Is Afzal now just a rallying point for intellectuals?
A day before the fifth anniversary of Parliament attack, some of country’s renowned journalists, activists and writers – led by Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy – came together to release a book that raises 13 “damning” questions about the attack. But is Afzal simply an intra-elite debate among India’s Left liberals or do the intellectuals actually have a public constituency outside the seminar halls of Delhi and Mumbai? [CNN-IBN]
A rallying point, says the dictionary, is “a point or principle on which scattered or opposing groups can come together.” So the question suggests that ‘intellectuals’ are merely exploiting Afzal to ‘come together’; the act of ‘coming together’ is the sole motive of the exercise.But ‘coming together’, I suppose, is a less cheap motive than TRPs.
The first question of the interview is, “But books written in English within India do tend to address an elite audience.” This, coming from an English language TV channel!
So “do the intellectuals actually have a public constituency outside the seminar halls of Delhi and Mumbai?” Is that the most important question to ask on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the attack on India’s Parliament? One can understand ridicule as mode of argument, but asking if ‘intellectuals have a public constituency’ goes a step beyond ridicule: it is like saying, how many TRPs do the intellectuals notch anyway? The question questions the value of ‘intellectuals’ in public debate. Coming from a TV channel, not surprising at all. And it keeps getting repeated in different words throughout the show: “Is this a group of people who are increasingly becoming known for rent-a-call mentality?” And a caption reads: “INTELLECTUAL PASSTIME? While some say it’s the coming-of-age of dissent, others deny furiously.”
But perhaps all this has something to do from the following excerpt from the introduction of the book:
At the end of November 2006, Afzal’s older brother Aijaz made it on to a national news channel (CNN-IBN). He was featured on hidden camera, on what was meant to be a ‘sting’ operation, making—we were asked to believe—stunning revelations. Aijaz’s story had already been on offer to various journalists on the streets of Delhi for weeks. People were wary of him because his rift with his brother’s wife and family is well known. More significantly, in Kashmir he is known to have a relationship with the STF. More than one person has suggested an audit of his newfound assets.
But here he was now, on the national news, endorsing the Supreme Court decision to hang his brother. Then, saying Afzal had never surrendered, and that it was he (Aijaz) who surrendered his brother’s weapon to the BSF! And since he had never surrendered, Aijaz was able to ‘confirm’ that Afzal was an active militant with the Jaish-e-Mohammed, and that Ghazi Baba, chief of operations of the Jaish, used to regularly hold meetings in their home. (Aijaz claims that when Ghazi Baba was killed, it was he who the police called in to identify the body). On the whole, it sounded as though there had been a case of mistaken identity—and that given how much he knew, and all he was admitting, Aijaz should have been the one in custody instead of Afzal!
Of course we must keep in mind that behind both Aijaz and Afzal’s ‘media confessions’, spaced five years apart, is the invisible hand of the STF, the dreaded counter-insurgency outfit in Kashmir. They can make anyone say anything at any time. Their methods (both punitive and remunerative) are familiar to every man, woman and child in the Kashmir Valley. At a time like this, for a responsible news channel to announce that their “investigation finds that Afzal was a Jaish militant”, based on totally unreliable testimony, is dangerous and irresponsible. (Since when did what our brothers say about us become admissible evidence? My brother, for instance, will testify that I’m God’s Gift to the Universe. I could dredge up a couple of aunts who’d say I’m a Jaish militant. For a price.) How can family feuds be dressed up as Breaking News?
The other character who is rapidly emerging from the shadowy periphery and wading on to centrestage is Dy Superintendent of Police Dravinder Singh of the STF.
He is the man who Afzal has named as the police officer who held him in illegal detention and tortured him in the STF camp at Humhama in Srinagar, only a few months before the Parliament attack. In a letter to his lawyer, Sushil Kumar, Afzal says that several of the calls made to him and Mohammed Yasin (the man killed in the attack) can be traced to Dravinder. Of course, no attempt was made to trace these calls.
Dravinder Singh was also showcased on the CNN-IBN show, on the by-now ubiquitous low-angle shots, camera shake and all. It seemed a bit unnecessary, because Dravinder Singh has been talking a lot these days. He has done recorded interviews, on the phone as well as face-to-face, saying exactly the same shocking things. Weeks before the sting operation, in a recorded interview to Parvaiz Bukhari, a freelance journalist, he said “I did interrogate and torture him (Afzal) at my camp for several days. 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 ass and gave him electric shocks. But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation. We tortured him enough for Ghazi Baba but he did not break. He looked like a ‘bhondu’ those days, what you call a ‘chootiya’ type. And I had a reputation for torture, interrogation and breaking suspects. If anybody came out of my interrogation clean, nobody would ever touch him again. He would be considered clean for good by the whole department.”
