I fought my tears; after months of suspicion, I was being welcomed.

  8 The Trial

  The Indian government believed that a Pakistan-based jihadi group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure), which drew its cadre mostly from the rural poor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, which claimed to fight to end Indian rule in Kashmir, had attacked the Indian parliament. Hardliners inside and outside the Hindu right’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or the Indian People’s Party (BJP), claimed that December 13 was India’s 9/11. They demanded that Indian soldiers cross the Line of Control and attack the terrorist camps in the part of Kashmir held by Pakistan. Leading the hardliners was the Indian home minister, L. K. Advani, who had engineered the rise to power of the BJP in the 1990s.

  Within hours of the attack, the Delhi police claimed to have recovered from the body of Mohammed—an allegedly Pakistani terrorist killed in the parliament complex—a mobile phone, three SIM cards, and some telephone numbers. Two days later, they arrested three Kashmiri men and a pregnant housewife and charged them with conspiring in the attack on the parliament. The police claimed that the telephone numbers had led them to the Kashmiris. The first to be arrested on December 15 was a thirty-two-year-old Delhi University Arabic lecturer, Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani. The police said they had picked him up outside his rented house in North Delhi.

  The news of his arrest shocked me. I had met Geelani one evening in autumn 1999 at Delhi University. A mutual acquaintance from Kashmir had introduced us. A short, handsome man, Geelani was warm and bookish. He told me that he had left Kashmir before the insurgency. He had studied in other parts of India before coming to the university in the early 1990s. He seemed happy to see me at the university and lamented the collapse of the educational system in Kashmir. “Delhi will teach you a lot and open your horizons,” he said. “Here, the bigger world opens to you. Work hard.” Geelani had talked a lot about his teaching job at a Delhi University college. He spoke with the pride of a small-town boy who had worked his way up to the faculty of a prestigious university. We walked to the hostel cafeteria for tea. His easygoing manner contrasted with the nervousness that I had seen in many other young Kashmiris in Delhi. When we talked about Kashmir, he showed none of the raw passion or emotion that most Kashmiris did. He seemed to have accepted Delhi as his world. I saw Geelani occasionally after that, but we did not progress beyond the usual pleasantries.

  In Srinagar, the police arrested two other Kashmiri men: Mohammed Afzal, who had joined a Kashmiri militant group in the early 1990s, then laid down his arms and apparently started a business; and Shaukat Guru, his businessman cousin. They lived in Delhi but had left for the valley on the day of the attack. The police also arrested Afshan Guru, Shaukat’s wife. All three arrested men were from Baramulla, a border district in North Kashmir; they lived in the same area in Delhi and knew one another. They were booked under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), introduced a month after the September 11 attacks. In March 2002 the ordinance became a law. Indian opposition parties and civil rights groups such as Amnesty International opposed it, but the global war against terror was taking its toll on civil liberties in India.

  The arrested men were interrogated. The police claimed that Afzal, the main accused, had confessed to his involvement. Rajbir Singh, the assistant commissioner in the anti-terrorism cell of the Delhi police, had invited television crews to record Afzal’s public confession, which was then broadcast across India. A tall, sturdy man with rugged features, Singh had risen from being a lowly subinspector to his present prestigious position in just a few years. His role in six separate killings of alleged terrorists and gangsters had provoked questioning by various Indian newspapers and magazines. Singh was already under a cloud when the home ministry, under Advani, appointed him to head the investigation into the attack on the Indian parliament. It was under Singh’s direction that Geelani was arrested.

  Soon after Geelani’s arrest, I left Srinagar for Baramulla. I drove for two hours past miles of leafless poplars and apple trees, past soldiers huddled in small groups around fires of twigs, past gray hills rolling in the distance. Baramulla began with the striking redbrick complex of a colonial high school run by British missionaries facing an enormous Indian military garrison. A little farther on, it was a noisy bazaar of hundreds of similar shops selling groceries, clothes, stationery, carpets, cement—almost anything. Signs for math tutors or computer-programming classes competed for attention with models drinking Coke or balancing precariously on new bikes. The town seemed to live up to its reputation of relative wealth and high education.

