Date With The Hangman
The inordinate focus and debate that has been raging
on the hanging of Yakub Memon on the 30th of July 2015, a man who
was, undeniably and substantially, involved in the terrorist carnage of 1993, is
nothing short of remarkable.
He was not only deeply involved in the planning and
execution of the Bombay blasts of 1993, but was probably his brother Tiger
Memon’s key henchman.
As the saying goes, the real story is rarely in the
crime, but in the cover-up. There has been much said and written, of late, once
Memon’s hanging date was announced a couple of weeks ago, oft citing a 2007
article by RAW official, the late B Raman, about how Yakub Memon had turned
approver.
He indicated that Yakub Memon practically allowed
himself to be caught, with multiple Indian and Pakistani passports, and quite a
bit of other incriminating paperwork. Raman, on his part, thought he should not
have been condemned to death by the courts, way back in 2007, when it happened
for the first time, and wrote as much.
The ‘liberenzia’ has seized upon the exaggerated
notion of Yakub Menon’s supposed ‘innocence’, driving multiple appeals to the
Supreme Court and the President of India, and taking supportive positions
publicly on social media, the press and on TV. But everyone knows approvers
might qualify for a reduced sentence, but are hardly ever deemed innocent!
Did Yakub Memon, if he was actually an approver,
deserve to hang? Who knows why the Supreme Court found merit in hanging him
anyway, even after multiple reviews, but it suggests that there is no substance
to the ‘approver’ theory.
Was Yakub Memon then, a sacrificial lamb or decoy,
thrown to the Indian authorities by his own co-conspirators, so that the
Indians could also save face, and desist from huge covert retaliation across
the border?
Perhaps, but we will never quite know. Besides, no
conspiracy on this scale goes without insider help from the politicians and
officialdom and this applies as much to 1993 as it does to 26/11.
Dawood Ibrahim, himself the son of a Bombay
policeman, is renowned for his enduring clout,
to this day, amongst the power elite in Maharashtra, police structures, the big builders, the stars/producers of
Bollywood, plus other influentials in
Bombay/Mumbai. This, according to crime reporter and author Hussain Zaidi, who
has written two very well received books on the subject, one of which has even
been made into the acclaimed film Black Friday.
The willingness of the Supreme Court to apply itself
to the maximum on such a matter of Yakub
Memon’s life and death however, is borne out by the late night sitting, that
still resulted in a thumbs-down for the final time on the night of the 29th
of July 2015.
But it is yet persistently rumoured that Yakub Menon
provided much of the hard evidence, documentation and details on who precisely
was involved in the attacks, and to what extent, and what they individually and
collectively did, how the Pakistani establishment was in cahoots up to the hilt.
But unfortunately, none of it, even if it is true, was found to be provable in
the very proper criminal courts of our system.
Intelligence gathering however is a process very
different from how the Indian civil and criminal courts work. Yakub Memon, if
he turned approver, presumably to mitigate the consequences of the law upon
himself, did not do so ‘officially’, presumably because he spoke to our ‘spooks’
and other shadow boxers.
What came out clearly in the courts however was
Yakub Menon’s culpability and guilt, and that he was careless enough, or
miscalculated the benefits of, straying into the hands of the Indian
intelligence agencies.
The explanation for this too exists. It is said that
Yakub thought he would be better off in India. Better off than at the mercy of
the ISI in Pakistan, virtual prisoners and ‘strategic assets’, like his brother
Tiger, Dawood Ibrahim and other fugitives from Indian law. They are there still,
apparently cowering in gilded cages, but, out of our reach.
Still, the stark facts from 22 years ago speak for
themselves, as if it were yesterday once more. Not only were 257 people killed
in the blasts, scores more wounded and maimed, and millions in property destroyed.
All of it, ostensibly in retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in
Ayodhya, where an ancient edifice that was both temple and mosque, was brought
down by Hindu activists, including a large contingent from Mumbai’s Shiv Sena -
without, however, any loss of life. Except that is, for the ‘Bombay riots’ that
followed it.
So the ‘revenge’ that Tiger Memon allegedly spoke
of, is mostly for the riots in Bombay of the time. But the perpetrators, as
explained very well by Hussain Zaidi in his two books , extended to random
innocents, Hindu, Muslim, others, and not the big-wigs in the Shiv Sena, for
fear of savage and stiff retaliation.
