“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
Search This Blog
Showing posts with label judiciary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label judiciary. Show all posts
Wednesday 2 May 2018
Monday 4 September 2017
On India's Supreme Courts: And then there were nine
Constitutions are enlarged and strengthened when courts act as brakes against majoritarian authoritarianism
Sanjay Hegde in The Hindu
In early 2014, Fali Nariman said to me in the corridors of the Supreme Court, “A government with an absolute majority will see a conformist judiciary.” Shortly thereafter, India elected a government with an absolute majority in Parliament.
Mr. Nariman prophesied based on past experiences. During the Emergency, the Supreme Court held in ADM Jabalpur that the fundamental right to life could be taken away or suspended. When asked by Justice H.R. Khanna if the right to life had been suspended during the Emergency, the then Attorney General, Niren De, had replied, “Even if life was taken away illegally, courts are helpless.” Four judges then succumbed to government power and failed to protect the citizen; Justice Khanna was the only dissenter.
The shame of that surrender has often been invoked against every judge who has subsequently held office. Justices Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati, who were part of that Bench, apologised for that judgment after demitting office. But, as Salman Rushdie wrote: “Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.” Judicial pusillanimity in the face of an authoritarian government was not entirely unexpected.
Pattern of retreat
The last three years have seen a rather conservative Supreme Court, which bears testimony to Mr. Nariman’s aphorism. The court chose to render ineffective challenges to demonetisation by referring the issue to a Constitution Bench. When lawyers beat up former JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar and journalists in the precincts of Patiala House, a mere stone’s throw away from the Supreme Court, the court chose to swallow its wrath. The court’s refusal to investigate the Birla-Sahara diaries, or to allow Harsh Mander’s plea to challenge Amit Shah’s discharge in a criminal case, all fit into this pattern of retreat. Possibly the sole exception was when the court struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act.
At a time when civil liberties seemed to be again imperilled, people wondered whether the court would firmly stand on the side of the citizens who claimed that their fundamental right to privacy was being taken away by the Aadhaar database.
In response to the citizens’ challenge, the Supreme Court was told by the government that there existed no fundamental right to privacy. The government’s stand was based on M.P. Sharma (delivered by eight judges in 1954) and Kharak Singh (delivered by six judges in 1962). Both these decisions had seemingly held that there was no fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution. Later decisions of smaller Benches had, however, held and proceeded on the basis that there did exist such a right.
At least two generations of Indians grew up assuming that a fundamental right to privacy existed. But because of diverse judicial opinions, the matter had to be considered by a Bench of at least nine judges. Assembling nine judges is not an easy task given the abnormal workload and administrative disruption it causes the court. It took nearly two years for a Bench to be constituted, by which time the administration tried to compulsorily impose Aadhaar on every sphere of human activity.
The government took an extreme stand that no fundamental right to privacy existed and that the later judgments were wrongly decided. It was a submission of the sort characterised by Lord Atkin in his 1948 dissent in Liversidge v. Anderson, as an argument that “might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of King’s Bench in the time of Charles I.” The government lost the argument 9-0.
The nine-judge Bench has unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right and clarified years of somewhat uncertain case law on the subject. It has unequivocally held that the doctrinal premise of M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh stand invalidated. Nearly half of the 547-page judgment has been written by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud who has recognised that “the right to privacy is an element of human dignity”. Perhaps, even more crucially, Justice Chandrachud (joined by all the others on the Bench), has explicitly overruled the ADM Jabalpur judgment to which his father was a party. The judgment is also remarkable for its stinging criticism of the court’s view in Suresh Koushal, which had upheld the validity of Section 377 of the IPC. The challenge to Section 377 is pending before a different Bench.
What the judges held
Justice J. Chelameswar writes a wonderful enunciation of the rationale behind the Constitution, its Preamble, and the fundamental rights chapter. He points out that provisions purportedly conferring power on the state are, in fact, limitations on the state’s power to infringe on the liberty of citizens. Crucially, after holding that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, he states that the right to privacy includes, among other things, freedom from intrusion into one’s home, the right to choice of food and dress of one’s choice, and the freedom to associate with the people one wants to.
Justice S.A. Bobde holds that privacy is integral to the several fundamental rights recognised by the Constitution. He holds that in case of infringement, the state must satisfy the tests applicable to whichever one or more of the fundamental rights is/are affected by the interference. He also traces the right to privacy to ancient Indian texts including the Grihya Sutras, the Ramayanaand the Arthashastra.
Tracing the right to privacy to the Preamble and the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution, Justice A.M. Sapre holds that the right to privacy is born with the human being and stays until death. He also holds that the unity and integrity of the nation can only be ensured when the dignity of every citizen is guaranteed through privacy.
Justice S.K. Kaul’s opinion makes a strong case for the horizontal application of fundamental rights. He observes that “digital footprints and extensive data can be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions and hence, is valuable information.” He expresses concern over the use of such data to “exercise control over us like the ‘big brother’ state exercised.”
Justice Rohinton Nariman has rejected the Union’s argument that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right in a developing country where people do not have access to food, shelter and other resources. He holds that the right to privacy is available to the rich and the poor alike: “Fundamental rights, on the other hand, are contained in the Constitution so that there would be rights that the citizens of this country may enjoy despite the governments that they may elect. The recognition of such right in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution is only a recognition that such right exists notwithstanding the shifting sands of majority governments.”
In a mature democracy, conformist judiciaries are not always guaranteed to governments with a popular majority. Constitutions are enlarged and strengthened when courts act as brakes against majoritarian authoritarianism. The larger security of the state lies in the protection of every individual’s freedoms. The judges of the Supreme Court, as sentinels on the qui vive, have stood tall and repelled yet another attack on citizens’ liberties. Fali Nariman and Y.V. Chandrachud’s anxieties and reverses of the Emergency era may just have been put to rest.
Sanjay Hegde in The Hindu
In early 2014, Fali Nariman said to me in the corridors of the Supreme Court, “A government with an absolute majority will see a conformist judiciary.” Shortly thereafter, India elected a government with an absolute majority in Parliament.
Mr. Nariman prophesied based on past experiences. During the Emergency, the Supreme Court held in ADM Jabalpur that the fundamental right to life could be taken away or suspended. When asked by Justice H.R. Khanna if the right to life had been suspended during the Emergency, the then Attorney General, Niren De, had replied, “Even if life was taken away illegally, courts are helpless.” Four judges then succumbed to government power and failed to protect the citizen; Justice Khanna was the only dissenter.
The shame of that surrender has often been invoked against every judge who has subsequently held office. Justices Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati, who were part of that Bench, apologised for that judgment after demitting office. But, as Salman Rushdie wrote: “Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.” Judicial pusillanimity in the face of an authoritarian government was not entirely unexpected.
Pattern of retreat
The last three years have seen a rather conservative Supreme Court, which bears testimony to Mr. Nariman’s aphorism. The court chose to render ineffective challenges to demonetisation by referring the issue to a Constitution Bench. When lawyers beat up former JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar and journalists in the precincts of Patiala House, a mere stone’s throw away from the Supreme Court, the court chose to swallow its wrath. The court’s refusal to investigate the Birla-Sahara diaries, or to allow Harsh Mander’s plea to challenge Amit Shah’s discharge in a criminal case, all fit into this pattern of retreat. Possibly the sole exception was when the court struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act.
At a time when civil liberties seemed to be again imperilled, people wondered whether the court would firmly stand on the side of the citizens who claimed that their fundamental right to privacy was being taken away by the Aadhaar database.
In response to the citizens’ challenge, the Supreme Court was told by the government that there existed no fundamental right to privacy. The government’s stand was based on M.P. Sharma (delivered by eight judges in 1954) and Kharak Singh (delivered by six judges in 1962). Both these decisions had seemingly held that there was no fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution. Later decisions of smaller Benches had, however, held and proceeded on the basis that there did exist such a right.
At least two generations of Indians grew up assuming that a fundamental right to privacy existed. But because of diverse judicial opinions, the matter had to be considered by a Bench of at least nine judges. Assembling nine judges is not an easy task given the abnormal workload and administrative disruption it causes the court. It took nearly two years for a Bench to be constituted, by which time the administration tried to compulsorily impose Aadhaar on every sphere of human activity.
The government took an extreme stand that no fundamental right to privacy existed and that the later judgments were wrongly decided. It was a submission of the sort characterised by Lord Atkin in his 1948 dissent in Liversidge v. Anderson, as an argument that “might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of King’s Bench in the time of Charles I.” The government lost the argument 9-0.
The nine-judge Bench has unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right and clarified years of somewhat uncertain case law on the subject. It has unequivocally held that the doctrinal premise of M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh stand invalidated. Nearly half of the 547-page judgment has been written by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud who has recognised that “the right to privacy is an element of human dignity”. Perhaps, even more crucially, Justice Chandrachud (joined by all the others on the Bench), has explicitly overruled the ADM Jabalpur judgment to which his father was a party. The judgment is also remarkable for its stinging criticism of the court’s view in Suresh Koushal, which had upheld the validity of Section 377 of the IPC. The challenge to Section 377 is pending before a different Bench.
What the judges held
Justice J. Chelameswar writes a wonderful enunciation of the rationale behind the Constitution, its Preamble, and the fundamental rights chapter. He points out that provisions purportedly conferring power on the state are, in fact, limitations on the state’s power to infringe on the liberty of citizens. Crucially, after holding that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, he states that the right to privacy includes, among other things, freedom from intrusion into one’s home, the right to choice of food and dress of one’s choice, and the freedom to associate with the people one wants to.
Justice S.A. Bobde holds that privacy is integral to the several fundamental rights recognised by the Constitution. He holds that in case of infringement, the state must satisfy the tests applicable to whichever one or more of the fundamental rights is/are affected by the interference. He also traces the right to privacy to ancient Indian texts including the Grihya Sutras, the Ramayanaand the Arthashastra.
Tracing the right to privacy to the Preamble and the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution, Justice A.M. Sapre holds that the right to privacy is born with the human being and stays until death. He also holds that the unity and integrity of the nation can only be ensured when the dignity of every citizen is guaranteed through privacy.
Justice S.K. Kaul’s opinion makes a strong case for the horizontal application of fundamental rights. He observes that “digital footprints and extensive data can be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions and hence, is valuable information.” He expresses concern over the use of such data to “exercise control over us like the ‘big brother’ state exercised.”
Justice Rohinton Nariman has rejected the Union’s argument that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right in a developing country where people do not have access to food, shelter and other resources. He holds that the right to privacy is available to the rich and the poor alike: “Fundamental rights, on the other hand, are contained in the Constitution so that there would be rights that the citizens of this country may enjoy despite the governments that they may elect. The recognition of such right in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution is only a recognition that such right exists notwithstanding the shifting sands of majority governments.”
In a mature democracy, conformist judiciaries are not always guaranteed to governments with a popular majority. Constitutions are enlarged and strengthened when courts act as brakes against majoritarian authoritarianism. The larger security of the state lies in the protection of every individual’s freedoms. The judges of the Supreme Court, as sentinels on the qui vive, have stood tall and repelled yet another attack on citizens’ liberties. Fali Nariman and Y.V. Chandrachud’s anxieties and reverses of the Emergency era may just have been put to rest.
Tuesday 29 August 2017
'I am drowning and you are describing the water' - A critique of India's liberals
Javed Naqvi in The Dawn
“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.
Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?
There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.
Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.
Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.
Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.
Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.
One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.
Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.
In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.
Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.
A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.
Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.
We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.
“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.
Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?
There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.
Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.
Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.
Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.
Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.
One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.
Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.
In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.
Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.
A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.
Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.
We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.
Wednesday 3 May 2017
You can’t just cut and run from Europe, Theresa May – it’s illegal
Helena Kennedy in The Guardian
Leaders of Britain’s 27 EU partner countries have now thrown down the gauntlet: no discussions on a trade deal will take place until there’s progress on the UK’s divorce bill, the Ireland-UK border and the rights of EU citizens.
We are told there is a document on the table relating to UK citizens living in Europe and those of citizens from other EU countries who live in Britain, but the UK is not prepared to sign. No reason has been given as to why.
The problem for our prime minister is that at every turn her head hits the hard wall of law and the role of the European court of justice (ECJ). Theresa May has cornered herself by insisting that the UK withdraw totally from the court and its decisions. Nobody explained to her that if you have cross-border rights and contracts you have to have cross-border law and regulations. And if you have cross-border law you have to have supranational courts to deal with disputes.
Call it what you like, but in the end you need rules as to conduct, and arbiters for disagreement. Even the World Trade Organisation has a disputes court.
But May has had a bellyful of European courts after her run-in with the totally separate European court of human rights when, as home secretary, she was trying to deport the fundamentalist preacher Abu Qatada to Jordan. Jordan’s use of torture on political opponents proved a handicap to his expulsion. However, although all this related to a quite separate legal regime, the words Europe and court in the same sentence still invite obstinate opposition from May.
This is now a problem in the Brexit negotiations, because all the preliminary matters raised by EU leaders involve legal commitments from which we cannot walk away. Calls to cut and run without paying a penny in the Brexit settlement are unlawful and unethical. It is not surprising that the other 27 want to see the colour of our money up front.
There is talk of a special deal to be negotiated for Northern Ireland, whatever the rest of the UK does, by possibly joining the European Economic Area (EEA) with some additional border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. EEA membership is a semidetached position that Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein have signed up to, whereby they have the benefits of the EU single market but not the full obligations. However, it also has legal implications. You cannot trade without the protection of law because things can go wrong. EEA members have to sign up to the European Free Trade Association court, a special supranational judicial body which deals with EEA disputes; it sits in Luxembourg, and is run largely according to EU law and ECJ judgments. Of course, such law is made without the input of EEA states, which makes it a solution that would be hard for many Brexiteers to swallow.
In preparation for the negotiations, EU representatives have been appearing before Lords and Commons committees and meeting Brexit ministers. They are invariably bemused. They say they keep being told the UK wants to continue to be part of various arrangements, including the European arrest warrant and Europol – yet nobody in London seems to understand that such collaboration requires the ECJ to have ultimate jurisdiction and for EU law to apply.
It seems obvious to them that cross-border collaboration requires supranational legal arrangements covering everything from financial services, trade, farming, fishing, security, environment, employment and maternity rights to industry standards and consumer rights. Intellectual property law, for instance, covers a huge array of research, entrepreneurship, invention and creativity; the European patent court has only recently been built here in London and was due to be opened. What happens to it now, they ask.
For years the British public have been subjected to a barrage of tabloid mendacity suggesting that we are victims of an onslaught of foreign-invented law and interference by foreign courts. In fact, a vast amount of incredibly advantageous law has been created in the EU in the past 40 years. And here’s the rub: we have been major contributors to that law. The British are good at law. We have had a strong hand in the creation of EU law.
The committee I chair in the House of Lords has heard overwhelming evidence about the benefits to business of being able, for instance, to secure a judgment in a British court against a recalcitrant debtor in Poland and know it will be enforced anywhere in the EU.
A mother can secure a maintenance order against her children’s renegade father who has sloped off to continental Europe, and have the order enforced. A holiday accident in Spain can lead to swifter resolution and compensation by virtue of EU law. A British father can get access to his kids by order of a court in Munich. Cross-border relationships require cross-border law, and agreements on mutual enforcement are fundamental.
