on the spot
Tavleen Singh
The first person who called me on the morning that they hanged Afzal Guru said, ‘Do you know why they’ve done this now? Its because of that speech Narendra Modi made in the University.’ It was early on a beautiful winter morning in Delhi and I had not yet got around to doing more than languidly sipping my first cup of tea so I was not sure what ‘this’ was. When my friend explained that what he was trying to tell me was that Guru had been hanged in Tihar Jail in the early hours of that day I asked why he thought this had anything to do with Modi’s speech a couple of days earlier. He said that he believed that Modi’s speech had been so well received, not just by the students he addressed but generally, that it had made the Congress Party and the Government very nervous so they decided that it was a good time for a hanging. And, why not Guru whose head the BJP has been hysterically demanding for so long.
When I put on my television and began the process of switching between news channels I discovered that my friend was not the only one who believed that the timing of the hanging was suspect. Many analysts who spoke on those endless panels of ‘experts’ appeared to feel the same way. Others objected to the hanging on the grounds that it was time that the death penalty was abolished altogether. Personally, I have no problem with capital punishment and would have no qualms about physically executing the men responsible for the gang rape and murder of Nirbhaya. But, I think it is wrong to keep a man on death row as long as Guru was kept waiting to die. There are other questions that inevitably arise because the hanging of the diminutive Kashmiri, found guilty of assisting Pakistani terrorists in their attack on Parliament house, was handled with such stealth and needless secrecy . Why was he made to wait nearly ten years on death row? Why was his family not given a chance to have a last meeting with him? Why was the media kept in the dark? Was his death sentence not commuted for political reasons? Why was he hanged now at this particular moment in history? Why was this week an appropriate time?
From an interview that the Home Minister of State, R.P.N. Singh gave Karan Thapar I gathered that they had waited all these years for the situation in the Kashmir valley to improve before carrying out the sentence. Karan reminded the Minister that Farooq Abdullah had warned that the Kashmir Valley would burn if Afzal Guru was hanged and the Minister said that in 2006 it may well have but the situation on the ground had changed since then. This leads to another obvious question which is that if the situation has improved so much why did the valley need to be put under total curfew and under a news and Internet blackout for several days after the hanging?
The truth is that although there have been fewer terrorist incidents in the Valley in recent years and less anger in the streets the situation is far from normal because nothing has been done in a serious way to bring about a lasting solution to India’s oldest political problem. The present Government has done even less than others contenting itself with pretending to act by setting up committees and sending up ‘interlocutors’. If these committees and interlocutors gave valuable suggestions on what should be done to bring real peace in Kashmir then the government has kept them secret possibly because in the past two years there has been a fragile kind of normality. Someone who went up to Gulmarg two weeks ago came back with reports of hotels filled with tourists and filmmakers from Bollywood. He said new hotels had come up and there was a general sense that two decades of violence were coming to an end. Reports of this must have reached the Prime Minister as well so although the Home Ministry, especially under P. Chidambaram, has gone to considerable lengths to strengthen our defenses against jihadi terrorism almost nothing was done about Kashmir.
Now there are ominous signs of a revival of the insurgency with ‘moral support’ from Pakistan. This year began on a menacing note with the beheading of an Indian soldier on the Line of Control (LOC) in the first week of January. This caused enough tension between India and Pakistan for defense analysts to start speculating about a possible end to the ceasefire that has held for many years. It also led to speculation that the Pakistanis were back to their bad old habit of pushing insurgents across the border under cover of incidents of this kind.
What makes the likelihood of fresh trouble in Kashmir more certain is that almost every major Kashmiri political leader has spoken out against the hanging of Afzal Guru. It is an unfortunate truth that these worthies rarely find time to raise the ‘long term Kashmir problem’ except when tensions are high. And, with JKLF leader, Yasin Malik, caught on camera in the company of the repugnant Hafiz Saeed there can be no doubt that tensions are high. Saeed is the founder of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and a terrorist wanted not just in India but across the world so what was Malik doing in his company? When asked about this by television reporters he tried slithering out of a bad situation by saying that he was on a 24-hour hunger strike to protest Guru’s hanging and he could not stop Saeed from coming to lend support. It is not a good enough answer and it puts the Indian government in a very difficult spot because if Malik’s passport is canceled or if some other action is taken against him it will further exacerbate a bad situation.
What India is going to have to pay for is the criminal ineptitude of a government that no longer seems able to do anything right. It seems always to forget that in today’s information age it is always a bad idea for governments to act under covers of stealth and secrecy. In today’s age Governments are required to answer to the people for everything they do but this is not something that either Sonia Gandhi or Dr. Manmohan Singh have ever kept in mind.
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