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Now
Five years ago this week, on December
13, 2001, the Indian parliament was in its winter session. The
government was under attack for yet another corruption scandal.
At 11.30 in the morning, five armed men in a white Ambassador
car fitted out with an improvised explosive device drove through
the gates of Parliament House. When they were challenged, they
jumped out of the car and opened fire. In the gun battle that
followed, all the attackers were killed. Eight security personnel
and a gardener were killed, too. The dead terrorists, the police
said, had enough explosives to blow up the parliament building,
and enough ammunition to take on a whole battalion of soldiers.
Unlike most terrorists, these five left behind a thick trail
of evidence--weapons, mobile phones, phone numbers, ID cards,
photographs, packets of dried fruit and even a love letter.
Not surprisingly, prime minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee seized the opportunity to compare the assault
to the September 11 attacks in the United States only three months
previously.
On December 14, 2001, the day
after the attack on parliament, the Special Cell (antiterrorist
squad) of the Delhi police claimed it had tracked down several
people suspected of being involved in the conspiracy. The next
day, it announced that it had "cracked the case": the
attack, the police said, was a joint operation carried out by
two Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Three Kashmiri men, Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani, Shaukat Hussain
Guru, and Mohammad Afzal, and Shaukat's wife, Afsan Guru, were
arrested.
In the tense days that followed,
parliament was adjourned. The Indian government declared that
Pakistan--America's closest ally in the "war on terror"--was
a terrorist state. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner
from Pakistan, suspended air, rail, and bus communications, and
banned air traffic with Pakistan. It put into motion a massive
mobilization of its war machinery, and moved more than half a
million troops to the Pakistan border. Foreign embassies evacuated
their staff and citizens, and tourists traveling to India were
issued cautionary travel advisories. The world watched with bated
breath as the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear
war. All this cost India an estimated $2.1 billion of public
money. About 800 soldiers died in the panicky process of mobilization
alone.
The police charge sheet was
filed in a special fast-track trial court designated for cases
under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Some three years
later, the trial court sentenced Geelani, Shaukat, and Afzal
to death. Afsan Guru was sentenced to five years of "rigorous
imprisonment." On appeal, the high court subsequently acquitted
Geelani and Afsan, but upheld Shaukat's and Afzal's death sentences.
Eventually, the supreme court upheld the acquittals and reduced
Shaukat's punishment to ten years of rigorous imprisonment. However,
it not just confirmed, but enhanced Mohammad Afzal's sentence.
He was given three life sentences and a double death sentence.
In its judgment on August 5,
2005, the supreme court admitted that the evidence against Afzal
was only circumstantial, and that there was no evidence that
he belonged to any terrorist group or organization. But it went
on to endorse what can only be described as lynch law. "The
incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the
entire nation," it said, "and the collective conscience
of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is
awarded to the offender."
Spelling out the reasons for
giving Afzal the death penalty, the judgment went on: "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." This
implies a dangerous ignorance of what it means to be a "surrendered
militant" in Kashmir today.
So, should Afzal's life be
extinguished? His story is fascinating because it is inextricably
entwined with the story of the Kashmir Valley. It is a story
that stretches far beyond the confines of courtrooms and the
limited imagination of people who live in the secure heart of
a self-declared "superpower." Afzal's story has its
origins in a war zone whose laws are beyond the pale of the fine
arguments and delicate sensibilities of normal jurisprudence.
For all these reasons it is
critical that we consider carefully the strange, sad, and utterly
sinister story of the December 13 attack. It tells us a great
deal about the way the world's largest "democracy"
really works. It connects the biggest things to the smallest.
It traces the pathways that connect what happens in the shadowy
grottoes of our police stations to what goes on in the snowy
streets of Paradise Valley, and from there to the malign furies
that bring nations to the brink of nuclear war. It raises specific
questions that deserve specific, and not ideological or rhetorical,
answers. What hangs in the balance is far more than the fate
of one man.
For the most part, the December
13 attack was an astonishingly incompetent "terrorist"
strike. But consummate competence appeared to be the hallmark
of everything that followed: the gathering of evidence, the speed
of the investigation by the Special Cell, the arrest and charging
of the accused and the three-and-a-half-year-long judicial process
that began with the fast-track trial court.
The operative phrase in all
of this is "appeared to be." If you follow the story
carefully, you will encounter two sets of masks. First, the mask
of consummate competence (accused arrested, "case cracked"
in two days flat), and then, when things began to come undone,
the benign mask of shambling incompetence (shoddy evidence, procedural
flaws, material contradictions). But underneath all of this--as
several lawyers, academics, and journalists who have studied
the case in detail have shown--is something more sinister, more
worrying. Over the past few years, the worries have grown into
a mountain of misgivings, impossible to ignore.
