On February 9, 2013 at eight in the morning, the Indian
state executed Mohammed Afzal Guru for his involvement in an attack on the
parliament in 2002. The Indian police had him implicated within three days of the
attack. Based on only circumstantial evidence, with not a single eyewitness,
Mohammed Afzal was sentenced to death by a trial court. The Supreme Court, in
the words of the court itself, ‘to satisfy the collective conscience’, upheld
that sentence eventually. To put meaning into it would read that they decided to
put a human being to death without conclusive evidence to satiate the blood
lust of the Indian nation.
The basic tenet of any law states that a person can only be
convicted for any crime based on evidence beyond reasonable doubt. The evidence
in the case of Mohammed Afzal did certainly not meet those criteria of beyond
reasonable doubt. Mohammed Afzal did not at any stage have a proper legal
representation, which justices of the Supreme Court chose to ignore. Perhaps for those justices it is more
important to take cognizance of the press reports detailing who slipped on the
road to a pilgrimage than the proper representation of an innocent being
charged with a crime that could invoke death penalty.
Almost eight years after the Supreme Court upheld the death
sentence, Mohammed Afzal Guru was executed in the prison conveniently ignoring
all the proper conventions and decencies. By their own admittance, the
authorities allegedly informed his family only by a speed post; but the family
learnt about the execution only through news. The family has even been denied
to carry out last rites for the deceased executed by the Indian state to
satisfy collective conscience.
It couldn’t have got more appalling than to see people
actually celebrate the execution. Communalists and secularists, capitalists and
socialists were all seen to be jubilant. Only if they would care to know that
those are the symptoms of a fascist state in making. The police in Delhi outsourced
its duties to the thugs of saffron brigade and actually facilitated them in physically
beating those who tried to protest peacefully against the execution of Mohammed
Afzal by the Indian state.
And if Indians still think that one day Kashmiris can be won
over, the Indian state nailed the last nail in the coffin of that hope by cold
bloodedly executing Mohammed Afzal against all evidences. Should the Indian state or its people be
under the impression that people of Kashmir can be coerced into submission
through gross revulsive tactics, they better read history. All that happened in
the execution of Mohammed Afzal was that India sullied itself again.
