["Nikam's revelations, aside from the private amusements afforded by a blustering pompous man, shine a light on the nature of our public discourse. How easily swayed it is by the irrelevant, and how clever men like Nikam can manipulate it. It also shows us up for who we are as a society - for all our pieties, so quick to draw blood.
"As for Kasab, condemned, his actions condemnable, he remained a pawn in the hands of silver-tongued men right until the end when he was hanged to death in November 2012. He was 25. His last meal was a tomato. The prison authorities had got him a basketful but he picked only one. It cost the public exchequer Rs 33." While Kasab is a mass murderer, not a shred of doubt about that, that does not confer on the PP any right to lie outright to the court. That's an act of serious professional misconduct, even if not of perjury. No doubt about that either.] http://www.mumbaimirror.com/mumbai/others/Dum-lagaa-ke/articleshow/46648313.cms DUM LAGAA KE... By Meenal Baghel, Mumbai Mirror | Mar 22, 2015, 12.00 AM IST According to Ujjwal Nikam revenge is a dish best served on slow simmer. THE Pakistani countryside signposted in Urdu is strangely comforting and elusive like the landscape in a dream. Brilliantly embellished trucks, glowing in their neon splendour, look like balls of fire hurtling towards you on the dark highway as directions to towns named Faislabad, Abbottabad, Sahiwal whip past. Last month, while driving back to Lahore from a trip to Harappa, one such name caught my eye: Depalpur. It was a mofussil town of no distinction except that it was the hometown of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab. Hours after he was caught on Marine Drive on November 26, 2008, Kasab was interrogated by an ACP of the Mumbai police. The videotape of that interrogation was accessed exclusively by this newspaper ('They said, 'Kill Till You Die'...Par Hum Bhi Insaan Hain Yaar', March 14, 2009) and reveals a young man who is dazed and coming to terms with the carnage he had participated in hours earlier. At one point during the interrogation he starts to weep and says that their handler, a man he called Chacha (later identified as Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi), gave them a succinct brief before they set out for Mumbai: "Woh bola maarte raho, maarte raho. Jab tak zinda ho maarte raho (weeping)... Par hum bhi insaan hain yaar." (He said kill, kill until your last breath..But we are also human beings yaar). The man in the video chronicling his meager history of acute deprivation is a far cry from the cocky assassin stalking CST platforms, waving around his AK-47 as captured in Mumbai Mirror photo editor Sebastian de Souza's iconic picture. In the days following his arrest, Kasab was to slip even further into the abyss. Sometime in early 2011, I was invited by the prison-in-charge at Arthur Road jail where Kasab was kept in solitary confinement in a cell especially constructed and secured at great cost, as chief guest at a cultural function put together by some of the undertrial prisoners. As I waited in his office for the prison boss to turn up - he was held up elsewhere - I was riveted by the large TV screen in the room that relayed live images of Kasab in his cell. The gaolers kept an eye 24/7 on their most celebrated inmate. What I saw on that screen for well over half-an-hour left me profoundly unsettled. In a tiny cage-like cell, Kasab, shorn of all his baby fat, dressed in a white kurta pyjama, circled repetitively making unintelligible animal noises. From time to time he would squat then get up to prowl again and bang his head against the bars of his cell, all the while making those unforgettable catatonic sounds. This was unquestionably a man on the brink of - if he had not already done so - losing his mind. In a piece he wrote for The New Yorker (Hellhole, March 30, 2009) on solitary confinement, Atul Gawande quotes a psychiatric study done on prisoners in long-term solitary confinement and says a third of them develop acute psychosis and show signs of cognitive dysfunction often leading to mental breakdown. Could there be a greater form of torture? This slow and relentless unraveling of the mind? Evidently, it was not enough for public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam. At a conference on counter-terrorism in Jaipur this week, he let it be known how he lied to manipulate public opinion so as to hasten Kasab's execution. Worried that public discourse on Kasab was being tinged by humanity, he "concocted" a story that the unremorseful assassin was demanding a feast fit for kings in prison, and that he only wanted to be served biryani. That story of the biryani with all its implicit connections to a Muslim identity, caught the public imagination and was followed by a great outcry about the public money being spent on Kasab's upkeep. Why couldn't they just hang the bastard? Fact is that the bulk of the monies spent on Kasab was a onetime expenditure to build that especially-secured cell and on his security. India did all that because we needed Kasab alive to provide to the world evidence of Pakistan's involvement in 26/11. Without him, we would not have known the modus operandi, the training camps, the involvement of the Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba and about the mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who is now in a Pakistani prison. The public's money was spent on this and not on feeding him long-grained dum biryani. Nikam's revelations, aside from the private amusements afforded by a blustering pompous man, shine a light on the nature of our public discourse. How easily swayed it is by the irrelevant, and how clever men like Nikam can manipulate it. It also shows us up for who we are as a society - for all our pieties, so quick to draw blood. As for Kasab, condemned, his actions condemnable, he remained a pawn in the hands of silver-tongued men right until the end when he was hanged to death in November 2012. He was 25. His last meal was a tomato. The prison authorities had got him a basketful but he picked only one. It cost the public exchequer Rs 33. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
