Introspecting Aloud

The correct and relevant context within the Supreme Court judgement on Afzal Guru's death sentence

For a long time, I have been reading articles from various sources (and not just Arundhati Roy's) about how Afzal Guru's death sentence given by Supreme Court of India was a gross miscarriage of justice. This newspaper article is an example,

Defending Afzal Guru, Arundhati Roy said that the Supreme Court’s ruling which says that Afzal Guru must be hanged ‘to satisfy the collective will of the nation’ although there is no proof of his involvement is in itself unconstitutional.

Being a person who has always been against capital punishment, I fell an easy prey to the argument made by these people. Obviously, when you read that statement, you would agree that it does smell like something really wrong has happened.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The supreme court judgement is here.

And here is the relevant context, which gives the correct context to the text Arundhati is quoting. But with the proper context you will see that she has been very "convenient" while choosing the excerpt. The Supreme Court, as always, had done an awesome job, to my untrained eyes.

The conspiracy to commit the offence of murder in the course of execution of conspiracy is well within the scope of conspiracy to which the accused Afzal was a party. Therefore, he is liable to be punished under Section 120B read with Section 302 IPC. The punishment applicable is the one prescribed under Section 109 IPC in view of the phraseology of Section 120B "be punished in the same manner as if he had abetted such offence". Section 109 IPC lays down that "if the act abetted is committed in consequence of the abetment, and no express provision is made by this Code for the punishment of such abetment, a person abetting the offence shall be punished with the punishment provided for the offence." Thus the conspirator, even though he may not have indulged in the actual criminal operations to execute the conspiracy, becomes liable for the punishment prescribed under Section 302 IPC. Either death sentence or imprisonment for life is the punishment prescribed under Section 302 IPC.

In the instant case, there can be no doubt that the most appropriate punishment is death sentence. That is what has been awarded by the trial Court and the High Court. The present case, which has no parallel in the history of Indian Republic, presents us in crystal clear terms, a spectacle of rarest of rare cases. The very idea of attacking and overpowering a sovereign democratic institution by using powerful arms and explosives and imperiling the safety of a multitude of peoples' representatives, constitutional functionaries and officials of Government of India and engaging into a combat with security forces is a terrorist act of gravest severity. It is a classic example of rarest of rare cases.

The gravity of the crime conceived by the conspirators with the potential of causing enormous casualties and dislocating the functioning of the Government as well as disrupting normal life of the people of India is some thing which cannot be described in words. The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender. The challenge to the unity, integrity and sovereignty of India by these acts of terrorists and conspirators, can only be compensated by giving the maximum punishment to the person who is proved to be the conspirator in this treacherous act. The appellant, who is a surrendered militant and who was bent upon repeating the acts of treason against the nation, is a menace to the society and his life should become extinct. Accordingly, we uphold the death sentence.

After a reading of the judgement, some points are very clear to me:

1. There were several very strong circumstancial evidence of a close link between the dead terrorists and Afzal. Here is one of them from the judgement:
   

   The picture that emerges is this: The fact that an instrument used by Afzal (with the phone number 9811489429) till 12.12.2001 was recovered from one of the deceased terrorists on the date of incident, reveals that Afzal would have necessarily met the deceased terrorist between the afternoon of 12th December and the morning of 13th December.

2. The police did a horrific job of investigation. Being under terrible work pressure is no excuse for causing a person's miscarriage of justice where the punishment is death. It is evident that police had some facts, but didn't spend enough effort connecting all of them. To make shortcuts, they violated procedures as pointed out by the court. They probably also coerced or forged confessions. Most of the problems people have with this judgement was the shoddy investigative work that the courts had to rely upon.
3. Afzal Guru had quite some problem getting good representation. However, I do see Ram Jethmalani having given a good defense to the defendants. A country which claims to be a fair democratic country should always see that the most rotten of defendants get the right support to defend themselves. This is because there is a tremendous amount of pressure and prejudice against the defendants already before the trial starts. To have even a sense of fair play, the defense should be such which can take on such an unfair environment. I salute Ram Jethmalani for always having done this for the country. Very few people of his kind exist in this country.
4. If one has an issue about why Afzal is being given the same punishment as the people who actually committed the crime, please read the judgement. The relevant part is in the excerpt above. This is the law in this country. The court just followed it.

