SRINAGAR: The Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has said he is worried about the long-term impact that the execution of Afzal guru will have on the psyche of Kashmiri people.
“Please understand there is more than one generation of young Kashmiris that have come to see themselves as victims, that have come to see themselves as a category that will not get justice.
Whether you like it or not Afzal’s execution has reinforced the sense of injustice. And that to my mind is more disturbing and far more worrying than the short term implications on the security front,” he told NDTV.
Abdullah said people had reason to doubt the judicial process leading to the Guru’s hanging.
He said the Supreme Court had based its judgement on circumstantial rather than direct evidence.
“I have never known that circumstantial evidence to be basis of a death sentence. You are using the word circumstantial evidence not categorical evidence.”
He also found fault with the Supreme Court’s observation that it had to award the death sentence to Guru to satisfy the collective conscience of society.
“You cannot hang people because the society demands. You hang somebody because the law demands it,” he said.
Abdullah is particularly upset with the Indian government for not arranging Guru’s meeting with his family before his death sentence was carried out.
“Forget as a politician, forget as a chief minister ….as a human being I cannot reconcile myself to the fact the he was not allowed to meet his family before his execution. It was the biggest tragedy on a human level,” he added.
The chief minister found fault with the union government’s claim that Guru’s family had been informed through a registered letter.
“Given the known lack of credibility of the postal system, if we are going to inform somebody’s family by post that a member of their family is being executed, then there is something seriously wrong.”
Mr Abdullah said the state government had been preparing for the eventuality of Guru’s hanging soon after the execution of Ajmal Amir Kasab (the sole survivor among the Mumbai attackers of November 2008).
“We had no definite indications (of Guru’s hanging), but we had begun talking among ourselves the possibility of preparing for it,” Abdullah said.
Many Kashmir watchers believe that Afzal Guru’s execution will cause further alienation among the people of this region and will make peace overtures difficult.
