An object of electoral worship

By: V Sundaram
March 23, 2006
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"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God" - Thomas Jefferson.

Death in the hands of a terrorist should be viewed as an act of courageous compassion, grace and humanity. This seems to be the near unanimous view of the Kerala Legislative Assembly which has passed a resolution for the release of Abdul Nasser Madani who is facing a criminal trial in a Coimbatore court for his acts of terrorism. This shows to what despicable depths politics of pseudo-secularism can descend in India. Assembly elections in Kerala are going to take place shortly. Every person facing charges in a criminal court in Kerala should be released forthwith unconditionally so that the elections can be fought on a clean pseudo-secular slate. It is a great national disaster that there is complete unanimity among all the major parties in Kerala on this issue. Aeschylus, the great man of Greek letters, had all the members of Kerala Legislative Assembly in mind when in his classic work "Agamemnon", he wrote in 458 BC: "Death is a softer thing by far than tyranny of Ministers and legislators". By passing such a reprehensible, barbarous, inhuman, uncivilised, immoral and irresponsible resolution, the Kerala Assembly has proclaimed to the world that it stands for nationalisation of Islamic terror and minority appeasement ??terror at all costs, terror in all the States, terror in all places, terror however long and hard the road may be. They seem to be unanimous in their determination to uphold the politically- sacred cause of terror in spite of the majesty of law and the magisterial processes of justice in Courts of Law.

What are the simple facts of this case? Muslim fundamentalists had entrusted the task of assassinating L K Advani, the then Bharatiya Janata Party president, with a seven-member suicide squad, in 1998 at Coimbatore. The charges, framed before Judicial Magistrate S T Tamilselvi by the Tamilnadu Crime Branch"s Special Investigation Team, named 166 people. Out of them, 145 people are now in judicial custody, eight were killed in subsequent blasts and police operations. Of the total accused, 11 were taken into custody from Kerala, three from Andhra Pradesh, two from Karnataka and one from Calcutta. The rest were arrested from Tamilnadu. Leaders of the banned Al-Umma, S A Basha, Tajudden and Mohammed Ansari and People"s Democratic Party chairman Abdul Nasser Madani were among the prime accused. Three of the seven members carried "instantaneous-type" bombs tied to their waists. The rest were armed with "throw-type" bombs. Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 250 injured in the blasts in 1998. The 800-page charge sheet filed by the Tamilnadu police said the Al-Umma planned and executed the blasts and acts of related violence as a brutal answer to the killing of 18 Muslims in communal violence and extensive damage to property of Muslims in November-December 1997. It should not be forgotten that in turn these acts of violence were only in retaliation to traffic constable Selvaraj"s murder on 29 November.

The police chargesheet against Madani and others has clearly stated that the blasts that caused large-scale casualties among Hindus and extensive damage to their property also targeted some police officers and police stations in the city. The police held that the accused were responsible for committing offences under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Explosives Substances Act, 1908, the Indian Arms Act and Tamilnadu Property (Prevention of Damage and Loss) Act, 1992. According to the chargesheet, although the incidents in November-December 1997 had been the immediate cause, they were really the culmination of a series of communal and fundamentalist violence that had affected Coimbatore in particular and Tamilnadu in general since 1983. This case is now on trial in a criminal court in Coimbatore. The Supreme Court has also refused to entertain a writ petition for grant of bail filed by Abdul Nasser Madani.

Kerala Legislative Assembly has globally disgraced itself by passing a resolution for the release of Abdul Nasser Madani. By passing such a resolution they have shown that they do not stand for the Indian Constitution. They do not stand for the rule of law in India. They do not stand for the principle of equality before the law in India. They have contempt for the judiciary. Their only focus is on their own electoral prospects in the Kerala Assembly elections to be held shortly.

In the context of Kerala Assembly"s approach to acts of Islamic terrorism in Coimbatore in 1998, I am reminded of what Sir Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons in 1944, while referring to dictatorships in Italy and Germany: "When a nation has allowed itself to fall under a tyrannical regime, it cannot be absolved from the faults due to the guilt of that regime".

Free governments in India after independence under the influence of Congress-sponsored pseudo secularism have committed more flagrant acts of tyranny than the most perfectly despotic governments we have ever known in our national history.

V Sundaram

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