But at the end of the day, my faith in our judiciary is restored. I don't see a miscarriage of justice from what I have read.

Now whether capital punishment is a good thing or not, is a different issue. I made my stand clear at the beginning of this post, and I don't want to mix issues in this post.

The age of celebrity terrorism?

The media and the blogosphere is filled with anger and vitriol. Perhaps, we Indians are too close to the scene of tragedy and are mostly incapable of seeing the large ramifications of what just happened in Mumbai. In this volatile time, perhaps some of the best analysis of the situation can be depicted by observers who are sufficiently detached from the incident and are therefore not as affected with the emotions running in this country. BBC has this brilliant analysis by Paul Cornish, who theorises about whether this is a new chapter of terrorism - "the age of celebrity terrorism".

Quite apart from the scores murdered and the hundreds injured, what the Mumbai terrorists really wanted was an exaggerated - and preferably extreme - reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion. In these terms, the attackers received as much attention as they could possibly have hoped for, and the Mumbai outrage can only be described as a very significant terrorist success.

Nothing too new there. The media frenzy about blame game, the war mongering by sections of the society. We all are reacting very predictably. But wait, here is the part of the article which is interesting.

The character of modern terrorism is widely understood to have been shaped by a mid-19th-Century idea known as the "propaganda of the deed" - a strategy for political change in which the message or cause is contained within, and expressed by the violent act. In a novel twist, the Mumbai terrorists might have embarked on propaganda of the deed without the propaganda, in the confident expectation that the rationalisation for the attack - the narrative - would be provided by politicians, the media and terrorism analysts. If so, then Mumbai could represent something rather different in the history of terrorism, and possibly something far more disturbing even than global jihad. Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie. These individuals indulge in terrorism simply because they can, while their audience concocts a rationale on their behalf. Welcome to the age of celebrity terrorism.

Read the complete article for a more detailed explanation behind the theory. We still don't have all the details of this attack to prove any of this. The only details that we have are premature and contantly revised and denied press revelations by the administration. But even if a bit of the theory of the article is true, we are in for really disturbing times. And it is even more unsettling to know about this possibility and watch the media and the government take the country inexorably to where the terrorists want it to be.

Is anger the best response to Mumbai?

