YAKUB MEMON’S HANGING: CAN WE BE NEUTRAL IN A MOVING TRAIN?

The score is 2-1, the cynics say.

Kasab and Afzal Guru to one side. Yakub Memon to the other side.

The courts, the pre-ordained referee.

The game of terror to what the fight against terrorism seems to have been reduced to is on.

And there’s a full house, so justice be damned.

There is no doubt about the role played by these three accused persons in the separate terror acts that rocked India. They needed to be brought to book. The problem is with the manner in which it was brought about in the case of Afzal Guru and today, Yakub Memon.

Hitler wanted Germans to turn in Jews. That was the law. It was therefore legal to snitch on a Jew hiding somewhere. You would be declared a law-abiding citizen if you ensured there was one Jew less in your locality. The Gestapo would laud you, the local court would back your act.

Is law an instrument to follow blindly? Isn’t its efficacy determined by its interpretation? Can’t say, the law-abiding Germans said after it was all over for them in 1945: We were only following orders.

The murder of Jews was a legal act, as far as they were concerned.

The Obama administration, we are told, thought it would be upholding the law against terror if it used unmanned drones to kill American citizens suspected of terrorist links.

The Indian State was also upholding the law by executing Yakub Memon on his 54^th birthday.

Some time in the future we will know if terrorism was dealt a deathly blow by Yakub’s execution, whether death penalty is a violation of human rights, whether Yakub was promised immunity and was eventually cheated out of it, whether he deserved the death warrant, whether the issue of the warrant while passing the test of the law, as the Supreme Court noted, also passed the test of justice.

Meanwhile, we will hear voices, lots of voices, all voices of protest which, if we didn’t know better, would make Yakub seem actually innocent. So, what’s the issue?

I hear a susurrus of lament that the law is about conforming to the detailed instructions of a State edict, that it has nothing to do with justice. They say that the law deals with evidence and not necessarily the truth. They say that it is a contest between evidence and fact. The winning side argues the evidence that could be proved in court. Not necessarily the facts. And when a case results in a judgment, it is said the purpose of truth has been served. But then, we are told that fact is objectively real, while truth must conform to fact. In which case, how can law be said to have served the purpose of fact or truth, when both are distinct in character with evidence, the only variable the sentiment-free law is capable of dealing with?

In the 1940s in Germany, loyal Germans saw a Jew hiding in a closet, reported to the police. The police picked up the Jew. The courts said there was clear evidence the German did see the Jew hiding in the closet and reported him and that it was as per law. The law, or the process of the law, did not give enough incentive to the German to think if reporting on a Jew – which would eventually lead to his/her murder – was right or wrong. The German was not expected to pause to explore any personal feelings for the Jew or consider, for a moment, whether the propaganda was true that the Jew who ran a clinic in the day and taught music in the evening was an evil person. The German did not have to wonder if the law was bad in taste, if it was undemocratic, if it was the product of a fascist agenda, if it was a gross miscarriage of justice.

Theoretically, these arguments arise out of a paradox that has befuddled man ever since King Charles signed the Magna Carta and set up the courts to enforce law, monitor its process and arbiter disputes arising out of it. The paradox runs something like this -- Murder requires death. It is part of the fundamental reciprocity that is the law. If there is no death, there is no murder, therefore no law. You need to prove there is a death and that the death was caused by murder. Only then, mind you, only then, law comes into existence. Else, not. 

You murder someone, you bring law into existence. You spread a terror act, you allow law to breathe. You commit a rape, arson, indulge in mayhem, whatever, you have given law a form and a shape and an existence.

But you do not commit any of these acts, but merely think about them, agitate over them in your mind, you do not attract the law and you are still innocent. Never mind if such thinking determines your entire approach to your life and your attitude to the world or drives your ideological positions – that’s what human nature is all about and history is full of them. You are still innocent in the eyes of the law.

By this logic, we are all innocent until we commit any act which attracts the law. Whether you are a voyeur who is thinking of having forced sex with a lady sitting opposite you in the metro; whether the medical student who would love to buy the leaked question paper; whether the upper caste government clerk who is angered by the promotion of a lower caste colleague thanks to the reservation policy; whether the abused wife who would like to murder her husband; whether the disillusioned youth who keeps thinking of blowing up a locality or even a town; whether a raped woman who would want to get hold of a weapon and kill all males; whether a bureaucrat in a defence organization who had heard of making money bartering secrets.

You can’t be neutral on a moving train. I’m reminded of the title of the memoirs of the flamboyant American anti-war activist, Howard Zinn. The words ring true. We are on a moving train. We are humans and like humans we all have bad thoughts, some of us commit bad acts. Yet, as humans, as citizens of this government, as members of our community, as participants in our government, in fast as a nation, we are all moving in the same direction. Often, the State would want us also to be obedient in moving in the same direction. If obedience is a strong word, it would want us to be at least neutral, by not taking a stand either way. Even then, its purpose is achieved. The question is, are we content remaining neutral?

