It would be an understatement to say that the trial in the November 26 attack on Bombay took a twist in the first three days of the week. It has taken is a mindblowing contortion.
For months, the “lone gunman captured alive”, Mohammed Amir Ajmal Kasab, was an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a Rubik’s cube. He would keep everybody guessing about his real name, he said he was a minor, he laughed at the prosecution’s questions, his parents claimed him but his nation didn’t, he said he didn’t understand Hindi, he said he did not throw grenades or shoot at Victoria Terminus, etc.
It looked like the case would drag on till the cows came home. Then, suddenly, on Monday morning—in the wake of Indian foreign policy’s ham-handed capitulation at Sharm el-Sheikh and Hillary Clinton‘s visit—Kasab did a u-turn. Yes, he killed the captain of the fishing vessel which was hijacked by the jehadis. Yes, he threw grenades and opened fire at VT. Yes, he fired at the police van carrying the Anti-Terrorism Squad personnel. Yes, yes, yes.
“Hang me,” he said. “Agar kisiko aitraaz hai…agar kisi ke dil mein shak hai ki main phansi se baachne ke liye yeh kar raha hoon toh beshak phansi ki saaza dijiye.” Relatives of the victims say Kasab’s wish should be granted to “set an example”. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray has already gone to town saying he should be publicly hanged. But will Ajmal Kasab be hanged?
Will a country sitting on Afzal Guru‘s fast-track Kasab’s case? Will the UPA government, which has cited a long list of people on the death bench, make an exception in this “rarest of rare” cases? Or will Kasab’s hanging, like Afzal Guru’s, become political football, softly raising the communal atmosphere? Or will death penalty as a form of punishment have been abolished by the time Kasab’s time comes in the natural order of events?
Also read: Hang Afzal Guru, pardon Sarabjit Singh?
churumuri 
Well, the foreign visitors are our guests you see… We treat them like gods. Why do you think we still haven’t hanged Afzal guru? he was our guest too!
So hold on, it will take a long time before our speedy law enforcement bodies dictate the terms and then our democratic system takes its own time to decide on whether to send him to president for granting Ajmal’s plea or not. Why are you in such a hurry?
LikeLike
So you are upset about our country’s various capitulations and indecisiveness? Good. Now let’s read an article that shows us how our mindset needs to change in order for us to face these challenges and dangers.
Taking medicines everytime we fall sick will make us sicker. We need to excercise and build our physical and mental strength. We need a purpose for our existence, for us to get on that road.
Ready to write?
LikeLike
Our Government will keep him alive, Healthy, Comfortable at public expenditure to win over Muslim Votes! They will spend crores to safe guard him.
LikeLike
” Then, suddenly, on Monday morning—in the wake of Indian foreign policy’s ham-handed capitulation at Sharm el-Sheikh and Hillary Clinton’s visit—Kasab did a u-turn ”
I just loved this angle in the post…
LikeLike
UPA cannot be expected to hang him. It is more concerned about safeguarding its vote bank and also helping the paki’s in deep shit by offering unsolicited help and support in “THEIR” fight against terror.
LikeLike
He will live and put the Congress in power.
LikeLike
Watch the film produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Dan Reed, ‘Terror in Mumbai’.
Has lots of new footage/conversations between the pakistanis and their handlers not shown in the early days of the attack:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1e4_1246490858
LikeLike
No.If Saddam Hussain had managed to come to India, he would still be alive. Congress will pussy foot on any issue likely to affect Muslim sentiment even if it is someone like Kasab who has been photographed killing innocent civilians.
LikeLike
What do you do with a cockroach? If you do not do what is required, they multiply…..
LikeLike
We have to demonstrate our secular credentials and thereby hangs a tale
LikeLike
No, he should not be hanged. Neither Afzal Guru. We should keep these, till some terrorist attack and take some into custody or hijak an aeroplane demanding these guys to be released. Then we can release them in safe manner. And the country would be more concentrating on hijack/attack issue and more worried about new causality. LOL.
LikeLike
Churmuri, you have a gift of bringing out the self loathing in your readers. Almost each one as if reveal in self humiliation, must be the effect of dhimmitude for hundreds of years, that they lost self confidence.
Here is a self confessed terrorist, the readers are looking in Muslims appeasement…….how pathetic is their existence??
Do these guys ever outgrow their obsession???
Case of Little people with narrow focus, who don’t think beyond their pet hatred even in the face of calamity.
