www.sacw.net - October 17, 2006
Attack on India's Parliament
Last Chance to Know What Really Happened
The attack on
Parliament on December 13, 2001 was a major event in contemporary
India. As the judicial procedure into this case nears its end, with
Mohammed Afzal to be hanged on October 20, our effort to get at the
truth as to what really happened is about to be scuttled. Who attacked
Parliament and what was the conspiracy? On what basis did the NDA
government take the country close to a nuclear war? What was the role
of the State TaskForce (J and K) on surrendered militants? What was the
role of the Special Cell of Delhi Police in conducting the case?
by Nirmalangshu Mukherji
A sessions court in Delhi has announced that Mohammed Afzal, sentenced
to death by the Supreme Court of India on August 4, 2005, is to be
hanged on October 20, 2006. While the judicial procedure is nearing its
end in the Parliament attack case, have we understood one of the
major events of contemporary India? More importantly, will the said
completion of the judicial process in fact scuttle our effort at
understanding the event?
Limits of Judiciary
The questions just asked presuppose that the judgment of the Supreme
Court failed to provide the required understanding. Why? As a
court of law, it is bound by a structure of responsibilities. In the
present case, the court was faced with four appeals: two by the Delhi
Police and one each by Afzal and Shaukat. To that end, it examined the
evidence produced before the trial court and the subsequent judgments
by the trial court and the high court. The evidence was produced by an
authorised investigating agency, namely, the Special Cell of the Delhi
Police, with its ACP Rajbir Singh as the investigating officer. The
evidence was presented in the trial court with supporting materials and
witnesses. Most of the evidence, especially in Afzal's case, went
unchallenged. The trial court provided Afzal with an accredited lawyer
who chose to remain largely inactive. In fairness, we must note
that whenever the defence - especially Gilani's and Shaukat's eminent
team of lawyers - was able to question some evidence success- fully,
the high court and the Supreme Court did take notice of that and set
the evidence aside. This is particularly true of the confessions
obtained from Afzal and Shaukat; setting them aside created a huge dent
in the case, as the Supreme Court noted. The high court in fact
reprimanded the police in fairly strong terms for fabricating the
arrest memos and for keeping people under illegal confinement. In each
case, Gilani's defence team successfully produced counter-evidence. As
for the overwhelming evidence produced against Afzal, al- most nothing
was challenged at the trial court, making the task virtually
insurmountable for his defence in the appeal courts. Looking at
this evidence, therefore, the Supreme Court was obliged to conclude
that Afzal was guilty of aiding and abetting the attackers.
To emphasise, although each of these have been fully documented
(December 13: Terror over Democracy, 2005 and reports by PUDR) the
Supreme Court was not seized of the role of the media in fanning
pre-trial hysteria, the notorious character of the investigating
agency, the mindset of the trial judge, and the role of Afzal's trial
lawyer. We have shown earlier (EPW, September 17, 2005) how these
factors might have contaminated the evidence against Afzal and its
judicial examination. By design, the limited legal window through which
the court examined the In particular, the court was not endowed with
the task of explaining the attack. Nonetheless, as noted, when
presented with credible arguments by the defence, the court did take
the bold step to set aside the confessions. Since the confessions
carried the only story of the conspiracy to attack the Parliament, the
court's story of the attack was swift and short. What we learn
from the judgment is that five persons with sundry names attacked the
Parliament, killed some people, and died. And Mohammed Afzal aided
these attackers. Period.
Voices
The wider issues that surround the case - including the role, if any,
of Mohammed Afzal in it - can then be addressed in forums other than a
court of law. A large number of writers, academicians and lawyers have
raised a number of grave issues concerning the Parliament attack case
to which the judgment of the court provided no answers. Importantly, as
we will sample below, many of these concerns were raised while the
court deliberated on the case, and the concerns continued even after
the judgment was delivered. What are these issues? While the
hearing in the court was nearing its end, lawyer Usha Ramanathan wrote
(Frontline, May 6, 2005), "the court, will not, and is not expected to,
concern itself with aspects that are not directly relevant to the case
of the accused before it. So, many questions will inevitably, and
predictably, remain uninvestigated in the court's docket." One of the
questions Ramanathan asked was: "Was it an act of war? Or was it a
terrorist act? Or perhaps a protest employing extremist methods?
