Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Anna Akhmatova, Tihar Jail
Poetry in the city.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
The Delhi Walla arranged to meet poet Anna Akhmatova outside the highly-secured boundary wall of Tihar Jail in West Delhi. In her late 20s, Ms Akhmatova is wearing a white shawl. A woman of somewhat severe features, she is looking immensely sad. Gesturing towards the prison wall, she says, “They hanged him today.”
Ms Akhmatova is referring to Mohammed Afzal, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament Attack. This morning he was secretly executed by our government. Mr Afzal was sentenced to death by a lower court in Delhi in 2002. Later, the Supreme Court verdict that upheld the sentence did confess of finding “no direct evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy”, but it nevertheless stated, “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”
Speaking softly, Ms Akhmatova says, “He was from Kashmir, a land as cold and tragic as my Leningrad. But they buried him inside the prison itself. Do you know his son is named after a Delhi poet?”
“Yes, Ghalib,” I say. “And they did not even inform his wife in Kashmir.”
“That’s not the point,” the poet says.
Walking slowly, Ms Akhmatova shares one of her poems with us.
The Sentence
And the stone word fell
On my still-living breast.
Never mind, I was ready.
I will manage somehow.
Today I have much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
Unless… Summer’s ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I’ve foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.
As part of the series Delhi’s Bandaged Moments, The Delhi Walla is searching for poets in the city. If you are one, please contact me at mayankaustensoofi@gmail.com.
Poet Anna Akhmatova
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To,
The Hon’ble President of India
Respected Sir,
We write to you in deep anguish, despair but in outrage as well. Afzal Guru was hanged on Saturday (9th February 2013) in secrecy. We have been told— after the hanging— that you rejected the mercy petition filed by Guru’s wife Tabassum, on 3rd February. We believe that you made a grave error in rejecting the mercy petition. If you had perused the trial records and the lengthy documentation put together over the years by lawyers and civil rights activists, or even the Supreme Court judgement which sentenced Afzal to death, you would have known, that his guilt was never established beyond reasonable doubt. The fact that the Court appointed as amicus curiae (friend of the court) a lawyer in whom Afzal had expressed no faith; the fact that he went legally unrepresented from the time of his arrest till his so-called confession, the fact that the court asked him to either accept the lawyer appointed by the Court or cross examine the witness himself should surely have concerned you while considering his mercy petition.
His personal history of being a surrendered militant, of harassment and torture at the hands of STF, as well as his statement in open court that he had indeed helped Mohammad, one of the attackers on the Parliament, find a house and obtain a car, the same car used in the attack, but at the orders of his STF handlers, should have spurred a full-scale investigation into the allegations. The citizens of this country do not know if one was ordered at all.
It is also a fact that the much-hyped investigation of the Parliament attack case and its prosecution resulted in two full acquittals and conviction of another for concealing knowledge of the crime. It was almost as if there was a need to at least ensure one death sentence so that the faith of the public / society in the efficacy of the prosecution and the judiciary and the Legislature which represented the ‘State” would not be shaken. Surely this was not a case where even the government of the day was convinced of the guilt of Afzal; but treated it like a case that was far too important for all accused to be acquitted. We must remind you sir that the Supreme Court threw out the confessions of both Afzal and Shaukat which obviously indicated that the investigation had been far from fair.
As in life, Afzal Guru was denied his legal rights in his death. Sir, every convict whose mercy petition has been rejected by the President, is entitled yet to a last resort. The convict has the constitutional right to file a judicial review or a delay petition, in the High Court and the Supreme Court, to seek commutation of the death sentence. There exists veritable case law to support a condemned convict’s right to appeal on grounds that pendency of death penalty for years causes suffering and torturous anxiety. We only cite the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, which in 1988 held that “Undue long delay in execution of the sentence of death will entitle the condemned person to approach this Court under Article 32”.
Under the law, Afzal Guru may have lived still despite your rejection of the mercy petition, had he, his family and lawyers been informed of the rejection of the mercy petition. But perhaps fearing precisely this, the state whose head you are, Sir, chose to execute him in secrecy. The killing was not a fait accompli— a natural culmination of the course of law, as it is being made out to be by the government and the media. In fact, Afzal Guru was cynically, callously and calculatedly denied access to judicial remedy that was due to him. His family was not informed, not only because our state has become unrecognizably cruel—which it has, but also because it did not want Afzal Guru to exercise his legal rights and possibly avert the execution. Informing the wife that her mercy petition had been rejected through speed post is a joke. What the state has done is not simply kill a convict. It has committed a fraud on the people by invalidating an entire body of jurisprudence and a category of rights inhering in our Constitution.
And finally, the Indian state must explain why it displayed such urgency in executing Afzal before those others whose mercy petitions your office has earlier rejected.
get lost … terrorists deserve to die … those who commit crime against humanity forego the entitlement to the human rights. What about the human rights of the security forces, innocent gardner and even a female these terrorists killed. And what for, they fucking want a separate nation for muslims, for wherever muslims are in majority they are incompatible with democracy, human rights, and equality for non-muslims. Cut out your shit.
what a joke. Go and take your petition to Pakistan.
Since we don’t have ample free time as Mr. Mukherjee, please just give us the bullet points. Bullet points, ha-ha. Geddit?