[Reader-list] Jaipur blasts & Afzal Guru

Sat May 24 10:02:04 IST 2008

After the Jaipur blasts the BJP has become even more strident on their
so-called anti-terror¹ campaign, which is nothing more than a two-pronged
strategy. They have promised that on their return to power, which they
assume will be the next general election they will 1. bring back POTA and 2.
Hang Afzal Guru.

The media is playing along without pausing to think.  They have dragged the
Home Minister Shivraj Patil over the coals for his alleged equation of the
Sarabjit Singh and Afzal Guru cases.  I watched his interview with Barkha
Dutt and all he said was that India had to have a consistent policy on the
death penalty and this is something that needed debate as many countries had
abolished the death penalty around the world.  Then he went on to say that
it would be inconsistent to ask for clemency for one of its citizens
internationally while stringing up another at home, or words to that effect.
Nothing he said was outrageous or controversial.  And yet it has snowballed
into a controversy with the BJP and larger public holding the delay in
hanging Afzal Guru responsible for acts like Jaipur.

I am posting an article I had written for the HT in 2006.  It is as relevant
today.  There are many questions about the Parliament Attack case which
remain unanswered to this day. If they hang Afzal they would be doing away
with a key witness and also manage to close a case that deserves to be
investigated by an independent and professional body.  I have tried to
provoke politicians, members of the bureaucracy and other journalists over
the last few years to raise some of these issues to no avail.  No one seems
interested in what happened.  I hope this will spark some discussion in the
Sarai List and that others join the voices that questioned the roots of this
conspiracy.  It¹s important that we do not allow time and indifference to
once again obscure injustice.

-sj

Hang the Truth 
By Sonia Jabbar

Those arguing that Mohammad Afzal¹s death sentence should not be commuted to
life imprisonment are doing so on the grounds that a) the Indian courts
pronounced the sentence after a fair trial and appealing to the President
for intervention would be undermining the judiciary and b) it would send out
a wrong message that India is a weak State, soft on terrorism.  Both
arguments are flawed.

First, the Presidential review is hardly illegal or controversial, enshrined
as it is in the Indian Constitution under Article 72, precisely to check
cases where the death penalty is deemed as too harsh a sentence or in cases
where there has been a miscarriage of justice.  Second, the Supreme Court
had a choice of sentencing Afzal under two laws for conspiracy and chose the
harsher (Sec.120B read with Sec 302 IPC), not because it was the only law
that would serve the purpose but because it believed that only the death
sentence could satisfy the Indian public: ³the collective conscience of the
(sic) society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the
offender.²  

So the court projecting the imagined desires of an imagined society, tosses
the ball into the court of the citizens of India, and the citizens of India,
citing the judgment, toss the ball right back into the courts in an absurd
game of circular logic.

The second argument of sending out a wrong message¹ is intimately tied up
with assumptions of Afzal¹s guilt.  Television shows are full of people
indignantly proclaiming Afzal to be a terrorist and the mastermind of the
Parliament attack. 

Both are patently false.

The investigation agencies and the prosecution named three masterminds:
Maulana Masood Azhar, chief of Jaish e-Mohammad, and the prisoner exchanged
for the IC814 hostages; Ghazi Baba, alleged chief of Jaish operations in J&K
and Tariq Ahmed, a Kashmiri. The Supreme Court acknowledged that Afzal was
neither the mastermind nor the executor of the Parliament attack, and that
it had no direct evidence, but only circumstantial evidence to prove Afzal¹s
guilt as a conspirator.  The Parliament attack was a serious and
unprecedented crime and Afzal¹s sensational arrest two days after the
attack, his trial, and subsequent debates on the death sentence all serve to
divert attention away from the crime itself.

On December 13, 2001, an Ambassador with five armed men entered the
Parliament premises while it was in session.  The security personnel
apprehended the car and in the exchange of gunfire that lasted for 30
minutes, all five terrorists were killed.  Seven policemen on duty at the
time also lost their lives.  Considering the enormity of the attack and the
fact that we nearly went to war with Pakistan, the Home Ministry in a
departure from all norms (where the CBI would normally investigate such a
case) named ACP Rajbir Singh of Delhi Police as Investigating Officer. And
who was this man?  A self-proclaimed encounter specialist, who later
conducted the dubious Ansal Plaza encounter, and was finally disgraced with
charges of corruption when he attempted to blackmail a couple of west Delhi
businessmen.  

Not surprisingly the Parliament Attack investigation was completed in a
record 17 days.  But with the Supreme Court setting aside Afzal¹s
confessional statement as unreliable there is nothing else that confirms the
sequence of events or the conspiracy theory linking the masterminds with
Afzal. Who were the attackers? Who were the masterminds? What was the
conspiracy?  Five years after the Parliament attack the Indian public still
doesn¹t know the truth, and seems to be content to hang a man, close the
case and sweep the rest under the carpet.

