Seeking a fair trial

On December 13, 2001, five terrorists (some say there were six) attacked the Indian Parliament. They were heavily armed and the car they were travelling in was believed to be carrying enough ammunition to blow up the entire Parliament building. The security guards stationed in Parliament acted bravely and killed all the five terrorists. A few security guards and other workers sustained injuries and succumbed to them.

The police displayed amazing speed in rounding up four conspirators and a special court passed its judgement in about a year ""three of them were to be hanged and one was given rigorous imprisonment for five years. The High Court modified the judgement""acquitting S A R Geelani, who had been sentenced to death, and Afsan Guru, who the special court had ordered to be jailed for five years, and upholding the two other death sentences on Shaukat Husain Guru and Mohammad Afzal. In 2006, the Supreme Court upheld the two acquittals by the High Court, commuted the death sentence on Shaukat Husain Guru to ten years of imprisonment and upheld the capital punishment for Mohammad Afzal.

This book, a collection of 15 essays, is primarily about Mohammad Afzal and whether justice is being meted out to him. Afzal's mercy petition (according to one of the contributors to the volume, this is a petition for fair trial and justice, not for mercy!) is now with the President of India. The substantive point made by all the contributors is that Mohammad Afzal did not get fair trial and his death sentence was sought to be justified on the grounds that the "collective conscience of the society" needed to be satisfied.

With the execution of former Iraq president Saddam Hussein fresh in one's mind, the essays do make a powerful point on the need for fair trial. They also raise disturbing questions about the single-minded pursuit of the state in its war against terror""a drive in which an individual without resources may often become a victim of a state apparatus keen on satisfying the so-called collective conscience of society.

Indira Jaising and Nandita Haksar, both lawyers (the latter also fought successfully to ensure Geelani's acquittal), have made a cogently argued case for a complete retrial of Mohammad Afzal. Their simple point is that Afzal did not have the benefit of a proper lawyer. The law provides that right from the start of the proceedings at the lower court the accused must have the benefit of a lawyer. In the case of Afzal, none of the lawyers the state offered to him for his defence took any initiative to fight the case.

Finally, the lawyer who defended Afzal acted only as a "friend of the court" as Afzal had refused to accept him as his counsel. At one stage, Afzal was reduced to conducting cross-examination of witnesses himself. Indira Jaising mentions that a paltry amount of only Rs 3,000 would have been paid to a lawyer to defend Afzal's case. As it has been argued elsewhere in the book, the difference between a commuted death sentence and walking to the gallows is the ability of an accused to get a good lawyer.

The essays also plead for a change in the way the law enforcement agencies and anti-insurgency outfits operate in different parts of the country. There are detailed accounts of hair-raising tales of how the Special Task Force (STF) in Jammu & Kashmir use state terror to deny ordinary citizens the right to lead a life with dignity and freedom. There is an account of how Geelani was treated in police custody and why Afzal is being dubbed as a terrorist by his own brother. Such declaration apparently will help Afzal's family in Kashmir to escape from any excesses from the STF, after Afzal's execution.

The role of the print and electronic media has also come in for some attack. The reportage on the trial of Geelani and his acquittal later has been closely analysed. And what emerges is a sorry state of affairs. Most newspapers and television channels (one TV channel even ran a reconstructed drama of the Parliament attack) relied almost unquestioningly on whatever the police claimed. The competition for improving viewership or readership may be responsible for this race to dish out unsubstantiated information. But Haksar points out that after Geelani was acquitted, not one newspaper or TV channel has sent an apology letter to the Delhi University college lecturer.

The only problem with this book is Arundhati Roy's introduction and her essay. Emotionally charged as she is in her rendering of the Afzal case, she completely lacks credibility while trying to see a larger diabolical plan of the Vajpayee government to engineer the attack, gain political mileage and justify military mobilisation on the border with Pakistan. Afzal still needs a fair trial, but not because there was such a grand conspiracy and which now needs to be uncovered.

13 DEC: A READER
The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament

Essays (Introduction by
Arundhati Roy); Penguin
Price: Rs 200; Pages: 234