LikeLike
Khan, what to do? Our pet hatred and calamity are one and the same.
LikeLike
churmuri, can you keep this post separate?
i dunno if sharm-el-shaikh was such a bad thing really. what it has done is internationalize balochistan issue. with that the contrast between how the kuffar india handled kashmir and how momeen pakistan handled balochistan is surely going to be in the open. i mean balochistan is a civilization as old as the indus valley, even if islam was a later day redemption. in civilizational terms, it is more attached to india. if being a part of a muslim country is such a big deal, why be a part of persia? or even gthe erstwhile gandhara now kandhar?
for upstarts and neo-wannabes like pakistani punjabis to believe that they can brow beat them, to subsume their culture and somehow buy into the manufactured worldview of maududi(which pakistan is a child of) is preposterous.
**
dharma, local muslims of mumbai refused to bury any of these terrorists as muslims. they have the right pulse to it. there are real measurable reasons how such monsters come about and it has nothing to with either islam or poverty.
please watch the link AG provided. in case that doesnot work, it is also available at other places online. it will boil your blood. the only redeeming part is when the words, “faadullah? faadullah?? …” are uttered following sniper shots – the moment when his maker rued that he had created a monster and unmade him.
if you watch it two things comeout:
1) they were high on islamic indoctrination stuff like kafir, jihad, every other word spoken invoked the “lord’s” name in vain. They are constantly misled about jannat and reassured of their places in it. they are constantly told that this is the lord’s work and what they are doing is carrying on the war between believers and infidels and
2) since even all this not guaranteed to make a normal human being the kind of monster their masters want them to be, they were heavily drugged so that their senses were numbed and their biology & psychology was altered. (this is a known phenomena, for example it is well known that in iraq and afghanistan, many of those who become fidayeen are actually psychologically vulnerable because they are first brutalized and sodomized by their handlers. what they then do is promise infinite control, will and virgins to these people in the next life. it is known that victims of rape crave to regain control. for somebody so humiliated and desperate for control, all this sounds like heaven.
the important and just thing to do is to deny these terrorists from using islam as a pulpit. kasab is just an agent and we should deny his handlers, who the bigger monsters, these agents. kasab should be alive for as long as he lives in an indian jail and more importantly he should be excommunicated from islam. and his excommunication and travails be publicized worldwide.
islam says killing of one innocent is like killing 1000 believers. there is a little muslim kid in that documentary, whose entire family was wiped out in the massacre of VT. the ulema should sit on it figure out the right punishment for ajmal kasab and any other wannabe like him from being even born.
the real monsters are the handlers. they are power hungry like the rest of the worlds leaders. only they refuse to achieve or assert power by methods accepted by modern man. they insist on achieving power piggybacking on the vulnerabilities of sodomized kids and blasphemy. get to them.
**
point is if he hanged, then those who are alive will not know how he was “judged” and will all sorts of politically expedient examples being made of his case. If he stays alive for another 80 years, even at “taxpayer’s” expense, for 80 years there will be an example that slaughtering of innocents does not give you any rewards. After 80 years of paschataapa and realization of reality, if the lord grants him virgins, i will not begrudge him.
**
why be a part of persia? should read why NOT be a part of persia?
let balochistan be in the open. let it be known that the “pak”istan army was and continuously been involved in genocide of muslims who were a political and cultural dipole. right upto the days when marri was assasinated. and to this day when activists are regularly kidnapped.
LikeLike
Tarlesubba,
So the Muslim Jihadis have nothing to do with Islam? I don’t buy the ridiculous poverty angle too but mixing it up with Islam makes no sense.
Mumbai’s Muslims did not bury these killers? Very well. What have they and their brethren been doing with bodies of Jihadis prior and since? What have Muslims been doing with Jihadi bodies worldwide? Let them rot? Where?
There were Muslims who opposed partition too. Kaffirs committed the blunder of calling such folk “nationalists”.
Even Germans had to indoctrinate their Hitler youth and SS. That did not make theoretical Nazism any more benign.
Sure Islam says don’t kill innocents but is it necessary to hide the fact that Islam also decides who is innocent?
Jihad is now reduced to after effects of sodomization? Who sodomized Osama and millions like him?
Perisa? What Persia? Are Kaffirs now supposed to feel better about Ahmedinejad and Co.because he’s “Persian”?
LikeLike
As I re-read TS’s post, I sincerely and fervently wish he is being sarcastic.
Else there must be another more innocent explanation for such focused naivete.
