THREAD - How I Became Azaadi-parast After 8 Years Of Being A Bhartiya Naagrik.

What you have to understand first and foremost is that I had a very sheltered and priveleged childhood. I had everything I wanted. Hence, I didn't notice oppression in my childhood.

I spent most of my childhood in Kashmir. Except for a year when I lived in Bangalore. I had interacted with Indians at a very young age and hence, I didn't see the difference or notice behavioural changes when Indians interact with Kashmiris back then.

Now let us move rapidly forward to February 9, 2013. The day Afzal Guroo's judicial murder happened. I was woken up in the morning by the helper of our house who said,"Zayd saeba, Afzal Goor ha morukh. Temis dyizchekh phaesi." Now let me put this in perspective.

I was the sort of person who once said,"The Indian army protects us and provides us with border security." This happened in the sixth grade. @hindustanskahar can testify to that. I never understood why people pelt stones at the security forces and often criticized them.

Back to the hanging of Afzal Guroo, I was so ignorant of Kashmir's politics that I didn't even know who he was, but that you can forgive me for, I suppose. I was only 15 and had never seen occupation firsthand. Again, I had a very sheltered and priveleged childhood.

And the fact that I was a loner, still am really, may have contributed to the apolitical cluelessness. So the news about Afzal Guroo's hanging has just broke. The government headed by Omar Abdullah at that time imposed a complete lockdown of the valley. A curfew was instated.

Then the incessant debates at home began and I caught snatches of it here and there but didn't really pay attention. Now, Omar Abdullah declared that he hadn't even been informed about Afzal Guroo's execution and the lockdown wasn't his doing. Now, this interested me quite a bit.

One of my flaws has always been that power interests me. And I thought how can the Chief Minister of a state not be informed of such a serious act which may cause turmoil in the state to the point where everything had to be shut down. Then there was another important question.

And this question came after watching the debates on news channels and it was simply this:
If the government of India has exercised its legitimate right to punish those who would wage war against the Union Of India, why are its own lawyers and intellectuals questioning it?

Now here's something else about me; my father happens to be a lawyer. So my barrage of questions were aimed at him during this time. Why was he hanged if all the evidence was flimsy and at best circumstantial? What is a collective conscience of the nation? Who defines it?

Is the conscience of a judge the collective conscience of a nation? He tried to patiently answer all of my questions but eventually, he directed me to two volumes of "The Shortened Constitution Of India by DK Basu." Another detail that must be mentioned is that Iive in a village.

So because of this, I didn't have access to books. What little I had, I'd already devoured multiple times through rereads, mostly fiction. And that is primarily why I decided to read both volumes of the Basu my father had handed me. It was painstakingly hard to read them.

Because I wasn't a student of the law yet. I knew the bare-bones of legalspeak by reading my father's office documents but that's about it. So, most of what I read went over my head but there was one thing that stuck. Just that one thing which put me on the path to know more.

And that one thing was Article 21 of the Constitution Of India which reads as,"No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to a procedure established by law.”

I read A21 and thought to myself,'Well, this sounds fair but then why are India's own intellectuals and lawyers saying Afzal Guroo's execution wasn't fair.' And then there was that ever-ominous phrase at the end,"Procedure established by law." What was this about?

And then I came across the term "Due Process." Something I write and talk about incessantly to the point where some of my fellow law friends have taken to calling me "Due Process Ka Dalaal." I won't bore you with what it means. You can look it up on the web if you wanna.

And this quest for Due Process lead me to "The Collected Writings & Speeches Of Thurgood Marshall." Backgroound; Thurgood Marshall was a Civil Rights Lawyer and served as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. I read his judgements and thoughts on the death penalty.

And what's lovely about Justice Thurgood Marshall's jurisprudence is that he was completely against the death penalty. And I was voraciously devoured anything on him I could find in our library. The man was a stalwart, a trailblazer. This was Justice Thurgood Marshall.

This was the bane of Jim Crow laws. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to Justice Marshall and said,"You have been one of the epochs of our time." And that same Marshall was telling me that sending anyone to the gallows or electric chair was utterly wrong.

However, I wasn't anti-India at this point. Although I had become an avowed civil libertarian and grown very opposed to the death penalty. The final blow came sometime later through two news articles in the Greater Kashmir.

One of them was about how Afzal Guroo's body would not be returned to his family, how they hadn't even been informed that he was going to be executed beforehand and the other was of Rahul Gandhi visiting Sarabjit Singh's sister. AUR PHIR RAB NE DIKHAYA MUAJZAA AUR SAB PARDEY HATE

Here was a man who'd been condemned to death on the basis of very poor evidence just to sate the bloodthirsty conscience of a nation and here was another man who had been arrested on the same charges of terrorism in Pakistan. And the prince of India was comforting his sister.

The former's family wasn't even allowed the basic human dignity of meeting the man whose life the collective conscience had decided to end and the latter's family was being hugged by the crown-prince of India's most powerful dynasty. Flags were to fly at half-mast in his honour.

And then I came across this very famous case-law called "Nalini V State Of Tamil Nadu" in which the accused were the assassins of Rajiv Gandhi and they weren't convicted of terrorism.

The judgement in the AIR Manual stated that it wasn't their intention to wage war against the Union Of India but rather, they only wanted to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. Imagine that! Imagine how hilarious that sounds. You blow up the executive head of a country and it's not war.

So that is precisely when I said,"Mokur mulk che Yi. Thu laanath eman hoonyan." And now here we are.

In summation, do not fret if someone around you thinks or says they're an Indian. The acts of the Indian state itself will cause them to feel alienated and they will see the light. Do not lose your cool. We do not win through violence, we only win when we maintain our dignity.

Educate yourself & others.
To quote Alexander Hamilton,"I know the action in the street is excitin',
But Jesus, between all the bleedin' 'n fightin'
I've been readin' 'n writin'
We need to handle our financial situation
Are we a nation of states? What's the state of our nation?"

Also, I hope someone noticed the dichotomy in the thread's title.
Azaadi-parast - Urdu
Bhartiya Naagrik - Hindi
I pay particular attention to how I write which is why threads likhne mein maut aati hai.

I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
When's it gonna get me?
In my sleep? Seven feet ahead of me?
If I see it comin', do I run or do I let it be?
Is it like a beat without a melody?
See, I never thought I'd live past twenty
Where I come from some get half as many

Ask anybody why we livin' fast and we laugh, reach for a flask
We have to make this moment last, that's plenty
Scratch that
This is not a moment, it's the movement
Where all the hungriest brothers with
Something to prove went?
Foes oppose us, we take an honest stand

We roll like Moses, claimin' our promised land
And? If we win our independence?
Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?
Or will the blood we shed begin an endless
Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?

13 years old*
Sorry, classic case of maghz buchaan cause problem is when I'm writing, I tend to digress and go on all sorts of tangents and think about what to write ahead.