No wonder the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, is reported to have said Theresa May is on another galaxy in imagining she can retain the best bits of Europe without its institutions or legal underpinnings. Her fantasy that the “great repeal bill” will fix the problem by bringing EU law home, or that a deal can be done without the need for any European court, is unravelling. These legal arrangements require reciprocity. The courts of EU countries do things for us because we do likewise for them. A piece of unilateral legislation on our part does not secure that mutuality which is embodied in many regulations.
Harmonising law across Europe has raised standards – to our advantage. Europe-wide law is integrated into our lives. In the “new order” of trade agreements with China and others, none of these safeguards will exist. My guess is that if May does secure a deal with the EU, we will find ourselves quietly signing up to a newly created court or tribunal, a lesser ECJ.
The law, judges and courts are under attack in many democracies – from Trump’s America to Poland, Hungary and Turkey. It is the currency of our dangerous times. Be warned: good law is a protection we have to preserve. The price of its loss will be very high indeed.
Leaders of Britain’s 27 EU partner countries have now thrown down the gauntlet: no discussions on a trade deal will take place until there’s progress on the UK’s divorce bill, the Ireland-UK border and the rights of EU citizens.
We are told there is a document on the table relating to UK citizens living in Europe and those of citizens from other EU countries who live in Britain, but the UK is not prepared to sign. No reason has been given as to why.
The problem for our prime minister is that at every turn her head hits the hard wall of law and the role of the European court of justice (ECJ). Theresa May has cornered herself by insisting that the UK withdraw totally from the court and its decisions. Nobody explained to her that if you have cross-border rights and contracts you have to have cross-border law and regulations. And if you have cross-border law you have to have supranational courts to deal with disputes.
Call it what you like, but in the end you need rules as to conduct, and arbiters for disagreement. Even the World Trade Organisation has a disputes court.
But May has had a bellyful of European courts after her run-in with the totally separate European court of human rights when, as home secretary, she was trying to deport the fundamentalist preacher Abu Qatada to Jordan. Jordan’s use of torture on political opponents proved a handicap to his expulsion. However, although all this related to a quite separate legal regime, the words Europe and court in the same sentence still invite obstinate opposition from May.
This is now a problem in the Brexit negotiations, because all the preliminary matters raised by EU leaders involve legal commitments from which we cannot walk away. Calls to cut and run without paying a penny in the Brexit settlement are unlawful and unethical. It is not surprising that the other 27 want to see the colour of our money up front.
There is talk of a special deal to be negotiated for Northern Ireland, whatever the rest of the UK does, by possibly joining the European Economic Area (EEA) with some additional border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. EEA membership is a semidetached position that Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein have signed up to, whereby they have the benefits of the EU single market but not the full obligations. However, it also has legal implications. You cannot trade without the protection of law because things can go wrong. EEA members have to sign up to the European Free Trade Association court, a special supranational judicial body which deals with EEA disputes; it sits in Luxembourg, and is run largely according to EU law and ECJ judgments. Of course, such law is made without the input of EEA states, which makes it a solution that would be hard for many Brexiteers to swallow.
In preparation for the negotiations, EU representatives have been appearing before Lords and Commons committees and meeting Brexit ministers. They are invariably bemused. They say they keep being told the UK wants to continue to be part of various arrangements, including the European arrest warrant and Europol – yet nobody in London seems to understand that such collaboration requires the ECJ to have ultimate jurisdiction and for EU law to apply.
It seems obvious to them that cross-border collaboration requires supranational legal arrangements covering everything from financial services, trade, farming, fishing, security, environment, employment and maternity rights to industry standards and consumer rights. Intellectual property law, for instance, covers a huge array of research, entrepreneurship, invention and creativity; the European patent court has only recently been built here in London and was due to be opened. What happens to it now, they ask.
For years the British public have been subjected to a barrage of tabloid mendacity suggesting that we are victims of an onslaught of foreign-invented law and interference by foreign courts. In fact, a vast amount of incredibly advantageous law has been created in the EU in the past 40 years. And here’s the rub: we have been major contributors to that law. The British are good at law. We have had a strong hand in the creation of EU law.
The committee I chair in the House of Lords has heard overwhelming evidence about the benefits to business of being able, for instance, to secure a judgment in a British court against a recalcitrant debtor in Poland and know it will be enforced anywhere in the EU.
A mother can secure a maintenance order against her children’s renegade father who has sloped off to continental Europe, and have the order enforced. A holiday accident in Spain can lead to swifter resolution and compensation by virtue of EU law. A British father can get access to his kids by order of a court in Munich. Cross-border relationships require cross-border law, and agreements on mutual enforcement are fundamental.
No wonder the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, is reported to have said Theresa May is on another galaxy in imagining she can retain the best bits of Europe without its institutions or legal underpinnings. Her fantasy that the “great repeal bill” will fix the problem by bringing EU law home, or that a deal can be done without the need for any European court, is unravelling. These legal arrangements require reciprocity. The courts of EU countries do things for us because we do likewise for them. A piece of unilateral legislation on our part does not secure that mutuality which is embodied in many regulations.
Harmonising law across Europe has raised standards – to our advantage. Europe-wide law is integrated into our lives. In the “new order” of trade agreements with China and others, none of these safeguards will exist. My guess is that if May does secure a deal with the EU, we will find ourselves quietly signing up to a newly created court or tribunal, a lesser ECJ.
The law, judges and courts are under attack in many democracies – from Trump’s America to Poland, Hungary and Turkey. It is the currency of our dangerous times. Be warned: good law is a protection we have to preserve. The price of its loss will be very high indeed.
Tuesday 22 November 2016
As a judge, I can see the racism embedded in the system
Peter Herbert in The Guardian
Britain often claims to possess the finest justice system in the world, with a “colour blind” approach to the law. Unfortunately, this isn’t true: justice is neither colour blind, nor is it equal.
Historically, the justice system has been used to legitimise slavery, and then colonialism, from Elizabethan England onwards. In Kenya, between 1951 and 1954, during the Mau Mau uprising, more than 1,090 Kenyans were executed by the British colonial judiciary, backed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This appalling figure represents the most liberal use of the death penalty in British legal history and is double the number of those executed by the French during the war of liberation in Algeria 10 years later.
In more recent times, judges have enforced the unjust “sus” laws (the informal name used for stop-and-search laws which still disproportionately affect BME people). It can be argued that racism is embedded in the DNA of the British judiciary and that it has proved uniquely resilient to education or training.
But to what extent is racism present in the system today? A study headed by David Lammy MP, published last week, makes for very disturbing reading.
In 1991, statistics regarding how differently BME and white suspects were dealt with in the criminal justice system helped to trigger race training for all full-time judges over a five-year period. Those statistics have not improved. If you are an African-Caribbean man you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white; you are also likely to obtain a custodial sentence of 24 months compared to your white counterpart’s 17 months. This is not because African-Caribbean men commit more serious offences than their white counterparts – these are punishments handed down for the same or similar offences. African-Caribbean men are also subject to receiving immediate custodial sentences with fewer previous convictions than their white counterparts. Our perceptions have become the reality that means 41% of all young people in detention are now from BME communities.
If you are African-Caribbean you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white
What is critical is that the report highlights, yet again, the fundamental racist disparities in the dispensation, administration and dissemination of justice. There is a crisis of both trust and confidence in the British judicial system among black communities. Their concerns are that it remains arbitrary, inconsistent and discriminatory. This interim report proves them right – despite its diplomatic language.
Of course, poverty, homelessness and drug addiction all play their part, as does the disproportionate influence of an institutionally racist police culture, which means black defendants are stopped and searched seven times more often than their white counterparts. This is despite falling stop-and-search figures, and falling crime generally.
A significant responsibility for this disparity of treatment still lies with an overwhelmingly white, middle class and male magistracy and judiciary, resistant to ethnic monitoring, which hides behind the fallacy that justice is “colour blind and impartial”.
We cannot expect to have a diverse judiciary and magistracy, and to recruit police officers, probation officers, prison officers and lawyers who look like us and are knowledgeable of our communities, if we are forced to operate in a system that is itself unwilling or unable to deliver justice equally to all. As Martin Luther King said, “It is not possible to be in favour of justice for some people and not to be in favour of justice for all people.”
At present, out of 161 members of the high court judiciary, there is not a single African-Caribbean judge, while only two are of Asian origin. Less than 2.5% of Oxford and Cambridge graduates (from whom 86% of high court judges are drawn) are of African-Caribbean origin. The legal pipeline and the outcome are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The race training introduced in 1991, was only introduced on the basis that high court judges were exempt, as they simply did not require it. That rather arrogant intellectual exception must now be addressed.
Lord Neuberger’s comments last night suggest that he knows judicial diversity needs tackling. I am currently suing the Ministry of Justice for race discrimination and victimisation arising out of short speech on judicial racism and human rights I gave. It was at a meeting to protest at the decision of an electoral deputy high court judge to ban the former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, from holding public office for five years. The allegation was that I indirectly criticised a fellow judge, the first time any judge has ever faced disciplinary action for this charge.
Several months later, in November 2015, there was an attempt to suspend me, approved by several high court judges, and the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, who threatened me with a formal suspension. This was at the same time that a fellow immigration judge of African origin had her complaint of sex and race discrimination ignored while the three white judges accused were never faced with suspension. A fellow Asian district judge still faces disciplinary sanctions for a minor complaint that at most was a competence issue, and three other BME judges are currently suing the Ministry of Justice. The treatment of BME judges by our white colleagues demonstrates a culture in which we are not accepted as equals with a fundamental right to challenge discrimination. Little wonder then that BME defendants and litigants face race discrimination in all jurisdictions.
Ethnic minorities more likely to be jailed for some crimes, report finds
Even if one achieves a “critical mass” of BME judges and magistrates, the injustice is unlikely to be eradicated if the culture of who is perceived to be the likely recidivist or the most “dangerous” offender persists. The only solution is the one resisted by the Ministry of Justice, and by most senior judges – that is monitoring each crown court and magistrates centre so that there can be proper scrutiny of individual courts to identify where the problem lies.
Allied to this must be a full acknowledgement by the Sentencing Council that sentencing and bail guidance must set out clearly the levels of disparity for each offence. Simply pretending the problem does not exist is a recipe for unconscious but appalling levels of racial bias to continue unchecked.
The training on race from 1991 to 1995 worked, as it forced judges to engage with BME mentors who challenged subconscious bias and racism as equals in a secure setting. The race awareness training practised in the 20 years since has been discredited as wholly ineffective. It is too polite, conducted infrequently and by fellow judges who themselves are part of the problem.
The judiciary is a pillar of our democracy with a historical responsibility for the racism that affects our fundamental freedoms and rights. If that is to change, it must work hard to eradicate disproportionate sentences and bail that remove the freedom and rights of people of colour. Justice cannot be the prerogative of a narrow, white middle-class elite, who believe that racism is a problem for other lesser mortals to confront.
Britain often claims to possess the finest justice system in the world, with a “colour blind” approach to the law. Unfortunately, this isn’t true: justice is neither colour blind, nor is it equal.
Historically, the justice system has been used to legitimise slavery, and then colonialism, from Elizabethan England onwards. In Kenya, between 1951 and 1954, during the Mau Mau uprising, more than 1,090 Kenyans were executed by the British colonial judiciary, backed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This appalling figure represents the most liberal use of the death penalty in British legal history and is double the number of those executed by the French during the war of liberation in Algeria 10 years later.
In more recent times, judges have enforced the unjust “sus” laws (the informal name used for stop-and-search laws which still disproportionately affect BME people). It can be argued that racism is embedded in the DNA of the British judiciary and that it has proved uniquely resilient to education or training.
But to what extent is racism present in the system today? A study headed by David Lammy MP, published last week, makes for very disturbing reading.
In 1991, statistics regarding how differently BME and white suspects were dealt with in the criminal justice system helped to trigger race training for all full-time judges over a five-year period. Those statistics have not improved. If you are an African-Caribbean man you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white; you are also likely to obtain a custodial sentence of 24 months compared to your white counterpart’s 17 months. This is not because African-Caribbean men commit more serious offences than their white counterparts – these are punishments handed down for the same or similar offences. African-Caribbean men are also subject to receiving immediate custodial sentences with fewer previous convictions than their white counterparts. Our perceptions have become the reality that means 41% of all young people in detention are now from BME communities.
If you are African-Caribbean you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white
What is critical is that the report highlights, yet again, the fundamental racist disparities in the dispensation, administration and dissemination of justice. There is a crisis of both trust and confidence in the British judicial system among black communities. Their concerns are that it remains arbitrary, inconsistent and discriminatory. This interim report proves them right – despite its diplomatic language.
Of course, poverty, homelessness and drug addiction all play their part, as does the disproportionate influence of an institutionally racist police culture, which means black defendants are stopped and searched seven times more often than their white counterparts. This is despite falling stop-and-search figures, and falling crime generally.
A significant responsibility for this disparity of treatment still lies with an overwhelmingly white, middle class and male magistracy and judiciary, resistant to ethnic monitoring, which hides behind the fallacy that justice is “colour blind and impartial”.
We cannot expect to have a diverse judiciary and magistracy, and to recruit police officers, probation officers, prison officers and lawyers who look like us and are knowledgeable of our communities, if we are forced to operate in a system that is itself unwilling or unable to deliver justice equally to all. As Martin Luther King said, “It is not possible to be in favour of justice for some people and not to be in favour of justice for all people.”
At present, out of 161 members of the high court judiciary, there is not a single African-Caribbean judge, while only two are of Asian origin. Less than 2.5% of Oxford and Cambridge graduates (from whom 86% of high court judges are drawn) are of African-Caribbean origin. The legal pipeline and the outcome are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The race training introduced in 1991, was only introduced on the basis that high court judges were exempt, as they simply did not require it. That rather arrogant intellectual exception must now be addressed.
Lord Neuberger’s comments last night suggest that he knows judicial diversity needs tackling. I am currently suing the Ministry of Justice for race discrimination and victimisation arising out of short speech on judicial racism and human rights I gave. It was at a meeting to protest at the decision of an electoral deputy high court judge to ban the former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, from holding public office for five years. The allegation was that I indirectly criticised a fellow judge, the first time any judge has ever faced disciplinary action for this charge.
Several months later, in November 2015, there was an attempt to suspend me, approved by several high court judges, and the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, who threatened me with a formal suspension. This was at the same time that a fellow immigration judge of African origin had her complaint of sex and race discrimination ignored while the three white judges accused were never faced with suspension. A fellow Asian district judge still faces disciplinary sanctions for a minor complaint that at most was a competence issue, and three other BME judges are currently suing the Ministry of Justice. The treatment of BME judges by our white colleagues demonstrates a culture in which we are not accepted as equals with a fundamental right to challenge discrimination. Little wonder then that BME defendants and litigants face race discrimination in all jurisdictions.
Ethnic minorities more likely to be jailed for some crimes, report finds
Even if one achieves a “critical mass” of BME judges and magistrates, the injustice is unlikely to be eradicated if the culture of who is perceived to be the likely recidivist or the most “dangerous” offender persists. The only solution is the one resisted by the Ministry of Justice, and by most senior judges – that is monitoring each crown court and magistrates centre so that there can be proper scrutiny of individual courts to identify where the problem lies.
Allied to this must be a full acknowledgement by the Sentencing Council that sentencing and bail guidance must set out clearly the levels of disparity for each offence. Simply pretending the problem does not exist is a recipe for unconscious but appalling levels of racial bias to continue unchecked.
