Other war on Afzal: Human rights vs Kashmiri cause

Pancholi met Afzal in Tihar on Friday and emerged with a hand-written letter by Afzal,authorising him to follow his appeal for shifting him to Srinagar Prison.

Simultaneously,Geelani has put out another hand-written letter by Afzal,written on the same date,saying that Pancholi is not his advocate “as he had never represented him in court.”

The roots of the dispute are deeper and complex. A campaign to free Geelani,when this DU teacher was also an accused,was spearheaded by those he is now opposing. Nandita Haksar and Pancholi had also led the campaign to meet the then-President and ask for clemency for Afzal.

That was four years ago and the seeds of the dispute were sown,as Geelani insists,“Afzal did not approve of certain passages in the clemency petition. And that was the problem. I have nothing against Nandita Haksar,she has been very good to me.”

Sources say the debate is in the politics of how the Afzal matter is to be handled. Pancholi (who finally took Afzal’s wife Tabassum to the President) and Haksar say it is from a human rights perspective that the Afzal matter needs to be approached,keeping it free of using him as a symbol of the larger Kashmir cause.

While Geelani and his recently set up NGO,Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP),do not say so openly,they are keen to project Afzal as a martyr in the Kashmir cause,rather than have him appear as a surrendered militant,one who has confessed to the Indian state and one who has petitioned for clemency. Says Geelani,“We have this letter from Afzal now,he wants these people to stay away.”

Haksar,who was in the forefront of the campaign to free Geelani and then bat for him when he was freed and shot at outside her house,is now angry and saddened by the course of events. She says Pancholi’s credentials cannot be doubted: “He was not only a founding member of the PUCL,but also the secretary of Citizens for Democracy,when Jayprakash Narayan was its President. He was the first to visit Geelani in jail when he was arrested. He took up Afzal’s case pro-bono once the death penalty was awarded. Afzal is suffering because of the pressure being brought on him in jail now.”

Interestingly,it was under the name of the Society for Protection of Detainees and Prisoners’ Rights (SPDPR) set up in 2004,that the campaign to free Geelani was conducted. But soon afterward,says a founding member of SPDPR,Janaki Srinivasan,now based in Chandigarh,“it stopped functioning,things dried up. We then heard that another group had been set up”. The new body,CRPP,is now anxious to distance Pancholi from the Afzal case. Asserts Geelani,“It has 13 chapters,and people from Andhra,Kerala,Maharashtra and Kashmir,we have people from everywhere. It’s a larger platform.”

On Friday,human rights activists including Rajni Kothari and Surendra Mohan had come out in support of Pancholi,castigating Geelani for “creating a controversy on the matter and asking him to apologise to Pancholi.”