I am not sure whether this is because of the subliminal mass indoctrination done by certain sections of the political class of this country, but I seriously disagree with the notion that Mumbai happened because India is "soft on terror". If being "hard on terror" is like behaving like Israel or USA, then I am sorry, but we have the wrong role models. Wouldn't it be more correct to call India incompetent in handling terror? It might sound similar but there is a big difference in our approach to the problem if we look at it differently. After all most citizens are convinced that our political leadership is incompetent, the bureaucracy is incompetent, the police and intelligence is incompetent. Wouldn't a mass incompetency of our entire political-police setup of the country have the same result when faced with such acts of terrorism? Why turn incidents like the Mumbai attacks a juvenile question of virility? That doesn't sound like a mature country! Why not grow up and just demand better and principled administrators of this country from now on? Question yourself. Why do we have only three pathetic major political parties in India? One, the Congress, which has no idea what it stands for and just prefers to "go with the flow". Two, the BJP who would rather make the entire country go in flames to achieve their 80 year old thinly disguised agenda of turning India into a Hindu equivalent of Pakistan. And three, the BSP who shamelessly exploits the image of a great man(Ambedkar) and has a leader who acts like a medieval queen. Have you ever thought why we haven't had a single political leader since Nehru (that also in his early days), who we have unquestionably admired and respected? Anger is justifiably the first response to what happened in Mumbai. But decisions taken in anger has rarely ever provided the best response. Why am I not seeing a single discussion, whether in the media or in the web, where people have sat down calmly and thought "why did these terrorists do this? What was their agenda?" After all these terrorists are not murderous psychopaths who kill because they like to kill. These are highly ideologically motivated people, and their leadership always have an agenda for every act that they do. They practice a form of politics in which the instruments are not speeches, lies and horse-trading like our politicians. Rather their instruments are acts of terror. But their aims are similar to politicians - to achieve a political goal. Political and security idiots from around the country are dismissing the whole act as merely "an act of destabilizing the country". While that might be true, it seems to me a dangerous over-simplification. Dangerous, because it is making the rest of India to stop thinking. They think they have got their answer to "why" and then keep raising the familiar ruckus of blaming the political class. Over the next few days, we would probably see the real reason of this attack come out in the open. Some say that it is already coming out in the open. As reports emerge of Pakistan considering moving a large part of its troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border in anticipation of a belligerent Indian response like after our parliament attack, the consequent results should be clear. The LeT and other terrorist leadership which organized the Mumbai attack were getting a lot of  heat from the combined US-Pakistani operations in Afghanistan border recently. The Indo-Pak escalations will take this heat off and help them consolidate their grip in that region. This theory might be proven wrong with information that we get in the coming days and months, but if this is the real agenda, then by irrational response to the Mumbai attack, we would only prove ourselves to be mere puppets in the hand of terrorists. For those eager to put labels on our country, being such a puppet would be a much better reason to call ourselves a soft state. I still prefer the term incompetent state though, even though idiot might be a better choice if it had not been so inflammatory. :) So the call I would like to make out to my country men, is to first defeat the terrorist's agenda (the real one, not the one which the political idiots have been mouthing), and then go ahead to discuss how to fix the country so as to prevent it from being so vulnerable and so easily manipulated.

Time magazine on the attackers

Nice analysis by Time. About the background of the attackers:

What we should be certain of, though, is that the Mumbai attackers were combat trained. You do not sustain a military assault for three days, taking only combat naps, unless you know what you are doing. You have to have been shot at before. You cannot be intimidated by flash-bang grenades, or commandos fast-roping down the side of a building. And it is almost certain that the planners of the attack understood that the only way to get into India with the amount of weapons and explosives used in the attacks was by sea — the risk of smuggling them in over land was too great.

About lessons learnt from the attack:

There are two lessons we should be taking away from Mumbai. The first is that all large cities are vulnerable to attack. Even if it doubled the size of its police force, there is no way New York City could could ever protect its hotels, schools or other public buildings from attacks of this type, short of turning them into fortresses. There is no way for the NYPD to prevent a car bombing on Wall Street, sending the stock market into an even worse plunge, or a single suicide bomber from blowing himself up in the subway. Plans are available on the Internet for making bombs like these with ingredients available in hardware stores. The second reminder we should take from Mumbai is that the longer the wars go on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more combat-experienced men there will be available to planners of terror attacks. And we should count on the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan going global — there is no reason they could not blend into the waves of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean from Northern Africa to Europe every day.

Don't make the wrong resolutions

We will no longer remain passive. We should stand up against terrorism once and for all.

Enough is enough

I say no to getting used to terrorism.

