Former Union minister P Chidambaram has said there were “grave doubts” about the involvement of Afzal Guru in the 2001 Parliament attack and that the case was “perhaps not correctly decided”.
Chidambaram was Union home minister when Guru’s mercy plea was rejected by the previous UPA government in 2011. Guru was hanged two years later.
“There were grave doubts about his involvement (in the conspiracy behind the attack on Parliament) and even if he was involved, there were grave doubts about the extent of his involvement. He could have been imprisoned for life without parole for (the) rest of his natural life,” Chidambaram was quoted as saying by The Economic Times.
Chidambaram was responding to questions from ET on whether the courts had reached the correct conclusions in the Afzal case and also whether execution was the appropriate penalty.
An event commemorating Guru’s hanging turned into a controversy after police charged six students with sedition for attending the function at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) earlier this month. Kashmiri separatists have also sought to use his execution to rally support.
“I think it is possible to hold an honest opinion that the Afzal Guru case was perhaps not correctly decided,” said the senior Congress leader who was the home minister from 2008 to 2012.
To a question that he was also in the government that executed Guru, Chidambaram said he was “not the home minister then”.
“I can’t say what I would have done. It is only when you sitting on that seat you take that decision.”
Chidambaram said though the government of the time could not have held the court decision wrong, “an independent person can hold an opinion that the case was not decided correctly”.
He said it was wrong to brand anyone with the same view as “anti-nation” and added the sedition charges against JNU students were “outrageous”.
“Free speech is not seditious speech. Is your speech a spark in the powder keg (inciting violence) only then it amounts to sedition,” he said.
Chidambaram also said the anti-national slogans allegedly chanted on the JNU campus did not amount to sedition.
“It is an age where students have the right to be wrong…And the university is a place where you don’t always need to be profound, you can be ridiculous also,” he added.