All this verbosity can be summed up in a sentence actually: Law is everything but human.  Change it if it is wrong. Change the law-makers if they are wrong. The noise over Yakub Memon, howsoever justified, makes no difference if it remains just that – a noise.

As Louis Brandeis, the first Jew appointed as a justice of the US Supreme Court and untiring social justice activist, remarked: If we desire respect for the law we must first make it respectable. 

I AM AN ANGRY FATHER OF A DAUGHTER

We have a daughter. She has just turned 13. Is my love and affection for my daughter to be made public? Should I take a #selfiewithdaughter and post it on Face Book or Twitter?

If I did so, what would that achieve? Other than getting lots of ‘’likes’’ from friends who in any case know about us dad and daughter?

Why am I asking these questions more than a week after the Prime Minister proposed rendering the public domain pink with people’s love for their daughters?

Because I was thinking all this while. I feel it is a cheap trick.

The head of my government is asking me, a citizen, to breach my daughter’s right to privacy.

My affection for my daughter is a private moment between us. A father is expected to love his children. It is natural. It is expected. Where it is not, a change in attitude will not be effected by a non-daughter-loving father seeing my selfie with my daughter and beginning to love his own daughter.

Secondly, my daughter is a minor. Why should her image be in the public domain? Is not there a rule in the social media not to register under-age children for the specific reason that it breaches their privacy?

Third, even if I were inclined to post a selfie with my daughter on the social media, why should I impose that inclination on my daughter? She has a choice, whatever her age. In this instant, my daughter laughed off the Prime Minister’s initiative.

Fourthly, once the selfie is in the public domain it is subject to mis-use, intentional or otherwise. Look what happened with Congress leader Digvijay Singh. Some idiotic media house picked up a selfie of his and posted it on its site. Unfortunately, it was a selfie of Singh and his current partner. How embarrassing it must have been for him. What about his daughters? He has four daughters. Can that idiotic media house undo the damage?

Obviously, the head of my government did not think this through. A #selfiewithdaughter is not like doing yoga on a mat in the centre of Lutyen’s Delhi (where, incidentally, the Prime Minister refused selfies with school children!).

We are of a country which is run by slogans. Because sloganeering does not take much effort. You keep repeating a phrase on and on, there are enough of us idiots who will take it up and make it look like a national cause in no time.

#Selfiewithdaughter is a slogan. The only thing it achieves is making a private moment public. Does it serve the purpose of saving the girl child from all kinds of abuse? A big no. During the past one week when most of us were unthinkingly – may be even with good intentions – popularizing this slogan, scores of cases of rape of young girls, molestation of older girls in schools and institutions, forced marriages of under-age girls, were reported. Probably an equal number of other evil acts went unreported.

What should the Prime Minister have done instead of this slogan? He did not ask me. So, I am not going to tell him. I am sure he is aware of the problems of girls and women in this country and yet, perhaps owing to a weak emotion, believes that the slogan will shame all of us into not harming our daughters. Dream world. Let me give him an illustration.

There are millions of men in India – many of them fathers of daughters and brothers of sisters – who cannot tolerate sharing any status with women or women who think for themselves.

There is this lady, Shruti Seth. An Indian. She too has an infant daughter. Reacting to the slogan, she wrote in the social media.

To quote the concluding portion of her write-up which is addressed to the Prime Minister: “If you truly wish to empower women I urge you to condemn this kind of hatred being spread in your name.  Regretfully, I deleted my initial tweet because of the backlash. But I stand by what I said and I'll reiterate it here: ‘Selfies don't bring about change, reform does. So please try and be bigger than a photograph. Come on!’ And as for my initial reservation about the initiative being nothing more than eyewash, I am deeply saddened to see that, in the end, I was proved right.”

I am unable to quote the initial part of her write-up. Because, I am ashamed to do so. Because, in that portion she talks of her hurt, thanks to the hurt and abuse hurled at her on the social media by rascally and cowardly Indian males who could not digest the fact that Seth could be an independent woman who also thought independently and did not automatlcally and blindly follow anyone or anything. (http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1smtdi6)

Do read her letter in full (use the link). What she is saying is that the average Indian male is dense, his skull is more dense, his attitudes are most dense. No selfie can penetrate them to his core which is black and corrupted.

I ask the Prime Minister: Can you please reply to Shruti Seth? My daughter is eager to know what you have to say.

Post Script: Cowardly and abusive males will be wasting their time criticizing me because for me you simply don’t merit acknowledgement.