India: “Condemn the execution of Afzal Guru!”

COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST) — CENTRAL COMMITTEE — Press Release (February 13, 2013)

Activists of mass movements, nationality struggles and revolutionaries are not terrorists,
the Indian State itself is the biggest terrorist!

 The Indian State which boasts itself as world’s biggest democracy has executed Afzal Guru on February 9, 2013 in Tihar jail of Delhi in a most clandestine manner. Afzal Guru, who was arrested on the charges of abetting the attack of December 13, 2001 on Indian parliament, was not given any opportunity to prove his innocence and even he was denied from deputing a lawyer of his choice. The supreme court of India confirmed death penalty to him in 2005 to ‘satisfy the nation’s collective conscience.’ Without conducting any impartial enquiry of who might be the real actors behind that attack and what might be the real conspiracy, activists and sympathizers of Kashmiri nationality struggle were deviously framed in this case.

As part of the ‘global war on terror’ unleashed by the US imperialists after 9/11 attacks, the Indian State launched a massive propaganda campaign through the corporate media depicting the nationality organizations and revolutionary organizations as terrorist ones. To systematically divert the people’s attention from their immediate and genuine problems, it has been propagating that the ‘terrorism’ is the lone biggest problem of all. In Kashmir and in all states of India, Muslim population in general are in a state of great agony for the fascistic massacres, atrocities, tortures, jail custodies and inhuman discrimination inflicted on them by both Congress and BJP governments and various Hindu religious fanatic forces belonging to the Sangh (RSS) gang. 

Arundhati Roy on Indian-Pakistani war clouds and the ‘secret’ hanging of Afzal Guru

Does Your Bomb-Proof Basement Have An Attached Toilet?

Afzal Guru

An execution carried out to thundering war clouds

by Arundhati Roy

What are the political consequences of the secret and sudden hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament attack, going to be? Does anybody know? The memo, in callous bureaucratese, with every name insultingly misspelt, sent by the Superintendent of Central Jail No. 3, Tihar, New Delhi, to “Mrs Tabassum w/o Sh Afjal Guru” reads:

“The mercy petition of Sh Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been rejected by Hon’ble President of India. Hence the execution of Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been fixed for 09/02/2013 at 8 am in Central Jail No-3.

This is for your information and for further necessary action.”

The mailing of the memo was deliberately timed to get to Tabassum only after the execution, denying her one last legal chanc­e—the right to challenge the rejection of the mercy petition. Both Afzal and his family, separately, had that right. Both were thwarted. Even though it is mandat­ory in law, the memo to Tabassum ascribed no reason for the president’s rejection of the mercy petition. If no reason is given, on what basis do you appeal? All the other prisoners on death row in India have been given that last chance.

Since Tabassum was not allowed to meet her husband before he was hanged, since her son was not allowed to get a few last words of advice from his father, since she was not given his body to bury, and since there can be no funeral, what “further necessary action” does the jail manual prescribe? Anger? Wild, irreparable grief? Unquestioning acc­eptance? Complete integration?

After the hanging, there have been unseemly celebrations. The bereaved wives of the people who were killed in the attack on Parliament were displayed on TV, with M.S. Bitta, chairman of the All-India Anti-Terrorist Front, and his ferocious moustaches playing the CEO of their sad little company. Will anybody tell them that the men who shot their husbands were killed at the same time, in the same place? And that those who planned the attack will never be brought to justice because we still don’t know who they are.

The hanging of Afzal Guru is a stain on India’s democracy

Despite gaping holes in the case against Afzal Guru, all India’s institutions played a part in putting a Kashmiri ‘terrorist’ to death

Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, Sunday 10 February 2013

Indian police bring Afzal Guru to court in Delhi in 2002. Photograph: Aman Sharma/AP

Spring announced itself in Delhi on Saturday. The sun was out, and the law took its course. Just before breakfast, the government of India secretly hanged Afzal Guru, prime accused in the attack on parliament in December 2001, and interred his body in Delhi’s Tihar jail where he had been in solitary confinement for 12 years. Guru’s wife and son were not informed. “The authorities intimated the family through speed post and registered post,” the home secretary told the press, “the director general of the Jammu and Kashmir [J&K] police has been told to check whether they got it or not”. No big deal, they’re only the family of yet another Kashmiri terrorist.

In a moment of rare unity the Indian nation, or at least its major political parties – Congress, the Bharatiya Janata party and the Communist party of India (Marxist) – came together as one (barring a few squabbles about “delay” and “timing”) to celebrate the triumph of the rule of law. Live broadcasts from TV studios, with their usual cocktail of papal passion and a delicate grip on facts, crowed about the “victory of democracy”. Rightwing Hindu nationalists distributed sweets to celebrate the hanging, and beat up Kashmiris (paying special attention to the girls) who had gathered in Delhi to protest. Even though Guru was dead and gone, the commentators in the studios and the thugs on the streets seemed, like cowards who hunt in packs, to need each other to keep their courage up. Perhaps because, deep inside, themselves they knew they had colluded in doing something terribly wrong.