The doubts set in as early
as the day after the parliament attack, when the police arrested
Geelani, a young lecturer at Delhi University. His outraged colleagues
and friends, certain that he had been framed, contacted the well-known
lawyer Nandita Haksar and asked her to take on his case. This
marked the beginning of a campaign for the fair trial of Geelani.
It flew in the face of mass hysteria and corrosive propaganda
that was enthusiastically disseminated by the mass media. But
despite this, the campaign was successful, and Geelani was eventually
acquitted, along with Afsan Guru.
Geelani's acquittal blew a
gaping hole in the prosecution's version of the parliament attack.
The linchpin of its conspiracy theory suddenly tuned out to be
innocent. But in some odd way, in the public mind, the acquittal
of two of the accused only confirmed the guilt of the other two.
There was bloodlust that had to be satiated. When the government
announced that Afzal, Accused No 1 in the case, would be hanged
on October 20, 2006, it seemed that most people welcomed the
news not just with approval but with morbid excitement. But then,
once again, the questions resurfaced.
To see through the prosecution's
case against Geelani was relatively easy. He was plucked out
of thin air and transplanted into the center of the "conspiracy"
as its kingpin. Afzal was different. He had been extruded through
the sewage system of the hell that Kashmir has become. He surfaced
through a manhole, covered in shit. (And when he emerged, policemen
in the Special Cell pissed on him. Literally.) The first thing
they made him do was a "media confession" in which
he implicated himself completely in the attack. The speed with
which this happened made many of us believe that he was indeed
guilty as charged. It was only much later that the circumstances
under which this "confession" was made were revealed,
and even the supreme court was to set it aside, saying that the
police had violated legal safeguards.
From the very beginning there
was nothing pristine or simple about Afzal's case. His story
gives us a glimpse into what life is really like in the Kashmir
Valley. It is only in the Noddy book version we read about
in our newspapers that security forces battle militants and innocent
Kashmiris are caught in the crossfire. In the adult version,
Kashmir is a valley awash with militants, renegades, security
forces, double-crossers, informers, spooks, blackmailers, blackmailees,
extortionists, spies, both Indian and Pakistani intelligence
agencies, human rights activists, NGOs, and unimaginable amounts
of unaccounted-for money and weapons. There are not always clear
lines that demarcate the boundaries between all these; it is
not easy to tell who is working for whom.
Truth, in Kashmir, is probably
more dangerous than anything else. The deeper you dig, the worse
it gets. At the bottom of the pit are the Special Operations
Group and Special Task Force (STF), the most ruthless, undisciplined,
and dreaded elements of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir,
which play a central role in the Afzal story. Unlike the more
formal forces, they operate in a twilight zone where policemen,
surrendered militants, renegades, and common criminals do business.
They prey upon the local population, particularly in rural Kashmir.
Their primary victims are the thousands of young Kashmiri men
who rose up in revolt in the anarchic uprising of the early 1990s
and have since surrendered and are trying to live normal lives.
In 1989, when Afzal crossed
the border to be trained as a militant, he was only twenty years
old. He returned with no training, disillusioned with his experience.
He put down his gun and enrolled himself in Delhi University.
In 1993, without ever having been a practicing militant, he voluntarily
surrendered to the Border Security Force. Illogically enough,
it was at this point that his nightmares began. His surrender
was treated as a crime, and his life became hell. Afzal's story
has enraged Kashmiris because what has happened to him could
have happened, is happening, and has happened to thousands of
young Kashmiri men and their families. The only difference is
that their stories are played out in the dingy bowels of interrogation
centers, army camps, and police stations where they have been
burned, beaten, electrocuted, blackmailed, and killed, their
bodies thrown out of the backs of trucks for passers by to find.
Whereas Afzal's story is being performed like a piece of medieval
theater on the national stage, in the clear light of day, with
the legal sanction of a "fair trial," the hollow benefits
of a "free press," and the all pomp and ceremony of
a so-called democracy.
In documents submitted to the
court, Afzal describes how, in the months before the attack on
parliament, he was tortured in the camps of the STF--with electrodes
on his genitals and chilies and petrol in his anus. He talks
of how he was a constant victim of extortion. He mentions the
name of Deputy Superintendent of Police Devinder Singh, who said
he needed him to do a "small job" for him in Delhi.
(Singh has subsequently admitted on record to having tortured
Afzal in exactly the ways Afzal has described.) Afzal has also
said that from the time he was arrested up to the time he was
charged (a few months), his younger brother Hilal was held in
illegal confinement in a police camp in Kashmir. As ransom.
Even today, Afzal does not
claim complete innocence. It is the nature of his involvement
that is being contested. For instance, was he coerced, tortured,
and blackmailed into playing even the peripheral part he played?
