THE death sentence meted out to Mohammed Afzal
under the Indian Constitution is not just in
any way." This is not a line from any appeal
for commutation of the punishment decreed by
the Supreme Court for Afzal Guru. It is a quote
from a section of the Hindutva camp that does
not find the punishment harsh enough.
An outfit in Tamil Nadu called the Federation
of Hindu Organisations has called upon President
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, with whom a mercy petition
for Afzal is pending, to set aside the death
sentence. Sounding as pious as the Fallen Angel
citing the scripture, the federation asks Mr
Kalam to recommend punishment as prescribed
(according to it) by the Shariat and the Quran.
A Tamil statement issued by the federation
spells out the alternative punishment with sadistic
glee. A free translation: "The sentence
should be so amended that his (Afzal's) right
hand and left leg are cut off and one of his
eyes is gouged out and he is allowed, in this
state of mutilation, to freely tour the whole
of India and make an exhibit of himself in order
that no extremist or terrorist ever emerges
in this country again."
The widely circulated statement adds that the
federation is "waiting with hope"
for the President to make this recommendation,
achieve "indelible fame in history"
and prove himself "a great patriot".
The statement seeks to kill three birds with
one stone. The federation's demand, of course,
is designed to deter a sympathetic official
consideration of the plea for commuting the
sentence to life imprisonment. It is also a
continuation, by other means, of the maliciously
communal campaign against Indian Muslims and
the Muslim personal law. And none but the most
naiv can miss the mischievous tenor of the plea
addressed to the President with an unstated
reference to his religious identity.
What the statement illustrates, more than anything
else, is the hate - or the ideology as well
as politics of hate - behind the campaign at
the mass level for Afzal's hanging. The avowedly
constitutional and anti-terrorist arguments
we hear in decorous television debates in favour
of the maximum punishment for the convict hardly
conceal the character of this campaign, which
matters far more in our free-for-all democracy.
The noose-for-the-anti-national demand is particularly
dangerous in a country and a system where a
political party can profit by a pogrom in a
state and actually threaten to repeat it as
an electoral tactic elsewhere. The demand is
all the more dangerous because it is not being
raised only in the state under Mr Narendra Modi.
Lethal assaults have been made on satyaghrahis
asking for clemency to Afzal even in Left-ruled
Kerala.
The clamour against clemency has only become
shriller and cruder after the expiry of the
original date for the hanging (October 20).
Mahatma Gandhi may have measured the distance
to Swaraj by the length of the khadi yarn spun
in the country. The present-day "patriots"
do not measure the distance to a victory in
the "war of terror" by the length
of the hangman's rope (already announced along
with its weight). They do so by counting the
days that remain for the death sentence to be
carried out.
The strongest argument for commutation of the
sentence, as some have pointed out, is the utter
anachronism of capital punishment. Most countries
have abolished this form of punishment, and
it does not do India proud that the latest to
join the list are five, far less developed Asian
nations - Cambodia, Nepal, Timor-Leste, Bhutan
and the Philippines. Intimately linked is the
argument about the unwisdom of empowering the
state as an executioner. An almost equally valid
objection to death sentences, however, is the
vicious social atmosphere they almost always
promote.
Hanging of persons convicted even of petty
thefts was a public spectacle in Britain of
the early Industrial Revolution, when the punishment
was intended to teach the young working class
respect for private property. Lynch mobs laughed
and cheered as the noose tightened around a
Negro's neck in the United States not too long
ago. No one may say it on the camera, but Afzal's
hanging is also being billed as mass communal
entertainment.
Custodians of public morality in these past
cases of both the US and Britain (which have
now declared a crusade against "Islamic
terror") held up the hangings as attempts
at civilising the economically or racially handicapped.
A vitally essential part of the exercise is
the portrayal of the victims - and, by implication,
their class and community - as criminal. Strikingly
similar is the way the holy warriors of the
hang-Afzal camp are now waxing self-righteous.
This finds crude evidence in the kind of responses
the campaigners against Afzal's hanging have
to cope with. One of the many examples is the
electronic epistle received by Sukla Sen of
the Ekta (Committee for Communal Amity), Mumbai,
after launching an online petition for the Presidential
pardon for Afzal. The petition said: "One
is only asking for the commutation of the death
sentence - not quashing of the punishment altogether,
whereas a demand for retrial would have perhaps
been more justified given the fact that all
the relevant facts were not allowed to be presented
before the trial court and that the facts presented
were doctored." The plea could not have
been less provocative.
The angry response asked Sen: "?how would
have reacted if Afzal had brutally raped your
wife or sister and killed your child? Why don't
you ask your wife what she would have wanted?"
The questions are not connected in any way to
the attack on Parliament, which involved no
such crimes. They only seek to reinforce a demonic
image of Kashmir rebels in defence of the death
sentence.
Pundits like Mr Soli Sorabjee may really mean
it, and do sound plausible, when they say the
sentence cannot be set aside on the ground that
its implementation will create an explosive
situation in Kashmir. The learned man of law,
personally opposed to capital punishment, argues
that, so long as the statute book provides for
it, an exception in its enforcement cannot be
made just because a political or pressure group
opposes it. What he fails to note is the force
of support from a much larger and more fiercely
determined family of political and pressure
groups for expeditious implementation of the
death sentence in this case.
The orchestrated opposition to the pursuit
of the constitutional process of the mercy petition
and a Presidential pardon is not seen as a pressure
campaign. The character of the campaign is not
readily recognised because the campaign is more
invisible than visible. Mr Sorabjee's stance
represents the campaign at its best, followed
by fervent pleas from retired luminaries of
the Foreign Service and the like for "responsible"
self-restraint by rights activists in such sensitive
natters of state. It is statements like the
one we started with that illustrate the
invisible but the more important part of the
campaign.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has threatened
to launch a "public awareness campaign"
across the country on the importance of hanging
Afzal. To be sure, the party has officially
put its stress on issues of "internal security"
and drafted its select Muslim showpieces in
the struggle for an early execution of the convict.
But then L.K. Advani, too, only kept repeating
his mantra of "cultural nationalism"
during his Ayodhya "rath yatra", which
left a trail of communal riots and culminated
in the Babri Masjid's demolition.
