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Maqbool and Guru

Kashmir Times. Dated: 2/10/2016 10:33:09 AM

Key to future lies in dispassionately engaging with how these two executions shaped the Kashmir discourse

That the entire Kashmir Valley needs to be turned into a vast prison from February 9 and February 11 to prevent Kashmiris from observing the martyrdom anniversaries of two men, Afzal Guru and Maqbool Butt, who have gone down in the history of Kashmir's conflict as heroes should serve as an eye-opener to the flawed policies being pursued by the Indian government to tame an entire population. A culture of curbs and restrictions does not bring about a change of heart. The stories of Maqbool Butt and Afzal Guru are very different from each other but hanged as they were in the Tihar jail three decades apart and buried in the prison premises, in the collective memory of Kashmir they have been united, turned into heroes and martyrs by their executions. Both the deaths are also seen as travesty of justice as many believe that both of them did not get a chance of fair trials and were unfairly projected as terrorists. For Kashmiris the words "to satisfy the national conscious" despite lack of evidence in Guru's case will continue to resonate and provide the ammunition to deepening sense of alienation and anger over what they will construe as injustice. This sense of injustice cannot be repaired and healed by marking the calendar days of the executions with arrests, imposition of curfews, curbs and restrictions on movement of people and disallowing protests. What adds a sense of humiliation to the sense of injury is the manner in which both Butt and Guru were hanged without announcing the executions, hanging them before their schedule and then denying the family members a last encounter or the rights to their last remains. Even if the Indian state may defend the executions as legally correct, the manner in which they were done and the manner in which the bodies were buried inside the Tihar jail premises are acts that can be justified as per norms and democratic ethics.
It is a shame that three years after his father was hanged, Afzal Guru's son, is seeking for his father's humble personal belongings, which are still in the jail's custody. Worse still, the executions were followed by adopting the most brazen and ruthless methods to curb an entire population that felt wronged and hurt by these executions. This was primarily so in the case of Afzal Guru, whose execution came at a time when the anger in the Valley, particularly among the youth, was on the boil. The execution betrayed the arrogance of a state that had failed to learn any lessons from history of repressive tactics, including the execution of Maqbool Butt in 1984, which played a great motivational role in pushing the youth in the late eighties towards the gun.
More than three decades after Butt, it may serve the Indian state to introspect and assess the Kashmir dispute in a new light, to understand it through the pages of history and learn why a sentiment of independence that was so feeble in the eighties was fanned by the late eighties. An unpartisan engagement with history would reveal that the answer did not simply lie at the doorstep of the neighbouring country which provided the moral and financial aid to the youth and trained them to militarily take on the Indian state. Pakistan may indeed was stoking up trouble for India but was not operating in vacuum; it was building up its armour on the opportunities and space created by India through acute alienation of the masses. Maqbool Butt's hanging is a grim, sordid incident, among many others, that fuelled that sense of alienation and three decades later in 2013, Afzal Guru's execution helped in spiraling the anger that began to grow due to unease and the brutal killings of 2010. "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards," wrote Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. In these words lies the key for the future. Indian state must look at how events like these two executions shaped the Kashmir discourse to make an intervention that is different from the present reality of converting the entire Valley into a prison in a dangerous and foolish bid to wipe off the collective and wounded memory of its population.