  Baramulla stretched along the two banks of the Jhelum River on its westward journey to Pakistan and the Arabian Sea. I drove across a wide wooden bridge spanning the river. Thousands of naked brick houses spread out from the riverbank to the massive arc of mountains forming the northern limits of the town.

  “Where is Professor Geelani’s house?” I asked a shopkeeper.

  “Are you from the press?” he replied, quickly stepping out of his shop and shaking my hand. “Geelani is being framed, sir! We know him. He is no terrorist!” His voice grew louder with every word. “We know him very well,” an older man said. He placed his hand on my shoulder and looked gravely into my eyes. “He has nothing to do with the parliament attack.” “That is what I was saying.” The shopkeeper raised his voice higher. A small crowd had circled me within seconds. “That boy is an angel,” the old man concluded. I extricated myself. A teenager jumped into my car and directed the driver to the Geelani house.

  We stopped outside an old house of limestone and red brick. A murmur rose from the crowd in the courtyard, and scores of eyes stared at me. A frail old man in an elegant sheepskin cap led me inside. “I am Habibullah. Professor Geelani is my son-in-law,” he said. A dozen visitors reclined against pillows placed along the walls. Everyone rose to shake our hands. “Salam-u-alikum Haz! Salam-u-alikum Masterji!” The same greeting that people gave my grandfather the schoolmaster. Habibullah had retired as a school headmaster some years earlier.

  Somebody brought tea. Habibullah explained slowly, like a teacher. “Geelani Sahib’s father died when he was very young. Life hasn’t been easy for him. But he worked hard for years till he got to teach at Delhi University.” Habibullah insisted that I drink my tea before he continued. I did. “He is a responsible man. I gave him my daughter in marriage. They have a boy and a girl. He is a responsible father and a responsible husband.” The visitors drank tea in silence, nodding in agreement. “It is impossible. He has nothing to do with the parliament attack.” Despite his grief and shock, Habibullah maintained a dignified air. “Hundreds of people have been coming to the house to express support. They want to protest on the highway against his arrest. But I have to stop them.” He feared that demonstrations, as they typically did in Kashmir, would lead to anti-India sloganeering, which would anger the government and damage the chances of his son-in-law’s release. “We will fight for his release in court.”

  I then sought out Geelani’s younger brother, Bismillah, who lived in Delhi with Geelani’s wife and children. Bismillah told me that he had visited his brother a week after his arrest; he was living in a cagelike room at a Delhi police interrogation center. Geelani was limping and had wounds on his ankles; nylon ropes had left blue marks on his wrists. Bismillah had brought him some food, but the torture had left Geelani without the appetite or energy to eat. The brothers met again a week later, this time in jail, where Geelani was in solitary confinement and denied access to books, paper, or the jail library. Criminals looked upon him as a terrorist and an anti-national and had assaulted him several times. Around that time, university officials suspended Geelani from his teaching job.

  In May 2002 the police filed a charge sheet against him. At the same time, his landlord evicted his wife and children, who had to find refuge in a Muslim ghetto in another part of the city. It was not until July that Geelani’s trial began. It proceeded not under the usual Indian law but under the controversial new Prevention of Terrorism Act. Amnesty International questioned whether a fair trial was possible. The Indian law ministry appointed Shiv Narayan Dhingra as a special judge. Dhingra had specialized in cases of terrorism and had earned the nickname the Hanging Judge.

  I was assigned to report on the trial. Policemen with automatic rifles guarded the courtroom; they checked my identity card and frisked me before allowing me inside. I had expected a crowd of reporters but was surprised to see very few there. Policemen, both uniformed and plainclothed, occupied most of the chairs, along with the lawyers in black gowns. Geelani stood in the dock with the other accused. I thought of our first meeting at Delhi University in 1999. He now stood before me, accused of conspiring in the attack on the Indian parliament that had almost triggered a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. I couldn’t stop looking at his handcuffs and at the three armed policemen watching him. Over the next few months, I kept going back to the trial. Each time Geelani’s brother, Bismillah, and father-in-law, Habibullah, sat in the courtroom with gloomy faces. And each time Geelani stood in the dock with the same serene expression. I often wondered why he appeared so unfazed.

