20/02/2026
On 9 February 2013, Afzal Guru was executed. Afzal was convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack case. In the winter of 2006, Vinod Jose interviewed him in Tihar Jail.
“I ask you, did I get a chance to tell my story?” Afzal asked Jose as they sat opposite each other in the High Risk Ward of Prison No. 3 in Tihar Central Prison. “Do you think justice is done? Would you like to hang a person without giving him a lawyer? Without a fair trial? Without listening to what he had to go through in life? Democracy doesn’t mean all this, does it?”
To Jose, Afzal seemed to be a person who wanted to say a lot of things to the world. But he often reiterated his helplessness in reaching people from his current state of “condemned for life.” “Police made me a scapegoat in order to mask their failure to find out the mastermind of Parliament attack. They have fooled the people. People still don’t know whose idea was to attack Parliament. I was entrapped into the case by Special Task Force (STF) of Kashmir and implicated by Delhi Police Special Cell,” Afzal said. “The media constantly played the tape. The police officers received awards. And I was condemned to death.”
“The fact of the matter,” he continued, “is that I did not have a lawyer and in a case like this, what does not having a lawyer mean, everyone can understand. If you wanted to put me to death, what was the need for such a long legal process which to me was totally meaningless?”
When Jose asked Afzal if he wanted to make any appeal to the world, he replied, “My simple appeal is that do not allow blind nationalism and mistaken perceptions to lead you to deny even the most fundamental rights of your fellow citizens.”
Read Jose’s entire interview, “Mulakat Afzal.” https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/mulakat-afzal
