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.
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 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.
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