The martyrdom anniversary of Muhammad Afzal Guru is celebrated on the 9th of February every year to pay homage to a hero of IIOJK’s indigenous freedom struggle who laid his life for the cause of Kashmiri people.
India secretly hanged him and buried inside the Tihar jail complex on 9 February 2013 where he had been in solitary confinement for 12 years. His mar-tyrdom resulted into protests in Kashmir and wide-spread condemnations from international media, various political and human rights organisations.
Afzal Guru was convicted in 2001 Parliament attack case and awarded death sentence. Afzal had always denied plotting the attack, which left 14 dead, including five militants.
In the past eight years, during his martyrdom anniversary, a complete shutdown was observed in the IIOJK and protest demonstrations were held to demand the return of mortal remains of Afzal Guru.
Even, the Sikh organization, Dal Khalsa Presi-dent H S Dhami, while paying tributes to Muham-mad Afzal Guru on the eve of his second martyrdom anniversary, in a statement in Amritsar criticized India for failing to hand over his mortal remains to his wife.
Since 1947, in order to maintain its illegal con-trol, India has continued its repressive regime in the IIOJK through various machinations.
Kashmir is among the most heavily militarized areas on the planet, with upwards of 700,000 to 900,000 Indian soldiers, paramilitary forces, and private security forces present.
Various forms of state terrorism have been part of a deliberate campaign by the Indian army and paramilitary forces against Muslim Kashmiris, es-pecially since 1989. It has been manifested in brutal tactics like crackdowns, curfews, illegal detentions, massacre, targeted killings, sieges, burning the houses, torture, disappearances, rape, breaking the legs, molestation of Muslim women and killing of persons through fake encounter.
Rape had been a primary weapon of the Indian army. Indian army has weaponized rape against Kashmiris. Estimates suggested that 8,000 to 11,500 Kashmiri women had been raped by Indian forces.
Since 1990 Indian occupational forces have killed more than 100000 innocent Kashmiris, more than 150000 civilians have been arrested, the unfor-tunate innocent people of IIOJK have faced; 8500 custodial killings, 12000 disappearances, 110000 structures destroyed, hundreds of thousands injured with at least 7000 with pellet injuries at the hands of Indian occupational forces.
Substantial evidence of atrocities was contained in the first report ever issued by the United Nations on human rights in Kashmir. The report was re-leased on 14 June 2018 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The second report issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, issued on 8 July 2019 under UN human rights head Michelle Bachelet also carried signifi-cant evidence of crimes. The report is titled, “Up-date on the Situation of Human Rights in Indian-Administered Kashmir and Pakistan-Administered Kashmir from May 2018 to April 2019. Annual Human Rights Review – Indian Illegally occupied Kashmir, 2021
This annual report prepared by Legal Forum for Kashmir (LFK) on the situation of human rights in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK) covers the period from January to December 2021.
2021 again saw bloodshed of Kashmiris and si-lencing of Kashmir’s civil society, arbitrarily arrest-ing of human rights defenders, journalists, and members of the civil society.
257 killings, 195 CASOs, 130 residential houses bombed, 80 military operations, 163 freedom fight-ers killed, 48 Indian occupying forces killed in re-taliation, and 46 civilians murdered by the occupy-ing forces. And Indian right-wing regime arrests members of the Kashmiri Civil Society, journalists, and activists.
Besides Human Rights Watch, in its various re-ports, Amnesty International has also pointed out grave human rights violations in the Indian con-trolled Kashmir, indicating, “The Muslim majority population in the Kashmir Valley suffers from the repressive tactics of the security forces.
It is mentionable that in 2008, a rights group re-ported unmarked graves in 55 villages across the northern regions of the Indian-held Kashmir. Then researchers and other groups reported finding thou-sands of mass graves without markers.
In this respect, in August, 2011, Indian Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission offi-cially acknowledged in its report that innocent civil-ians killed in the two-decade conflict have been buried in unmarked graves.
Notably, foreign sources and human rights or-ganisations have revealed that unnamed graves in-clude those innocent persons, killed by the Indian military and paramilitary troops in the fake encoun-ters including those who were tortured to death by the Indian secret agency RAW.
The Hanging of Afzal Guru is a Stain on India’s Democracy In fact the police charge sheet did not accuse Afzal of the crime he was ultimately hanged for.
The Indian Supreme Court judgment acknowl-edged the evidence was circumstantial: “As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and could be no evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy.”
But then, shockingly, it went on to say: “The in-cident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation, and the collective con-science of society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”
The trial in the fast-track court began in May 2002. This was the time when the state of Gujarat had witnessed the massacre of Muslims by Hindu goon squads, helped along by the police and the state government machinery.
The entire Indian state was charged with com-munal hatred. And in the (so called) parliament attack case the law was taking its own course under the mounting pressure of RSS pressure groups.
At the most crucial stage of a criminal case, when evidence is presented, when witnesses are cross-examined, when the foundations of the argu-ment are laid in the high court and Supreme Court you can only argue points of law, you cannot intro-duce new evidence Afzal Guru, locked in a high-security solitary cell, had no lawyer.
The court-appointed junior lawyer did not visit his client even once in jail, he did not summon any witnesses in Guru’s defence, and he did not cross-examine the prosecution witnesses. The judge ex-pressed his inability to do anything about the situa-tion.
Even so, from the word go the case fell apart. A few examples out of many: The two most incrimi-nating pieces of evidence against Guru were a cell-phone and a laptop confiscated at the time of arrest. They were not sealed, as evidence is required to be.
During the trial it emerged that the hard disk of the laptop had been accessed after the arrest. It only contained the fake home ministry passes and the fake identity cards that the “terrorists” used to ac-cess parliament and a Zee TV video clip of parlia-ment house.
So according to the police, Guru had deleted all the information except the most incriminating bits. The police witness said he sold the crucial sim card that connected all the accused in the case to one another to Guru on 4 December 2001. But the prosecution’s own call records showed the sim was actually operational from 6 November 2001.
The most likely course anyone who was really interested in solving the mystery of the parliament attack would have followed the dense trail of evi-dence on offer. No one did, thereby ensuring the real authors of the conspiracy will remain unidenti-fied and uninvestigated.
The real story and the tragedy of what happened to Guru is too immense to be contained in a court-room. The real story would lead us to the Kashmir valley, that potential nuclear flashpoint, and the most densely militarised zone in the world, where a million Indian soldiers (one to every three civilians) and a maze of army camps and torture chambers that would put Abu Ghraib in the shade are bringing secularism and democracy to the Kashmiri people.
What sets Guru’s killing apart is that, unlike those tens of thousands who died in prison cells, his life and death were played out in the blinding light of day in which all the institutions of Indian democ-racy played their part in putting him to death.
Indian forces have employed various draconian laws like the Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act, and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act and Public Safety Act in killing the Kashmiri people, and for the arbitrarily arrest of any individual for an indefinite period.
