Click to play videoHe is perhaps one of the most debated persons in present day India.
As Mohammad Afzal Guru – accused for plotting the daring attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001 – awaits President A P J Abdul Kalam’s word on his clemency plea, the debate on his death sentence rages on.
On Tuesday – a day before the fifth anniversary of the attack – some of country’s renowned journalists, activists and writers - led by Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy - came together to release a book that raises 13 “damning” questions about the attack they claim have remained unanswered till date.
The book - 13 December - A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament - has the lead essay written by Arundhati Roy, considered a champion of a range of democratic causes.
But is Afzal simply an intra-elite debate among India’s Left liberals or do they actually have a public constituency outside the seminar halls of Delhi and Mumbai?
More specifically, has Afzal become a rallying point for India’s Left-liberal intellectuals?
That was the big topic of debate on CNN-IBN show India 360 with Sagarika Ghose.
On the guest panel were columnist from The Pioneer Sandhya Jain and columnist of The Dawn and also a contributor to the book Jawed Naqvi.
Sagarika Ghose: Jawed Naqvi you are one of the many eminent writers, journalists and activists who have contributed to the book and you have made a persuasive case of state terror that’s existent in Kashmir. But books written in English within India do tend to address an elite audience. So what role are you seeking to play with this book?
Jawed Naqvi: I agree with you that books written in English seek to address a very elite audience, and it is our hope that Penguin’s (the publisher), who have started a Hindi and an Urdu print too, will be interested in translating these collection of essays and making it more widely available. But really, the book is a bouquet of articles that are not just about Afzal or his death sentence. If you read Arundhati’s main piece, the punchline is a critique of the media and the role that it played in bringing Afzal to his current pass. And it’s no small role. As Arundhati says it’s a very corrosive role and if you go back a couple of weeks, your channel carried an interview with an STF officer who brazenly said that he had been a party to the torture of Afzal in Srinagar. And anywhere else we should have expected the media to follow up on why this man got away with torture. I mean, it’s bad enough that India is not a signatory to the conventions on torture.
Sagarika Ghose: That, of course, are the conventions that a journalist follows. We believe that we are looking at both sides of the picture. In a war zone perhaps, there are no angels and demons and all are equally compromised.
Jawed Naqvi: But we are talking here about journalists who are not compromised. I mean, I don’t think that CNN-IBN is a compromised channel, and therefore I would think that once this officer was shown saying that he had tortured Afzal, there would be some kind of a follow up.
Sagarika Ghose: So are you addressing the media primarily or are you seeking to address a mass constituency?
Jawed Naqvi: I think we are talking g about a constituency of our readers and TV watchers whom we want to educate about really what’s going on within the media fraternity and how we are ourselves responsible to a large extent in bringing Afzal to his current pass.
THE CASE AGAINST AFZAL |
 Charges against Afzal include murder, criminal conspiracy and waging war against country. That, coupled with conclusive evidence from phone taps made Afzal's case fall under 'rarest of rare' crime. He has also been accused of sheltering and managing logistics for Jaish commander Ghazi Baba, and the five attackers. |
| Afzal's accomplices in crime were Delhi University lecturer SAR Geelani, Shaukat Guru and his wife Afsan. Afzal, Geelani, Guru were accused of having a hand in planning the strike, Afsan was accused of concealing conspiracy. |
| Geelani, Afzal and Shaukat sentenced to death by POTA court on Dec 18, 2002. The High Court in Oct 2003 upheld Afzal, Shaukat's death sentences while Geelani, Afsan Guru were acquitted. The court said proof against Geelani, based on phone taps, insufficient for conviction. |
| Supreme Court, however, upheld Afzal's death sentence, reduced Shaukat's sentence to 10 years RI. Geelani and Afsan's acquittals were upheld as SC agreed with HC that evidence against them was insufficient. |
| Afzal has not yet appealed for clemency, but lawyers are reported to have been considering. Rashtrapati Bhavan, too, says no mercy petition has been received. |
| Experts say court's permission needed to file mercy plea. If court says no, can move writ petition in HC/SC as last option. |
Sandhya Jain: I want to raise few points here. First is that the book is badly timed. They had taken a cue from Sanjay Dutt who has matured greatly in the last 13 years. He would have told them that when you seek clemency, you don’t also run a petition or a campaign the way this nationwide campaign is challenging the integrity of the Indian judiciary as a whole which will not go down well with the public. Secondly, it was again your channel that did an interview with Afzal’s brother who said clearly that Afzal was a member of Jaish-e-Mohammad. So he does have very clear terrorist links and this fact cannot be denied.