Too many similar resolutions being made by people all around. And my take is that they are all the wrong ones. This incident of unimaginable proportions came about because of our acceptance of medicority everywhere in our country. We are ok with mediocre politicians, mediocre bureaucrats, mediocre sportspeople, mediocre (rather pathetic) standard of education, mediocre(rather pathetic) police and intelligence. The whole country is just a huge celebration of mediocrity. Questioning mediocrity on the other hand is considered the act of a traitor. If a person dies he is a martyr and automatically a hero (like this time). No matter if there is a possibility of incompetency which could have caused the death. Just mere questioning of the circumstances of death can get you lynched. That is the mediocre level of pitiful mediocre nationalism that things have come down to. Instead of terrorism, why can't we instead say no to "mediocrity"? Why can't we stop being passive about the sheer incompetency of the government in every sphere - not just terrorism which is but the flavor of the day? Why don't we ever say "enough is enough. I am tired of being passive about the pitiful state of roads and drainage every year"? Why don't we ever say "I am tired of parochialism and irrelevant issues raised by politicians". Why don't we get angry about the state of our education? Every years, lakhs pass out of schools and colleges, after having spent years studying in a terribly lacking system. But so few of them, resolve that "enough is enough. this is not how school/college should be. it can be better". Security/anti-terrorism measures don't exist in a vacuum. How can we demand excellence from our police and intelligence, when all around them mediocrity is what defines their environment. Whether it is mediocre politicians, mediocre bureaucrats or a  mediocre and unjust work environment. None of all these resolutions is going to make a difference to our internal security. If anything, ham handed security experts and politicians will only make life worse for all of us, and we ,being used to our pathetic existence at their hands will just accept our even more humiliating daily lives - the one which involves more symbolic security checks everywhere and effectively no additional increase in our security. It is clear what we really need to resolve. We should resolve that we should demand excellence from everybody out there - the police, the politician, the bureaucrat ... and even each others and oneself! It is only in such an environment where excellence is but a normal expectation, can our security forces be actually effective. Otherwise all these resolutions are a load of ...

Alarm bells about the Indian Army

(On Asian age, via Communalism Combat) Arrest of Lt. Col. is an alarm bell

Hindu extremists call themselves "nationalist" and extremists of other breeds "secessionist" and "anti-national". This is a grotesque inversion of democratic logic, especially in a country of such bewildering diversity as India. The message should be clear: if we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately. If incursion of the extreme tendencies among the majority community into the armed forces is not eradicated with a firm hand in the incipient stage, the prognosis can be unnerving. This is how the seizure of power by unconstitutional elements began in Pakistan and in most of the dictatorships in West Asia and elsewhere. All in the name of nationalism.

An analysis of the terrorism situation in Pakistan

Was curiously browsing around for some Pakistani views of the situation in their country. If you can ignore the rare India/RAW bashing(which even one of the commentors admitted was ridiculous) and a a pro-Musharraf stance, this article at a Pakistani website provides quite a detailed analysis of the history and the current security condition in Pakistan. The suicide anatomy I also saw an interesting attempt by a lawyer in Karachi to gather signatures for a "Say no to state religion" campaign, aiming to stop Pakistan from being a theocratic state. I hope he succeeds. Looking at the responses however, it seems unlikely. :)

Daily Herald on Hindu Suicide Squads

Via Communalism Watch. Unfortunately, this blog doesn't give the right context to the video, and even though it is somewhat relevant to the current state of affairs, the article was dated in 2003, just after the Gujarat riots. Daily Herald: Passage from India : The scars of Nationalism. Apart from a decent article on the nature of the Sangh Parivar, and it's presence in USA, the article has a video of a person, presumably from the Hindu suicide squad, passionately talking about why he feels the squad is needed. Do remember the context in 2003, his arguments and the apparent aim of the group is against Pakistan. A flier from the squad articulates the position of the group. However, the parallels of the situation in India today is scarily becoming parallel to the experience of Pakistan. At the beginning, benevolent rulers in Pakistan allowed groups like this to flourish because they thought it was okay as long as they target India. As history has shown, these groups in Pakistan became really big and powerful in time, and have now moved back and targeted Pakistan itself, aiming to establish their medieval interpretation of their religion on the country, like Taliban. Similarly, these Hindu groups were allowed to go ahead and flourish in 2003. Indoctrinated heavily, these are now coming back and biting our country with a greater agenda of their radical idea of Hinduism they call Hindutva. They have already shown their bomb making prowess. With indoctrinated suicide bombers like these, how long before we start getting blown up in the road to Hindu rashtra?

The Delhi encounter gets more confusing

Just wanted to get this blog rolling. :) The doubts presented in Outlook("No cover under fire") and Tehelka about the Delhi encounter, had almost convinced me that there was something seriously wrong with the official version. However, India Today's detailed interview of the people caught in this encounter shows a completely different side. I am totally confused now.