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” (Prosecution Witness 62), Mohammed Akbar, head constable, Parimpora police station, the Jammu and Kashmir 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 recognized 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 he was plainly told that his wife and family would suffer dire consequences if he did not cooperate. (We already know that Afzal’s brother Hilal had been held in illegal detention by the Special Operations Group during some crucial months.)
In this letter, Afzal describes how he was tortured in the Special Task Force camp—with electrodes on his genitals and chilies and petrol in his anus. He mentions the name of deputy 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 charge sheet can be traced to an Special Task Force camp in Kashmir.
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 crossfire. 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 Special Operations Group and Special Task Force that Afzal talks about. These are the most ruthless, undisciplined, 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 on 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 1990s 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 twenty 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 practicing militant, he voluntarily surrendered to the Border Security Force. 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 also 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 Mohammad 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 centers, 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 passersby to find. Whereas Afzal’s story is being performed like a piece of medieval theater 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 Lash-kar-e-Taiba? 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 Mohammad Afzal without knowing what really happened is a misdeed that will not easily be forgotten. Or forgiven. Nor should it be.
Notwithstanding the 10 Percent Growth Rate.
This essay first appeared in Outlook, October 30, 2006.
CUSTODIAL CONFESSIONS, THE MEDIA, AND THE LAW
The supreme court of India has sentenced Mohammad Afzal, Accused Number One in the Parliament attack case, to death. It acknowledged that the evidence against him was not direct, only circumstantial, but in its now famously controversial statement it said: “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, has shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”1
Is the “collective conscience” the same as majority opinion? Would it be fair to say that it is fashioned by the information we receive? And therefore, that in this case, the mass media has played a pivotal role in determining the final court verdict? If so, has it been accurate and truthful?
Now, five years later, when disturbing questions are being raised about the Parliament attack, is the Special Cell once again cleverly exploiting the frantic hunt for “breaking news”? Suddenly spurious “exposés” are finding their way onto prime-time TV. Unfortunately, some of India’s best, most responsible news channels have been caught up in this game in which carelessness and incomprehension is as deadly as malice. (A few weeks ago we had a fiasco on CNN-IBN.)
Last week (December 16), on a ninety-minute prime-time show, NDTV showcased an “exclusive” video of Mohammad Afzal’s “confession” made in police custody, in the days immediately following his arrest. At no point was it clarified that the “confession” was five years old.2
Much has been said about the authenticity, reliability, and legality of confessions taken in police custody, as well as the circumstances under which this particular “confession” was extracted. Because of the very real danger that custodial torture will replace real investigation, the Indian Penal Code does not admit confessions made in police custody as legal evidence in a criminal trial. The Prevention of Terrorism Act was considered an outrage on civil rights and was eventually withdrawn, primarily because it made confessions obtained in police custody admissible as legal evidence. In fact, in the case of Afzal’s “confession,” the Supreme Court said the Special Cell had violated even the tenuous safeguards provided under the act, and set it aside as being illegal and unreliable. Even before this, the high court had already reprimanded the Special Cell sharply for forcing Afzal to incriminate himself publicly in a “media confession.”3
So what made NDTV showcase this thoroughly discredited old “confession” all over again? Why now? How did the Special Cell video find its way into their hands? Does it have something to do with the fact that Afzal’s clemency petition is pending with the president of India and a curative petition
asking for a retrial is pending in the Supreme Court? In her column in the Hindustan Times, Barkha Dutt, managing editor of NDTV, said the channel spent many hours “debating what the fairest way” was to show this video.4 Clearly, it was a serious decision and demands to be discussed seriously.
At the start of the show, for several minutes the image of Afzal “confessing” was inset with a text that said, “Afzal ne court mein gunaa qabool kiya tha” (Afzal has admitted his guilt in court). This is blatantly untrue. Then, for a full fifteen minutes the “confession” ran without comment. After this, an anchor came on and said, “ Sansad par hamle ki kahani, Afzal ki zubaani” (The story of the Parliament attack, in Afzal’s words). This, too, is a travesty of the truth. Well into the program a reporter informed us that Afzal had since withdrawn this “confession” and had claimed it had been extracted under torture. The smirking anchor then turned to one of the panelists, S. A. R. Geelani, who was also one of the accused in the case (and who knows a thing or two about torture and the Special Cell) and remarked that if this confession was “forced,” then Afzal was a very good actor.
(The anchor has clearly never experienced torture. Or even read the wonderful Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano—“The electric cattle prod turns anyone into a prolific storyteller.” Nor has he known what it’s like to be held in police custody in Delhi while his family was hostage—as Afzal’s was—in the war zone that is Kashmir.)