Sagarika Ghose: But let’s just widen the debate from Afzal. What we were trying to show in our reports was that Kashmir is a war zone and that in a war zone, everyone’s up for questioning. Afzal is, the STF is, the detective agencies are everybody is a soldier in that sense. But let’s leave Afzal aside and talk about Indian dissent. Do you think Arundhati Roy and other activists who have written the book illustrate a coming-of-age of Indian dissent?
Sandhya Jain: One of the names I saw on the cover of the book was Mr Noorani. You can’t get a better jurist than him. He could have defended Afzal, no one was questioning his liberty to do so that time If he felt that was all. But I don’t think it’s just about picking holes in the defence.
Sagarika Ghose: Do you think there’s a manufactured consent?
Sandhya Jain: There’s a manufactured dissent over here. The Left and the liberals you talk about are both political elitist groups who speak from an elitist constituency, they speak from above, call themselves vanguards and public-opinion moulders and what nots. Basically it’s meant to be an elitist affair and the constituency they talk about is not a public constituency as they have none. The constituency is targeted exclusively at the UPA Government as it is seen as a coalition government, a government of factions and a slightly weak government prone to pressure. That’s all that’s there to it.
Sagarika Ghose: Jawed Naqvi, there’s a criticism made of your group, the complexion of your group that it’s the same group of people who are anti Afzal’s death sentence, who are anti-Singur TATA plant, who are in the Narmada Bachao Aandolan. So is this a group of people who are increasingly becoming known for rent-a-call mentality?
Jawed Naqvi: I think I should object to that because I don’t know at least half-a-dozen people face-to-face and we don’t run a secret society or a group or a club. We are independent writers and some of these essays were written years ago, and some of them are very recent. And it is just that in the process of selection, Arundhati or whoever was editing it. Prof Nirmalanshu Mukherjee is a leading person in this case and he has written a book on this and these are very damning questions.
VOICES FOR AFZAL | |
| Demanding clemency for Guru, JKLF chief Yasin Malik, People's Conference leader Sajjad Lone, noted Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande, social activist Medha Patkar and writer Arundhati Roy joined hands to organise a protest in the Capital against the death sentence given to him. |
VOICES AGAINST AFZAL | |
| BJP has flayed all political leaders who are opposing the death penalty for Parliament attack convict Mohammad Afzal and said the recent remarks of former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah on the issue would send "wrong signal to terrorists". |
| Proceedings for contempt of court should be initiated against all leaders who were opposing death sentence for Afzal and demanding clemency for him, state BJP chief Avinash Rai Khanna told reporters here. |
| Besides, cases should also be registered against them for "supporting terrorists", he said. |
| On Abdullah's recent remarks expressing fear that hanging of Afzal could pose security threat to the judges who dealt with his case, Khanna said such a statement from a person like him would send "wrong signal to terrorist groups and anti-national forces." |
Sagarika Ghose: One of the criticisms made against the dissenters in India is that they are seeing things in binary opposition - in terms of black and white, good and bad, that there are no angels and demons here. Everyone is in the same kind of conflict zone. Now in this context, what are the out-of-the-box solutions you can offer? Isn’t it easier to make allegations and perhaps much difficult to actually advance solutions?
Jawed Naqvi: I think what we are trying to do here is – I haven’t read all the essays of the book, just a couple – raising questions. As journalists you would know better than anyone else. Your job is really not always to answer and provide solutions, but to ask pertinent questions. I think what Arundhati and others have done is in this case is to ask very pertinent questions.
Sagarika Ghose: The group of people who are the dissenters in India, the “vanguards” of democratic processes, on the one hand you can call it the coming-of-age of Indian dissent but on the other do you think they are influential?
Sandhya Jain: They have this scope for dissent or organising better defence during the course of the trial. And they did intervene with the high-profile lawyers for other people who were exonerated by the same judicial process. So to say that he (Afzal) didn’t get a fair trial is wring. Secondly, they have to understand that Indian people have come-of-age and that they want to respect institutions and the ones who stand for them when terrorist attacks take place. The first line of defence in such circumstances, in any country, is the police. Now if policemen are going to die in the widely-publicised attack on Parliament that’s covered live by many news channels and their families say they will return the awards if you exonerate him, you need to respect that sentiment. You have to respect the fact that people are upset that an institution like Parliament is attacked. You also have to recognise the contradictory thing that when Parliamentarians fall below standards, and people stand behind the judiciary when it pulls them up, they don’t want to stand by the Parliamentarians.
Sagarika Ghose: So how would you counter Jawed Naqvi’s arguments.
Sandhya Jain: See, Jawed’s arguments are totally misplaced and ill-timed and I can tell you a s a journalist that if decision on Afzal had been pardoned – before PM’s very controversial remark that Muslims should have the first claim on resources – they might have got away with it. Now it’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be seen openly as Muslim appeasement.
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