The training on race from 1991 to 1995 worked, as it forced judges to engage with BME mentors who challenged subconscious bias and racism as equals in a secure setting. The race awareness training practised in the 20 years since has been discredited as wholly ineffective. It is too polite, conducted infrequently and by fellow judges who themselves are part of the problem.
The judiciary is a pillar of our democracy with a historical responsibility for the racism that affects our fundamental freedoms and rights. If that is to change, it must work hard to eradicate disproportionate sentences and bail that remove the freedom and rights of people of colour. Justice cannot be the prerogative of a narrow, white middle-class elite, who believe that racism is a problem for other lesser mortals to confront.
Monday 25 April 2016
Pakistan Army Accounts - No Audit permitted
Accountability without exception Friday Night with Hamid Bashani Ep48 (in Urdu)
History of Pakistan's Foreign Policy - AApas ki Baat with Najam Sethi and Muneeb Farooq
Politician & Military in Pakistan Part II
Monday 22 December 2014
Sunday 7 July 2013
Failed by the lawyer
The judicial system is looking the other way as unscrupulous professional behaviour by advocates is causing distress to litigants and affecting their cases
Lawyers have an illustrious pedigree in India to emulate. Nehru, Ambedkar, and many of the country’s most pre-eminent leaders were trained as lawyers. Yet today, ask a typical litigant what he thinks of the profession and he is likely to regale you with stories of being tied up in court for years and facing unscrupulousness and exasperation.
The plot lines of these stories become predictably repetitive. Lawyers do not show up at scheduled hearings. When they do appear, they are often not prepared. Litigants complain that their lawyers do not keep them informed about their case and that they are charged for hearings where nothing of substance happens.
Double fees
Ironically, complaints become even more pronounced about high-profile lawyers who commonly overbook their schedules, expecting everyone else to be accommodative. A prestigious law firm employs an associate to follow a well-known senior advocate at the Supreme Court to try to ensure that the senior turns up for scheduled hearings of their client. Double fees have reportedly become accepted practice among many of the biggest names in litigation — one fee to argue a case, another fee to guarantee they will actually show up.
The cost of such behaviour is high not just to clients, but for everyone. When a hearing is rescheduled to accommodate a lawyer, the other side still has to pay its counsel. The public has to pay for the courtroom and the judge. With so much time being wasted, cases take longer, a backlog ensues, and economic efficiency and justice suffer.
Fears
The poor are in the worst position to navigate this mess. Take the example of a single mother who was acquitted by a Delhi court earlier this year. She had been detained by the police in 2009 when they (mistakenly) thought she was connected to accused drug dealers in her neighbourhood. With the money she had, she hired a popular, if modestly priced, private lawyer. The lawyer kept missing hearings, which meant that the judge could not decide her case. Frustrated by these delays, distraught from being separated from her epileptic daughter, and unable to get in touch with her lawyer, she sank into depression in jail and attempted suicide. She survived and was eventually freed, albeit traumatised by the four year ordeal.
Why is such behaviour by lawyers tolerated? In private, judges will admit that it is difficult for them to discipline members of the bar. Although lawyers may make their arguments to judges in grovelling terms, it is the lawyers who often have the power in the relationship. Judges fear that if they try to discipline lawyers in their courtroom they will be spoken ill of by the bar: a powerful constituency which could impact their chances of a promotion or post-retirement appointments.
Others fear the possibility of lawyers boycotting the courtroom. Still others think it is simply not worth the trouble of going against a group of which they were once a part of.
Independent boards
Meanwhile, the Bar Council of India has done far too little to rein in errant advocates. Although the Bar Council releases no publicly available annual report, in the little information that is available for 2010-11 their disciplinary committee reportedly suspended only 14 members of the bar in the entire country (by comparison, about 800 lawyers are disbarred and 3,000 suspended each year in the United States).
Part of the problem is that lawyers in India largely police themselves, creating few incentives for them to vigorously enforce high standards. India might learn from the experiences of the United Kingdom or Australia where independent boards, which include non-lawyers, now oversee the profession and attempt to put litigants’ interests first.
Beyond restructuring and reinvigorating the means through which lawyers are disciplined, other steps are needed to curb lawyer misbehaviour. A litigant bill of rights should be widely publicised informing litigants of what to expect from their lawyer and what redress they have available if mistreated. For example, when litigants try to switch advocates, many find their original lawyer refuses to give them back the files related to their case, making it all but impossible to go to a new counsel. Such self-serving tactics should be swiftly punished.
Allow advertising
Given the opacity of the judicial system, most litigants find lawyers through personal contacts. As a result, their choice is often based on anecdotes and misunderstandings about what they really need. To help litigants better choose their lawyer, the Bar Council should consider repealing the current ban on advertising for legal services and allow carefully restricted advertising to provide better information to litigants about their options. Similarly, the judiciary could help the public better compare lawyer performance by creating a type of lawyer report card that would detail how often a lawyer missed a hearing or was so unprepared that a hearing needed to be rescheduled.
The legal profession rightly values its independence, but when it fails to self-regulate it makes itself vulnerable to government interference and public condemnation. Many honest and industrious lawyers lament the unprincipled practices of their peers and the time they end up wasting in undisciplined court rooms. It is time for everyone — the bar, the bench, the government, and the public — to demand more from the profession.
Sunday 10 February 2013
A perfect day for Indian democracy - And a Rebuttal
Wasn’t it? Yesterday I mean. Spring announced itself in Delhi. The sun
was out, and the Law took its Course. Just before breakfast, Afzal Guru,
prime accused in the 2001 Parliament Attack was secretly hanged, and
his body was interred in Tihar Jail. Was he buried next to Maqbool Butt?
(The other Kashmiri who was hanged in Tihar in 1984. Kashmiris will
mark that anniversary tomorrow.) Afzal’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
J&K Police has been told to check whether they got it or not.” No
big deal, they’re only the family of a Kashmiri terrorist.
In a moment of rare unity the Nation, or at least its major political
parties, the Congress, the BJP and the CPM came together as one (barring
a few squabbles about ‘delay’ and ‘timing’) to celebrate the triumph of
the Rule of Law. The Conscience of the Nation, which broadcasts live
from TV studios these days, unleashed its collective intellect on us —
the usual cocktail of papal passion and a delicate grip on facts. Even
though the man was dead and gone, like cowards that hunt in packs, they
seemed to need each other to keep their courage up. Perhaps because deep
inside themselves they know that they all colluded to do something
terribly wrong.
What are the facts?
On the 13th of December 2001 five armed men drove through the gates of
the Parliament House in a white Ambassador fitted out with an Improvised
Explosive Device. When they were challenged they jumped out of the car
and opened fire. They killed eight security personnel and a gardener. In
the gun battle that followed, all five attackers were killed. In one of
the many versions of confessions he made in police custody, Afzal Guru
identified the men as Mohammed, Rana, Raja, Hamza and Haider. That’s all
we know about them even today. L.K. Advani, the then Home Minister,
said they ‘looked like Pakistanis.’ (He should know what Pakistanis look
like right? Being a Sindhi himself.) Based only on Afzal’s confession
(which the Supreme Court subsequently set aside citing ‘lapses’ and
‘violations of procedural safeguards’) the Government of India recalled
its Ambassador from Pakistan and mobilised half a million soldiers to
the Pakistan border. There was talk of nuclear war. Foreign embassies
issued Travel Advisories and evacuated their staff from Delhi. The
standoff lasted for months and cost India thousands of crores.
On the 14th of December 2001 the Delhi Police Special Cell claimed it
had cracked the case. On the 15th of December it arrested the ‘master
mind’ Professor S.A.R Geelani in Delhi and Showkat Guru and Afzal Guru
in a fruit market in Srinagar. Subsequently they arrested Afsan Guru,
Showkat’s wife. The media enthusiastically disseminated the Special
Cell’s version. These were some of the headlines: ‘DU Lecturer was
Terror Plan Hub’, ‘Varsity Don Guided Fidayeen’, ‘Don Lectured on Terror
in Free Time.’ Zee TV broadcast a ‘docudrama’ called December 13th , a
recreation that claimed to be the ‘Truth Based on the Police Charge
Sheet.’ (If the police version is the truth, then why have courts?) Then
Prime Minister Vajpayee and L.K. Advani publicly appreciated the film.
The Supreme Court refused to stay the screening saying that the media
would not influence judges. The film was broadcast only a few days
before the fast track court sentenced Afzal, Showkat and Geelani to
death. Subsequently the High Court acquitted the ‘mastermind’, Professor
S.A.R Geelani, and Afsan Guru. The Supreme Court upheld the acquittal.
But in its 5th August 2005 judgment it gave Mohammed Afzal three life
sentences and a double death sentence.
Contrary to the lies that have been put about by some senior journalists
who would have known better, Afzal Guru was not one of “the terrorists
who stormed Parliament House on December 13th 2001” nor was he among
those who “opened fire on security personnel, apparently killing three
of the six who died.” (That was the BJP Rajya Sabha MP, Chandan Mitra,
in The Pioneer, October 7th 2006). Even the police charge sheet does not
accuse him of that. The Supreme Court judgment says the evidence is
circumstantial: “As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and
could be no direct evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy.” But then
it goes on to say: “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties had
shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of society will
only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”
Who crafted our collective conscience on the Parliament Attack case?
Could it have been the facts we gleaned from the papers? The films we
saw on TV?
There are those who will argue that the very fact that the courts
acquitted S.A.R Geelani and convicted Afzal proves that the trial was
free and fair. Was it?
The trial in the fast-track court began in May 2002. The world was still
convulsed by post 9/11 frenzy. The US government was gloating
prematurely over its ‘victory’ in Afghanistan. The Gujarat pogrom was
ongoing. And in the Parliament Attack case, the Law was indeed taking
its own course. At the most crucial stage of a criminal case, when
evidence is presented, when witnesses are cross-examined, when the
foundations of the argument are laid — in the High Court and the Supreme
Court you can only argue points of law, you cannot introduce new
evidence — Afzal Guru, locked in a high security solitary cell, had no
lawyer. The court-appointed junior lawyer did not visit his client even
once in jail, he did not summon any witnesses in Afzal’s defence and did
not cross examine the prosecution witnesses. The judge expressed his
inability to do anything about the situation.
Even still, from the word go, the case fell apart. A few examples out of many:
How did the police get to Afzal? They said that S.A.R Geelani led them
to him. But the court records show that the message to arrest Afzal went
out before they picked up Geelani. The High Court called this a
‘material contradiction’ but left it at that.
The two most incriminating pieces of evidence against Afzal were a
cellphone and a laptop confiscated at the time of arrest. The Arrest
Memos were signed by Bismillah, Geelani’s brother, in Delhi. The Seizure
Memos were signed by two men of the J&K Police, one of them an old
tormentor from Afzal’s past as a surrendered ‘militant’. The computer
and cellphone were not sealed, as evidence is required to be. During the
trial it emerged that the hard disc of the laptop had been accessed
after the arrest. It only contained the fake home ministry passes and
the fake identity cards that the terrorists used to access Parliament.
And a Zee TV video clip of Parliament House. So according to the police,
Afzal had deleted all the information except the most incriminating
bits, and he was speeding off to hand it over to Ghazi Baba, who the
charge sheet described as the Chief of Operations.
A witness for the prosecution, Kamal Kishore, identified Afzal and told
the court he had sold him the crucial SIM card that connected all the
accused in the case to each other on the 4th of December 2001. But the
prosecution’s own call records showed that the SIM was actually
operational from November 6th 2001.
It goes on and on, this pile up of lies and fabricated evidence. The
courts note them, but for their pains the police get no more than a
gentle rap on their knuckles. Nothing more.
Then there’s the back story. Like most surrendered militants Afzal was
easy meat in Kashmir — a victim of torture, blackmail, extortion. In the
larger scheme of things he was a nobody. Anyone who was really
interested in solving the mystery of the Parliament Attack would have
followed the dense trail of evidence that was on offer. No one did,
thereby ensuring that the real authors of conspiracy will remain
unidentified and uninvestigated.
But now that Afzal Guru has been hanged, I hope our collective
conscience has been satisfied. Or is our cup of blood still only half
full?
-------An earlier article with details of the case by Ms. Roy
Not surprisingly, PM A.B. Vajpayee seized the opportunity to compare the assault to the September 11 attacks in the US that had happened only three months previously.
On
December 14, 2001, the day after the attack on Parliament, the Special
Cell of the Delhi Police claimed it had tracked down several people
suspected to have been involved in the conspiracy. A day later, on
December 15, 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-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Twelve people were named as being
part of the conspiracy. Ghazi Baba of the Jaish (Usual Suspect I),
Maulana Masood Azhar also of the Jaish (Usual Suspect II); Tariq Ahmed
(a "Pakistani"); five deceased "Pakistani terrorists" (we still don't
know who they are). And three Kashmiri men, S.A.R. Geelani, Shaukat Hussain Guru, and Mohammed Afzal; and Shaukat's wife Afsan Guru. These were the only four to be arrested.
In the tense days that followed, Parliament was adjourned. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner from Pakistan, suspended air, rail and bus communications and banned over-flights. It put into motion a massive mobilisation 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 travelling 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 Rs 10,000 crore of public money. A few hundred soldiers died just in the panicky process of mobilisation.)
Almost three-and-a-half years later, on August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court delivered its final judgement in the case. It endorsed the view that the Parliament attack be looked upon as an act of war. It said, "The attempted attack on Parliament is an undoubted invasion of the sovereign attribute of the State including the Government of India which is its alter ego...the deceased terrorists were roused and impelled to action by a strong anti-Indian feeling as the writing on the fake home ministry sticker found on the car (Ex PW1/8) reveals." It went on to say "the modus operandi adopted by the hardcore 'fidayeens' are all demonstrative of launching a war against the Government of India".
The text on the fake home ministry sticker read as follows:
This subtly worded sticker-manifesto was displayed on the windscreen of the car bomb as it drove into Parliament. (Given the amount of text, it's a wonder the driver could see anything at all. Maybe that's why he collided with the Vice-President's cavalcade?)
The police chargesheet was filed in a special fast-track trial court designated for cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). The trial court sentenced Geelani, Shaukat and Afzal to death. Afsan Guru was sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment. The high court subsequently acquitted Geelani and Afsan, but it upheld Shaukat's and Afzal's death sentence. Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittals, and reduced Shaukat's punishment to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. However it not just confirmed, but enhanced Mohammed Afzal's sentence. He has been given three life sentences and a double death sentence.
In
its August 4, 2005, judgement, the Supreme Court clearly says that
there was no evidence that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist
group or organisation. But it also says, "As is the case with most of
the conspiracies, there is and could be no direct evidence of the
agreement amounting to criminal conspiracy. However, the circumstances,
cumulatively weighed, would unerringly point to the collaboration of the
accused Afzal with the slain 'fidayeen' terrorists."
So: No direct evidence, but yes, circumstantial evidence.
A controversial paragraph in the judgement goes on to say, "The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if 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 maximum punishment to the person who is proved to be the conspirator in this treacherous act" (emphasis mine).
To invoke the 'collective conscience of society' to validate ritual murder, which is what the death penalty is, skates precariously close to valorising lynch law. It's chilling to think that this has been laid upon us not by predatory politicians or sensation-seeking journalists (though they too have done that), but as an edict from the highest court in the land.
Spelling out the reasons for awarding Afzal the death penalty, the judgement goes on to say, "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 paragraph combines flawed logic with absolute ignorance of what it means to be a 'surrendered militant' in Kashmir today.
