December 13’s bodily fluids

Kashmir is a twilight zone. The Parliament attack is layered with half-lies. And pre- and post-Gujarat, Muslims are being targetted all over India. Arundhati Roy in conversation with Amit Sengupta

On December 13, 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by five (some say six) armed men. Five years later we still do not know who was behind the attack and the identity of the attackers. Civil society groups have pointed out that the police violated legal safeguards, fabricated evidence and extracted false confessions. Even the Supreme Court rejected the ‘confession’ of Afzal Guru, which was repeatedly telecast by irresponsible TV channels and presumed as stage-managed media plants by the Special Police. Earlier, a Delhi-based academic, Professor SAR Geelani, was falsely implicated and almost led to the hangman's noose, despite stunningly thin evidence against him. There was a big campaign against the death penalty, led by novelist Arundhati Roy, social scientist Rajni Kothari, among other eminent citizens. He was acquitted. Till today, as Roy asks, no one knows the identity of the five (or six?) attackers. Was it an inside job, this interview puts this question to Roy? No one knows and no one can claim anything with clear evidence, because a huge web of propaganda, lies and half-lies have been fabricated by the establishment, police, intelligence agencies and the media in India.

As of now, Afzal Guru has been sentenced to death, accused as part of the ‘conspiracy’, though no direct evidence about his involvement has been found. There is a big campaign for a retrial because he did not even have legal representation at the trial court, though the BJP is clamouring for his blood. How can you hang someone without even a legal trial?

Arundhati Roy launched in a jam-packed auditorium, on December 12 in Delhi, a new book, published by Penguin, 13 December, A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. The Reader brings together 15 incisive essays by academics, journalists and lawyers, who look at the available facts and raise serious questions about the dubious investigations and the not-so-fair trial of the Parliament attack case. The Reader includes an introduction by Roy. The writers prove that not a single piece of evidence stands up to scrutiny and emphasise the urgent need for an inquiry into the Parliament attack that led to a military stand-off with Pakistan, threat of a nuclear war in the subcontinent and hundreds of meaningless deaths, apart from crores lost in this act of war. Roy has asked 13 hard-hitting questions that will put the political establishment and the thick-skinned ‘embedded media’ in much embarrassment. But the uncanny question remains: will they still hang Afzal, despite no legal representation, and flimsy evidence?

Is the 'fundamentalist' Islamic threat a real or fake one, or has it been invented by the Indian establishment's propaganda machinery and intelligence agencies?

It's not entirely fake nor is it entirely real. Robert Pape, in his book Dying to Win, talks of how an overwhelming majority of suicide bombers are actually fighting neo-colonial military occupation. I think this is very revealing. What we see as the threat of 'Islamic terrorism' or 'Islamic fundamentalism' has a lot to do with liberation struggles in which Islam is used as an instrument of mobilisation — extremely effectively. Using religion or ethnic identity to mobilise people in liberation struggles is not new. The other aspect of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ is that when people, who see themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion begin to feel oppressed, occupied, unfree, dominated by the ‘other’, it often radicalises them and they turn inward.