An acclaimed writer digs into the story of Afzal Guru, who’s on death row
THE reason I had come to Kashmir was to meet Tabassum Guru, the wife of Mohammad Afzal Guru, who is on death row for his role in the attack on the Indian Parliament.
However, when I reached her in Sopore, north of Srinagar, she waved me away saying she had no desire to meet with journalists.
Mohammad Afzal Guru was the main accused in the attack on the Parliament.
While two of his co- accused, S. A. R. Geelani and Afsan Guru, had been acquitted, Afzal was sentenced to death by hanging in 2004. A fourth accused, Afsan Guru’s husband, Shaukat Hussain, was sentenced to ten years in prison. The hanging was scheduled for October 20, 2006, but it was stayed after a mercy petition was filed with the president.
In its judgment on his appeal, the Supreme Court recognized that the evidence against Afzal was only circumstantial and that legal procedures had not been followed by the police. Nevertheless, the judgment stated that the attack on the Indian Parliament had “ shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.” In response, a group of Kashmiri leaders passed a resolution that read, in part, “ We the people of Kashmir ask why the collective conscience of the Indians is not shaken by the fact that a Kashmiri has been sentenced to death without a fair trial, without a chance to represent himself?” Afzal’s family could not afford a lawyer. He was provided a courtappointed lawyer, but the lawyer never appeared. Then, a second lawyer was appointed but she didn’t take instructions from her client and agreed to admission of documents without proof. 
Afzal submitted four names of senior advocates to the court but they refused to represent him too. The lawyer who was now chosen by the court stated that he did not want to appear for Afzal, and Afzal expressed a lack of confidence in the advocate.
Nevertheless, under the court’s insistence, this was the choice that both lawyer and client had to stay with.
That is why, in the Srinagar resolution mentioned above, the Kashmiri leaders asked whether it was Afzal’s fault that Indian lawyers thought that it was “ more patriotic” to allow a Kashmiri to die than to ensure that he received a fair trial.
Such questions were raised from a sense of great helplessness.
Only the naïve assume that the conflict in Kashmir is between fanatical militants and valiant soldiers. The real picture is much more complicated. In this system the conventional economic nodes no longer function, and all resource lines intersect at some level with the security- state.
There is a sense of enormous, often inescapable, dependency on those who are clearly seen as oppressors. This has bred complex schizophrenia in the society. Arundhati Roy has written, “ 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.” It is this murky landscape that is so clearly illuminated by the night- flare that was Tabassum Guru’s statement published in Kashmir Times in October 2004.
Entitled ‘ A Wife’s Appeal for Justice it is a unique statement, anguished and unafraid. It tells the story of the way in which the police and the armed forces have turned Kashmiris into collaborators, and, although the statement is no more than 1,500 words long, it demonstrates more starkly than most documents about Kashmir the brutal cost of military occupation.
In 1990, like thousands of other Kashmiri youth, Afzal had joined the movement for liberation.
He had been studying to be a doctor, but instead went to Pakistan to receive training. He returned in three months, not having finished his training, because he was disillusioned.
Upon his return he surrendered to the Border Security Force and was given a certificate stating that he was a surrendered militant. His dream of becoming a doctor was now lost; he started a small business dealing in medical supplies and surgical instruments. The following year, in 1997, he got married. Afzal was 28, and Tabassum 18.
AFTER his surrender, Afzal wasn’t free of harassment. He was always being asked to spy on other Kashmiris who were suspected of being militants. ( This is Sartre, writing more than 50 years ago: “ The purpose of torture is not only to make a person talk, but to make him betray others. The victim must turn himself by his screams and by his submission into a lower animal, in the eyes of all and in his own eyes.”) One night, members of a counterinsurgency unit, Special Task Force or STF, took Afzal away.
He was tortured at an STF camp. Afzal was asked by his torturers to pay one lakh rupees and because there was no such money available Tabassum had to sell everything she had, including the little gold she had received on her marriage.
And, as at other points in her appeal, her own particular suffering is interpreted in the light of what other Kashmiris have experienced: “ You will think that Afzal must be involved in some militant activities and that is why the security forces were torturing him to extract information.
But you must understand the situation in Kashmir, every man, woman and child has some information on the movement even if they are not involved. By making people into informers they turn brother against brother, wife against husband and children against parents.” One of the officers mentioned in Tabassum’s appeal, Dravinder Singh, has been frank about the necessity of torture in his line of work. He has stated that torture is the only deterrent to terrorism.
In fact, Singh has told a journalist in a recorded interview about having questioned Afzal: “ I did interrogate and torture him at my camp. And we never recorded his arrest in the books anywhere. His description of torture at my camp is true.
That was the procedure those days and we did pour petrol in his arse and gave him electric shocks. But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation.” After his release from the camp, Afzal had needed medical treatment. Six months later, he moved to Delhi. He had decided that he would soon bring Tabassum and their little son, Ghalib, to a place he had rented. But while in Delhi, Afzal received a call from Dravinder Singh. Singh said that he needed Afzal to do a small job for him. He was to take a man named Mohammad from Kashmir to Delhi, which he did, and he accompanied the same Mohammad to a shop where he bought a used Ambassador car. T HE car was used in the attack on the Parliament, and Mohammad was identified as one of the attackers. Afzal was waiting at a bus stand in Srinagar for a bus to Sopore when he was arrested and taken to the STF headquarters and then to Delhi.
Afzal identified the slain terrorist Mohammad as someone he knew. This part of his statement was accepted by the court but not the part where he said that he had acted under direction from the STF. Tabassum wrote, “ In the High Court one human rights lawyer offered to represent Afzal and my husband accepted. But instead of defending Afzal the lawyer began by asking the court not to hang Afzal but to kill him by a lethal injection. My husband never expressed any desire to die. He has maintained that he has been entrapped by the STF.”