Afzal¹s own statement recorded by the courts blows holes in the police
version, and yet the honourable judges have selectively ignored the
startling revelations.  According to Afzal he joined the JKLF in 1990, but
was disillusioned and surrendered before the BSF in 1993.  As the courts
noted, Afzal had to regularly report to the Special Task Force (STF) as per
laws governing surrendered militants. Regarding Tariq Ahmad, named by the
prosecution as one of the masterminds, Afzal says that it was at an STF camp
that he was introduced to Ahmad.  As for Mohammad, the terrorist killed in
the attack, Afzal says that Tariq took him to meet the DSP of Humhuma Chowk,
Davinder Singh, who then introduced him to Mohammad.  Singh allegedly
instructed Afzal to take Mohammad to Delhi, find him accommodation and help
him out generally. 

Afzal admits doing this and accompanying Mohammad to purchase the
Ambassador, which was later used in the attack.  According to Afzal, his
role began and ended with these specific acts done at the behest of Tariq
Ahmad and Davinder Singh, and yet no one the investigating team, the
prosecution, the learned judges or the phalanx of eager reporters have
bothered with investigating this further.  Where is Tariq Ahmad?  Is there
any truth to the Davinder Singh link?  Does none of this merit
investigation?

For those who may be tempted to dismiss this story, Afzal begs us to
investigate the call records to his cell phone and to Mohammad¹s from
Srinagar. He claims that there were many calls to both these numbers from
DSP Davinder Singh.  This is easily verifiable and yet, has not been
investigated.  Curiously, although the apex court alludes to the terrorist
Mohammad making and receiving other phone calls from Dubai and Bombay, no
one has thought it fit to scrutinize these telephone numbers.  Why was the
entire focus of the investigation been limited to Afzal, Shaukat, Geelani
and Afsan Guru and the ambit of investigations not enlarged?

The role of the police is also suspect because of their claims and
counterclaims.  The Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi Police both announced that
Mohammad was Sunny Ahmad Qazi, the very same Burger,¹ the hijacker of
IC814.  On investigation the CBI found this to be untrue.  If this were so,
why has the CBI not probed into the other claims made by the same agencies?
On Dec.19, the Thane Police Commissioner, S.M. Shangari, made a startling
announcement.  He said the Mohammad killed in the Parliament attack was the
same Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammad of the Lashkar e-Toiba whom he had
arrested in Mumbra (a Bombay suburb) on Nov.23, 2000 and handed over to the
J&K Police on Dec. 8, 2000.

The Commissioner was well acquainted with the terrorist and described
Mohammad in detail, giving his address in Pakistan, and even narrating how
he fought the police in hand to hand combat after he was grievously injured.
And yet, the following day, IGP Rajendran of Kashmir Range, rubbished the
claim as ³totally false.²  He was backed by DCP Ashok Chand of Delhi Police
who issued a completely misleading press statement, ³the terrorist named
Hamza killed in Delhi on Dec.13th was definitely different from the one
Thane police claim to have arrested last year.²  Thereafter we hear nothing
further on this.  Who was lying and why?  If the Parliament attack Mohammad
was different from the one captured in Thane, what happened to the Thane
Mohammad, why was he not produced?  Why wasn¹t anyone even remotely
interested in cross checking this claim?

And how hard did the investigators try to catch the alleged masterminds,
Masood Azhar, Ghazi Baba and Tariq Ahmad?  The Delhi Police claims that the
Srinagar Police arrested Afzal and Shaukat when they were going to meet
Ghazi Baba with Mohammad¹s laptop and Rs.10 Lakhs in cash.  In which case
why were they nabbed before, and not followed to the rendezvous with Ghazi
Baba? Why did the Srinagar Police not want to catch the suspected mastermind
when they had specific information, allegedly from Afsan Guru, Shaukat¹s
wife, about this meeting?

On April 3, 2002, Judge S.N. Dhingra asked the Delhi Police whether the
Interpol had been alerted for the arrest of the three masterminds, to which
a senior police officer replied that the ³matter was being look into.²
Thereafter, we hear nothing more about Interpol or any further activity to
apprehend the masterminds.  And apart from a few members of civil society no
one not the judges, the many security experts, the investigating agencies,
the Indian intelligence agencies, Members of Parliament, journalists
thought it fit to demand a probe. In 2003, nearly two years after the
Parliament attack, Ghazi Baba was killed by the BSF in a routine operation
in Srinagar.  One can only assume that this was done without the knowledge
and coordination of the team investigating the Parliament attack, or more
care would have been taken, perhaps, to capture him alive, bring him to
trial, and get to the truth of the conspiracy.

If I were the mastermind, would hanging Afzal deter me from planning further
attacks, or would it only confirm my suspicions that India is content to
leave me untouched as long as they get somebody to hang? The Supreme Court
observed, ³The challenge to the unity, integrity and sovereignty of India by
these acts of terrorists can only be compensated by giving the maximum
punishment to the person who is proved to be the conspirator in this act²
I beg to differ.  Afzal is the reddest herring that has appeared before the
Indian republic in a long time, and the challenge to this country¹s ³unity,
integrity and sovereignty² would be far better met by conducting a thorough
and professional probe into the Parliament attack instead of hanging a man
who is so clearly the scapegoat in the whole sordid affair.