This is not an empty boast. Dravinder Singh has a formidable reputation for torture in the Kashmir Valley. On TV his boasting spiralled into policymaking. “Torture is the only deterrent for terrorism,” he said, “I do it for the nation.” He didn’t bother to explain why or how the ‘bhondu’ that he tortured and subsequently released allegedly went on to become the diabolical mastermind of the Parliament attack. Dravinder Singh then said that Afzal was a Jaish militant. If this is true, why wasn’t the evidence placed before the courts? And why on earth was Afzal released? Why wasn’t he watched? There is a definite attempt to try and dismiss this as incompetence. But given everything we know now, it would take all of Dravinder Singh’s delicate professional skills to make some of us believe that.
Meanwhile right-wing commentators have consistently taken to referring to Afzal as a Jaish-e-Mohammed militant. It’s as though instructions have been issued that this is to be the Party Line. They have absolutely no evidence to back their claim, but they know that repeating something often enough makes it the ‘truth’. As part of the campaign to portray Afzal as an ‘active’ militant, and not a surrendered militant, S.M. Sahai, Inspector General, Kashmir, J&K Police, appeared on TV to say that he had found no evidence in his records that Afzal had surrendered. It would have been odd if he had, because in 1993 Afzal surrendered not to the J&K Police, but to the BSF. But why would a TV journalist bother with that kind of detail? And why does a senior police officer need to become part of this game of smoke and mirrors? [By Arundhati Roy, via Outlook]
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Commentaries have started appearing on the recently launched Penguin book on the events surrounding December 13. A recent television program staged a debate, with panelists discussing before a studio public, various positions around the time scale of pardon decision (need for urgencies vs natural procedural delays) for people on death row. As if they are discussing some latest pension scheme!
These commentaries and shows want to show that there are just two lines of argument – one legal, the other pragmatic. Some insinuate vile motivations to the book. Such views distract from a serious engagement with the terrain that the book opens up.
The commentators in the book use available but dispersed public documents and materials to stitch together an interconnected narrative. The documents are all available in the public domain. They are court judgments, trial documents, affidavits, petitions, news reports, TV footage, films, public service ads, editorials etc. The authors bring these materials in relationship with each other and ask questions about gaps, erasures, silences and oversights. A kind of work that historians would be doing in the archives. Contemporary commentators need the historian’s crafts of reading documents and materials more and more urgently now. This is a very critical aspect of the book.
The other aspect that comes out loudly in the book is the ‘fusion’ of the State and media networks in moments of ‘security emergency’. Barrage of false reports, spectacular media events, suppression of footage, sustained campaign based on police versions, dramatisation of events based on custodial confessions etc. The custodial confessions are being telecast even now. This ‘media question’ raised in the book is compelling. To pursue it further – is it just the political economy of media organizations that produces these kinds of ‘fused moments’, or are there other explanations? (A simple answer to this is difficult. Many of the essays in the book have appeared in magazines and papers that also have large commercial interests to hold on to.)
Having said that, a few questions can be asked about the ‘forms’ of the commentary in the book.
The event around 13th December was produced as an urgency and an ‘excess’ by the State and the media. There was a surfeit of images, investigation reports, security mobilization etc. This ‘excess’ was instrumental to, and made legitimate, many of the actions that followed the event (military mobilization, POTA etc). This is well recorded in the book. But, while recording this, the texts also un-reflexively reproduce the ‘excess’. Would not this ‘counter-excess’ make for a reading that leaves the reader disoriented about and withdrawn from the larger circumstances of power of state craft and media effects, and work against persuading a critical reading of events? The State and the media look too all-powerful.
The seams of the ‘police narrative’ tore as the case moved upwards in the legal hierarchy and as some people asked difficult questions of the materials that fabricated the narrative. This unravelling happened slowly over time, itself tells another story, is important to detail. The `forms` of the writings in the book often do not make space for recognizing the multi-site and multi-act process of the tearing down of the ‘police narrative’ over four years.
The writers have done excellently to show the ‘fused’ nature of the media and the State during the course of the unfolding of the event. But, many a times one feels in the mode of arguments or emphasis, a nostalgia or a desire for a ‘sovereignty of the media’. I would think, if we give up the idea of ‘sovereignty’ around media, and face it head on, we may be able to see more cracks, interest/faction battles, exhausted producers, tired ideas, desperation of hierarchies of news control and inability to comprehend the world around. The search for the missing ‘sovereignty’, on the other hand, produces the counter image of a ‘monolith’ that is either sold-out, or too-scared, plain cynical, or just lethargic. (With such apriori dismissal, whither the analysis?)
One critical question that the book opens out, is the nature of ‘media events’. What are these ‘events’? How are they staged? When? Who stages them? How are the directions of the fallout controlled? Since we will have to live a large part of our lives under the influence of these ‘mediatised events’, it will be in our best interest to develop a critical commentary on them.
The appendix of the book by itself makes one wonder about the nature of the fast track ‘trial’ that was carried out under the full gaze of cameras and reporters, and the uncanny trails that were left behind by a highly publicized case.
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