Jyothy Sreedhar

A Kasabian write-up

Now that’s some sense! Ajmal Kasab hanged at Yervada jail, Mumbai today morning! The first verdict of the new President Pranab Mukherjee on a mercy petition is worth honouring. Well done, rejecting his mercy petition which was left even unconsidered by the former President, Prathibha Patil. The only thing that I had liked about Shiv Sena’s Bal Saheb Thackerey was that he highly demanded this decision when he was alive.

But I get so thoughtful when the line flashes that Kasab is the only terrorist who was arrested in the Mumbai Attack case. I am not concerned about the other terrorists as much as I do for the master brains behind. Can’t it be that, the master brain is still the brain which hanged Kasab today morning, that too in a highly confidential way not leaking the news out? And the elections…have to keep in mind! There are different sides for it, but still thumbs up and claps for this final verdict! One big hang against 166 innocent deaths still is justice, when it is of a very important someone behind the black day.

It was pretty interesting to read more about Kasab (from Wikipedia). I saw that all this violence has started off from a silly fight with his father when he was denied new dress for Eid. For that, Kasab left his home in 2005 at the age of 18 (co-incidently the right age when people are said to mature) and started robbery, then practised armoury, then got trained in terrorism. But even before all his family history, we have to include a point that Kasab belonged to the village of Faridkot, Okara district of Punjab, Pakistan, which is quite impoverished and isolated. On the side of a building, just outside Faridkot, there is a graffiti in large letters saying, in Urdu, “Go for jihad. Go for jihad. Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad”(parent organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba). Villagers of Okara claimed that he was at their village six months before the Mumbai attack. They said that he asked his mother to bless him as he was going for Jihad, and claimed that he demonstrated his wrestling skills to a few village boys that day. After when he was arrested, he was quoted as repeatedly saying “I have done right, I have no regrets”. A birth in such circumstances, getting exposed to extremism naturally, having a silly fight at home and leaving it, then starting robbery and self- ugrading to terrorism all for money is what Kasab was made of. There is a Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a senior commander of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who reportedly offered to pay his family Rs.150,000 for his participation in the attacks. Kasab can be seen as a perfect representative of today’s youth who crave for money and agree to do anything for money! “We were told that our big brother India is so rich and we are dying of poverty and hunger. My father sells dahi wada on a stall in Lahore and we did not even get enough food to eat from his earnings. I was promised that once they knew that I was successful in my operation, they would give 150,000 (around US$ 3,352), to my family,” said Kasab, “If you give me regular meals and money I will do the same for you that I did for them!”

When the man doesn’t even think that he did something wrong even while getting hanged, when Jihad is a part of culture of a particular village still, when lot of youth are being fetched by the terrorists and are trained to fight for what they define as “holy war”, when there exists master heads that promote this movement, when a mother gives blessings to his son for killing hundreds in the name of Jihad, what gets right after the celebrated hanging of a someone among them!
What gets right?- I repeat!