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ShareEver since the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in 2005, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been predictably needling the UPA government on issue of Afzal Guru. The UPA has been seen to be on the back foot because the sentence has not been carried out as Guru's mercy petition is lying with the President. Though the decision is to be formally taken by the President, it is the government that offers the official reasoning for that decision. That has become a political football.
The Congress has been denying that it is troubled by the implications of sending Afzal Guru to the gallows in terms of its impact in Jammu& Kashmir -- Afzal Guru is a Kashmiri -- and on Muslims in the country. All these are extraneous reasons and do not or should not count in taking the final decision. The attack on Parliament in December 2001 for which Guru was found guilty was a seditious act, and the courts have felt that the death sentence was the appropriate punishment as it is the 'rarest of rare cases'. The President has of course the discretion to commute it to a life term. The record shows that presidents have exercised the discretionary power to commute quite sparingly.
The legal underpinnings of the Afzal Guru case are quite clear but it is the politics that is muddying the issue. But Guru's is not the only petition before the President -- there are 28 of them. And now the Union home minister has decided to expedite their passage; his ministry will take up a case a month and clear them. By this token, Guru's case, which is not only among the most high profile but also the most contentious, will come up after two years. This, in fact puts a sort of time horizon to the various cases that have been caught up in the bureaucratic labyrinth.
There has been an objection from Afzal Guru and his lawyers that he was not given a fair hearing, but this objection does not hold because the Supreme Court considered all aspects of the case during the hearing of the review petition. Chidambaram's new plan kickstarts the process which had slowed down due to several reasons. But the impression that the delay is due to the fear of the fallout of hanging Afzal Guru has to be dispelled. This is about justice; political calculations should not play a role in this matter.