In a gross violation of his constitutional rights, from the time
he was arrested and right through the crucial phase of the trial
when the real work of building up a case is done, Afzal did not
have a lawyer. He had nobody to put out his version of the story,
or help him or anyone else sift through the tangle of lies and
fabrications and propaganda put out by the police. Various individuals
worked it out for themselves. Today, five years later, a group
of lawyers, academics, journalists, and writers has published
a reader (December 13th: The Strange Case of the Parliament
Attack, published by Penguin India). It is this body of work
that has fractured what, only recently, appeared to be a national
consensus interwoven with mass hysteria.
Through the fissures, those
who have come under scrutiny--shadowy individuals, counter-intelligence
and security agencies, political parties--are beginning to surface.
They wave flags, hurl abuse, issue hot denials, and cover their
tracks with more and more untruths. Thus they reveal themselves.
The essays in the Penguin book
raise questions about how Afzal, who never had proper legal representation,
can be sentenced to death without having had an opportunity to
be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated
arrest memos, falsified seizure and recovery memos, procedural
flaws, vital evidence that has been tampered with, false telephone
records, false testimonies, legal lacunae, material contradictions
in the testimonies of police and prosecution witnesses, and the
outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers.
They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that
stands up to scrutiny.
And then there are even more
disturbing questions that have been raised, which range beyond
the fate of Afzal. Some of these are critical for a country that
is claiming to be a responsible nuclear power. Here are thirteen
questions regarding December 13:
Question 1: For months before
the attack on parliament, both the government and the police
had been saying that parliament could be attacked. On December
12, 2001, then prime minister A.B. Vajpayee warned of an imminent
attack. On December 13, it happened. Given that there was an
"improved security drill," how did a car bomb packed
with explosives enter the parliament complex?
Question 2: Within days of
the attack, the Special Cell of the Delhi police said it was
a meticulously planned joint operation of Jaish-e-Mohammad and
Lashkar-e-Taiba. They said the attack was led by a man called
Mohammad who was also involved in the hijacking of flight IC-814
in 1998. (This was later refuted by the Central Bureau of Investigation.)
None of this was ever proved in court. What evidence did the
Special Cell have for its claim?
Question 3: The entire attack
was recorded live on closed-circuit television (CCTV). Two Congress
Party members of parliament, Kapil Sibal and Najma Heptullah,
demanded in parliament that the CCTV recording be shown to the
members. They said that there was confusion about the details
of the event. The chief whip of the Congress Party, Priyaranjan
Dasmunshi, said, "I counted six men getting out of the car.
But only five were killed. The closed-circuit TV camera recording
clearly showed the six men." If Dasmunshi was right, why
did the police say that there were only five people in the car?
Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recording
not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why
was it not released for public viewing?
Question 4: Why was parliament
adjourned after some of these questions were raised?
Question 5: A few days after
December 13, the government declared that it had "incontrovertible
evidence" of Pakistan's involvement in the attack, and announced
a massive mobilization of almost half a million soldiers to the
Indo-Pakistan border. The subcontinent was pushed to the brink
of nuclear war. Apart from Afzal's "confession," extracted
under torture (and later set aside by the supreme court), what
was the "incontrovertible evidence"?
Question 6: Is it true that
the military mobilization to the Pakistan border had begun long
before the December 13 attack?
Question 7: How much did this
military standoff, which lasted for nearly a year, cost? How
many soldiers died in the process? How many soldiers and civilians
died because of mishandled landmines, and how many peasants lost
their homes and land because trucks and tanks were rolling through
their villages and landmines were being planted in their fields?
Question 8: In a criminal investigation,
it is vital for the police to show how the evidence gathered
at the scene of the attack led them to the accused. The police
have not managed to show how they connected Geelani to the attack.
And how did the police reach Afzal? The Special Cell says Geelani
led them to Afzal. But the message to look out for Afzal was
actually flashed to the Srinagar police before Geelani was arrested.
So how did the Special Cell connect Afzal to the December 13
attack?
Question 9: The courts acknowledge
that Afzal was a surrendered militant who was in regular contact
with the security forces, particularly the STF of Jammu and Kashmir
police. How do the security forces explain the fact that a person
under their surveillance was able to conspire in a major militant
operation?
Question 10: Is it plausible
that organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammad
would rely on a person who had been in and out of STF torture
chambers, and was under constant police surveillance, as the
principal link for a major operation?
Question 11: In his statement
before the court, Afzal says that he was introduced to "Mohammed"
and instructed to take him to Delhi by a man called Tariq, who
was working with the STF. Tariq was named in the police charge
sheet. Who is Tariq and where is he now?