So: Should Mohammed Afzal's life become extinct?
A small, but influential minority of intellectuals, activists, editors, lawyers and public figures have objected to the Death Sentence as a matter of moral principle. They also argue that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the Death Sentence works as a deterrent to terrorists. (How can it, when, in this age of fidayeen and suicide bombers, death seems to be the main attraction?)
If opinion polls, letters-to-the-editor and the reactions of live audiences in TV studios are a correct gauge of public opinion in India, then the lynch mob is expanding by the hour. It looks as though an overwhelming majority of Indian citizens would like to see Mohammed Afzal hanged every day, weekends included, for the next few years. L.K. Advani, leader of the Opposition, displaying an unseemly sense of urgency, wants him to be hanged as soon as possible, without a moment's delay.
Meanwhile
in Kashmir, public opinion is equally overwhelming. Huge angry protests
make it increasingly obvious that if Afzal is hanged, the consequences
will be political. Some protest what they see as a miscarriage of
justice, but even as they protest, they do not expect justice from
Indian courts. They have lived through too much brutality to believe in
courts, affidavits and justice any more. Others would like to see
Mohammed Afzal march to the gallows like Maqbool Butt, a proud martyr to
the cause of Kashmir's freedom struggle. On the whole, most Kashmiris
see Mohammed Afzal as a sort of prisoner-of-war being tried in the
courts of an occupying power. (Which it undoubtedly is). Naturally,
political parties, in India as well as in Kashmir, have sniffed the
breeze and are cynically closing in for the kill.
Sadly, in the midst of the frenzy, Afzal seems to have forfeited the right to be an individual, a real person any more. He's become a vehicle for everybody's fantasies—nationalists, separatists, and anti-capital punishment activists. He has become India's great villain and Kashmir's great hero—proving only that whatever our pundits, policymakers and peace gurus say, all these years later, the war in Kashmir has by no means ended.
In a situation as fraught and politicised as this, it's tempting to believe that the time to intervene has come and gone. After all, the judicial process lasted 40 months, and the Supreme Court has examined the evidence before it. It has convicted two of the accused and acquitted the other two. Surely this in itself is proof of judicial objectivity? What more remains to be said? There's another way of looking at it. Isn't it odd that the prosecution's case, proved to be so egregiously wrong in one half, has been so gloriously vindicated in the other?
The story of Mohammed Afzal is fascinating precisely because he is not Maqbool Butt. Yet his story too is inextricably entwined with the story of the Kashmir Valley. It's a story whose coordinates range far beyond the confines of courtrooms and the limited imagination of people who live in the secure heart of a self-declared 'superpower'. Mohammed 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 Parliament 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 grottos of our police stations to what goes on in the cold, snowy streets of Paradise Valley; from there to the impersonal 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.
On
October 4 this year, I was one amongst a very small group of people who
had gathered at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi to protest against Mohammed
Afzal's death sentence. I was there because I believe Mohammed Afzal is
only a pawn in a very sinister game. He's not the Dragon he's being made
out to be, he's only the Dragon's footprint. And if the footprint is
made to 'become extinct', we'll never know who the Dragon was. Is.
Not surprisingly, that afternoon there were more journalists and TV crews than there were protesters. Most of the attention was on Ghalib, Afzal's angelic looking little son. Kind-hearted people, not sure of what to do with a young boy whose father was going to the gallows, were plying him with ice-creams and cold drinks. As I looked around at the people gathered there, I noted a sad little fact. The convener of the protest, the small, stocky man who was nervously introducing the speakers and making the announcements, was S.A.R. Geelani, a young lecturer in Arabic Literature at Delhi University. Accused Number Three in the Parliament Attack case. He was arrested on December 14, 2001, a day after the attack, by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police. Though Geelani was brutally tortured in custody, though his family—his wife, young children and brother—were illegally detained, he refused to confess to a crime he hadn't committed. Of course you wouldn't know this if you read newspapers in the days following his arrest. They carried detailed descriptions of an entirely imaginary, non-existent confession. The Delhi Police portrayed Geelani as the evil mastermind of the Indian end of the conspiracy. Its scriptwriters orchestrated a hateful propaganda campaign against him, which was eagerly amplified and embellished by a hyper-nationalistic, thrill-seeking media. The police knew perfectly well that in criminal trials, judges are not supposed to take cognisance of media reports. So they knew that their entirely cold-blooded fabrication of a profile for these 'terrorists' would mould public opinion, and create a climate for the trial. But it would not come in for any legal scrutiny.
Here are some of the malicious, outright lies that appeared in the mainstream press:
'Case Cracked: Jaish behind Attack'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 16, 2001: Neeta Sharma and Arun Joshi
"In Delhi, the Special Cell detectives detained a Lecturer in Arabic, who teaches at Zakir Hussain College (Evening)...after it was established that he had received a call made by militants on his mobile phone." Another column in the same paper said: "Terrorists spoke to him before the attack and the lecturer made a phone call to Pakistan after the strike."
'DU Lecturer was terror plan hub'
The Times of India, Dec 17, 2001
"The attack on Parliament on December 13 was a joint operation of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist groups in which a Delhi University lecturer, Syed A.R. Gilani, was one of the key facilitators in Delhi, Police Commissioner Ajai Raj Sharma said on Sunday."
'Varsity don guided fidayeen'
The Hindu, Dec 17, 2001: Devesh K. Pandey
"During interrogation Geelani disclosed that he was in the know of the conspiracy since the day the 'fidayeen' attack was planned."
'Don lectured on terror in free time'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 17, 2001: Sutirtho Patranobis
"Investigations have revealed that by evening he was at the college teaching Arabic literature. In his free time, behind closed doors, either at his house or at Shaukat Hussain's, another suspect to be arrested, he took and gave lessons on terrorism..."
'Professor's proceeds'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 17, 2001
"Geelani recently purchased a house for 22 lakhs in West Delhi. Delhi Police are investigating how he came upon such a windfall...".
'Aligarh se England tak chaatron mein aatankwaad ke beej bo raha tha Geelani (From Aligarh to England Geelani sowed the seeds of terrorism)
Rashtriya Sahara, Dec 18, 2001: Sujit Thakur
Trans: "...According to sources and information collected by investigation agencies, Geelani has made a statement to the police that he was an agent of Jaish-e-Mohammed for a long time.... It was because of Geelani's articulation, style of working and sound planning that in 2000 Jaish-e-Mohammed gave him the responsibility of spreading intellectual terrorism."
'Terror suspect frequent visitor to Pak mission'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 21, 2001: Swati Chaturvedi
"During interrogation, Geelani has admitted that he had made frequent calls to Pakistan and was in touch with militants belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammed...Geelani said that he had been provided with funds by some members of the Jaish and told to buy two flats that could be used in militant operations."
'Person of the Week'
Sunday Times of India, Dec 23, 2001:
"A cellphone proved his undoing. Delhi University's Syed A.R. Geelani was the first to be arrested in the December 13 case—a shocking reminder that the roots of terrorism go far and deep..."
Zee TV trumped them all. It produced a film called December 13th, a 'docudrama' that claimed to be the 'truth based on the police chargesheet'. (A contradiction in terms, wouldn't you say?) The film was privately screened for Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani. Both men applauded the film. Their approbation was widely reported by the media.
TV grab of one of the terrorists of the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack
The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal to stay the broadcast of the
film on the grounds that judges are not influenced by the media. (Would
the Supreme Court concede that even if judges are beyond being
influenced by media reports, the 'collective conscience of the society'
might not be?) December 13th was broadcast on Zee TV's national
network a few days before the fast-track trial court sentenced Geelani,
Afzal and Shaukat to death. Geelani eventually spent 18 months in jail,
many of them in solitary confinement on death row.
He was released when the high court acquitted him and Afsan Guru. (Afsan, who was pregnant when she was arrested, had her baby in prison. Her experience broke her. She now suffers from a serious psychotic condition.) The Supreme Court upheld the acquittal. It found absolutely no evidence to link Geelani with the Parliament attack or with any terrorist organisation. Not a single newspaper or journalist or TV channel has seen fit to apologise to Geelani for their lies. But S.A.R.
Geelani's troubles didn't end there. His acquittal left the Special Cell with a plot, but no 'mastermind'. This, as we shall see, becomes something of a problem. More importantly, Geelani was a free man now—free to meet the press, talk to lawyers, clear his name. On the evening of February 8, 2005, during the course of the final hearings at the Supreme Court, Geelani was making his way to his lawyer's house. A mysterious gunman appeared from the shadows and fired five bullets into his body. Miraculously, he survived. It was an unbelievable new twist to the story. Clearly somebody was worried about what he knew, what he would say.... One would imagine that the police would give this investigation top priority, hoping it would throw up some vital new leads into the Parliament attack case. Instead, the Special Cell treated Geelani as though he was the prime suspect in his own assassination. They confiscated his computer and took away his car. Hundreds of activists gathered outside the hospital and called for an enquiry into the assassination attempt, which would include an investigation into the Special Cell itself. (Of course that never happened. More than a year has passed, nobody shows any interest in pursuing the matter. Odd.)
So here he was now, S.A.R. Geelani, having survived this terrible ordeal, standing up in public at Jantar Mantar, saying that Mohammed Afzal didn't deserve a death sentence. How much easier it would be for him to keep his head down, stay at home. I was profoundly moved, humbled, by this quiet display of courage.
Across
the line from S.A.R. Geelani, in the jostling crowd of journalists and
photographers, trying his best to look inconspicuous in a lemon T-shirt
and gaberdine pants, holding a little tape-recorder, was another Gilani.
Iftikhar Gilani. He had been in prison too. He was arrested and taken
into police custody on June 9, 2002. At the time he was a reporter for
the Jammu-based Kashmir Times. He was charged under the Official
Secrets Act. His 'crime' was that he possessed obsolete information on
Indian troop deployment in 'Indian-held Kashmir'. (This 'information',
it turns out, was a published monograph by a Pakistani research
institute, and was freely available on the Internet for anybody who
wished to download it. ) Iftikhar Gilani's
computer was seized. IB officials tampered with his hard drive, meddled
with the downloaded file, changed the words 'Indian-held Kashmir' to
'Jammu and Kashmir' to make it sound like an Indian document, and added
the words 'Only for Reference. Strictly Not For Circulation', to make it
seem like a secret document smuggled out of the home ministry. The
directorate general of military intelligence—though it had been given a
photocopy of the monograph—ignored repeated appeals from Iftikhar
Gilani's counsel, kept quiet, and refused to clarify the matter for a
whole six months.
Ghalib, 7, Afzal’s son, with Yasin Malik and S.A.R. Geelani in Delhi on Oct ’06
Once again the malicious lies put out by the Special Cell were
obediently reproduced in the newspapers. Here are a few of the lies they
told:
"Iftikhar Gilani, 35-year-old son-in-law of Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, is believed to have admitted in a city court that he was an agent of Pakistan's spy agency." -- The Hindustan Times, June, 11, 2002: Neeta Sharma
"Iftikhar Gilani was the pin-point man of Syed Salahuddin of Hizbul Mujahideen. Investigations have revealed that Iftikhar used to pass information to Salahuddin about the moves of Indian security agencies. He had camouflaged his real motives behind his journalist's facade so well that it took years to unmask him, well-placed sources said." -- The Pioneer, Pramod Kumar Singh
"Geelani ke damaad ke ghar aaykar chhaapon mein behisaab sampati wa samwaidansheil dastaweiz baramad" (Enormous wealth and sensitive documents recovered from the house of Geelani's son-in-law during income tax raids) -- Hindustan, June 10, 2002
Never mind that the police chargesheet recorded a recovery of only Rs 3,450 from his house.
Meanwhile, other media reports said that he had a three-bedroom flat, an undisclosed income of Rs 22 lakh, had evaded income tax of Rs 79 lakh, that he and his wife were absconding to evade arrest.
But arrested he was. In jail, Iftikhar Gilani was beaten, abjectly humiliated. In his book My Days In Prison
he tells of how, among other things, he was made to clean the toilet
with his shirt and then wear the same shirt for days. After six months
of court arguments and lobbying by his colleagues, when it became
obvious that if the case against him continued it would lead to serious
embarrassment, he was released.
Here he was now. A free man, a reporter come to Jantar Mantar to cover a story. It occurred to me that S.A.R. Geelani, Iftikhar Gilani and Mohammed Afzal would have been in Tihar jail at the same time. (Along with scores of other less well known Kashmiris whose stories we may never learn.)
It can and will be argued that the cases of both S.A.R. Geelani and Iftikhar Gilani serve only to demonstrate the objectivity of the Indian judicial system and its capacity for self-correction, they do not discredit it. That's only partly true. Both Iftikhar Gilani and S.A.R. Geelani are fortunate to be Delhi-based Kashmiris with a community of articulate, middle-class peers; journalists and university teachers, who knew them well and rallied around them in their time of need. S.A.R. Geelani's lawyer Nandita Haksar put together an All India Defence Committee for S.A.R. Geelani (of which I was a member). There was a coordinated campaign by activists, lawyers and journalists to rally behind Geelani. Well-known lawyers Ram Jethmalani, K.G. Kannabiran, Vrinda Grover represented him. They showed up the case for what it was—a pack of absurd assumptions, suppositions, and outright lies, bolstered by fabricated evidence. So of course judicial objectivity exists. But it's a shy beast that lives somewhere deep in the labyrinth of our legal system. It shows itself rarely. It takes whole teams of top lawyers to coax it out of its lair and make it come out and play. It's what in newspaper-speak would be called a Herculean task. Mohammed Afzal did not have Hercules on his side.
For five months, from the time he was arrested to the day the police charge-sheet was filed, Mohammed Afzal, lodged in a high-security prison, had no legal defence, no legal advice. No top lawyers, no defence committee (in India or Kashmir), and no campaign. Of all the four accused, he was the most vulnerable. His case was far more complicated than Geelani's. Significantly, during much of this time, Afzal's younger brother Hilal was illegally detained by the Special Operations Group (SOG) in Kashmir. He was released after the chargesheet was filed. (This is a piece of the puzzle that will only fall into place as the story unfolds.)
In a serious lapse of procedure, on December 20, 2001, the investigating officer, Asst Commissioner of Police (ACP) Rajbir Singh (affectionately known as Delhi's 'encounter specialist' for the number of 'terrorists' he has killed in 'encounters'), called a press conference at the Special Cell. Mohammed Afzal was made to 'confess' before the media. Deputy commissioner of police (DCP) Ashok Chand told the press that Afzal had already confessed to the police. This turned out to be untrue. Afzal's formal confession to the police took place only the next day (after which he continued to remain in police custody and vulnerable to torture, another serious procedural lapse). In his media 'confession' Afzal incriminated himself in the Parliament attack completely.
From left; Shaukat Guru, S.A.R. Geelani and Mohammed Afzal in Delhi, 2001
During the course of this 'media confession' a curious thing
happened. In an answer to a direct question, Afzal clearly said that
Geelani had nothing to do with the attack and was completely innocent.
At this point, ACP Rajbir Singh shouted at him and forced him to shut
up, and requested the media not to carry this part of Afzal's
'confession'. And they obeyed! The story came out only three
months later when the television channel Aaj Tak re-broadcast the
'confession' in a programme called Hamle Ke Sau Din (Hundred Days
of the Attack) and somehow kept this part in. Meanwhile in the eyes of
the general public—who know little about the law and criminal
procedure—Afzal's public 'confession' only confirmed his guilt. The
verdict of the 'collective conscience of society' would not have been
hard to second guess.