We don't know. But, on the presumption that it was an act of war, the
troops were massed along the border, Indian and Pakistani soldiers
glowered at each other for nearly a year, enormous resources were sunk
into aggressive posturing, soldiers lost their lives, over a hundred
children reportedly fell prey to land mines, and many farmers along
this mined, potential battlefield were left without a livelihood."
Noting that Mohammed Afzal, the prime accused, was a surrendered
militant in regular contact with the State Task Force (STF) in Kashmir,
Ramanathan observed, "a surrendered militant is no longer a militant
but one who has chosen to return. The surrendered militant is in
the uneasy zone where he is suspect on both sides of the divide. The
militants see in him a turncoat. The security forces and the Special
Task Force (STF) hold him in their thrall, while viewing him constantly
with suspicion." Specifically, "If a person under the watchful eye of
the STF could be part of a conspiracy to wage war against the state,
how can anything less than a public inquiry do? For this is not about
the guilt or innocence of one man, but about how a system works and
what it means, to democracy, sovereignty and the security of the
state."
Yet, the "astonishing fact", Ramanathan suggested, was that "there has
never been a public inquiry into the attack on Parliament: not by a
parliamentary committee, not by the media, not an expanded search by
the police, nor even a commission of inquiry. When we picture the
parliamentarians huddled inside Parliament as the sounds from the
battleground outside told them of their narrow escape, it is difficult
to understand why no one, not in the ruling coalition, not in the
opposition, not in the secretariat of Parliament, thought there should
be an immediate and deep-reaching inquiry." Elsewhere (The Book Review,
May 5, 2005), Ramanathan wrote, "the only inquiry of which the public
has knowledge has been translated into criminal proceedings in the
court. The micro- scopic nature of a trial in court, however, means
that it is only the accused whose conduct will be interrogated and
judged." About the failure of the media to initiate a deep-reaching
inquiry, Gouri Chatterjee wrote (The Telegraph, June 30, 2005), "the
media's unquestioning acceptance of whatever the police fed them, no,
directed them to say, their complicity in the government's scheme of
things are downright embarrassing". Rajat Roy (Anandabazar Patrika,
July 16, 2005) illustrated the complicity of the media with the police
by recounting the event of Afzal's forced confession before the media.
Subhendu Dasgupta (EPW, July 22, 2006) summed up the complicity as
follows: "The truth that the media presented was incomplete, partial,
truncated, engineered and designed, and the judgment was made on the
basis of this truth. The media came to its judg- ment before the
judicial process started. The administrative truth was passed on
to the media; the media took the official truth and transformed it into
‘media truth'." Notice that Dasgupta maintained this nearly one
year after the judgment of the Supreme Court. Commenting on the entire
episode, Gouri Chatterjee observed that "the greater tragedy is, we are
condemned to repeat all this the next time round too". One year
after the judgment, Sukumar Muralidharan expanded on these themes
(Biblio, September-October 2005). "The December 13 event", Muralidharan
observed, "proved the pivot from which momentous consequences followed.
These involved issues of war and peace, the security and well-being of
the peoples of India and Pakistan, and the posture that national
governments in the two countries would adopt towards the global
struggle being waged between what was ‘civilisation' and its
supposed antithesis." Need- less to say, none of these momentous issues
can be addressed without ascertaining the facts surrounding the event.
More specifically, "a well-informed citizenry obviously owes itself the
duty of unravelling the facts behind the attack on a central
institution of its democracy. And an indispensable part of the process
of ascertaining facts would be to establish the motivations that led
the Delhi Police into its sordid saga of fabrication." After describing
Afzal's predicaments as a surrendered militant, Muralidharan observed,
"any Indian citizen with a basic level of civic involvement would be
assailed by a number of questions if she were to take the statements by
Afzal in their entirety". "Indeed", Muralidharan went on to observe,
"the conclusions that any observer who has not surrendered his critical
faculties to the cult of the nation state would be impelled to" are
"fraught with immensely disturbing consequences for the functioning of
the Indian state and, hence, for the health of Indian democracy",
quoting from a recent book on the topic.