  Perhaps he was given hope by the Indian intellectuals who believed that he was innocent and had come together under the banner of the All India Defense Committee for Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani. Many teachers and journalists had written letters of protest to the chief justice. Initially, there was no criminal lawyer ready to defend him in court. Finally, Seema Gulati, a well-known, sought-after criminal lawyer, agreed. Her high fees were paid by contributions from university teachers, lawyers, and civil rights activists.

  The prosecution presented the evidence. It said that Geelani had received a call on his mobile phone on December 14, 2001, from Kashmir, in which he had supported the previous day’s attack on the parliament. This two-and-a-half-minute telephone conversation in Kashmiri with his younger brother was the main evidence against him. The police had it translated by a semiliterate Kashmiri youth, Rashid Ali, who worked as a fruit vendor in North Delhi. The incriminating evidence, according to the police translation, was this: Caller (Faisal): “What is this you have done in Delhi?” Receiver (Geelani): “This was necessary.”

  The conversation, police said, revealed the role of the teacher in the conspiracy to attack the parliament. Seema Gulati produced two respected Kashmiris as defense witnesses: Sampath Prakash, a veteran trade union leader from Srinagar; and Sanjay Kak, a well-known filmmaker. The witnesses maintained that the call was an innocent conversation between two brothers that had been mistranslated. Kak’s translation of the same conversation was markedly different. Caller: “What’s happened?” Receiver: “What? In Delhi?” Caller: “What’s happened? In Delhi?” Receiver (noise, laughter): “By God!” Giving evidence in court, Kak said, “The Kashmiri equivalent of ‘What’s happened?’ is Yeh Kya Korua. It is a broad term used in all kinds of circumstances, such as when a child spills a glass of milk or when there is snowfall or a marital dispute. Geelani’s brother had called simply to get a syllabus and a prospectus.” Kak translated that portion of the call as: Receiver (Geelani): “Tell me what you want?” Caller (Faisal): “Syllabus and prospectus.” The boy was preparing for the medical school entrance examination and wanted a brochure of a school in Delhi.

  During the cross-examination, Ali, the police translator, admitted that he could not understand English; he was also shaky in Hindi, the language into which he had translated the call. That day I saw Bismillah and Habibullah smile. Testimonies by independent witnesses seemed to tilt the balance in favor of Geelani’s innocence.

  One day a fellow reporter, Shams Tahir Khan, who worked for Aaj Tak, a popular Hindi-language Indian news channel, took the stand. He was one of the television reporters invited by Singh, the Delhi police officer, to record the confession of the main accused, Mohammed Afzal, after his arrest. The full version of the video interview was played in the courtroom. Afzal was seen saying that Geelani was a professor and that he, Afzal, “never shared any of this [terrorism-related] information with him.” Khan told the court that Assistant Commissioner Singh had requested the media not to relay that part of the interview. Geelani, his relatives, and his lawyer seemed more relieved; their smiles were broader.

  Other days revealed other flaws in the case against Geelani. By November the witnesses had testified, the accused had given their statements, and the final arguments in the case had begun. The Delhi high court had ordered that Geelani’s handcuffs be taken off, though armed policemen still filled the courtroom. Barring a few reporters, the media continued to ignore the trial. The prosecution argued for Geelani’s conviction for conspiring in the attack on the Indian parliament. The grounds were that he had supported the attack while talking on the phone; he knew the other accused; his phone number was found on their phones; and he had received calls from one of the accused on the day of the attack. Geelani did not deny knowing the co-accused and speaking to them on the phone.

  On December 16, 2002, when the judge was to deliver the verdict, Habibullah did not come to the court. Instead, led by Singh, personnel from the Delhi police’s anti-terrorism wing—who had arrested Geelani and conducted the investigation—filled the courtroom. The policemen, who were usually unshaven and shabbily clothed, were dressed in expensive suits with matching neckties. They would look good in the newspaper photographs tomorrow, I thought. The courtroom was for once crowded with reporters. I stood close to the judge’s table, hoping to hear every word of the verdict. It was very humid. A reporter shouted at an attendant to switch on the air conditioner. It did not work. A reporter standing behind me placed his notebook on my back for support to take notes.

