Let’s introspect

Vishal Sharma
In hanging the Parliamentary convict, Afzal Guru, the political India took a decision that was long awaited given the sensitivities involved. The legal India had long back shown where it stood in the matter. For political India to, therefore, keep pussyfooting on the issue was being increasingly seen as playing politics with the national security. But the ground that the political India had to cover to be finally able to help the case reach the closure was politically treacherous. It could either build a political fortune or lose it all on this. The status quo had also held out a certain electoral allure. In all of this, therefore, it faced the classic dilemma of damn, if you do, and damn, if you don’t. However, this stand-still scenario could not have continued endlessly. Therefore, when the political hostage taking became a baggage that could no longer be carried, the governing paladins of the day thought that there was more sense in hanging Guru than in twiddling thumbs and getting hung at the next elections. Such a stage apparently was achieved in the first half of this month.
There is politics in all this. But it is restricted more to the timing of the hanging and not to the hanging per se. However, there is nothing wrong in that for in democracies politics is an important stakeholder. It determines the course of elections and elections decide who will hold the reins of power. In contrast, totalitarian regimes don’t have such ideological dilemmas to contend with. A tin pot dictator is not bothered about the craft of rhetoric and verbal calisthenics so on and so forth. He is only hung up on the power that he wields. For him power is the be all and end all of the governance. For him, subtlety, nuance, political correctness, and, least of all, political timing are the tools of the weak.
Guru’s case is the typical of the way the state of India has come to function. Consider this: Indian Parliament is attacked and the man who is convicted by the highest court is not penalized for years together. Reasons given are trivial to say the least. It is let out that there is a mercy petition pending disposal at the level of the president of the country. Then there is talk of some kind of queue which can’t be jumped. This queue is not made public even as the spokespersons of the political parties who are past masters of the political spin script an expedient construction of national security for public consumption. Worse enough, the whole of political India, one-third of whom could easily have been killed on that fateful day, can’t get the government to have the procedures fast tracked so that the apex court’s judgment could be implemented. Instead, it allows the petty politicking to construct a narrative of legal and evidentiary obfuscation around it. They even forget the sacrifices of the men and women, who laid down their lives defending them, and anguish of their families who returned their medals to the government for not executing the convict. In any other country, a terrorist act of such proportions would have elicited entirely different response from the Government. There is a lesson in this for all of us, much more for our political class.
The aftermath of the hanging has seen an intense debate on the merits of the hanging itself. More pertinently, a reference to the judge’s expression in the verdict is being made where he has held the ‘satisfaction of the collective conscience of the nation’ as an important reason underlying the award of penalty. An inference has  been drawn that may be  evidence gathered against him did not hold up adequately enough and, therefore, he was under some kind of a moralistic stranglehold of the radical voices in India to deliver. Such a line of thinking is preposterous. A judicial system which is designed to err on the side of caution can’t be gullible enough to be guillotine happy. Incidentally, his case passed through the multiple tiers of the judicial scrutiny. One has to be naïve to believe that the system kept repeating the mistakes.
Now about the ‘collective conscience’ construction itself, well, a text has many subtexts and the one relating to ‘collective conscience’ is perhaps the derivative of all pervasive angst about the man. In wordy judgments, such references are often. Another important subtext in such cases is the determination as to whether the case fits in the definition of rarest of rare. In this particular case, the judge while holding the case against the benchmark of rarest of rare could not have possibly overlooked the subtext of the widespread outrage and, therefore, not placed it in the league of rarest of rare. Once he made up his mind about its category, the natural corollary was the capital punishment. His thought process has been linear and conclusions straight. It is our interpretation that has been parabolic and convoluted.
There is one aspect of the narrative though that has gone horribly wrong. It is the total disconnect with the humane India. While the legal and political India did what they did to Guru, Indian humanity, however, did not cover itself with any glory. Guru was an Indian national and deserved to be given dignity in death. In executing him in the manner we did, we allowed a Pakistani Kasab and a Kashmiri Guru to die as comrade in arms. There were obviously no moral qualms in executing a Pakistani in the hush hush manner, but indeed there were, or should have been, in the case of an Indian.
When in life we have tirelessly sought to draw a distinction between a Pakistani terrorist and a Kashmiri militant; indigenous disenchantment and cross-border terror; inclusive kashmiriyat and talibanised Islam, there was no reason for us to let their death blur this distinction.  Heavens would not have fallen, if his family had been allowed to have one last glimpse of the man. Even Guru would have died a satisfied death and, who knows, may have after all shown some remorse. In not allowing this final rendezvous to happen, we have shown the innate frailties of Indian democracy. The fault lines in our five-decade old nationhood, we so dreadfully fear, have been laid bare for the entire world to see. This has not diminished us. This has shamed us.
Nations like India can’t be brought to knees by random acts of many a Guru. They can very well be by the tunnel visioned thinking and the monochromatic ambition to gut fear emanating from the perceived unfulfilled aspirations of the people. But the discourse of fear can’t be invaded by the impulses of power. It can very well be by the symphony of love and language of civility. We allowed our apprehensions to cloud our judgment. We embedded a just act in the matrix of unjust in order to preempt unrest. We failed. If we had done the reverse, unrest may still have happened. But that would not have diminished us. Rather, it would have enhanced our stature. It would have shown to the world that even when we are pushed to the wall, we may lose everything but dignity and value for life.

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