LikeLike
Not while Congress is in Power!
One of the worst things about congress is it sits on any decision that some of its leaders think may loose Muslim votes.
The irony will be – If they loose any votes for hanging someone like Kasab, those vote deserve to be lost. They shouldn’t win an election on the back of votes by people who have sympathies for people like Afzal Guru or Kasab.
LikeLike
noDi saar…. only the easy part here. Balochistan(B). B is a part of a greater phenomena of which even pakistan is a symptom of. that much i agree. but before we get to the greater intangible problem, we have to get to the basic tangible part of the problem(s):
B had some legal dealings with the British in the colonial days. not with P. P was not even an entity then. in 1947 pakistanis usurped B against the will of people and rulers of B.
and so, if in 1947 if the Bs could not be independent, and the only option they had was to join some other muslim country, they could have joined either iran(which has significant baloch population in the east) or afghanistan(B has significant pakhtun population to the north). either of these is(despite afghanistan’s current problems) and has always been a more coherent and legitimate nation than pakistan ever was or ever will be.
i have no special love for iran, especially the post zoarastrian one, since the day zendavesta was rooted out of that place and right upto the days of the sikhs, persia and india has always competed for control of gandhaara. nothing worth while has ever been grown in gandhaara, but gandhaara and the hills around it, have always been strategic to holding on to the real prize – the plains to the east of sindhu – aka heartland india.
P, blinded by the rhetoric of people like maududi, assumed that islam was a glue strong enough to gloss over all sorts of other real differences and influences. but it is not. islam is a theory, and one of those revealed ones at that. it first makes caricatures of real people and then theorizes on how the caricatures should interact. but in a real world, coherant nations/civilizations are those that can mediate between real problems of real people who inhabit the lands.
The natural progression of the ideas on which Pakistan was found leads to the Taliban – the literalists. But do you think that will work in a place Pakistani Punjab? For example, banning women from public interaction in the deserts of Arabia is one thing, but if you try that in a place like Pakistani Punjab, which is mostly agrarian, who is going to do all the sowing and reaping? And how do the women do all these without exposing their faces and wrists, not to mention breasts, thighs, and waists, to other men? Without the women, the entire economy will collapse.
The point being there is a whole lot of romantic Islamism, amongst the believers. And these romantic notions need to be put to test against the daily grind of reality and against its own claims. Tippu, Akbar, Sikoh etc., each of these when put to the test of real dialectic life of the kaffirs, came to their senses. Right now, we have a whole lot of population buying into this romanticism because they have no real responsibility. Put them to responsibility, and accountability is all I am saying.
***
added later:
and so from then on, time and gain, whenever the Bs dissented the punjabi hegemony, pakistan wrongly assumed equivalence to the turn of the last millenium battles between desert nomads that informs islamic theory, and put the hapless balochs down with a heavy hand – genocide, aerial attacks, assassination, kidnapping, murder, trying to change the demographics of the land and so on.
and so, since then, irrespective of what india has actually done or not done in balochistan, any and all takers for the idea of pakistan in balochistan have all evaporated. it does not make any difference. and so it is clear the na-pak idea of pakistan has no takers in B, and it never had.
and so, it does not matter what MMS and SMK said or allowed to be said in SeS.
LikeLike
TS,
Unfortunately the ‘handlers’ seem to be the people calling the shots nowadays. Or maybe they always were and it is becoming more evident nowadays.
I would like to see the cold and calcuated conversations of the ‘handlers’ of those fighting the ‘war on terror’ a.ka. the christian wars too somewhere. Or maybe they are too clever and never leave a trail.
LikeLike
TS, the assumption being (B) will be less Islamic when they move away from (P). The problem here is neither (I) nor (A) is going to be any the less Islamic than they are today. Punjabi Muslim women may not love the burqa, but the burqa or these lovely lasses wearing or not wearing them is hardly the issue. Their attitude to Islam is. Will they reject Islam? Hardly. Why are we confusing Islam’s model with that of Sanatana Dharma? So long as Islam is, it will attract the literalists like flowers attract bees. The literalists in Islam always have the truer argument. Tipu was hardly of the same mould as Shukho and Aurangzeb followed a tentative Akbar.We do know what fate awaited Shukho himself – The highly doubtful quality of Shukho as leader who inspired his fellows notwithstanding.
So TS, aren’t you the one who’s being overly romantic about this intra-Muslim strife?
We are too unrealistically happy and satisfied to single out the ‘handlers’. As unrealistic as when we expected a Shukho to hold fort.
