I am one of those who feel no joy, and only deep pain, whenever anyone is awarded the death sentence. The death of every human being diminishes us all. And few things can be more horrific to think of than the prospect of an innocent person’s life being extinguished by a flawed judicial verdict. On December 14, Afzal has filed a curative petition, a noble judicial provision that enables a convicted person to seek a final review of the court’s verdict. If there is any miscarriage of justice in his case, his life must be spared. Nevertheless, whatever the Supreme Court decides should be the final word in the matter.

However, for some extremists in the “Save Afzal” campaign, it won’t be the final word because their very first word in the December 13 debate is “conspiracy”! Conspiracy, not by the anti-India jehadi terrorists backed by, or based in, Pakistan, but by the Indian state, more specifically by the government of the day, headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

If this sounds unbelievable, go to the nearest book store and buy Dec 13, A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, with an introduction by writer-activist Arundhati Roy. Published by Penguin, no less, the book is a compilation of 15 articles by well-known lawyers, journalists and human rights campaigners, none of whom accepts that what the entire nation watched on December 13 was a terrorist attack.

Instead, the book insinuates that the attack was actually stage-managed by the Indian security forces with backing from the political leadership, who used the incident as a pretext to carry out a “massive military mobilization on the Indo-Pakistan border” and thus “pushed the subcontinent to the brink of nuclear war”. After raising “13 Disturbing Questions” (which are now circulating all over the world on the Internet), Roy holds the NDA government guilty of “Complicity, Collusion and Involvement”. There is no need, she adds, “for us to feign shock, or shrink from thinking these thoughts and saying them aloud. Governments and their Intelligence Agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies like this to further their own ends.”

... contd.