DEATH SENTENCE TO 38 MUSLIM YOUTHS SHOCKING

NewDelhi, 19th Feb 2022: Adv.  Sharfuddin Ahmad, National Vice President of Social Democratic Party of India expressed strong concern about the Ahmadabad Special Court verdict of death sentence to 38 Muslim youths, and life imprisonment for 11 others. The verdict is shocking, said Ahmad.

It is while the entire world is raising voice against death sentence and demanding to abandon it, the special court has proclaimed a mass massacre order for around two scores youths, who already have spent more than a decade in the jails as undertrials. The special court order is in the Ahmadabad serial blasts in 2008.

It is highly regrettable that the court didn’t venture to ensure the veracity of the allegations of involvement of the accused in the blasts, some of whom had already been in the jail while the case in question occurred; and one of the accused from Kerala, was seeing Ahmadabad for the first time, when he was arrested in this case and taken to Ahmadabad by the Gujarat police. The routine of creating an approver in ‘terror’ cases against Muslims too has invariably taken place in this case also. 

Indian judiciary has been following the doctrine of rarest of rare cases for capital punishment. India has witnessed umpteen cases of blasts since independence in which thousands were killed and equal numbers were seriously injured. Nobody had been awarded death sentence in those cases. The accused in these cases on their privilege of their loyalty to the ruling fascist party and its associates are roaming scot-free and even enjoying high positions in the legislature of the country. Almost all including the abettor and chief conspirator of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom are not even jailed for a single day, despite the solid evidences of their involvement in the pogrom. But all the accused in this blast case is from the ‘other’ community, who, as per the ideological book the fascists follow, is not eligible to enjoy even the basic civil and human rights; and for that very reason, this case becomes ‘rarest of the rare.’

Though the death verdict is shocking, it is not astonishing in the current milieu of theorization. However, this not being the final verdict, and ambit of appeal to the higher courts is open, we have full confidence that justice will be done in the higher court.  This system of hate and hatred is not going to win over the people by sending them to jail and hanging them. Social Democratic Party of India will lead the secular society in the country to strongly resist the fascist politics of hatred and defeat it, stated Adv. Sharfuddin.