The
day after this 'media' confession, Afzal's 'official' confession was
extracted from him. The flawlessly structured, perfectly fluent
narrative dictated in articulate English to DCP Ashok Chand (in the
DCP's words, "he kept on narrating and I kept on writing") was delivered
in a sealed envelope to a judicial magistrate. In this confession,
Afzal, now the sheet-anchor of the prosecution's case, weaves a
masterful tale that connected Ghazi Baba, Maulana Masood Azhar, a man
called Tariq, and the five dead terrorists; their equipment, arms and
ammunition, home ministry passes, a laptop, and fake ID cards; detailed
lists of exactly how many kilos of what chemical he bought from where,
the exact ratio in which they were mixed to make explosives; and the
exact times at which he made and received calls on which mobile number.
(For some reason, by then Afzal had also changed his mind about Geelani
and implicated him completely in the conspiracy.)
Each point of the 'confession' corresponded perfectly with the evidence that the police had already gathered. In other words, Afzal's confessional statement slipped perfectly into the version that the police had already offered the press days ago, like Cinderella's foot into the glass slipper. (If it were a film, you could say it was a screenplay, which came with its own box of props. Actually, as we know now, it was made into a film. Zee TV owes Afzal some royalty payments. )
Eventually, both the high court and the Supreme Court set aside Afzal's confession citing 'lapses and violations of procedural safeguards'. But Afzal's confession somehow survives, the phantom keystone in the prosecution's case. And before it was technically and legally set aside, the confessional document had already served a major extra-legal purpose: On December 21, 2001, when the Government of India launched its war effort against Pakistan it said it had 'incontrovertible evidence' of Pakistan's involvement. Afzal's confession was the only 'proof' of Pakistan's involvement that the government had! Afzal's confession. And the sticker-manifesto. Think about it. On the basis of this illegal confession extracted under torture, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were moved to the Pakistan border at huge cost to the public exchequer, and the subcontinent devolved into a game of nuclear brinkmanship in which the whole world was held hostage.
Big Whispered Question: Could it have been the other way around? Did the confession precipitate the war, or did the need for a war precipitate the need for the confession?
Later,
when Afzal's confession was set aside by the higher courts, all talk of
Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba ceased. The only other link to
Pakistan was the identity of the five dead fidayeen. Mohammed Afzal,
still in police custody, identified them as Mohammed, Rana, Raja, Hamza
and Haider. The home minister said they "looked like Pakistanis", the
police said they were Pakistanis, the trial court judge said they were
Pakistanis. And there the matter rests. Had we been told that their
names were Happy, Bouncy, Lucky, Jolly and Kidingamani from Scandinavia,
we would have had to accept that too. We still don't know who they
really are, or where they're from. Is anyone curious? Doesn't look like
it. The high court said the "identity of the five deceased thus stands
established. Even otherwise it makes no difference. What is relevant is
the association of the accused with the said five persons and not their
names."
In his Statement of the Accused (which, unlike the confession, is made in court and not police custody) Afzal says: "I had not identified any terrorist. Police told me the names of terrorists and forced me to identify them." But by then it was too late for him. On the first day of the trial, the lawyer appointed by the trial court judge agreed to accept Afzal's identification of the bodies and the postmortem reports as undisputed evidence without formal proof! This baffling move was to have serious consequences for Afzal. To quote from the Supreme Court judgement, "The first circumstance against the accused Afzal is that Afzal knew who the deceased terrorists were. He identified the dead bodies of the deceased terrorists. On this aspect the evidence remains unshattered."
Of course it's possible that the dead terrorists were foreign militants. But it is just as possible that they were not. Killing people and falsely identifying them as 'foreign terrorists', or falsely identifying dead people as 'foreign terrorists', or falsely identifying living people as terrorists, is not uncommon among the police or security forces either in Kashmir or even on the streets of Delhi.
The best known among the many well-documented cases in Kashmir, one that
went on to become an international scandal, is the killing that took
place after the Chhittisinghpura massacre. On the night of April 20,
2000, just before the US President Bill Clinton arrived in New Delhi, 35
Sikhs were killed in the village of Chhittisinghpura by 'unidentified
gunmen' wearing Indian Army uniforms. (In Kashmir many people suspected
that Indian security forces were behind the massacre.) Five days later
the SOG and the 7th Rashtriya Rifles, a counter-insurgency unit of the
army, killed five people in a joint operation outside a village called
Pathribal. The next morning they announced that the men were the
Pakistan-based foreign militants who had killed the Sikhs in
Chhittisinghpura. The bodies were found burned and disfigured. Under
their (unburned) army uniforms, they were in ordinary civilian clothes.
It turned out that they were all local people, rounded up from Anantnag
district and brutally killed in cold blood.
There are others: On October 20, 2003, the Srinagar newspaper Al-safa printed a picture of a 'Pakistani militant' who the 18 Rashtriya Rifles claimed they had killed while he was trying to storm an army camp. A baker in Kupwara, Wali Khan, saw the picture and recognised it as his son, Farooq Ahmed Khan, who had been picked up by soldiers in a Gypsy two months earlier. His body was finally exhumed more than a year later.
On April 20, 2004, the 18 Rashtriya Rifles posted in the Lolab valley claimed it had killed four foreign militants in a fierce encounter. It later turned out that all four were ordinary labourers from Jammu, hired by the army and taken to Kupwara. An anonymous letter tipped off the labourers' families who travelled to Kupwara and eventually had the bodies exhumed.
On
November 9, 2004, the army showcased 47 surrendered 'militants' to the
press at Nagrota, Jammu, in the presence of the General Officer
Commanding XVI, Corps and the Director General of Police, J&K. The
J&K police later found that 27 of them were just unemployed men who
had been given fake names and fake aliases and promised government jobs
in return for playing their part in the charade.
These are just a few quick examples to illustrate the fact that in the absence of any other evidence, the police's word is just not good enough.
The hearings in the fast-track trial court began in May 2002. Let's not forget the climate in which the trial took place. The frenzy over the 9/11 attacks was still in the air. The US was gloating over its victory in Afghanistan. Gujarat was convulsed by communal frenzy. A few months previously, coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express had been set on fire and 58 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive inside. As 'revenge' in an orchestrated pogrom, more than 2,000 Muslims were publicly butchered and more than 1,50,000 driven from their homes.
For Afzal, everything that could go wrong went wrong. He was incarcerated in a high-security prison, with no access to the outside world, and no money to hire a lawyer professionally. Three weeks into the trial the lawyer appointed by the court asked to be discharged from the case because she had now been professionally hired to be on the team of lawyers for S.A.R. Geelani's defence. The court appointed her junior, a lawyer with very little experience, to represent Afzal. He did not once visit his client in jail to take instructions. He did not summon a single witness for Afzal's defence and barely cross-questioned any of the prosecution witnesses. Five days after he was appointed, on July 8, Afzal asked the court for another lawyer and gave the court a list of lawyers whom he hoped the court might hire for him. Each of them refused. (Given the frenzy of propaganda in the media, it was hardly surprising. At a later stage of the trial, when senior advocate Ram Jethmalani agreed to represent Geelani, Shiv Sena mobs ransacked his Bombay office.) The judge expressed his inability to do anything about this, and gave Afzal the right to cross-examine witnesses. It's astonishing for the judge to expect a layperson to be able cross-examine witnesses in a criminal trial. It's a virtually impossible task for someone who does not have a sophisticated understanding of criminal law, including new laws that had just been passed, like POTA, and the amendments to the Evidence Act and the Telegraph Act. Even experienced lawyers were having to work overtime to bring themselves up to date.
The case against Afzal was built up in the trial court on the strength of the testimonies of almost 80 prosecution witnesses: landlords, shopkeepers, technicians from cell-phone companies, the police themselves. This was a crucial period of the trial, when the legal foundation of the case was being laid. It required meticulous back-breaking legal work in which evidence needed to be amassed and put on record, witnesses for the defence summoned and testimonies from prosecution witnesses cross-questioned. Even if the verdict of the trial court went against the accused (trial courts are notoriously conservative), the evidence could then be worked upon by lawyers in the higher courts. Through this absolutely critical period, Afzal went virtually undefended. It was at this stage that the bottom fell out of his case, and the noose tightened around his neck.
Even still, during the trial, the skeletons began to clatter out of the Special Cell's cupboard in an embarrassing heap. It became clear that the accumulation of lies, fabrications, forged documents and serious lapses in procedure began from the very first day of the investigation. While the high court and Supreme Court judgements have pointed these things out, they have just wagged an admonitory finger at the police, or occasionally called it a 'disturbing feature', which is a disturbing feature in itself. At no point in the trial has the police been seriously reprimanded, leave alone penalised. In fact, almost every step of the way, the Special Cell displayed an egregious disregard for procedural norms. The shoddy callousness with which the investigations were carried out demonstrate a worrying belief that they wouldn't be 'found out,' and if they were, it wouldn't matter very much. Their confidence does not seem to have been misplaced.
There is fudging in almost every part of the investigation.
Consider the Time and Place of the Arrests and Seizures: The Delhi Police said that Afzal and Shaukat were arrested in Srinagar based on information given to them by Geelani following his arrest. The court records show that the message to look out for Shaukat and Afzal was flashed to the Srinagar police on December 15 at 5.45 am. But according to the Delhi Police's records Geelani was only arrested in Delhi on December 15 at 10 am—four hours after they had started looking for Afzal and Shaukat in Srinagar. They haven't been able to explain this discrepancy. The high court judgement puts it on record that the police version contains a 'material contradiction' and cannot be true. It goes down as a 'disturbing feature.' Why the Delhi Police needed to lie remains unasked, and unanswered.
When the police arrest somebody, procedure requires them to have public witnesses for the arrest who sign an Arrest Memo and a Seizure Memo for what they may have 'seized' from those who have been arrested—goods, cash, documents, whatever. The police claim they arrested Afzal and Shaukat together on December 15 at 11 am in Srinagar. They say they 'seized' the truck the two men were fleeing in (it was registered in the name of Shaukat's wife). They also say they seized a Nokia mobile phone, a laptop and Rs 10 lakh from Afzal. In his Statement of the Accused, Afzal says he was arrested at a bus stop in Srinagar and that no laptop, mobile phone or money was 'seized' from him.
Scandalously, the Arrest Memos for both Afzal and Shaukat have been signed in Delhi, by Bismillah, Geelani's younger brother, who was at the time being held in illegal confinement at the Lodhi Road Police Station. Meanwhile, the two witnesses who signed the seizure memo for the phone, the laptop and the Rs 10 lakh are both from the J&K Police. One of them is Head Constable Mohammed Akbar (Prosecution Witness 62) who, as we shall see later, is no stranger to Mohammad Afzal, and is not just any old policeman who happened to be passing by. Even by the J&K Police's own admission they first located Afzal and Shaukat in Parimpura Fruit Mandi. For reasons they don't state, the police didn't arrest them there. They say they followed them to a less public place—where there were no public witnesses.
So here's another serious inconsistency in the prosecution's case. Of this the high court judgement says 'the time of arrest of accused persons has been seriously dented'. Shockingly, it is at this contested time and place of arrest that the police claim to have recovered the most vital evidence that implicates Afzal in the conspiracy: the mobile phone and the laptop. Once again, in the matter of the date and time of the arrests, and in the alleged seizure of the incriminating laptop and the Rs 10 lakh, we have only the word of the police, against the word of a 'terrorist'.
The Seizures Continued:
The seized laptop, the police said, contained the files that created
the fake home ministry pass and the fake identity cards. It contained no
other useful information. They claimed that Afzal was carrying it to
Srinagar in order to return it to Ghazi Baba. The Investigating Officer,
ACP Rajbir Singh, said that the hard disk of the computer had been
sealed on January 16, 2002 (a whole month after the seizure). But the
computer shows that it was accessed even after that date. The courts
have considered this but taken no cognisance of it. (On a speculative
note, isn't it strange that the only incriminating information found on
the computer were the files used to make the fake passes and ID cards?
And a Zee TV film clip showing the Parliament Building. If other
incriminating information had been deleted, why wasn't this? And why did
Ghazi Baba, Chief of Operations of an international terrorist
organisation, need a laptop—with bad artwork on it— so urgently?)
Consider the Mobile phone call records: Stared at for long enough, a lot of the 'hard evidence' produced by the Special Cell begins to look dubious. The backbone of the prosecution's case has to do with the recovery of mobile phones, SIM cards, computerised call records, and the testimonies of officials from cellphone companies and shopkeepers who sold the phones and SIM cards to Afzal and his accomplices. The call records that were produced to show that Shaukat, Afzal , Geelani and Mohammad (one of the dead militants) had all been in touch with each other very close to the time of the attack were uncertified computer printouts, not even copies of primary documents. They were outputs of the billing system stored as text files that could have been easily doctored and at any time. For example, the call records that were produced show that two calls had been made at exactly the same time from the same SIM card, but from separate handsets with separate IMEI numbers. This means that either the SIM card had been cloned or the call records were doctored.
Consider the SIM card: To prop up its version of the story, the prosecution relies heavily on one particular mobile phone number—9811489429. The police say it was Afzal's number—the number that connected Afzal to Mohammad, Afzal to Shaukat, and Shaukat to Geelani. The police also say that this number was written on the back of the identity tags found on the dead terrorists. Pretty convenient. Lost Kitten! Call Mom at 9811489429. (It's worth mentioning that normal procedure requires evidence gathered at the scene of a crime to be sealed. The ID cards were never sealed and remained in the custody of the police and could have been tampered with at any time.)
The only evidence the police have that 9811489429 was indeed Afzal's
number is Afzal's confession, which as we have seen is no evidence at
all. The SIM card has never been found. The police produced a
prosecution witness, Kamal Kishore, who identified Afzal and said that
he had sold him a Motorola phone and a SIM card on December 4, 2001.
However, the call records the prosecution relied on show that that
particular SIM card was already in use on the November 6, a whole month before Afzal is supposed to have bought it!
So either the witness is lying, or the call records are false. The high
court glosses over this discrepancy by saying that Kamal Kishore had
only said that he sold Afzal a SIM card, not this particular SIM
card. The Supreme Court judgement loftily says "The SIM card should
necessarily have been sold to Afzal prior to 4.12.2001." And that, my
friends, is that.
Consider the Identification of the Accused: A series of prosecution witnesses, most of them shopkeepers, identified Afzal as the man to whom they had sold various things: ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, sulphur, a Sujata mixer-grinder, packets of dry fruit and so on. Normal procedure would require these shopkeepers to pick Afzal out from a number of people in a test identification parade. This didn't happen. Instead Afzal was identified by them when he 'led' the police to these shops while he was in police custody and introduced to the witnesses as an Accused in the Parliament Attack. (Are we allowed to speculate about whether he led the police or the police led him to the shops? After all he was still in their custody, still vulnerable to torture. If his confession under these circumstances is legally suspect, then why not all of this?)
The
judges have pondered the violation of these procedural norms but have
not taken them very seriously. They said that they did not see why
ordinary members of the public would have reason to falsely implicate an
innocent person. But does this hold true, given the orgy of media
propaganda that ordinary members of the public were subjected to,
particularly in this case? Does this hold true, if you take into account
the fact that ordinary shopkeepers, particularly those who sell
electronic goods without receipts in the 'grey market', are completely
beholden to the Delhi Police?