Question 12: On December 19,
2001, six days after the parliament attack, police commissioner
S.M. Shangari identified one of the attackers who was killed
as Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammed (alias Abu Hamza) of the Lashkar-e-Taiba,
who had been arrested in Mumbai in November 2000 and immediately
handed over to the Jammu and Kashmir police. He gave detailed
descriptions to support his statement. If police commissioner
Shangari was right, how did Yasin, a man in the custody of the
Jammu and Kashmir police, end up participating in the parliament
attack? If he was wrong, where is Yasin now?
Question 13: Why is it that
we still do not know who the five "terrorists" killed
in the parliament attack are?
These questions, examined cumulatively,
point to something far more serious than incompetence. The words
that come to mind are complicity, collusion, involvement. There
is no need for us to feign shock or shrink from thinking these
thoughts and saying them out loud. Governments and their intelligence
agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies such as this
to further their own ends. (Look up the burning of the Reichstag
and the rise of Nazi power in Germany in 1933; or Operation Gladio,
in which European intelligence agencies created acts of terrorism,
especially in Italy, in order to discredit militant groups such
as the Red Brigades.)
The official response to all
of these questions has been dead silence. As things stand, Afzal's
execution has been postponed while the president considers his
clemency petition. Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party (now
in the opposition) announced that it would turn "Hang Afzal"
into a national campaign. But it does not seem to have taken
off. Now other avenues are being explored. The main strategy
seems to be to create confusion and polarize the debate on communal
lines. In the business of spreading confusion, the media, particularly
television journalists, can be counted on to be perfect collaborators.
On discussions, chat shows and "special reports," we
have television anchors playing around with crucial facts, like
young children in a sandpit. Torturers, estranged brothers, senior
police officers, and politicians are emerging from the woodwork
and talking. The more they talk, the more interesting it all
becomes.
One character who is rapidly
emerging from the shadowy periphery and wading on to center stage
is deputy superintendent Devinder Singh. He was showcased on
the national news (CNN-IBN), in what was presented as a "sting"
operation with a hidden camera. It all seemed a bit unnecessary,
however, because Singh has been talking a lot these days. He
has done recorded interviews, on the phone as well as face to
face, saying exactly the same shocking things. Weeks before the
sting operation, in a recorded interview with Parvaiz Bukhari,
a freelance journalist, he said, "I did interrogate and
torture him [Afzal] at my camp for several days. And we never
recorded his arrest in the books anywhere. His description of
torture at my camp is true. That was the procedure those days
and we did pour petrol in his ass and gave him electric shocks.
But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite
our hardest possible interrogation ... He looked like a bhondu
[fool] those days, what you call a chootya [idiot] type.
And I had a reputation for torture, interrogation and breaking
suspects. If anybody came out of my interrogation clean, nobody
would ever touch him again. He would be considered clean for
good by the whole department."
This is not an empty boast.
Singh has a formidable reputation for torture in the Kashmir
Valley. On television, his boasting spiraled into policy making.
"Torture is the only deterrent for terrorism," he said.
"I do it for the nation." He did not bother to explain
why or how the "bhondu" that he tortured and
subsequently released allegedly went on to become the diabolical
mastermind of the parliament attack. Singh then said that Afzal
was a Jaish militant. If this is true, why was the evidence not
placed before the courts? And why on earth was Afzal released?
Why was he not watched? There is a definite attempt to try to
dismiss this as incompetence. But given everything we know now,
it would take all of Singh's delicate professional skills to
make some of us believe that.
The official version of the
story of the parliament attack is very quickly coming apart at
the seams. Even the supreme court judgment, with all its flaws
of logic and leaps of faith, does not accuse Afzal of being the
mastermind of the attack. So who was the mastermind? If Afzal
is hanged, we may never know. But L.K. Advani, the leader of
the opposition, wants him hanged at once. Even a day's delay,
he says, is against the national interest. Why? What is the hurry?
The man is locked up in a high-security cell on death row. He
is not allowed out of his cell for even five minutes a day. What
harm can he do? Talk? Write, perhaps? Surely, even in Advani's
own narrow interpretation of the term, it is in the national
interest not to hang Afzal? At least not until there is an inquiry
that reveals what the real story is and who actually attacked
parliament?
A genuine inquiry would have
to mean far more than just a political witch-hunt. It would have
to look into the part played by intelligence, counter-insurgency,
and security agencies as well. Offences such as the fabrication
of evidence and the blatant violation of procedural norms have
already become established in the courts, but they look very
much like just the tip of the iceberg. We now have a police officer
admitting--boasting--on record that he was involved in the illegal
detention and torture of a fellow citizen. Is all of this acceptable
to the people, the government, and the courts of India?
Given the track record of Indian
governments (past and present, right, left, and center) it is
naive--perhaps utopian is a better word--to hope that today's
politicians will ever have the courage to institute an inquiry
that will, once and for all, uncover the real story. A maintenance
dose of pusillanimity is probably encrypted in all governments.
But hope has little to do with reason.
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