Later on, the “confession” was juxtaposed with what the channel said was Afzal’s statement to the court, but was actually the text of a letter he wrote to his high court lawyer in which he implicates the Special Task Force (STF) in Kashmir and describes how in the months before the Parliament attack the task force illegally detained and tortured him. NDTV does not tell us that a deputy superintendent of the STF has since confirmed that he did illegally detain and torture Afzal. Instead it uses Afzal’s letter to discredit him further. The bold caption at the bottom of the frame read: “Afzal ka badalta hua baiyan” (Afzal’s changing statements).
There is another serious ethical issue. In Afzal’s confession to the Special Cell in December 2001 (as opposed to his “media confession”), he implicated S. A. R. Geelani and said he was the mastermind of the conspiracy. While this was in line with the Special Cell’s charge sheet, it turned out to be false, and Geelani was acquitted by the Supreme Court. Why was this portion of Afzal’s confession left out? So that the confession would seem less constructed, more plausible? Who made that decision to leave it out? NDTV or the Special Cell?
All this makes the broadcast of this program a seriously prejudicial act. It wasn’t surprising to watch the “collective conscience” of society forming its opinion as the show unfolded. The SMS messages on the ticker tape said:
“Afzal ko boti boti mein kaat ke kutton ko khila do” (Cut him into bits and feed him to the dogs).
“Afzal ke haath aur taang kaat ke, road mein bheek mangvaney chahiye” (Cut off his arms and legs and make him beg).
Then in English: “Hang him by his balls in Lal Chowk. Hang him and hang those who are supporting him.”
Even without Sharia courts, we seem to be doing just fine.
For the record, the reporter Neeta Sharma, credited several times on the program for procuring the video, has been previously exposed for publishing falsehoods, on the “encounter” in Ansal Plaza, on the Iftikhar Gilani case, and on the S. A. R. Geelani case—and now on this one. Neeta Sharma was formerly a reporter with the Hindustan Times. Publishing Special Cell handouts seems to have gotten her a promotion—from print journalism to TV.
This kind of thing really makes you wonder whether media houses have an inside track on the police and intelligence agencies, or whether it’s the other way around.
The quietest guest on the panel was M. K. Dhar, a former joint director of the Intelligence Bureau. He was pretty enigmatic. He certainly didn’t repeat what he has said in his astonishingly frank book Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled: “Some day or the other, taking advantage of the weakening fabric of our democracy, some unscrupulous intelligence men may gang up with ambitious Army Brass and change the political texture of the nation.”5
Weakening fabric of our democracy. I couldn’t have put it better.
This essay was first published in the Hindustan Times on December 22, 2006.
LISTENING TO GRASSHOPPERS: GENOCIDE, DENIAL, AND CELEBRATION
I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago, I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, “We are all Armenians,” “We are all Hrant Dink.” Perhaps I’d have carried the one that said, “One and a half million plus one.”1
I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic Armenian city of Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting.
“When we left, my family was twenty-five in the family,” Araxie Barsamian says.
They took all the men folks … They asked my father, “Where is your ammunition?” He says, “I sold it.” So they says, “Go get it.” So when he went to the Kurd town, to get it, they beat him and took him all his clothes. And when he came back there—this is my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms … So he die in the jail… They took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them.2
Araxie, her mother, and three younger brothers were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor. This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government and many Turks as well.
I have not come here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.
The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant. Obviously, the assassination was meant both as a punishment for Hrant and a warning to others in this country who might have been inspired by his courage—not just to say the unsayable, but to think the unthinkable.
This was the message written on the bullet that killed Hrant Dink. This is the message in the death threats received by Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak, and others who have dared to differ with the Turkish government’s view.3 Before he was killed, Hrant Dink was tried three times under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes publicly denigrating “Turkishness” a criminal offense. Each of these trials was a signal from the Turkish state to Turkey’s fascist right wing that Hrant Dink was an acceptable target. How can telling the truth denigrate Turkishness? Who has the right to limit and define what Turkishness is?
Hrant Dink has been silenced. But those who celebrate his murder should know that what they did was counterproductive. Instead of silence, it has raised a great noise. Hrant’s voice has become a shout that can never be silenced again, not by bullets, or prison sentences, or insults. It shouts, it whispers, it
sings, it shatters the bullying silence that has begun to gather once again like an army that was routed and is regrouping. It has made the world curious about something that happened in Anatolia more than ninety years ago. Something that Hrant’s enemies wanted to bury. To forget. Well … speaking for myself, my first reaction was to find out what I could about 1915, to read history, to listen to testimonies. Something I might not otherwise have done. Now I have an opinion, an informed opinion about it, but, as I said, that is not what I’m here to inflict on you.
My Seditious Heart Page 43