None of the inconsistencies that I have written about so far are the result of spectacular detective work on my part. A lot of them are documented in an excellent book called December 13th: Terror Over Democracy by Nirmalangshu Mukherji; in two reports (Trial of Errors and Balancing Act) published by the Peoples' Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi; and most important of all, in the three thick volumes of judgements of the trial court, the high court and the Supreme Court. All these are public documents, lying on my desk. Why is it that when there is this whole murky universe begging to be revealed, our TV channels are busy staging hollow debates between uninformed people and grasping politicians? Why is it that apart from a few sporadic independent commentators, our newspapers carry front-page stories about who the hangman is going to be, and macabre details about the length (60 metres) and weight (3.75 kg) of the rope that will be used to hang Mohammed Afzal (Indian Express, October 16, 2006). Shall we pause for a moment to say a few hosannas for the Free Press?
It's not an easy thing for most people to do, but if you can, unmoor yourself conceptually, if only for a moment, from the "Police is Good/Terrorists are Evil" ideology. The evidence on offer minus its ideological trappings opens up a chasm of terrifying possibilities. It points in directions which most of us would prefer not to look.
The prize for the Most Ignored Legal Document in the entire case goes to the Statement of the Accused Mohammed Afzal under Section 313 of the Criminal Procedure Code. In this document, the evidence against him is put to him by the court in the form of questions. He can either accept the evidence or dispute it, and has the opportunity to put down his version of his story in his own words. In Afzal's case, given that he has never had any real opportunity to be heard, this document tells his story in his voice.
In this document, Afzal accepts certain charges made against him by the prosecution. He accepts that he met a man called Tariq. He accepts that Tariq introduced him to a man called Mohammad. He accepts that he helped Mohammad come to Delhi and helped him to buy a second-hand white Ambassador car. He accepts that Mohammad was one of the five fidayeen who was killed in the Attack. The important thing about Afzal's Statement of the Accused is that he makes no effort to completely absolve himself or claim innocence. But he puts his actions in a context that is devastating. Afzal's statement explains the peripheral part he played in the Parliament attack. But it also ushers us towards an understanding of some possible reasons for why the investigation was so shoddy, why it pulls up short at the most crucial junctures and why it is vital that we do not dismiss this as just incompetence and shoddiness. Even if we don't believe Afzal, given what we do know about the trial and the role of the Special Cell, it is inexcusable not to look in the direction he's pointing. He gives specific information—names, places, dates. (This could not have been easy, given that his family, his brothers, his wife and young son live in Kashmir and are easy meat for the people he mentions in his deposition.)
In Afzal's words:
"I
live in Sopre J&K and in the year 2000 when I was there Army used
to harass me almost daily, then said once a week. One Raja Mohan Rai
used to tell me that I should give information to him about militants. I
was a surrendered militant and all militants have to mark Attendance at
Army Camp every Sunday. I was not being physically torture by me. He
used to only just threatened me. I used to give him small information
which I used to gather from newspaper, in order to save myself. In June/
July 2000 I migrated from my village and went to town Baramullah. I was
having a shop of distribution of Surgical instruments which I was
running on commission basis. One day when I was going on my scooter
S.T.F (State Task Force) people came and picked me up and they
continuously tortured me for five days. Somebody had given information
to S.T.F that I was again indulging in militant activities. That person
was confronted with me and released in my presence. Then I was kept by
them in custody for about 25 days and I got myself released by paying Rs
1 lakh. Special Cell People had confirmed this incident. Thereafter I
was given a certificate by the S.T.F and they made me a Special Police
Officer for six months. They were knowing I will not work for them.
Tariq met me in Palhalan S.T.F camp where I was in custody of S.T.F.
Tariq met me later on in Sri Nagar and told me he was basically working
for S.T.F. I told him I was also working for S.T.F. Mohammad who was
killed in Attack on Parliament was along with Tariq. Tariq told me he
was from Keran sector of Kashmir and he told me that I should take
Mohammad to Delhi as Mohammad has to go out of country from Delhi after
some time. I don't know why I was caught by the police of Sri Nagar on
15.12.2001. I was boarding bus at Sri Nagar bus stop, for going home
when police caught me. Witness Akbar who had deposed in the court that
he had apprehended Shaukat and me in Sri Nagar had conducted a raid at
my shop about a year prior to December 2001 and told me that I was
selling fake surgical instruments and he took Rs 5000/- from me. I was
tortured at Special Cell and one Bhoop Singh even compelled me to take
urine and I saw family of S. A.R. Geelani also there, Geelani was in
miserable condition. He was not in a position to stand. We were taken to
Doctor for examination but instructions used to be issued that we have
to tell Doctor that everything was alright with a threat that if we do
not do so we be again tortured."
He then asks the court's permission to add some more information.
"Mohammad the slain terrorist of Parliament attack had come along with me from Kashmir. The person who handed him over to me is Tariq. Tariq is working with Security Force and S.T.F JK Police. Tariq told me that if I face any problem due to Mohammad he will help me as he knew the security forces and S.T.F very well... Tariq had told me that I just have to drop Mohammad at Delhi and do nothing else. And if I would not take Mohammad with me to Delhi I would be implicated in some other case. I under these circumstances brought Mohammad to Delhi under a compulsion without knowing he was a terrorist."
So now we have a picture emerging of someone who could be a key player. 'Witness Akbar' (PW 62), Mohd Akbar, Head Constable, Parimpora Police Station, the J&K policeman who signed the Seizure Memo at the time of Afzal's arrest. In a letter to Sushil Kumar, his Supreme Court lawyer, Afzal describes a chilling moment at one point in the trial. In the court, Witness Akbar, who had come from Srinagar to testify about the Seizure Memo, reassured Afzal in Kashmiri that "his family was alright". Afzal immediately recognised that this was a veiled threat. Afzal also says that after he was arrested in Srinagar he was taken to the Parimpora police station and beaten, and plainly told that his wife and family would suffer dire consequences if he did not co-operate. (We already know that Afzal's brother Hilal had been held in illegal detention by the SOG during some crucial months.)
In this letter, Afzal describes how he was tortured in the STF camp—with electrodes on his genitals and chillies and petrol in his anus. He mentions the name of Dy Superintendent of Police Dravinder Singh who said he needed him to do a 'small job' for him in Delhi. He also says that some of the phone numbers mentioned in the chargesheet can be traced to an STF camp in Kashmir.
Protests against Afzal’s hanging in Srinagar
It is Afzal's story that gives us a glimpse into what life is really
like in the Kashmir Valley. It's only in the Noddy Book version we read
about in our newspapers that Security Forces battle Militants and
innocent Kashmiris are caught in the cross-fire. 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 things and people, it's 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 is the SOG and STF that Afzal talks about. These are the most ruthless, indisciplined and dreaded elements of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir. 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 '90s 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 20 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 practising militant, he voluntarily
surrendered to the Border Security Force (BSF). Illogically enough, it
was at this point that his nightmares began. His surrender was treated
as a crime and his life became a hell. Can young Kashmiri men be blamed
if the lesson they draw from Afzal's story is that it would be not just
stupid, but insane to surrender their weapons and submit to the vast
range of myriad cruelties the Indian State has on offer for them?
The story of Mohammed Afzal has enraged Kashmiris because his story is their story too. 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 joint interrogation centres, 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 theatre 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 all the pomp and ceremony of a so-called democracy.
If Afzal is hanged, we'll never know the answer to the real question: Who attacked the Indian Parliament? Was it the Lashkar-e-Toiba? The Jaish-e-Mohammed? Or does the answer lie somewhere deep in the secret heart of this country that we all live in and love and hate in our own beautiful, intricate, various, and thorny ways?
There ought to be a Parliamentary Inquiry into the December 13 attack on Parliament. While the inquiry is pending, Afzal's family in Sopore must be protected because they are vulnerable hostages in this bizarre story.
To hang Mohammed Afzal without knowing what really happened is a misdeed that will not easily be forgotten. Or forgiven. Nor should it be.
Notwithstanding the 10% Growth Rate.
-------A Rebuttal
Praveen Swami in The Hindu
-------An earlier article with details of the case by Ms. Roy
'And His Life Should Become Extinct' - The Very Strange Story of the Attack on the Indian Parliament
We know this much: On December 13, 2001,
the Indian Parliament was in its winter session. (The NDA 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 dry fruit, and even a love letter.
Not surprisingly, PM A.B. Vajpayee seized the opportunity to compare the assault to the September 11 attacks in the US that had happened only three months previously.
|
In the tense days that followed, Parliament was adjourned. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner from Pakistan, suspended air, rail and bus communications and banned over-flights. It put into motion a massive mobilisation 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 travelling 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 Rs 10,000 crore of public money. A few hundred soldiers died just in the panicky process of mobilisation.)
Almost three-and-a-half years later, on August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court delivered its final judgement in the case. It endorsed the view that the Parliament attack be looked upon as an act of war. It said, "The attempted attack on Parliament is an undoubted invasion of the sovereign attribute of the State including the Government of India which is its alter ego...the deceased terrorists were roused and impelled to action by a strong anti-Indian feeling as the writing on the fake home ministry sticker found on the car (Ex PW1/8) reveals." It went on to say "the modus operandi adopted by the hardcore 'fidayeens' are all demonstrative of launching a war against the Government of India".
The text on the fake home ministry sticker read as follows:
"INDIA IS A VERY BAD COUNTRY AND WE HATE INDIA WE WANT TO DESTROY INDIA AND WITH THE GRACE OF GOD WE WILL DO IT GOD IS WITH US AND WE WILL TRY OUR BEST. THIS EDIET WAJPAI AND ADVANI WE WILL KILL THEM. THEY HAVE KILLED MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE AND THEY ARE VERY BAD PERSONS THERE BROTHER BUSH IS ALSO A VERY BAD PERSON HE WILL BE NEXT TARGET HE IS ALSO THE KILLER OF INNOCENT PEOPLE HE HAVE TO DIE AND WE WILL DO IT."
This subtly worded sticker-manifesto was displayed on the windscreen of the car bomb as it drove into Parliament. (Given the amount of text, it's a wonder the driver could see anything at all. Maybe that's why he collided with the Vice-President's cavalcade?)
The police chargesheet was filed in a special fast-track trial court designated for cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). The trial court sentenced Geelani, Shaukat and Afzal to death. Afsan Guru was sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment. The high court subsequently acquitted Geelani and Afsan, but it upheld Shaukat's and Afzal's death sentence. Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittals, and reduced Shaukat's punishment to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. However it not just confirmed, but enhanced Mohammed Afzal's sentence. He has been given three life sentences and a double death sentence.
|
So: No direct evidence, but yes, circumstantial evidence.
A controversial paragraph in the judgement goes on to say, "The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if 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 maximum punishment to the person who is proved to be the conspirator in this treacherous act" (emphasis mine).
To invoke the 'collective conscience of society' to validate ritual murder, which is what the death penalty is, skates precariously close to valorising lynch law. It's chilling to think that this has been laid upon us not by predatory politicians or sensation-seeking journalists (though they too have done that), but as an edict from the highest court in the land.
Spelling out the reasons for awarding Afzal the death penalty, the judgement goes on to say, "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 paragraph combines flawed logic with absolute ignorance of what it means to be a 'surrendered militant' in Kashmir today.
So: Should Mohammed Afzal's life become extinct?
A small, but influential minority of intellectuals, activists, editors, lawyers and public figures have objected to the Death Sentence as a matter of moral principle. They also argue that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the Death Sentence works as a deterrent to terrorists. (How can it, when, in this age of fidayeen and suicide bombers, death seems to be the main attraction?)
If opinion polls, letters-to-the-editor and the reactions of live audiences in TV studios are a correct gauge of public opinion in India, then the lynch mob is expanding by the hour. It looks as though an overwhelming majority of Indian citizens would like to see Mohammed Afzal hanged every day, weekends included, for the next few years. L.K. Advani, leader of the Opposition, displaying an unseemly sense of urgency, wants him to be hanged as soon as possible, without a moment's delay.
|
Sadly, in the midst of the frenzy, Afzal seems to have forfeited the right to be an individual, a real person any more. He's become a vehicle for everybody's fantasies—nationalists, separatists, and anti-capital punishment activists. He has become India's great villain and Kashmir's great hero—proving only that whatever our pundits, policymakers and peace gurus say, all these years later, the war in Kashmir has by no means ended.
In a situation as fraught and politicised as this, it's tempting to believe that the time to intervene has come and gone. After all, the judicial process lasted 40 months, and the Supreme Court has examined the evidence before it. It has convicted two of the accused and acquitted the other two. Surely this in itself is proof of judicial objectivity? What more remains to be said? There's another way of looking at it. Isn't it odd that the prosecution's case, proved to be so egregiously wrong in one half, has been so gloriously vindicated in the other?
The story of Mohammed Afzal is fascinating precisely because he is not Maqbool Butt. Yet his story too is inextricably entwined with the story of the Kashmir Valley. It's a story whose coordinates range far beyond the confines of courtrooms and the limited imagination of people who live in the secure heart of a self-declared 'superpower'. Mohammed 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 Parliament 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 grottos of our police stations to what goes on in the cold, snowy streets of Paradise Valley; from there to the impersonal 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.
|
Not surprisingly, that afternoon there were more journalists and TV crews than there were protesters. Most of the attention was on Ghalib, Afzal's angelic looking little son. Kind-hearted people, not sure of what to do with a young boy whose father was going to the gallows, were plying him with ice-creams and cold drinks. As I looked around at the people gathered there, I noted a sad little fact. The convener of the protest, the small, stocky man who was nervously introducing the speakers and making the announcements, was S.A.R. Geelani, a young lecturer in Arabic Literature at Delhi University. Accused Number Three in the Parliament Attack case. He was arrested on December 14, 2001, a day after the attack, by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police. Though Geelani was brutally tortured in custody, though his family—his wife, young children and brother—were illegally detained, he refused to confess to a crime he hadn't committed. Of course you wouldn't know this if you read newspapers in the days following his arrest. They carried detailed descriptions of an entirely imaginary, non-existent confession. The Delhi Police portrayed Geelani as the evil mastermind of the Indian end of the conspiracy. Its scriptwriters orchestrated a hateful propaganda campaign against him, which was eagerly amplified and embellished by a hyper-nationalistic, thrill-seeking media. The police knew perfectly well that in criminal trials, judges are not supposed to take cognisance of media reports. So they knew that their entirely cold-blooded fabrication of a profile for these 'terrorists' would mould public opinion, and create a climate for the trial. But it would not come in for any legal scrutiny.
Here are some of the malicious, outright lies that appeared in the mainstream press:
'Case Cracked: Jaish behind Attack'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 16, 2001: Neeta Sharma and Arun Joshi
"In Delhi, the Special Cell detectives detained a Lecturer in Arabic, who teaches at Zakir Hussain College (Evening)...after it was established that he had received a call made by militants on his mobile phone." Another column in the same paper said: "Terrorists spoke to him before the attack and the lecturer made a phone call to Pakistan after the strike."
'DU Lecturer was terror plan hub'
The Times of India, Dec 17, 2001
"The attack on Parliament on December 13 was a joint operation of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist groups in which a Delhi University lecturer, Syed A.R. Gilani, was one of the key facilitators in Delhi, Police Commissioner Ajai Raj Sharma said on Sunday."
