Muhammad Afzal Guru’s widow, Tabassum, sat huddled in the dark on the floor of a large room Tuesday evening, closely surrounded by grieving female relatives in the home of her husband’s family.
“I just want his body back. That’s all,” she said, blinking back tears as a relative held a candle to her face because the electricity had gone out in the town of Sopore in Baramulla district. The 34-year-old woman, who goes by one name, filed a mercy petition for her husband’s life to be spared on Feb. 3. Now she is pleading for the government to return his body to her after he was executed for his role in a deadly attack on India’s Parliament.
Afzal, 43, a member of the Jaish-e-Muhammad militant group was secretly executed and buried on Feb. 9 at Tihar Jail in New Delhi, after being convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to death in 2002 for the December 2001 terrorist attack. His family was not informed the mercy plea had been denied, and learned of his death on television.
The execution and the circumstances surrounding it have fueled smoldering unrest in Kashmir, and the calls for the government to return his body are growing louder here and around the country.
Several Indian courts ruled that he helped plan an attack aimed at causing huge casualties and disrupting the government, which killed nine, not including the attackers. Many in India view him as a cold-blooded conspirator and welcomed the government decision to carry out the sentence. But many Kashmiris believe he was framed and did not receive a fair trial.
A letter from the government informing his family of his execution was delivered two days after he was killed, a lapse that has been widely criticized. This lapse deprived his wife and son of a last meeting, family members said on Tuesday.
“I was shocked and my mind became numb” upon hearing of the execution, said Ghalib Guru, his 13-year-old son, who is named after an Urdu poet. “They should have told us a week before,” he said. The slender boy with dark flashing eyes was wearing a traditional Kashmiri pheran — a long woolen cloak worn in the winter — over jeans, along with a round prayer cap.
The family has refused an invitation to pray over his grave at Tihar Jail. “I am very angry with the Indian government. His body should be sent back so that we can bury him with proper religious rites,” Tabassum told India Ink in her first interview since her husband’s hanging. A soft spoken woman with dark eyes and a full face that was tightly wound up in a light headscarf, she looked calmer and more composed than her distraught relatives.
“If I want to visit his grave 100 or 1,000 times, I cannot go to Delhi,” she said. “I want it to be here.”
A spokesman for the Home Ministry said Monday her request has been received and is being processed.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has expressed dismay about the fact that the family was not informed of his pending execution, said Monday that the parliament should decide whether the body should be returned.
In Sopore, a two-hour drive from Srinagar, Tabassum and her son recalled their visits to Afzal in Tihar Jail once a year. “He was a loving husband and usually talked about what was happening in the house,” she said.
His son, who was a year old when his father was imprisoned, said he only remembers him behind bars.
“I am proud of him. He is like what Bhagat Singh was for Hindustan,” he said, referring to the Indian independence movement leader who was hanged by the British in 1931.
Ghalib, who is in the eighth grade, recalled that most conversations with his father were about his own studies. While his father wanted him to be an Islamic scholar, he hopes to become a cardiologist, he said.
The elder Afzal’s extended family described him as a serious-minded child devoted to school. Then in 1991, his family said, he left for Pakistan to train as a militant and became a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, the first militant group of Kashmir when he returned home.
But they said he quickly abandoned the group. “Seeing the infighting between the militant groups he got disgruntled and left it,” said Yaseen Guru, his cousin.
Yaseen, 34, said that in 1993, Afzal left for three years to study politics and history at Delhi University, and came back in 1996 to open up a shop selling surgical equipment in Kashmir. After he returned, Yaseen said that his cousin was often picked up and questioned by security forces before being arrested in 2001 for aiding in the attack on parliament.
. Yaseen remembers his cousin’s decade of incarceration in Tihar Jail as a period when he became a voracious reader, especially of books by the Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was executed in 1966.
Seclusion in prison had made Afzal more devout, and he increasingly read books on religion, philosophy and comparative religion, Yaseen said, a change that was reflected in his appearance, from clean-shaven to donning a bushy beard.
“During my visits, he would always give a list of books for me to get. He had even read the Vedas,” the cousin said, referring to sacred Hindu scriptures. “He named his son Ghalib so you can understand his love for poetry,” he added.
Family members said that they never really expected the death sentence to be carried out. Many Kashmiris see the Indian government’s decision as politically motivated to appear tough on terrorism ahead of the 2014 national elections.
Hilal Ahmed Guru, his 38-year-old brother, recalled becoming uneasy after Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman in the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, was hanged on Nov. 20, after his mercy petition was rejected on Nov. 6.
“I thought my brother is next,” he said.
Since the execution on Feb. 9, Kashmir Valley was paralyzed by a seven-day-long curfew, which involved heavy deployment of security forces on the ground to curb unrest, and blocking the Internet on cell phones and dongles. After the curfew ended on Feb. 15, much of the Valley continued to be shut due to a strike call.
The hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani, after calling for three days of strikes this week, has warned that the cycle of protests will continue in Kashmir until the body is returned.
Kashmir REVIEW 