The ‘manufactured’ enemy of the Indian state, Afzal Guru (accused of attacking the Indian parliament in 2001), another hero of the Kashmiri narrative of struggle, was hanged to death on February 9, 2013 secretly at the Tihar jail without informing even his family. Guru’s death saw a violent reaction from the Valley, claiming three lives and dozens injured in the first two days because the consensus of the Vale was…he was framed. Even though the fairness of his trial is contested but why he was hanged secretly puts a question mark over several things. Having no proper evidence, the Supreme Court hanged him to satisfy ‘the collective conscience’ of India. Is the collective conscience (created by the media) more important than the truth? It is certain that India can cross any limit to show that it has hard power along with its tremendous soft power.
Everybody knows that such an event would lead to serious repercussions and would break down the peace developed since the last year or so in the Kashmir Valley, which has now happened. Was it then a miscalculation on the part of the government? No, the government of India has calculated all its consequences and repercussions, but keeping them aside, tried to serve its objectives. By hanging Guru, the Congress-led UPA government tried to give three messages to the nation: one, that the Congress is also sympathetic to Hindus and prepared to compromise on its secular ethos; two, it is not soft but hard on terrorism; three, not the peripheral communities but the main Hindu community matters during the upcoming elections.
There were three pressures on the UPA government for the last month or so, and by hanging Guru, it tried to meet all three challenges and provide a strong response to them. The first was the popularity of the BJP candidate Narinder Modi’s economic development model, though a myth yet highly promoted by the media and the neo-liberals of India along with several multinational companies. After a recent visit by Modi to the Shri Ram college at Delhi, Congress was shocked at Modi’s popularity and more by his economic propaganda, “youth should not be treated as new age voters but new age power… the government has no business doing business… minimum government and maximum governance is my slogan.” Taking the upcoming elections into account, the Congress took an immediate step to recover its receding popularity. But whether the economic trends or political trends would affect the upcoming elections needs to be seen. However, the government did make its calculation in favour of political considerations and thought political trends would affect its election prospects.
Secondly, it was a response to the changing position of Pakistan over Kashmir and the plea of Pakistan first to the UN concerning the future of Kashmir regarding the right of self-determination and then to the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) to send its fact-finding mission to investigate the recent ceasefire violations. The request made by the OIC to India to send its fact-finding team to Kashmir to make inquiries about the situation there worried India’s defence establishment, and it in turn decided to construct a new story of violence in Kashmir as an excuse to mould international opinion over Kashmir. This was in fact a tough response to Pakistan and the OIC to abstain from such pleas in future.
The third is a crucial one, without which the Indian intelligence agencies and defence establishment would not have been provided the consensus to hang Guru. The Indian defence establishment had developed apprehensions that the situation in Kashmir would turn bad after the withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan in 2014, and militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas could turn against India once they were finished with their job in Afghanistan. India considers it a security threat and Guru was on offer to avoid that security threat. India wants to deploy more and more forces in Kashmir and does not want to lift draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). The eruption of violence in the Kashmir Valley merely provides an excuse to send more and more forces there, and since there were demands for the withdrawal of forces from Kashmir, it was a strategic response to that.
How then did Guru become a victim of this strategy? The decision to hang Guru was not preplanned but was taken immediately, keeping into account these different pressures on India. The words of the Union Law Minister Ashwani Kumar makes this clear: “There are far too many grave challenges before the nation, which require broad and sustainable political consensus to facilitate complex policy decisions…” (The Hindu, February 11, 2013). India earlier tried to blame Pakistan for violating the Line of Control and the beheading of two soldiers; that too was a strategy to blame Pakistan and maintain the existing military presence in Kashmir. But that failed because of an immediate response from people like the renowned journalist Praveen Swami, who claimed that it was India who first opened fire. Two days earlier, India refused the OIC’s request to send their observer team to Kashmir. All these trends worried the Indian defence establishment and demanded an immediate response from the government. Through a close collaboration between government and the defence establishment, Guru seemed to be the asset that could be used to avoid the crisis, and the UPA government fully agreed, as they were already in search of some God-given magic tool to reconstruct their vote bank.
This drama makes Mohammad Afzal Guru a victim of strategy, which will have different repercussions that even the government of India might not have imagined. But in order to avoid any attack on its objectivity, the government might hang another inmate on death row like Santhan, Murugan or Surabjit Singh and try to restore its receding popularity among Muslims and the people of the Vale. To conclude, though it may serve short-term objectives, in the long run India will suffer heavy losses. But such things are already calculated by the Indian defence establishment; it has calculated how to control the situation, but the question will be to see how much of the Indian strategy would become successful in achieving its objectives.
.The writer is pursuing M Phil in South Asian studies at the JNU, New Delhi, and can be reached at [email protected]