'Varsity don guided fidayeen'
The Hindu, Dec 17, 2001: Devesh K. Pandey
"During interrogation Geelani disclosed that he was in the know of the conspiracy since the day the 'fidayeen' attack was planned."
'Don lectured on terror in free time'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 17, 2001: Sutirtho Patranobis
"Investigations have revealed that by evening he was at the college teaching Arabic literature. In his free time, behind closed doors, either at his house or at Shaukat Hussain's, another suspect to be arrested, he took and gave lessons on terrorism..."
'Professor's proceeds'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 17, 2001
"Geelani recently purchased a house for 22 lakhs in West Delhi. Delhi Police are investigating how he came upon such a windfall...".
'Aligarh se England tak chaatron mein aatankwaad ke beej bo raha tha Geelani (From Aligarh to England Geelani sowed the seeds of terrorism)
Rashtriya Sahara, Dec 18, 2001: Sujit Thakur
Trans: "...According to sources and information collected by investigation agencies, Geelani has made a statement to the police that he was an agent of Jaish-e-Mohammed for a long time.... It was because of Geelani's articulation, style of working and sound planning that in 2000 Jaish-e-Mohammed gave him the responsibility of spreading intellectual terrorism."
'Terror suspect frequent visitor to Pak mission'
The Hindustan Times, Dec 21, 2001: Swati Chaturvedi
"During interrogation, Geelani has admitted that he had made frequent calls to Pakistan and was in touch with militants belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammed...Geelani said that he had been provided with funds by some members of the Jaish and told to buy two flats that could be used in militant operations."
'Person of the Week'
Sunday Times of India, Dec 23, 2001:
"A cellphone proved his undoing. Delhi University's Syed A.R. Geelani was the first to be arrested in the December 13 case—a shocking reminder that the roots of terrorism go far and deep..."
Zee TV trumped them all. It produced a film called December 13th, a 'docudrama' that claimed to be the 'truth based on the police chargesheet'. (A contradiction in terms, wouldn't you say?) The film was privately screened for Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani. Both men applauded the film. Their approbation was widely reported by the media.
TV grab of one of the terrorists of the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack
He was released when the high court acquitted him and Afsan Guru. (Afsan, who was pregnant when she was arrested, had her baby in prison. Her experience broke her. She now suffers from a serious psychotic condition.) The Supreme Court upheld the acquittal. It found absolutely no evidence to link Geelani with the Parliament attack or with any terrorist organisation. Not a single newspaper or journalist or TV channel has seen fit to apologise to Geelani for their lies. But S.A.R.
Geelani's troubles didn't end there. His acquittal left the Special Cell with a plot, but no 'mastermind'. This, as we shall see, becomes something of a problem. More importantly, Geelani was a free man now—free to meet the press, talk to lawyers, clear his name. On the evening of February 8, 2005, during the course of the final hearings at the Supreme Court, Geelani was making his way to his lawyer's house. A mysterious gunman appeared from the shadows and fired five bullets into his body. Miraculously, he survived. It was an unbelievable new twist to the story. Clearly somebody was worried about what he knew, what he would say.... One would imagine that the police would give this investigation top priority, hoping it would throw up some vital new leads into the Parliament attack case. Instead, the Special Cell treated Geelani as though he was the prime suspect in his own assassination. They confiscated his computer and took away his car. Hundreds of activists gathered outside the hospital and called for an enquiry into the assassination attempt, which would include an investigation into the Special Cell itself. (Of course that never happened. More than a year has passed, nobody shows any interest in pursuing the matter. Odd.)
So here he was now, S.A.R. Geelani, having survived this terrible ordeal, standing up in public at Jantar Mantar, saying that Mohammed Afzal didn't deserve a death sentence. How much easier it would be for him to keep his head down, stay at home. I was profoundly moved, humbled, by this quiet display of courage.
|
Ghalib, 7, Afzal’s son, with Yasin Malik and S.A.R. Geelani in Delhi on Oct ’06
"Iftikhar Gilani, 35-year-old son-in-law of Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, is believed to have admitted in a city court that he was an agent of Pakistan's spy agency." -- The Hindustan Times, June, 11, 2002: Neeta Sharma
"Iftikhar Gilani was the pin-point man of Syed Salahuddin of Hizbul Mujahideen. Investigations have revealed that Iftikhar used to pass information to Salahuddin about the moves of Indian security agencies. He had camouflaged his real motives behind his journalist's facade so well that it took years to unmask him, well-placed sources said." -- The Pioneer, Pramod Kumar Singh
"Geelani ke damaad ke ghar aaykar chhaapon mein behisaab sampati wa samwaidansheil dastaweiz baramad" (Enormous wealth and sensitive documents recovered from the house of Geelani's son-in-law during income tax raids) -- Hindustan, June 10, 2002
Never mind that the police chargesheet recorded a recovery of only Rs 3,450 from his house.
Meanwhile, other media reports said that he had a three-bedroom flat, an undisclosed income of Rs 22 lakh, had evaded income tax of Rs 79 lakh, that he and his wife were absconding to evade arrest.
|
Here he was now. A free man, a reporter come to Jantar Mantar to cover a story. It occurred to me that S.A.R. Geelani, Iftikhar Gilani and Mohammed Afzal would have been in Tihar jail at the same time. (Along with scores of other less well known Kashmiris whose stories we may never learn.)
It can and will be argued that the cases of both S.A.R. Geelani and Iftikhar Gilani serve only to demonstrate the objectivity of the Indian judicial system and its capacity for self-correction, they do not discredit it. That's only partly true. Both Iftikhar Gilani and S.A.R. Geelani are fortunate to be Delhi-based Kashmiris with a community of articulate, middle-class peers; journalists and university teachers, who knew them well and rallied around them in their time of need. S.A.R. Geelani's lawyer Nandita Haksar put together an All India Defence Committee for S.A.R. Geelani (of which I was a member). There was a coordinated campaign by activists, lawyers and journalists to rally behind Geelani. Well-known lawyers Ram Jethmalani, K.G. Kannabiran, Vrinda Grover represented him. They showed up the case for what it was—a pack of absurd assumptions, suppositions, and outright lies, bolstered by fabricated evidence. So of course judicial objectivity exists. But it's a shy beast that lives somewhere deep in the labyrinth of our legal system. It shows itself rarely. It takes whole teams of top lawyers to coax it out of its lair and make it come out and play. It's what in newspaper-speak would be called a Herculean task. Mohammed Afzal did not have Hercules on his side.
For five months, from the time he was arrested to the day the police charge-sheet was filed, Mohammed Afzal, lodged in a high-security prison, had no legal defence, no legal advice. No top lawyers, no defence committee (in India or Kashmir), and no campaign. Of all the four accused, he was the most vulnerable. His case was far more complicated than Geelani's. Significantly, during much of this time, Afzal's younger brother Hilal was illegally detained by the Special Operations Group (SOG) in Kashmir. He was released after the chargesheet was filed. (This is a piece of the puzzle that will only fall into place as the story unfolds.)
In a serious lapse of procedure, on December 20, 2001, the investigating officer, Asst Commissioner of Police (ACP) Rajbir Singh (affectionately known as Delhi's 'encounter specialist' for the number of 'terrorists' he has killed in 'encounters'), called a press conference at the Special Cell. Mohammed Afzal was made to 'confess' before the media. Deputy commissioner of police (DCP) Ashok Chand told the press that Afzal had already confessed to the police. This turned out to be untrue. Afzal's formal confession to the police took place only the next day (after which he continued to remain in police custody and vulnerable to torture, another serious procedural lapse). In his media 'confession' Afzal incriminated himself in the Parliament attack completely.
From left; Shaukat Guru, S.A.R. Geelani and Mohammed Afzal in Delhi, 2001
|
Each point of the 'confession' corresponded perfectly with the evidence that the police had already gathered. In other words, Afzal's confessional statement slipped perfectly into the version that the police had already offered the press days ago, like Cinderella's foot into the glass slipper. (If it were a film, you could say it was a screenplay, which came with its own box of props. Actually, as we know now, it was made into a film. Zee TV owes Afzal some royalty payments. )
Eventually, both the high court and the Supreme Court set aside Afzal's confession citing 'lapses and violations of procedural safeguards'. But Afzal's confession somehow survives, the phantom keystone in the prosecution's case. And before it was technically and legally set aside, the confessional document had already served a major extra-legal purpose: On December 21, 2001, when the Government of India launched its war effort against Pakistan it said it had 'incontrovertible evidence' of Pakistan's involvement. Afzal's confession was the only 'proof' of Pakistan's involvement that the government had! Afzal's confession. And the sticker-manifesto. Think about it. On the basis of this illegal confession extracted under torture, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were moved to the Pakistan border at huge cost to the public exchequer, and the subcontinent devolved into a game of nuclear brinkmanship in which the whole world was held hostage.
Big Whispered Question: Could it have been the other way around? Did the confession precipitate the war, or did the need for a war precipitate the need for the confession?
|
In his Statement of the Accused (which, unlike the confession, is made in court and not police custody) Afzal says: "I had not identified any terrorist. Police told me the names of terrorists and forced me to identify them." But by then it was too late for him. On the first day of the trial, the lawyer appointed by the trial court judge agreed to accept Afzal's identification of the bodies and the postmortem reports as undisputed evidence without formal proof! This baffling move was to have serious consequences for Afzal. To quote from the Supreme Court judgement, "The first circumstance against the accused Afzal is that Afzal knew who the deceased terrorists were. He identified the dead bodies of the deceased terrorists. On this aspect the evidence remains unshattered."
Of course it's possible that the dead terrorists were foreign militants. But it is just as possible that they were not. Killing people and falsely identifying them as 'foreign terrorists', or falsely identifying dead people as 'foreign terrorists', or falsely identifying living people as terrorists, is not uncommon among the police or security forces either in Kashmir or even on the streets of Delhi.
Bodies of the Chhittisinghpura ‘terrorists’ being exhumed |
There are others: On October 20, 2003, the Srinagar newspaper Al-safa printed a picture of a 'Pakistani militant' who the 18 Rashtriya Rifles claimed they had killed while he was trying to storm an army camp. A baker in Kupwara, Wali Khan, saw the picture and recognised it as his son, Farooq Ahmed Khan, who had been picked up by soldiers in a Gypsy two months earlier. His body was finally exhumed more than a year later.
On April 20, 2004, the 18 Rashtriya Rifles posted in the Lolab valley claimed it had killed four foreign militants in a fierce encounter. It later turned out that all four were ordinary labourers from Jammu, hired by the army and taken to Kupwara. An anonymous letter tipped off the labourers' families who travelled to Kupwara and eventually had the bodies exhumed.
|
These are just a few quick examples to illustrate the fact that in the absence of any other evidence, the police's word is just not good enough.
The hearings in the fast-track trial court began in May 2002. Let's not forget the climate in which the trial took place. The frenzy over the 9/11 attacks was still in the air. The US was gloating over its victory in Afghanistan. Gujarat was convulsed by communal frenzy. A few months previously, coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express had been set on fire and 58 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive inside. As 'revenge' in an orchestrated pogrom, more than 2,000 Muslims were publicly butchered and more than 1,50,000 driven from their homes.
For Afzal, everything that could go wrong went wrong. He was incarcerated in a high-security prison, with no access to the outside world, and no money to hire a lawyer professionally. Three weeks into the trial the lawyer appointed by the court asked to be discharged from the case because she had now been professionally hired to be on the team of lawyers for S.A.R. Geelani's defence. The court appointed her junior, a lawyer with very little experience, to represent Afzal. He did not once visit his client in jail to take instructions. He did not summon a single witness for Afzal's defence and barely cross-questioned any of the prosecution witnesses. Five days after he was appointed, on July 8, Afzal asked the court for another lawyer and gave the court a list of lawyers whom he hoped the court might hire for him. Each of them refused. (Given the frenzy of propaganda in the media, it was hardly surprising. At a later stage of the trial, when senior advocate Ram Jethmalani agreed to represent Geelani, Shiv Sena mobs ransacked his Bombay office.) The judge expressed his inability to do anything about this, and gave Afzal the right to cross-examine witnesses. It's astonishing for the judge to expect a layperson to be able cross-examine witnesses in a criminal trial. It's a virtually impossible task for someone who does not have a sophisticated understanding of criminal law, including new laws that had just been passed, like POTA, and the amendments to the Evidence Act and the Telegraph Act. Even experienced lawyers were having to work overtime to bring themselves up to date.
The case against Afzal was built up in the trial court on the strength of the testimonies of almost 80 prosecution witnesses: landlords, shopkeepers, technicians from cell-phone companies, the police themselves. This was a crucial period of the trial, when the legal foundation of the case was being laid. It required meticulous back-breaking legal work in which evidence needed to be amassed and put on record, witnesses for the defence summoned and testimonies from prosecution witnesses cross-questioned. Even if the verdict of the trial court went against the accused (trial courts are notoriously conservative), the evidence could then be worked upon by lawyers in the higher courts. Through this absolutely critical period, Afzal went virtually undefended. It was at this stage that the bottom fell out of his case, and the noose tightened around his neck.
Even still, during the trial, the skeletons began to clatter out of the Special Cell's cupboard in an embarrassing heap. It became clear that the accumulation of lies, fabrications, forged documents and serious lapses in procedure began from the very first day of the investigation. While the high court and Supreme Court judgements have pointed these things out, they have just wagged an admonitory finger at the police, or occasionally called it a 'disturbing feature', which is a disturbing feature in itself. At no point in the trial has the police been seriously reprimanded, leave alone penalised. In fact, almost every step of the way, the Special Cell displayed an egregious disregard for procedural norms. The shoddy callousness with which the investigations were carried out demonstrate a worrying belief that they wouldn't be 'found out,' and if they were, it wouldn't matter very much. Their confidence does not seem to have been misplaced.
|
Consider the Time and Place of the Arrests and Seizures: The Delhi Police said that Afzal and Shaukat were arrested in Srinagar based on information given to them by Geelani following his arrest. The court records show that the message to look out for Shaukat and Afzal was flashed to the Srinagar police on December 15 at 5.45 am. But according to the Delhi Police's records Geelani was only arrested in Delhi on December 15 at 10 am—four hours after they had started looking for Afzal and Shaukat in Srinagar. They haven't been able to explain this discrepancy. The high court judgement puts it on record that the police version contains a 'material contradiction' and cannot be true. It goes down as a 'disturbing feature.' Why the Delhi Police needed to lie remains unasked, and unanswered.
When the police arrest somebody, procedure requires them to have public witnesses for the arrest who sign an Arrest Memo and a Seizure Memo for what they may have 'seized' from those who have been arrested—goods, cash, documents, whatever. The police claim they arrested Afzal and Shaukat together on December 15 at 11 am in Srinagar. They say they 'seized' the truck the two men were fleeing in (it was registered in the name of Shaukat's wife). They also say they seized a Nokia mobile phone, a laptop and Rs 10 lakh from Afzal. In his Statement of the Accused, Afzal says he was arrested at a bus stop in Srinagar and that no laptop, mobile phone or money was 'seized' from him.
Scandalously, the Arrest Memos for both Afzal and Shaukat have been signed in Delhi, by Bismillah, Geelani's younger brother, who was at the time being held in illegal confinement at the Lodhi Road Police Station. Meanwhile, the two witnesses who signed the seizure memo for the phone, the laptop and the Rs 10 lakh are both from the J&K Police. One of them is Head Constable Mohammed Akbar (Prosecution Witness 62) who, as we shall see later, is no stranger to Mohammad Afzal, and is not just any old policeman who happened to be passing by. Even by the J&K Police's own admission they first located Afzal and Shaukat in Parimpura Fruit Mandi. For reasons they don't state, the police didn't arrest them there. They say they followed them to a less public place—where there were no public witnesses.
