while Afzal Guru was in
the custody of the Delhi police special cell, he had admitted to being a member
of the Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). The supreme court
set aside that "confession" extracted in police custody as
inadmissible in law. Does a document that is inadmissible in law, become
admissible in war?
In its final judgment
on the case, apart from the now famous statements about "satisfying
collective conscience" and having no direct evidence, the supreme court
also said there was "no evidence that Mohammad Afzal belonged to any
terrorist group or organisation". So what justified that military
aggression, that loss of soldiers' lives, that massive hemorrhaging of public
money and the real risk of nuclear war (remember, foreign embassies issued
travel advisories and evacuated their staff)?
Was there some
intelligence that preceded the parliament attack and the arrest of Afzal Guru
that we had not been told about? If so, how could the attack have been allowed
to happen? If the intelligence was accurate and infallible enough to justify
such dangerous military posturing, don't people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir
have the right to know what it was? Why was that evidence not produced in court
to establish Afzal Guru's guilt?
In the endless debates
around the parliament attack case, on this, perhaps the most crucial issue of
all, there has been dead silence from all quarters – leftists, rightists,
Hindutva-ists, secularists, nationalists, seditionists, cynics, critics. Why?
Maybe the JeM did mastermind the attack. Praveen Swami, perhaps
the Indian media's best known expert on "terrorism", who seems to
have enviable sources in the Indian police and intelligence agencies, has
recently cited the 2003 testimony of former ISI chief, Lieutenant General Javed Ashraf Qazi, and the
2004 book by Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani scholar, holding the JeM
responsible for the parliament attack (this belief in the veracity of the
testimony of the chief of an organisation whose mandate it is to destabilise
India is touching). It still doesn't explain what evidence there was in 2001,
when the army mobilisation took place.
For the sake of argument let's accept that the JeM carried out
the attack. Maybe the ISI was involved too. We needn't pretend that the government
of Pakistan is innocent of carrying out covert activity over Kashmir (just as
the government of India does in Balochistan and parts of Pakistan).
Remember, the Indian army trained the Mukti Bahini in east Pakistan in the
1970s. It trained six different Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups including the LTTE in the 1980s. It's a filthy scenario
all around.
What would a war with
Pakistan have achieved then and what will it achieve now (apart from a massive
loss of life and fattening the bank accounts of some arms dealers). Indian
hawks routinely suggest the only way to "root out the problem" is
"hot pursuit" and the "taking out" of "terrorist
camps" in Pakistan. Really? It would be interesting to research how many
of the aggressive strategic experts and defence analysts on our TV screens have
an interest in the defence and weapons industry. They don't even need war. They
just need a warlike climate in which military spending remains on an upward
trend.
This idea of hot
pursuit is even stupider and more pathetic than it sounds. What would they
bomb? A few individuals? Their barracks and food supplies? Or their ideology?
Look how the US government's "hot pursuit" has ended in Afghanistan.
And look how a "security grid" of half a million soldiers has not
been able to subdue the unarmed, civilian population of Kashmir. And India is
going to cross international borders to bomb a country – with nuclear arms –
that is rapidly devolving into chaos?
India's professional
warmongers derive a great deal of satisfaction by sneering at what they see as
the disintegration of Pakistan. Anyone with a rudimentary, working knowledge of
history and geography, would know that the breakdown of Pakistan (into a
gangland of crazed, nihilistic, religious zealots) is absolutely no reason for
anyone to rejoice.
The US presence in
Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan's official role as America's junior partner
in the war on terror, makes that region a much-reported place. The rest of the
world is at least aware of the dangers unfolding there. Less understood, and
harder to read, is the perilous wind that's picking up speed in the world's
favourite new superpower. The Indian economy is in considerable trouble. The
aggressive, acquisitive ambition that economic liberalisation unleashed in the
newly created middle class is quickly turning into an equally aggressive
frustration. The aircraft they were sitting in has begun to stall just after
take off. Exhilaration is turning to panic.
The general election is due in 2014. Even without an exit poll I
can tell you what the results will be. Though it may not be obvious to the
naked eye, once again we will have a Congress-BJP coalition, two partieswhose members have been heavily implicated in the mass murder of
thousands of people belonging to minority communities. The CPM will give support from
outside, even though it hasn't been asked to. Oh, and it will be a strong
state. On the hanging front, the gloves are already off. Could the next in line
be Balwant Singh Rajoana, on death row, for the
assassination of Punjab's chief minister Beant Singh? His execution could
revive Khalistani sentiment in the Punjab and put the Akali Dal and the BJP on
the mat. Perfect old-style Congress politics.
But that old-style politics is in some difficulty. In the last
few turbulent months, it is not just the image of major political parties, but
politics itself, the idea of politics as we know it, which has taken a
battering. Again and again, whether it's about corruption, rising prices, or
rape and the rising violence against women, the new, emerging middle class is
at the barricades. They can be water-cannoned or lathi charged, but they cannot be shot and
imprisoned in their thousands, in the way the poor can, in the way Dalits,
Adivasis, Muslims, Kashmiris, Nagas and Manipuris can – and have been.
The old political
parties know that if there is not to be a complete meltdown, this aggression
has to be headed off, redirected. They know that they must work together to
bring politics back to what it used to be. What better way than a communal
conflagration? How else can the secular play at being secular and the communal
be communal? Maybe even a little war, so that we can play hawks and doves all
over again. What better solution than to aim a kick at that tried and trusted
old political football – Kashmir? The hanging of Afzal Guru, its brazenness and
timing, is deliberate. It has brought politics and anger back onto Kashmir's
streets.
India hopes to manage
it with the usual combination of brute force and poisonous, machiavellian
manipulation designed to pit people against one another. The war in Kashmir is
presented to the world as a battle between an inclusive, secular, democracy and
radical Islamists. What then, should we make of the fact that Bashiruddin
Ahmad, the so-called grand mufti of Kashmir (which by the way is a completely
phantom post) – who has issued fatwah after fatwah intended to present Kashmir
as a demonic, monolithic Wahhabi society – is actually a government anointed
cleric? Kids on Facebook will be arrested, but never him.
What should we make of
the fact that the Indian government looks away, while money from Saudi Arabia
(that most steadfast partner of the US) is pouring into Kashmir's madrassas?
How different is this from what the CIA did in Afghanistan all those years ago?
That whole, sorry business created Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and the Taliban.
It has decimated Afghanistan and Pakistan. What sort of incubus will this
unleash?
The old political
football is not going to be all that easy to control. And it's radioactive. A
few days ago Pakistan tested a short-range battlefield
nuclear missile to protect itself against threats from
"evolving scenarios". Two weeks ago the Kashmir police published "survival tips" for nuclear war.
Apart from advising people to build toilet-equipped bombproof basements large
enough to house their entire families for two weeks, it said: "During a
nuclear attack, motorists should dive out of their cars toward the blast to
save themselves from being crushed by their soon-to-be tumbling vehicles."
And to "expect some initial disorientation, as the blast wave may blow
down and carry away many prominent and familiar features". Prominent and
familiar features may have already blown down. Perhaps we should all jump out
of our soon-to-be-tumbling vehicles.