Appeal for Inquiry
Going beyond printed words in the margins of the media, a group of
citizens consisting of writers, academicians, lawyers, and journalists
have publicly appealed for a parliamentary inquiry into the entire
episode. A committee chaired by Nirmala Deshpande with Mahasweta Devi,
Rajni Kothari, Prabhat Patnaik, Ashish Nandy, Prashant Bhushan, Sumanta
Banerjee, Mihir Desai, and others as members, held a press conference
within a week of the judgment by the Supreme Court. In its press
statement the committee noted, "Afzal has been convicted of conspiracy
primarily on the basis of statements of police witnesses and seizures
of materials from him shown by the police, which went un- rebutted
during trial, because Afzal was practically unrepresented in the trial.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the court has acquitted three
of the four persons charged of conspiracy and has held that the manner
and circumstances in which the confessions were obtained, makes them
unreliable. However, it is only on the basis of these unreliable
confessions that the then government immediately committed the country
to a full-scale war mobilisation against Pakistan with the possibility
that it might have escalated to a nuclear war. The mobilisation was
used by the NDA government for political purposes. POTA was immediately
enacted, and anti-Pakistan as well as communal feelings were whipped up
in the war hysteria which was drummed up taking advantage of the attack
on Parliament." Soon after, the committee appealed to the members of
Parliament in the following words, with supporting documentation:
Members of the Committee as well as reputed human rights organisations
have been raising serious questions on the con- duct of the previous
NDA government, especially the functioning of the investiga- ting
agencies, in the Parliament attack case. In the light of the
Supreme Court judgment of August 4, 2005, we wish to draw your
attention to these apprehensions.
(1) The NDA government initiated a full- scale
mobilisation for war against Pakistan, saying that the terrorists were
Pakistanis sponsored by the Pakistan govern- ment. The war-effort,
which was sustained for nearly a year, had very serious consequences.
We have mentioned them in our public appeal located at Appendix
1. The only evidence of terrorist conspiracy originating from
Pakistan is Mohammed Afzal's confessional statement. The Su- preme
Court has held that the confession is unreliable. With the confession
set aside, we do not know who attacked Parliament and what was the
conspiracy.
(2) Mohammed Afzal, the only person found guilty of
conspiracy by the Apex Court, is a surrendered militant, who was not
only supposed to report regularly to the Special Task Force of J and K,
but was also under their surveillance. How could such a person
mastermind and execute such a complex conspiracy? How could a terrorist
organisation rely upon such a person as the principal link for their
operation? On whose behest was he acting? Is there some
credibility to Afzal's statement, noted at Appendix 2, that both the
leader of the attack, Mohammed, and that one of the masterminds in
Kashmir, Tariq actually belonged to the Special Task Force? What is the
significance of the press report that 4 terrorists including one Hamza
- the same name as one of the terrorists killed in the Parliament
attack and supposedly identified by Afzal - had been arrested by the
Thane police in November 2000 and handed over to the J and K police for
further investigation? The press report is located at Appendix
3. It will be a travesty of justice to hang Mohammed Afzal
without ascertaining answers to these questions.
(3) With the acquittal of three out of four persons
from the charge of conspiracy, it is clear that the investigating
agency tried to frame at least three innocent persons. The high
court had found the agency guilty of producing false arrest memos,
doctoring telephone conversations, and illegal confinement of people to
force them to sign blank papers. It is also clear that false
confessions were extracted by torture.
In the absence of alternative explanations, it seems that the NDA
government was massively fooled by its own police. The country must
learn the truth behind the attacks. Responsibility must be fixed for
those guilty of negligence, concoction of evidence, and propagation of
deliberate falsehood. Above all, those who almost took the country to
war in such a reckless manner must be made accountable. To that end,
the Committee has already issued an appeal for Parliamentary
inquiry. Some press coverage of the appeal is shown at Appendix
4. There have been other recent appeals for a public inquiry on the
case, shown at Appendix 5. We urge you to institute a Parliamentary
inquiry at least on the following questions:
(1) Who attacked Parliament and what was the conspiracy?
(2) On what basis did the NDA government take the country close to a nuclear war?
(3) What was the role of the State Task Force (J and K) on surrendered militants?
(4) What was the role of the Special Cell of Delhi Police in conducting the case?
(5) What institutional and legal changes are required
to prevent a government from going to war unilaterally without the
consent of Parliament as in this case?
The political system has failed to take the steps to answer the grave
questions raised at length by eminent citizens. And the time is running
out for initiating any fruitful inquiry on these questions. From what
we can see through the restricted legal window of the Supreme Court,
just six persons are in view, five attackers and Mohammed Afzal, as
noted. Since the attackers died on the spot, Mohammed Afzal is the only
living soul who, according to the Supreme Court, might know something
of what really happened. Mohammed Afzal has not been heard yet
(Nandita Haksar, Indian Express, September 30, 2006).
(This article was published earlier in The Economic and Political Weekly, October 7, 2006)
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