So here's another serious inconsistency in the prosecution's case. Of this the high court judgement says 'the time of arrest of accused persons has been seriously dented'. Shockingly, it is at this contested time and place of arrest that the police claim to have recovered the most vital evidence that implicates Afzal in the conspiracy: the mobile phone and the laptop. Once again, in the matter of the date and time of the arrests, and in the alleged seizure of the incriminating laptop and the Rs 10 lakh, we have only the word of the police, against the word of a 'terrorist'.
|
Consider the Mobile phone call records: Stared at for long enough, a lot of the 'hard evidence' produced by the Special Cell begins to look dubious. The backbone of the prosecution's case has to do with the recovery of mobile phones, SIM cards, computerised call records, and the testimonies of officials from cellphone companies and shopkeepers who sold the phones and SIM cards to Afzal and his accomplices. The call records that were produced to show that Shaukat, Afzal , Geelani and Mohammad (one of the dead militants) had all been in touch with each other very close to the time of the attack were uncertified computer printouts, not even copies of primary documents. They were outputs of the billing system stored as text files that could have been easily doctored and at any time. For example, the call records that were produced show that two calls had been made at exactly the same time from the same SIM card, but from separate handsets with separate IMEI numbers. This means that either the SIM card had been cloned or the call records were doctored.
Consider the SIM card: To prop up its version of the story, the prosecution relies heavily on one particular mobile phone number—9811489429. The police say it was Afzal's number—the number that connected Afzal to Mohammad, Afzal to Shaukat, and Shaukat to Geelani. The police also say that this number was written on the back of the identity tags found on the dead terrorists. Pretty convenient. Lost Kitten! Call Mom at 9811489429. (It's worth mentioning that normal procedure requires evidence gathered at the scene of a crime to be sealed. The ID cards were never sealed and remained in the custody of the police and could have been tampered with at any time.)
A suspected ‘militant’ gunned down by the police in Ansal Plaza, Delhi, 2002 |
Consider the Identification of the Accused: A series of prosecution witnesses, most of them shopkeepers, identified Afzal as the man to whom they had sold various things: ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, sulphur, a Sujata mixer-grinder, packets of dry fruit and so on. Normal procedure would require these shopkeepers to pick Afzal out from a number of people in a test identification parade. This didn't happen. Instead Afzal was identified by them when he 'led' the police to these shops while he was in police custody and introduced to the witnesses as an Accused in the Parliament Attack. (Are we allowed to speculate about whether he led the police or the police led him to the shops? After all he was still in their custody, still vulnerable to torture. If his confession under these circumstances is legally suspect, then why not all of this?)
|
None of the inconsistencies that I have written about so far are the result of spectacular detective work on my part. A lot of them are documented in an excellent book called December 13th: Terror Over Democracy by Nirmalangshu Mukherji; in two reports (Trial of Errors and Balancing Act) published by the Peoples' Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi; and most important of all, in the three thick volumes of judgements of the trial court, the high court and the Supreme Court. All these are public documents, lying on my desk. Why is it that when there is this whole murky universe begging to be revealed, our TV channels are busy staging hollow debates between uninformed people and grasping politicians? Why is it that apart from a few sporadic independent commentators, our newspapers carry front-page stories about who the hangman is going to be, and macabre details about the length (60 metres) and weight (3.75 kg) of the rope that will be used to hang Mohammed Afzal (Indian Express, October 16, 2006). Shall we pause for a moment to say a few hosannas for the Free Press?
It's not an easy thing for most people to do, but if you can, unmoor yourself conceptually, if only for a moment, from the "Police is Good/Terrorists are Evil" ideology. The evidence on offer minus its ideological trappings opens up a chasm of terrifying possibilities. It points in directions which most of us would prefer not to look.
The prize for the Most Ignored Legal Document in the entire case goes to the Statement of the Accused Mohammed Afzal under Section 313 of the Criminal Procedure Code. In this document, the evidence against him is put to him by the court in the form of questions. He can either accept the evidence or dispute it, and has the opportunity to put down his version of his story in his own words. In Afzal's case, given that he has never had any real opportunity to be heard, this document tells his story in his voice.
In this document, Afzal accepts certain charges made against him by the prosecution. He accepts that he met a man called Tariq. He accepts that Tariq introduced him to a man called Mohammad. He accepts that he helped Mohammad come to Delhi and helped him to buy a second-hand white Ambassador car. He accepts that Mohammad was one of the five fidayeen who was killed in the Attack. The important thing about Afzal's Statement of the Accused is that he makes no effort to completely absolve himself or claim innocence. But he puts his actions in a context that is devastating. Afzal's statement explains the peripheral part he played in the Parliament attack. But it also ushers us towards an understanding of some possible reasons for why the investigation was so shoddy, why it pulls up short at the most crucial junctures and why it is vital that we do not dismiss this as just incompetence and shoddiness. Even if we don't believe Afzal, given what we do know about the trial and the role of the Special Cell, it is inexcusable not to look in the direction he's pointing. He gives specific information—names, places, dates. (This could not have been easy, given that his family, his brothers, his wife and young son live in Kashmir and are easy meat for the people he mentions in his deposition.)
In Afzal's words:
|
He then asks the court's permission to add some more information.
"Mohammad the slain terrorist of Parliament attack had come along with me from Kashmir. The person who handed him over to me is Tariq. Tariq is working with Security Force and S.T.F JK Police. Tariq told me that if I face any problem due to Mohammad he will help me as he knew the security forces and S.T.F very well... Tariq had told me that I just have to drop Mohammad at Delhi and do nothing else. And if I would not take Mohammad with me to Delhi I would be implicated in some other case. I under these circumstances brought Mohammad to Delhi under a compulsion without knowing he was a terrorist."
So now we have a picture emerging of someone who could be a key player. 'Witness Akbar' (PW 62), Mohd Akbar, Head Constable, Parimpora Police Station, the J&K policeman who signed the Seizure Memo at the time of Afzal's arrest. In a letter to Sushil Kumar, his Supreme Court lawyer, Afzal describes a chilling moment at one point in the trial. In the court, Witness Akbar, who had come from Srinagar to testify about the Seizure Memo, reassured Afzal in Kashmiri that "his family was alright". Afzal immediately recognised that this was a veiled threat. Afzal also says that after he was arrested in Srinagar he was taken to the Parimpora police station and beaten, and plainly told that his wife and family would suffer dire consequences if he did not co-operate. (We already know that Afzal's brother Hilal had been held in illegal detention by the SOG during some crucial months.)
In this letter, Afzal describes how he was tortured in the STF camp—with electrodes on his genitals and chillies and petrol in his anus. He mentions the name of Dy Superintendent of Police Dravinder Singh who said he needed him to do a 'small job' for him in Delhi. He also says that some of the phone numbers mentioned in the chargesheet can be traced to an STF camp in Kashmir.
Protests against Afzal’s hanging in Srinagar
There are not always clear lines that demarcate the boundaries between all these things and people, it's 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 is the SOG and STF that Afzal talks about. These are the most ruthless, indisciplined and dreaded elements of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir. 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 '90s and have since surrendered and are trying to live normal lives.
|
The story of Mohammed Afzal has enraged Kashmiris because his story is their story too. 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 joint interrogation centres, 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 theatre 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 all the pomp and ceremony of a so-called democracy.
If Afzal is hanged, we'll never know the answer to the real question: Who attacked the Indian Parliament? Was it the Lashkar-e-Toiba? The Jaish-e-Mohammed? Or does the answer lie somewhere deep in the secret heart of this country that we all live in and love and hate in our own beautiful, intricate, various, and thorny ways?
There ought to be a Parliamentary Inquiry into the December 13 attack on Parliament. While the inquiry is pending, Afzal's family in Sopore must be protected because they are vulnerable hostages in this bizarre story.
To hang Mohammed Afzal without knowing what really happened is a misdeed that will not easily be forgotten. Or forgiven. Nor should it be.
Notwithstanding the 10% Growth Rate.
-------A Rebuttal
The vanity of 13/12 ‘truth-telling’
The ground beneath Arundhati Roy’s seismic claims on the Parliament House attack, is shaky — to say the least
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions”, the American politician
Daniel Patrick Moynihan — among others — is credited with having said,
“but not to his own facts.”
Muhammad Afzal Guru’s execution on Saturday morning — a grim spectacle,
where the Indian government disgraced itself by denying his family a
last meeting, or a dignified burial — has set off perhaps the most
serious debate on the death penalty India has ever seen. Legal experts
have cast no small doubt on whether Guru received a fair trial; whether
his guilt was proved; whether his death penalty was legitimate. These
debates engaged some of India’s finest legal minds for months, both on
the side of the state and defence. The Supreme Court’s word is not, and
ought not to be, the final word. Indeed, the deep ambiguities that
surround Guru’s case are in themselves compelling argument to rethink
the death penalty.
In her article in The Hindu,
however, Arundhati Roy makes claims that far transcend this debate. In
her reading of events, Guru is “a victim of torture, blackmail,
extortion. In the larger scheme of things he was a nobody. Anyone who
was really interested in solving the mystery of the Parliament Attack
would have followed the dense trail of evidence that was on offer. No
one did, thereby ensuring that the real authors of conspiracy will
remain unidentified and uninvestigated”. Political parties and the
media, she asserted, “all colluded to do something terribly wrong”.
Back in 2006, in her introduction to a collection of essays on the 13/12
trial, Ms Roy insisted Guru had been “plucked out of thin air” and
transplanted into the centre of the ‘conspiracy’ as its kingpin. She had
no doubt the investigation and trial threw up evidence of state
“complicity, collusion, involvement”.
Errors of the first kind
Is there actual evidence that 13/12 is a macabre plot, in which the
criminal justice system and judiciary are implicated? Ms Roy builds her
case around what can, at best, be described as parts of the evidence,
cherry-picked for polemical effect. For example, Ms Roy raises questions
over how police investigators chose to apprehend Guru in the first
place. “They said”, Ms Roy notes, “that S.A.R. Geelani led them to him.
But the court records show that the message to arrest Afzal went out
before they picked up Geelani”. In Ms Roy’s view, this lends weight to
the claim that Guru was framed.
In fact, a quite different conclusion can be arrived at. In paragraph 78
of his judgment, Additional Sessions judge S.N. Dhingra arrived at the
conclusion that Mr. Geelani and Afsan Guru were probably taken into
custody by the police after 8 p.m. on December 14, 2001 — some 14 hours
before their arrest was legally recorded. Put bluntly, Mr. Geelani and
Ms Afsan were in illegal custody when the Delhi Police sent its message
seeking Guru. This illegal detention was criminal — but doesn’t suggest
the existence of a sinister mystery over the timing of Guru’s arrest.
Ms Roy has pointed to several other potential flaws in the evidence the
prosecution used during the trial. She notes, for example, that a laptop
seized from Guru was not properly sealed. However, Ms Roy omits to
record that the Supreme Court discussed this issue at some length,
concluding that a defence expert witness’ testimony did not
“substantiate the point of criticism about the possible tampering of
laptop nor does it make a dent on the findings of the experts examined
by the prosecution”.
This may not be a conclusion Ms Roy agrees with; the defence most
certainly did not. Yet,she cites no evidence, compelling or otherwise,
to dispute the judges’ appraisal of expert testimony.
Less excusable is Ms Roy’s censoring of facts that sit ill with her
account. She asserts, for example, that Guru lacked legal representation
“at the most crucial stage of a criminal case”. However, she omits
mentioning that Supreme Court judges P. Venkatarama Reddi and P.P.
Naolekar heard extensive arguments on the quality of Guru’s legal
representation in the trial court — and concluded that they found “no
substance in this contention”. The judges examined precisely what
proceedings took place during every period when Guru was unrepresented,
and concluded that they did not include substantive, adverse
proceedings.
This judicial determination will — and ought to be — subjected to
continued critical scrutiny but there is nothing to show the judicial
system was blind to Guru’s legal rights.
Ms Roy’s account in The Hindu of suspicions about the
investigation isn’t, understandably, exhaustive. Guru, for example,
claimed he had been instructed to carry out the plot by a Jammu and
Kashmir Police officer, Davinder Singh. His supporters argue the police
officer was never investigated. Prosecutors, however, say there was
nothing in the evidence they found — which, after all, stood repeated
judicial scrutiny — on an allegation they believe was intended to
mislead.
Error of the second kind
The larger assertions Ms Roy makes, based on her selective reading of
evidence, are even less grounded in the real world. “Based only on
Afzal’s confession”, she claims, “the Government of India recalled its
Ambassador from Pakistan and mobilised half a million soldiers to the
Pakistan border”.
In fact, there’s a fairly persuasive body of evidence that tells us just
who carried out the attack — and why. In testimony to Pakistan’s Senate
in 2003, former Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lieutenant-General
Javed Ashraf Qazi called on his nation to “not be afraid of admitting
that the Jaish was involved in the deaths of thousands of innocent
Kashmiris, bombing the Indian Parliament, Daniel Pearl’s murder and
attempts on President Musharraf’s life”.
Pakistani scholar Muhammad Amir Rana, in a 2004 book, noted that the
Jaish-e-Muhammad had initially taken responsibility for the operation
but later retracted “under pressure from various agencies”. Independent
journalists like Amir Mir have held the Jaish responsible for the
operation; scholars like Peter Chalk and C. Christine Fair have arrived
at much the same conclusion.
Few of these facts were unknown to anyone who followed the
Jaish-e-Muhammad at the time — least of all to governments either in
India or the rest of the world.
Grave truth
Precisely how easy it is to deduce conspiracy from incomplete evidence
ought to be clear from the case of Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammad, who,
Ms Roy noted in her essay, was identified by Thane’s then-Police
Commissioner S.M. Shangari as one of the Parliament attackers. Mohammad
had earlier been handed over to the J&K Police by the Thane Police,
Ms Roy noted.
Had she bothered to consult public documents, a somewhat less
categorical reading of Mr. Shangari’s testimony might have suggested
itself. Mohammad, a resident of Allahabad — a small town that lies
between Rahim Yar Khan and Bahawalpur, in Pakistan’s Punjab — was shot
dead by the police while allegedly attempting to escape from custody. So
were two other men held with him — 22-year-old Faislabad resident
Mohammad Tayyab Niaz and 24-year-old Mohammad Afzal Shahid. These
killings were, quite possibly, extrajudicial executions but they took
place between December 19, 2000 and February 13, 2001. Mohammad was in a
grave in January, 2001, 11 months before 13/12.
Ms Roy is right on one key issue: we are still far from knowing the full
truth of 13/12. It is likely that many of the unanswered questions
might resolve themselves if Pakistan were ever to arrest
Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar — currently living, in some
luxury, in his Bahawalpur home. Nothing in recent experience — witness
the 26/11 case — suggests this will happen.
Perhaps the most damaging vanity of journalists, as well as political
pamphleteers of a certain kind, is the certainty that there is something
called the “full truth”. There is a reason, after all, that each year’s
crop of historical journals publish appraisals of everything from 17th
century riots to the Vietnam War. The ground beneath Ms Roy’s seismic
claims, however, is shaky — to say the least.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)