  Judge Dhingra walked in. There was a long silence in the courtroom. Nobody moved while he pronounced the verdict. He held the accused teacher, Geelani, guilty of “conspiracy to attack the parliament, wage war against the government of India, murder and grievous hurt.” The two other men were also found guilty. Geelani remained silent. I kept looking at him. He seemed to see me, but his eyes said nothing. Two days after the verdict, Judge Dhingra sentenced Geelani to death, along with the co-accused Kashmiris, Mohammed Afzal and Shaukat Guru.

  Geelani was stoic and sought the judge’s permission to speak to the journalists. Judge Dhingra granted it. “Without justice, there will be no democracy. It is the Indian democracy that is under threat,” Geelani shouted.

  Policemen whisked Geelani and the other convicted men toward prison trucks. Television crews jostled for close-ups. Bismillah watched him being taken away and burst into tears. In Baramulla, hundreds of protesters burst out onto the streets as the news spread.

  One of India’s most respected lawyers and a former federal law minister, Ram Jethmalani, agreed to defend Geelani in the higher courts without payment, prompting activists of the Hindu extremist Shiv Sena (the Army of Shivaji, named after a medieval Hindu chieftain who fought the Mughal rulers of India) to burn the lawyer in effigy as a traitor and threaten him with consequences if he honored his promise. Jethmalani stood his ground. He filed an appeal against Geelani’s conviction in the Delhi high court. Its judges began their hearings in April 2003. Hearings and arguments followed. If Judge Dhingra’s order was upheld, Geelani would be hanged.

  In October the high court pronounced its verdict. Geelani was acquitted of all charges. He was free. He is back at his college, teaching.

  Part Two Journeys

  9 I See You Again

  I had begun to think seriously about returning to Kashmir, where far grimmer things were happening. I had shared some stories with a few friends in Delhi, but I could never say everything. I would find myself stopping in the middle of a sentence, rendered inarticulate by memory. The telling, even in the shade of intimacy, was painful. And a sense of shame overcame me every time I walked into a bookstore. People from almost every conflict zone had told their stories: Palestinians, Israelis, Bosnians, Kurds, Tibetans, Lebanese, East Germans, Africans, East Timorese, and many more. I felt the absence of the unwritten books of the Kashmiri experience. The memories and stories of Kashmir that I had carried with me could fade away. I had to find the words to save them from the callous varnish of time. I had to write. And to write, I had to return and revisit the people and places that had haunted me for years.

  Among the few literary responses to Kashmir, the poems of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali were the foremost. I often turned to his verses, which evoked the fear, the tension, the anger, and the hopelessness of our experience. I had met Shahid only in his books—Country Without a Post Office, Half-Inch Himalayas, and Rooms Are Never Finished. I had seen him smile from wooden frames in his elegant house in southern Srinagar and watched his father, Agha Ashraf Ali, a retired professor, entertain a constant flow of visitors curious to hear about his poet son. Shahid had died of cancer in 2001 in Brooklyn. Newspapers in Kashmir printed his poems every other day in the autumn of 2001, during his final days. Prayers for him rose from all the mosques of Kashmir.

  I caught glimpses of Shahid the man from an essay that his friend the novelist Amitav Ghosh wrote in The Nation. One day Ghosh accompanied Shahid and his siblings to a hospital for one of his many unsuccessful surgeries. Shahid tried to walk on his own but fell and had to be put in a wheelchair. Ghosh wrote, “When the hospital orderly returned with the wheelchair Shahid gave him a beaming smile and asked where he was from. Ecuador, the man said, and Shahid clapped his hands gleefully together. ‘Spanish!’ he cried, at the top of his voice. ‘I always wanted to learn Spanish. Just to read Lorca.’ At this the tired, slack-shouldered orderly came suddenly to life. ‘Lorca? Did you say Lorca?’ He quoted a few lines, to Shahid’s great delight. ‘Ah! “La Cinque de la Tarde,”’ Shahid cried, rolling the syllables gleefully around his tongue. ‘How I love those words. “La Cinque de la Tarde”!’”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24