A View Point
Ghazala Wahab
Officially, Afzal Guru was hanged on February 9. But he died long ago. Nearly two decades before his body was hanged inside Delhi’s Tihar jail.
One senior Indian Army officer posted in Srinagar had told me a few years ago that the lifespan of an average militant/terrorist is only a year or less from the time he decides to take up the gun.
“Either he is killed while ex-filtrating or infiltrating. If he survives both, he is killed a few months after infiltrating,” he had said.
By this reckoning, Afzal was a dead man in the early Nineties when he crossed the Line of Control. By surrendering to the Border Security Force in 1993-94, he tried to cheat death and those who wanted him covered in a martyr’s shroud.
He didn’t know then, that none of these take kindly to cheating. All his efforts to resume an uneventful life were stonewalled by a State that operates on neatly laid out white and black lines of nationalism and anti-nationalism; even though the instruments of State frequently walk in the murky zones of opportunism, self-interest and greed between these lines.
Once he was labelled black, he simply couldn’t wash the stain off his hands. He could have been smarter, and settled for grey. Perhaps, he could have cheated death after all. But he was foolish and wanted to turn white. Who could have allowed that either in the state of Jammu and Kashmir or India, where perception is passed off as truth and popular opinion for justice.
Despite the uncertainties about Guru’s case, nobody can deny that Afzal did not get a fair trial. Perhaps, there wasn’t much really that the judiciary could have done in his case, especially in the early phase of the trial when the jingoistic public opinion was manufactured. Those were the times when, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was hard-selling the idea of ‘zero-tolerance’ for terrorism and creating a society of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.
In that atmosphere, it was too much to expect the judges to really care about ensuring a fair trial to a renegade Kashmiri ‘terrorist’. If the US could invade another country to avenge 9/11 attacks, the least India could do was hang one man, who in any case would have died! Afzal was extremely dispensable.
Interests Above All
The STF and the JKP officers who probably trapped Afzal were as pragmatic as the Separatist politicians and to some extent the people of Kashmir are. They look at both the big and the small pictures. For the police, Afzal was nobody; for the Separatists, he was a prospective hero; for his extended family, he was a person more profitable dead than alive.
Probably, Afzal was conscious of his absolute dispensability. Even in his mercy petition to President APJ Abdul Kalam he wrote that he has no hope of survival and that he has written the petition primarily for the sake of his mother, wife and son – the three people who had sought (and got) an audience with Kalam, and who saw Afzal as a person who must be given a chance to change his destiny.
Afzal had tried very hard to resume his normal life as a fruit-seller, but was constantly thwarted by the STF and other security forces. When his wife and mother sought to do the same, they were thwarted by Afzal’s own extended family comprising his brothers and cousins, who saw in him a martyr trying to cheat his fate.
Even the Separatists in Kashmir realised that Afzal can be converted into a heroic martyr. While Afzal and his wife could not afford a lawyer, nothing stopped the Separatists from hiring a lawyer to save an innocent Kashmiri. But then Afzal may have lived at the cost of a martyr. And in Kashmir, that would have been sacrilege. Nearly 24 years of brutalisation, fear and suspicion has ripped the Kashmiri soul to such as extent that it can longer distinguish between larger humanity and personal opportunity.
World of Terror
As a child, one of my recurring nightmares was going out of my home and then not being able to find my way back. As the Afzal Guru saga unfolded over the decade, I was reminded of my nightmare. Imagine a world where you take one wrong turn, and can never ever return home. To family. Security. Normalcy.
Afzal may yet attain immortality, and in that sense redemption, but so many unknown young lives are constantly being snuffed out in places as diverse as Kashmir, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Manipur and so on, simply because they took one wrong turn in their lives. And sometimes not even that. Sometimes, they have just been on the wrong side of the nationalistic debate. And sometimes, even worse: Sometimes they were simply dispensable; or valuable to certain police or military officers, in death; who could then claim gallantry awards or commendations on their dead bodies.
It is convenient to blame rogue men in uniform for their greed or dishonesty; but it is not right. Senior officers often explain away such acts as aberrations or argue that the offenders are products of our times and society. They are right. Indeed, our times and society has been instrumental in creating such monstrosities. After all, what does it say about our moral compass or our ‘collective conscience’ that we can pour out on the streets in thousands to protest against corruption but don’t even squeak on issues of human rights violations?
Shouldn’t national security be a sum total of individual security? Can a nation of insecure, frightened people, convinced that they will never get justice, ever be secure? Can we be secure as a nation, if an average Kashmiri or a Chhattisgarhi tribal continues to feel insecure? Or is reduced to the status of half-human, to whom the human courtesies of politeness, respect and honour need not be extended? When the State claims to go tough on terror, I go weak in my knees. I don’t want my security to be built on the carcasses of mislead, misunderstood or unheard of people.
(The views of the author are personal)
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