In my latest column in the International Herald Tribune, I argue that the Indian justice system, which includes shoddy police investigations and the powerful influence of political calculations, is not competent nor fair enough to grant India the moral right to hang a man, assuming that any society can have such a right in the first place.
Page Two
Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.
On Saturday, a militant who is widely known in India as Afzal Guru, was hanged in a secret operation. The hanging, which was his punishment for assisting five terrorists who had attacked the Indian Parliament in 2001, has raised a number of issues, most of them questions that supporters of human rights have raised since 2004 when he was sentenced to death by the highest court in the land. They believe that he did not receive a fair trial, that he was a convenient scapegoat, that he was a minor player in a crime that the Indian state was not good enough to fully investigate, that he did not deserve to be hanged according to the evidence that was available.
They had solid reasons to say all this, but one of Afzal Guru’s misfortunes was that the liberal voice in India has progressively lost its power and influence because it has lost its credibility with the state, the news media and the fast changing Indian urban middle class.
In the past, when the liberals took on the state over dams or other developmental projects, or minority rights or the armed activities of tribal gangs that sought their own revolutions, they have been more preoccupied with maintaining their ideological positions and their love for the underdogs than with the practicality of hard facts. So, even though the Indian state’s handling of the Afzal Guru’s case was disgraceful, the voice of the liberals had become too feeble, dull and predictable to intimidate the state. The liberals are seeing their constituency shrink even in mainstream English journalism in India, and they have themselves to blame for this.
IHT Rendezvous: Hanging of Militant Raises Questions in India
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IHT Rendezvous: Hanging of Militant Raises Questions in India
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IHT Rendezvous: Hanging of Militant Raises Questions in India