Btw, do you notice your confusion being used by professional ‘diversion’ experts? This is what happens outside of the blogosphere too.
LikeLike
No I donot assume that A,B or I will move out of Islamic influence nor do i think that outcome is consequential. A, B and I are already well established muslim societies. that by itself does not automatically make them problematic. For example, underneath the messianic Ahmedinijad, the iranian society has more than enough ferment to incubate people like majid majidi.
isomorphism or even equivalence between SD and I is inconsequential to the discussion here. (is dharma = mazhab, are contents within smriti = those in hadiths, do these have the same influence on its users etc. is irrelevant here.)
i am not saying islam is benign. it is a powerful theory. however, it is important to understand that it is deficient in dealing with real problems of real people. that islam is complete is primarily its own self description, and a self-image of people within it. this is then projected outside.
one of the payoffs of this projection is that of all the malignant people in this world only islamists are allowed to be overtly and entirely theological, as if they have no other experience. the other payoff is that people outside it are so worked up about the internal narrative, that they are blind to real issues within it. basically the trick is to completely the narrative. so pictures and people like nazreen are a strict no-no.
you should please realize that even sharia is not similarly followed in all the countries, professing allegiance to islam. this is damning for a system that derives all its legitimacy on its written/revealed word. in practice, real muslims have in effect declared sharia by and large inapplicable and irrelevant to their experience and have only picked those parts that are acceptable to them.
i can give other examples like this, but the bottomline is that there is a distinction to be made between the condition of real muslims and narrative of islamists.
in anycase, i urge you to get your purva paksha on the issue going, meditate on it for a while and then tell us if it is the trunk or the tail that you are holding.
LikeLike
TS, this is a good discussion. Much better than argueing with silly rationalists.
My perspective needs to be clarified further.
1. When I view Islam and its Muslims, I view a whole elephant. Perhaps it should strike me that the elephant is slightly limp or has an ulser? But it makes little difference to me. Its effect on me will not vary too greatly.
2.I’m not against the existence of Islamic societies. All I am saying is that any other culture cannot flower alongside. There are irreconcilable differences with at least SD. In so far as Iran and its Ahmedinejad is concerned, I’m sure he’s relieved that his sole “threat” is a film man. I’m not missing your point here but simply looking at the whole elephant.
3.Are you serious about your SD and Islam comparisons? Pls think about it again.
4.I would have been pleased if Mohammed and his men had merely weilded a not so benign theory a la Marx full stop. The problem for folks like us is that the theory actually is also quite practical a la Stalin and Mao. This although I’m against buying into it’s “perfect” exageration. Another thing is that Islamic practicality is opposed to our practicality and therefore the tension.
5.Speaking of narratives being completed by folks like us, isn’t that what we’ve been doing all along? We are happy in the hope that the elephant with its ulser and its limp won’t charge us. Will be too preoccupied with itself. Slowly, for us, the ulser and the limp take on an importance not known to the elephant until it looks down at us quizzically before walking over our heads.
6.So “in effect” Muslims have declared the Shar’ia inapplicable and irrelevant. I’d just like to know whose been saying this? Where? Is it TS or his readers? Is that enough? That a lion thinks that the elephant “in effect” has given up use of its trunk and tusks? Is it not important for the elephant to know that? The same goes for Islamic States. It does not matter to them that Shar’ia seems “irrelevant” to the Hindu. Try quizzing an Indian Muslim on Shar’ia in India. He will say nothing against even the penal code but will nevertheless tell you this – “India is not yet ready for Shar’ia. Its too imperfect a society”
TS, even the women flogged in Swat and Malaysia are not against Shar’ia.
No wonder a man like Napoleon saw Islam as indeed useful and much suited to his temperment.
***
TS, did some more research on Majidi. He’s the guy who backed Mousavi the “moderate” in the last poll?
Excellent example of an elephant’s limp. Will carry the beast nevertheless.
If you tell me he has little choice in the matter, I would agree completely.
LikeLike
Ah Palahalli we are back to your looong posts again :) Thought you had sworn off it.
If you are so obsessed with Islam and Muslim, you should convert to it no?
LikeLike
Houdu houdu. I’ll think about it the moment I deign to acknowledge your rationalist logic.
LikeLike
hang kasab and hang sarabjit, the hell with these terrorists
LikeLike
Ajmal Kasab :
Even capital punishment would not be enough for what you have done.
LikeLike