Vimal Sumbly
Post execution protests against Afzal Guru’s hanging that he was not accorded a fair trial notwithstanding, the matter of the fact remains that he was accorded all the available means of defence anybody could afford anywhere in the world despite the serious charges of literally waging a war against a sovereign nation which later accorded him a fair trial.
Let us not forget that he was not the only accused in the case and he was not the only one accorded death penalty by the trial court. There were two others, his cousin Shaukat Guru and associate SAR Geelani who were also awarded capital punishment while their fourth accomplice Afshan Guru was given five years imprisonment.
Geelani and Afshan were acquitted later while Shaukat’s sentence was reduced from death to 10 years. They were all accused in the same case. So why should the judiciary be unfair to Afzal Guru only? The very fact that two of the four accused were acquitted and other’s punishment reduced from death penalty to ten years imprisonment should silence all those who are trying to question the genuineness of the trial against Guru. It took the government of India 12 long years to complete the trial that concluded with Guru’s execution. So much so the critics of the government went to the extent of saying India was proving to be a soft state.
Compare this with how the United States dealt with Osama-bin-Laden. The crimes of both Laden and Guru were almost of similar nature although that of Laden’s turned out to be greater for the obvious reasons of the enormity of loss caused by these in terms of life and also in symbolic terms as well. Laden masterminded an attack on the mightiest of all the nations on globe, the US. He targeted the twin towers, the symbols of the American, rather western, civilisation. The Americans hunted him down with dogged persistence and traced him to Pakistan. They did not subject him to any trial. They simply shot him dead in a quick operation without even according him a summary trial.
Guru masterminded the attack on the Indian parliament, the highest symbol of the sovereignty of a sovereign nation. You can’t inflict a greater hurt on a nation than that. It was actually a war on the nation aimed at not only hurting its ego, but even humbling it down. The nation’s ego was not hurt. It was not humbled down either. And the nation did not retaliate in the same measure or any vengeance. While it took the Americans a full decade to trace and catch hold of Laden, the police in India tracked and arrested the people responsible within a week. And it goes to the credit of the magnanimous nation that accorded a fair trial to someone accused of such a serious offence.
Indian democracy is not as old as that of the US nor the Indian liberal values as much glorified as the US, yet we don’t have any Abu Gharib or the Guantanamo Bay detention camps for brutalising the accused. This is not to say that the Indian democracy is better than the US, it certainly has so many shortfall. Yet it accords all the rights and privileges due to its citizens and even those who are not.
Unlike Afzal Guru, Ajmal Kasab was no Indian citizen. Rather he was an aggressor from another country against whom there was undisputed and irrefutable evidence recorded live. Yet it took so many years for his trial and final execution. That is the beauty of the Indian democracy rooted deeply in its egalitarian values that go hundreds of years back and far ahead of the modern western liberal values.
And again even in the aftermath of Afzal’s execution, the nation not only allowed a debate with so many dissenting notes against the execution, but even the protests in the national capital New Delhi by the Kashmiri students against the judicial execution. Imagine anybody protesting against Laden’s extra-judicial execution by the US in New York!
On the darker side, however, we as a nation lacked sensitivity in the aftermath of the execution. We celebrated the death probably because the “collective conscience” of the nation was satisfied over the execution. This was further magnified by our television anchors, one in particular, who made the judicial execution look like as if the country had won some war, instead of the mere completion of a legal process. In this mad pursuit we, rather unwittingly, tried to make hero of someone who did not deserve to be made one.
After all, whether we like it or not, Afzal was not a routine convict executed for the rarest of the rare crime. He represented an ideology with which thousands others do identify. More so, he had a family as well; a 14 year old son and a young widow in her thirties. They did not have any role in what Afzal was executed for. Or maybe they thought he had done the right thing or he was being wronged by the Indian state. Yet it would be too insensitive to overlook their sensitivities. Let us not celebrate the death no matter even if judicially and judiciously executed, lest it create many more “others” with a risk of giving birth to more Gurus.
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