That Yakub Menon was the only key terrorist caught
after the blasts, condemned to death, and hanged, after spending 22 years in
jail, is indeed ironic. But, the fact that many who were accused of involvement,
but let go and acquitted, because of inadequate evidence, is no less
remarkable.
Is the civil and criminal justice system equipped to
pronounce on terrorism given its elaborate processes? The truth of the matter
is that much is rotten in the Indian legal system, including being over-burdened
and the curse of extreme tardiness.
It took an inordinately long time, many years too,
for Pakistani Ajmal Kasab, who was captured, as it were, with a machine gun in
his hand, and scores of victims strewn around him at 26/11, and the Kashmiri
Afzal Guru, who plotted to kill parliamentarians and blow up the parliament
buildings during the Vajpayee administration, to reach the gallows as well.
It must therefore be said, the Indian State could
have saved a lot of time and money by having such cold-blooded killers,
treasonous conspirators, and out-and-out terrorists, domestic, or from abroad,
tried by a military tribunal, before being executed forthwith, if ever they are
caught alive.
Going forward, we need a separate military tribunal
that applies the laws and protocols used when a nation is at war if we want to
end this travesty and circus that we can ill afford. Its working also
polarises and traumatises civil society to have this kind of wound opened up
again and again in the name of justice.
That the usual civil and criminal law processes,
applied to terrorists and traitors, who in a very real sense have waged war on
the nation, killing soldiers and policemen and civilians- men, women and
children at random alike; is probably a bizarre
and perverse misapplication of a genteel justice system.
How can the same due process be made available to
bloodthirsty enemies of the state? It is also enormously tardy, expensive and
wasteful, and not what the criminal and civil legal system was best designed for.
This legal system must assume a person is innocent
unless proven to be guilty. This burden of proof is not always possible to
dovetail, with the methods of guerrilla warfare perpetrated by well-trained
killers. Terrorists,with huge amounts of weaponry and technology at their
command operating by stealth on soft, mostly unarmed, targets. Why then is this
nicety of a civilian justice machinery being offered to such terrorists and
traitors?
Perhaps the raging debate on whether the death
penalty should be repealed, as a badge of our civilised sensibilities, cannot,
and emphatically should not, apply to people who wage war on the nation!
Otherwise, we run the additional risk of rendering meaningless the sacrifices
of our policemen and soldiers who lay down their lives fighting terrorism on
every given day!
And to date, the key perpetrators of the terrorist
blasts that wracked the city, Yakub’s brother Tiger Memon, and underworld don
Dawood Ibrahim, their henchmen, trained, armed, motivated by the ISI of
Pakistan, are free, and at large. They are living comfortably abroad, allegedly
in the custody of, but also under the protection of, Pakistan.
India, as a nation, has not, apparently, managed to
take the battle to the enemy, the allegations of Indian involvement in
fomenting violence in Karachi and Baluchistan unexcepted. If we have meddled in
those places, perhaps we need to step it up, so that the battle of attrition is
truly joined and tilted in India’s favour. We have, of course, reserved the
right to retaliate of late, in a manner, scale, time and place of our own
choosing, and again after the recent terrorist attack in Gurdaspur district in
Punjab.
But, there is a decided gulf between a government
that wants to take terrorism head on, and a liberal presence amongst civil
society and some of its luminaries, that wants India to be lofty and take the
moral high ground, even in the face of repeated provocation. Mahatma Gandhi’s
borrowed statement on an eye-for-an- eye is much quoted to justify this kind of
pacifism.
However, because we are a diverse and pluralistic people,
it may be best to let both schools of thought survive, contend, even thrive, in
parallel! The liberals should be allowed to constitutionally amend capital
punishment for a list of crimes that stop short of premeditated first degree
murder in the common course.
But every act of treason against the country, and
terrorism involving loss of life, should be handed over to a military trial that
is swift and final, and determined to punish the guilty with summary execution.
For: Swarajyamag
(1,593 words)
July 30th, 2015
Gautam Mukherjee
No comments:
Post a Comment