In history, farce and tragedy often come in pairs...

In some ways, the Ajmal Kasab (the lone gunman captured alive in the Mumbai terror attack) saga resembles Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For want of something better to do, the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon engage in a duel of abuses. Vermin, cretin, moron, they call each other. The winner yells the ultimate insult. “You are a critic,” he screams at the top of his voice as the lights fade.

Long before the court could give its verdict the media pronounced Kasab guilty. But now, case plays itself out, Kasab has done what most people faced with a death sentence do. He has disowned his earlier statement implicating himself. So now he is being called a liar. It’s almost as though being a liar is somehow worse than being a terrorist. What would they ideally want him to do short of confessing to his role in the terror plot? Do they want the man they so revile to act nobly and voluntarily stick his head in the noose?

It is axiomatic that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy then as a farce. Yet sometimes there is such a fine difference between history’s two consorts that it is hard to tell them apart.Take the two events as examples that came towards the fag end of this year. One was the indictment by an inquiry commission of a former prime minister and self-proclaimed charioteer of Indian nationalism. He, along with 68 others was found culpable of razing the Babri Masjid in 1992. In other words they had organised the mobs to tear the Indian constitution to shreds. Much of the media treated it as a minor aberration, a speck of dust merely, and no more, on democracy’s fair name. It was further claimed that Messrs L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee were unjustly dragged in it. It didn’t matter that TV coverage of that event proved otherwise.

Then came the last stages of the Mumbai terror trial in which Kasab, the main accused in captivity, denied any role he had previously admitted to having played in inflicting the gruesome attack. Now he claims that he had travelled from his native Pakistan to act in movies in Mumbai! That’s how he was picked up by police a day before the November 26 attack. He claims he was framed.Perhaps he is lying.

Who doesn’t tell lies to win a court case, particularly when the alternative is a likely death sentence? The great statesmen involved in the demolition of the Babri Masjid have lied even without the fear of the noose.So between the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, which was tragedy and which was farce? The sad truth, however, is that while Ayodhya and Mumbai cannot and should not be juxtaposed or compared, there is a common link. Both have led to rightwing consolidation of the polity, and in the final analysis it is this that has serious implications for India’s democracy.

India’s middle classes want Kasab hanged, they want to lynch him in the tradition of the Ox-Bow Incident. They like to pick and choose their injustices. To them the Liberhan Commission’s indictment of rightwing politicians is passé and boring.The hype around the attacks on Mumbai (the 26/11 incident, as it has come to be called) has similarities with the way the middle classes and the media had approached the attack on parliament on December 13, 2001. On that occasion Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha. He had cast doubts over the official theory about the attack.We came close to a nuclear war with Pakistan over that incident.

Suppose we look at the hysteria generated by the media in that, which had declared S.A.R. Geelani guilty even before the trial court had sentenced him to death. Considering that the High Court exonerated him of any role in the parliament attack episode, imagine the absurdity, the farce and the tragedy of putting at risk the lives of millions over a false lead.Mercifully then as after the Mumbai attacks a grave possibility of war did not erupt into something more sinister than the attacks had proved to be.

As last week’s Economic and Political Weekly observed, “India could not replicate the US response to 9/11 with its own mini-war of terror by attacking Pakistan, which at one time seemed very imminent but may have been thwarted by the imperative of the US-led war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a tacit binary was established which effectively blocked legitimate questions around the incident.”

Commenting on last month’s official commemoration of the Mumbai attack, the EPW observed: “The jingoistic hype duly helped by the media reached its crescendo on its first anniversary. While one would expect the nation to come to its senses after the heat of the incident had come down and to ponder over the real questions the incident raised, it was not to be.”

The journal put out an interesting array of statistics. India has faced more than 4,100 terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2004, accounting for about 12,540 fatalities, according to the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland and the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).That accounts for an average of almost 360 fatalities per year.

The earlier attack in Mumbai on 11 July 2006 in the form of serial blasts at seven places in local trains, the lifeline of the city, was executed within a short time of 11 minutes, and the death toll was far higher at 200 and with 714 people being wounded.

In terms of potential, if one may say so, the 2001 attack on the Parliament in New Delhi, symbolising our national sovereignty, in which five terrorists, six policemen and one civilian were killed was far more perilous than the 26/11 attack.

“Why then has the 26/11 episode been singled out as ‘the attack on India’ and projected as India’s 9/11?,” asks the EPW article.The only distinguishing factor in the 26/11 attack is that it is the first time that the elite establishments symbolised by the Taj and Trident hotels were targeted. In terms of casualties, about 61 persons were killed in these two hotels, and of 102 of the rest, 58 ordinary citizens were shot randomly at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) station. In the list of victims there were 37 foreigners.

Among those killed were senior police officials of the Indian Police Service such as Anti-Terrorist Squad chief Hemant Karkare. Although, the CST attack lasted for over 30 minutes just a stone’s throw away from the police posse at the Azad Maidan Police Station the entire resistance effort was directed towards the Taj, Trident and of course Nariman House. Our elitist media also largely ignored the CST tragedy and focused its attention during and after the attack around these places.

At his first press conference after his release, Zakir Hussain College lecturer S.A.R. Geelani referred to the role of the media in his case. It had lent itself to carrying propaganda put out by the police, he said. To the extent that journalists take briefings from the police, often unquestioningly, he is right.

Several of India’s leading national newspapers and TV channels have been exposed as having widely and repeatedly published and telecast falsehoods about the accused in the Parliament attack. The coverage brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war.

A few years later, when the trial was completed, the Supreme Court acquitted two of the four accused. A third was convicted on a separate set of charges altogether. Mohammad Afzal continues to be on death row even though the Supreme Court held that it had found no evidence to prove that he was a member of a terrorist group. However the judgement went on to say that “in order to satisfy the collective conscience of society” it was sentencing him to death. In modern society, it is the mass media that fashions the collective conscience of society. It is the mass media that is deciding which injustices society should tolerate and which it should not.

Whether Ajmal Kasab is found guilty, or whether he lives or dies will not affect the problem of terrorism that India faces. Yet that hardly seems to matter to those who revel in one sordid tragedy after another, seeking a sound bite here or a quotable quote there. Estragon and Vladimir had found their ultimate insult.

The Indian media and Ajmal Kasab are still searching for theirs...

ARTICLE BY JAVED NAQVI.