Should Afzal be hanged or not

The nation seems to be divided over whether Mohammed Afzal, the prime accused in the 2001 parliament attack, should be given death sentence or not. Yasin Malik of JKLF has gone as far as claiming that the killing of Afzal will derail the Indo-Pak peace process (as if some peace process exists!). Yesterday I saw in a news channel that some have claimed the entire Kashmire valley shall be up in flames if Afzal is hanged.

I personally believe terrorists should never get the death sentence because it unnecessarily earns them sympathy and turns them into martyrs. They should be — one way or the other — made to languish into the oblivion. Yes, we don’t have enough room in the Indian jails, but I think some petty criminals can be released to make some space to keep terrorists locked up for ever so that they gradually fade away from people’s memory.

So for the first time when I heard that Mohammed Afzal was to be hanged, my reaction was, this is a mistake. Terrorists are trained for such scenarios. In fact if Afzal doesn’t want to die, I doubt if he is a fully-trained terrorist.

Now about the “fair trial” conundrum the human rights activists and the Muslim intellectuals are embroiled in. They say Afzal didn’t get a fair trial and that’s why he shouldn’t get the death sentence. It confuses me. I wonder how Afzal was arrested. I think he was arrested during the attack and he had the weapons with him. So was he on a leisurely stroll enjoying the serenity of the parliament (this phrase — the serenity of the parliament — is an oxymoron for our country’s parliament) when he was arrested. Poor chap. Or was he just picked up from some other place?

It has almost become a Kashmir Vs. the rest of the country issue, with every political entity, cutting across the party lines, demanding the death sentence be revoked. This, I think is a dangerous trend. Let me be frank here; on such issues I don’t have a single iota of sympathy for the Kashmiri people. Their hearts bleed for all the wrong people and for all the wrong reasons. Have they ever hit the streets when terrorists blow up schools and other places where scores of innocent people are killed? Have they ever beaten their chests for hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus who are living like refugees in their own country? Will they ever learn to live and let live?

Again, coming back to Mohammed Afzal: no, he shouldn’t be hanged, but neither should he get clemency from the president. Our being a so-called civilized society, every person, whether he or she is a terrorist or a politician, should get a fair trial, otherwise there would be no difference between our society and an uncivilized society – and I know particular sections take advantage of this provision. That’s sad, but ineluctable.