SARABJIT SINGH, an aam admi (common
man) like you and me, is no more. May his soul rest in peace after spending 23
torturous years in Pakistani jails. Sarabjit died yesterday (May 2)
following a brutal attack by fellow prisoners in a Pakistani jail on April 26.
The nation is angry, but I think a bit late. Bollywood too has expressed its
condolences. But all these 23 years when Sarabjit had been in the Pakistani
jail, I don’t think whether Bollywood had ever appealed the government to get
him freed from Pakistani clutches. Neither we mango people took out candle
marches to pressure our governments to get him released.
Sadly, in the election season, BJP and Akali Dal see in
Sarabjit yet another cause to corner the UPA2 government, mired in 2G spectrum
and coalmine scams. Akali Dal leader Sukhbir Badal says "The whole country
is angry with the lame-duck attitude of the union government." BJP
president Rajnath Singh chips in with: "I would just like to say that the
Congress-UPA government has blurred the image
of India internationally and spread this message of being a weak
nation."
Perhaps
neither Sukhbir Badal nor Rajnath Singh remembers or doesn’t want to remember
that they also ruled the country from 1999 to 2004, and during this period also
Sarabjit Singh was in the Pakistani jail. I shudder to imagine the type of
torture Sarabjit Singh would have been subjected to in the Pakistani jail after
the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 and the Kargil war of 1999. For both
these events BJP can’t escape the blame. Rajnath Singh would also like to forget Kandahar where in December 1999 his fellow partyman Jaswant Singh, a Minister under the then Prime Minister AB Vajpayee, had presented the gift of three arrested militants to Harkut-ul-Mujahideen to end the hijack of an Indian Airlines aircraft.
Any day aam
admi (common man), if not instigated by politicians, is more sensible
than the leader he/she elects. It is clear from the following sensible and
politically-neutral words of the lady who has lost in Sarabjit her
brother. Sarabjit’s sister Dalbir Kaur, unlike the electorally-targeted
reactions of Akali Dal and BJP, pleads, "I
appeal to all political parties to come together and support Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde. Earlier, Pakistan
stabbed Vajpayee’s (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) back and today they have stabbed
Manmohan Singh. It’s time to wage a war against Pakistan."
Will our
political leaders sink their differences to present India as a nation which
speaks in one voice to safeguard its honour and interests? If it happens, then
we can take the toughest possible actions against Pakistan and China who are always
creating problems on our borders and anti-national movements within the
country.
Apart from
our myopic, self-seeking political leaders, a section of our judiciary and
intellectuals too seem to be acting too liberal when they plead for granting mercy to or respecting the human rights of those facing death penalty for terrorist acts
or other heinous crimes. May I ask these ultra liberal Indians: Did these
terrorists (Kasab, Afzal Guru, Bhullar or Rajiv Gandhi assassination conspirators)
respect the human rights of their victims? Did they allow the kin of their victims
to meet them one last time before killing them? Then why this hue and cry if
Afzal is not allowed to meet his family before his hanging?
If we
want to appear a tough nation to the world at large then we must stop playing
politics while dealing with terrorists charged with human slaughter. All political
parties must agree at once for meting out the rarest of rare punishment to
those who, driven by fundamentalist ideologies, are just not bothered about their
fellow citizens’ most basic fundamental right to live.
