The law allows it, and the court awards it

                                           Sukumaran C. V.

To
Ghalib, 
S/o Afsal Guru, 
Sopore, Jammu Kashmir.

                                           Afsal Guru's wife and son 
                                                                 
Dear boy,
Your father was hanged to death for abetting the attack on the temple of our democracy.  'The collective conscience' of the nation was outraged and it was impossible not to hang your father.
You and I are the citizens of the largest democracy in the world and we should be proud of that. I don’t forget the fact that you can’t be proud of our democracy as I am, because I live in the southern part of our country where it is easy to live enjoying all democratic rights (and neglecting all democratic duties) and you live under the jurisdiction of the AFSPA which doesn’t allow you any democratic rights. Like you, there are millions of Indian citizens who live in the areas under the AFSPA and are forced to believe that their country is the largest democracy in the world. And I know that you have to face another dreaded thing called STF (Special Task Force, the counter-insurgency wing of the police).
I don’t think that your father was guilty of any crime that is to be dealt with capital punishment. But I think genocide is a heinous crime and the perpetrators of which should be awarded capital punishment. We have seen genocide or pogrom in our country and bone-chilling cruelties have been committed in the name of religion. People were torched alive, charred to death and hacked to death. Pregnant women were raped, their wombs ripped apart and the foetus tossed to the fire.
But neither the people who perpetrated the horrible crimes nor those who abetted them have been punished, because the collective conscience of the nation was not outraged and therefore the law was not allowed to punish the culprits and the court did not award any punishment. And the victims are forced to believe that they live in the largest democracy in the world.
Nearly ten years before the Parliament attack for which your father was hanged to death, a 400 years old mosque was vandalized in our country and the law was not allowed to punish the culprits and the courts didn’t punish them, because, as usual, the collective conscience of the nation was not outraged.
And in the aftermath of the mosque demolition, in Mumbai, our country’s economic capital, innocent people were hunted down in the name of religion. Rape, arson and murder were committed in large scale. The police, who are supposed to prevent the anti-social elements from committing atrocities against the innocent, let the hooligans slaughter both the innocent and our democracy and many of the police personnel were, as the Srikrishna Commission report points out, ‘found actively participating in riots, communal incidents of looting, arson and so on.’ But as the collective conscience of the nation was not outraged, the law was not allowed to punish the culprits and the courts didn’t punish them. And the victims are asked to believe that they live in the largest democracy in the world.

The Srikrishna Commission report records a large number of gruesome incidents occurred in Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993. One of such incidents—“On 12th January 1993, a Hindu mob surrounds, strips and assaults two Muslim women. The older woman manages to run away. The uncle of the younger woman, who comes to rescue the young girl of 19, and that girl are beaten and burnt alive by the violent mob. The names of the miscreants are disclosed to the police by a Hindu lady in the locality. Though the miscreants were arrested and tried, they were all acquitted.” (Srikrishna Commission report, Volume I, Chapter II, 1.15) And we live in the largest democracy in the world.
Let me quote one more incident: “Between 1100 to 1130 hours on 10 January 1993, after having arrived at Pathan Chawl, the police forcibly entered the premises of the Muslims and started picking them up. They entered the residence of one Hasamaniya Wagale, terrorized his wife and daughter at the point of rifle, picked up his 16-year-old son, Shahnawaz, and dragged him out, all the while kicking him and assaulting him with rifle butts. Wagale’s daughter, Yasmin Hasan Wagale, saw Shahnawaz being taken towards police vehicle, when one of the constables shot him from behind at point blank range…..Despite overwhelming evidence which, in the opinion of the Commission, clearly indicts the police for cold-blooded murder, the Deputy Commissioner of Police has adroitly white-washed the affair.” (Srikrishna Commission report, Volume II, Chapter I, 5.58)
And your father has been hanged to death even if there was no direct evidence which clearly indicts him for the Parliament attack! But, you see, the collective conscience of the nation was outraged, and that is more than enough reason the largest democracy needed to hang your father. But, believe it, ours is certainly the largest democracy in the world.

