[Reader-list] Does Your Bomb-Proof Basement Have An Attached Toilet? An execution carried out to thundering war clouds

[Asit Das]

Does Your Bomb-Proof Basement Have An Attached Toilet?

An execution carried out to thundering war clouds

Arundhati Roy<http://www.outlookindia.com/peoplefnl.aspx?pid=4112&author=Arundhati+Roy>



What are the political consequences of the secret and sudden hanging of
Mohammed Afzal Guru, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament attack, going to
be? Does anybody know? The memo, in callous bureaucratese, with every name
insultingly misspelt, sent by the Superintendent of Central Jail No. 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 mailing of the memo was deliberately timed to get to Tabassum only
after the execution, denying her one last legal chanc­e—the right to
challenge the rejection of the mercy petition. Both Afzal *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 have been unseemly celebrations. The bereaved
wives of the people who were killed in the attack on Parliament were
displayed on TV, with M.S. Bitta, chairman of the All-India Anti-Terrorist
Front, and his ferocious moustaches 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? And that those who planned the
attack will never be brought to justice because we still don’t know who
they are.









India has displayed a touching belief in the testimony of a former chief of
the ISI, of which the mandate has been to destabilise India.









  Meanwhile, Kashmir is under curfew, once again. Its people have been
locked down like cattle in a pen, once again. They have defied curfew, once
again. Three people have already been killed in three days and fifteen 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. With good reason.

He went virtually unrepresented in the lower court during the most crucial
part of the trial. The court-appointed lawyer never visited him in prison,
and actually admitted incriminating evidence against his own client.  (The
Supreme Court deliberated on that matter and decided it was okay.) In
short, his guilt was by no means established beyond reasonable doubt. 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?


Afzal Guru family weren’t given the President’s reasons for rejecting his
mercy plea. (Photograph by Getty Images, From Outlook 25 February 2013)

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 Afzal 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 Afzal Guru in the way that it did, and looking at it
just politically, 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.









Kashmiri youth have seen Indian democracy at work now, and believe its
institutions have sent a man to the gallows without a fair trial.









  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 is 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 what is inadmissible in law become admissible in
war?

In its final judgement 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 Mohammed Afzal belonged
to any terrorist group or organisation”. So what justified that military
aggression, that loss of soldiers’ lives, that massive haemorrhaging 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 be
allowed to happen? And 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<http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-vanity-of-1312-truthtelling/article4400821.ece?homepage=true>
 the 2003 testimony of former ISI chief Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi, and the
2004 book by Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani scholar, holding the JeM
responsible for the Parliament attack. (It’s touching, this belief in the
veracity of the testimony of the chief of an organisation whose mandate it
is to destabilise India.) 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, and
six different Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE, in the
1980s.)









A few days back, Pakistan test-fired a nuclear missile of short range, for
use on the battlefield. And Kashmir police published N-survival tips.









  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 war-like
climate in which military spending remains on an upward graph. 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
war-mongers 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 takeoff. 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 parties, each
with a mass murder of thousands of people belonging to minority communities
under their belts.) The CPI(M) 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 Punjab and
put the Akali Dal 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, that has taken a
battering. Again and again, whether it’s corruption, rising prices, or rape
and the rising violence against women, the new middle class is at the
barricades. They can be water-cannoned or lathicharged, but can’t be shot
or impriso­ned in their thousands, in the way the poor can, 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 & 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
its timing, is deliberate. It has brought politics and anger back onto
Kashmir’s streets.









The idea of ‘hot pursuit’ is stupid, pathetic. What would we bomb? Some
individuals? Their barracks? Or their ideology?









  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 Mufti Bashiruddin, the so-called Grand Mufti of
Kashmir (a completely phantom post)—who has made most abominable hate
speeches and issued fatwa after fatwa, intended to present Kashmir as a
demonic, monolithic, Wahabi society—is actually a government-anointed
cleric? Kids on Facebook will be arrested, 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 is what created Osama bin
Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It has decimated Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What sort of incubus will this unleash?

The trouble is that the old political football may not be all that easy to
control any more. And it’s radioactive. Maybe it is not a coincidence that
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 already have been blown down. Perhaps
we should all jump out of our soon-to-be-tumbling vehicles.