Dear Ghalib, I know how irksome it would be to live under the AFSPA, even if I have never had the misfortune to live under it. I know that as far as the people of North East and Kashmir and the tribals of Central India (Dhandakaranya) are concerned, ‘the largest democracy’ means nothing but State-sponsored terrorism or atrocities. And yet let’s believe in our democracy.
Our democracy is certainly a flawed one but still it is democracy. Let’s try to make it flawless and perfect. When you grow up, certainly you will hate the Indian State and our flawed democracy which deprived you of your father, but let that hatred lead you to shun terrorism, because, as long as terrorism exists, our democracy will have excuses to remain as the flawed one as it is. Let’s, the people of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, work together to get rid our nation of both varieties of terrorism—State terrorism and religious terrorism of all hues.

Jingoism rules in the name of democracy

                               Sukumaran C. V.
 
One of our fellow citizens, Afsal Guru, was hanged to death on the basis of flimsy (fabricated) evidence which falls apart if scrutinized even by an individual with average intelligence. There was no solid evidence to incriminate him in the 2001 Parliament attack. The Supreme Court itself admitted that the evidence against Afsal Guru was not direct and yet he was sentenced (and hanged) to death to satisfy ‘the collective conscience of the society’. As the conscience of everybody of us is included in the collective conscience of the society, we have to penetrate the case which, unlike the Mumbai terror attack, seems to be imposed on the collective conscience of the nation.

Thirteen insightful questions in relation to the Parliament attack are asked by the most penetrating writer in our country, Arundhati Roy, in her essay ‘Breaking the News’. Let’s look at two of the 13 questions. “Question 3: The entire attack was recorded live on closed circuit TV. …The chief whip of the Congress Party, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, said, ‘I counted six men getting out of the car. But only five were killed. The CCTV camera recording clearly showed the six men.’ If Dasmunshi was right, why did the police say that there were only five people in the car? Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recordings not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why was it not released for public viewing?
Question 13: Why is that we still don’t know who the five dead ‘terrorists’ killed in the Parliament attack are?” 

Ms. Roy says that ‘these questions, examined cumulatively, point to ...  Complicity, Collusion, Involvement…Governments and their intelligence agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies like this to further their own ends.’ 

And the terrible news of the hanging of Afsal Guru reminded me of the strategies the most ‘powerful’ Government in the world and its intelligence agencies used in the Rosenberg case. Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel Rosenberg, two U.S. citizens, were charged with espionage in 1950. The prosecution case was that the Rosenbergs passed valuable information on the making of the atomic bomb to the Russians. David Greenglass, the key witness, was a machinist at the Manhattan Project laboratory in 1944-45 when the bomb was being made there and he testified that Julius Rosenberg had asked him to get information for the Russians and he had made sketches (‘of experiments with lenses to be used to detonate atomic bombs’) from memory. 

The prosecution presented Harry Gold as the person (witness) to whom Greenglass gave the sketches, as directed by Rosenberg, supposed to be passed to the Russians.  The people’s historian Howard Zinn asks: “How reliable a memorizer of atomic information was David Greenglass, an ordinary-level machinist, not a scientist, who had taken six courses at Brooklyn Polytechnical Institute and flunked five of them?” 
And ‘it turned out that Harry Gold had been prepared for the Rosenberg case by four hundred hours of interviews with the FBI. It also turned out that Gold was a frequent and highly imaginative liar.’

The Rosenbergs were sentenced ‘to die in the electric chair’. It was revealed later that the CJ of the U. S. Supreme Court Fred Vinson assured the Attorney General that if any SC judge stayed the execution, he would override it by calling a full court session. And at the last moment, stay was granted by Justice William O. Douglas, but the CJ ‘sent out special jets to bring the vacationing justices back to Washington from various parts of the country’ and canceled the stay.

 

                                                The Rosenbergs
The Rosenbergs were electrocuted on June 19, 1953. The husband died with the very first shock, but even after the normal three shocks, the heart of Ethel was throbbing and the heart needed two more shocks to stop throbbing. That was done by the ‘perfect’ democracy in the world! A democracy which speaks of ‘certain unalienable Rights’, (of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness). By a democracy which says that Governments are instituted among men to secure these rights. By the country that always boasts of its tradition of free speech and fair trial. And we have seen how ‘fair’ the trial of the Rosenbergs had been!

And the largest democracy in the world also uses identical strategies and fabricates evidence to satisfy the ‘collective conscience’ of the nation, to satisfy the religious jingoism, to appease pseudo nationalism and thus to detract people’s attention from the real issues that torment the nation. 

Afsal Guru has been sacrificed at the altar of religious and sectarian jingoism. And we should not allow ourselves to be part of the collective conscience of the nation, as it is hijacked by all kinds of chauvinistic elements. We have to free the collective conscience of the nation from the grip of the exclusive and sectarian nationalism (of both the fanatical Muslim and Hindu outfits) which is draped in bigotry and fragments the nation.

Flowers that torment the Mahatma

                                            Sukumaran C. V.

And then Gandhi came. … He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths;… He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition. Get off the backs of these peasants and workers, he told us, all you who live by their exploitation; get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery.—Jawaharlal Nehru (The Discovery of India)


“Everybody agreed to follow the ways of Mahatma Gandhi. But one man didn’t give up his old habit…he went mad…when he offered Rs. 5 in the name of Mahatmaji he quieted down.”
“…a sadhu came to Godhbal village and began puffing at his gunja pipe. People tried to reason with him, but he started abusing Mahatmaji. In the morning his entire body was seen covered with shit.”
“The water of a well in Bikramajit Bazar had very foul smell. Two mahajans took a manauti of the Mahatmaji. By morning the water had become pure.”

All the three anecdotes are quoted from Shahid Amin's paper ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2’ (Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajith Guha)

Gandhi was seen by the peasants as a deity or mahatma who performs miracles on behalf of them and for them. Stories as the above quoted ones gave them strength. All over India, especially in the North, the peasantry followed Gandhi because he was against reforming their age-old means of production and introducing that of ‘modern civilization’. As far as Gandhi is concerned, machinery, the chief symbol of modern civilization, represents a great sin (See Gandhi's Hind Swaraj or the Indian Home Rule).

He wanted India to do what the country had done before the machine-made articles and the machinery were introduced. His vision of development was sustainable. But if we look at his idea of development through the Marxist or capitalist paradigm, certainly it will look like an absurd and quixotic notion, which was/is bound to be a failure. But  look at the problem through the necessities and demands of the National Movement and from the angle of sustainable development (a term that is unheard at that time), then, we can see that the very base and foundation which made Gandhi a mass leader and the Mahatma is his negation of modernity and everything associated with it—the railways, the lawyers, the doctors, the machinery etc. (Chapters 9, 11, 12 and 19 of Hind Swaraj).
Therefore, unlike any other Indian leader, he could talk a language that the illiterate mass and the peasantry could understand. He approached them not to reform them, not to tell them their ways of living and their means of production are inferior to that of the West. He wanted to tell his people that the western ‘civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ (Hind Swaraj). How prophetic the Mahatma was!!

The sustainable economy of Gandhi which is anti-western and anti-machinery can be interpreted as the genuine concern of a leader to the welfare of millions and millions of the poor in his country. And this is the factor that enabled Gandhi to bring the vast majority of the people into the whirlpool of the freedom struggle. India’s tragedy is that the sustainable vision of development was also assassinated with Gandhi on January 30, 1948.

                                 The light has gone out of our lives...

Actually, the bigot Nathuram Vinayak Godse had done a good deed for the Indian elites. What they wanted was to usurp the power to exploit the resources of the vast country from the hands of the British and to continue the exploitation. Gandhi and his sustainable vision of development would have certainly come across their way of ‘development’ as an insurmountable hurdle, had he been alive.

Nehru tells us that Gandhi told them to ‘get off the backs of these peasants and workers’ and to ‘get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery’. But did our politicians in independent India get off the backs of the peasants? Did they get rid of the system that produces poverty and misery?

In his opening remarks at the interaction with newspaper editors (on June 29, 2011) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that ‘we must not bring back the licence permit raj which we sought to abolish in 1991. …our nation has prospered as a result of that. If you look at the list of top 100 firms today you will find a sea change in that list today. New entrepreneurs have come into the list. These are some of the gains of liberalization which we must cherish, we must nurse and we must develop.’

And look at the real gains of liberalization of which P. Sainath speaks: “…over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide.” (Of luxury cars and lowly tractors, The Hindu, Dec. 28, 2010)

Our neo-liberal rulers ask us to look at the list of the top 100 firms and not to look at the millions of farmers who kill themselves. And these people pay floral tribute to the Mahatma at the Rajghat on the day of his martyrdom. Won't that flowers torment the Mahatma?

                                         'The light has gone out of our lives...'
                               Nehru adresses the nation on January 30, 1948