Afzal's hanging exposes double standards of justice: CPI-ML

Terming the hanging of Afzal Guru as "travesty of justice and democracy", the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist on Saturday said it was carried out to "appease the communal fascist forces who want to make Narendra Modi India's Prime Minister."

"Faced with growing popular opposition and resistance on every front, the Congress party and the UPA government are desperately trying to appease the BJP and the communal-fascist brigade," General Secretary of CPI(ML) Liberation, Dipankar Bhattacharya said in a statement in New Delhi.

Claiming that Guru was a surrendered Kashmiri militant who had given himself up to the BSF in 1993 and had since been working in the shadow of the Special Task Force of Kashmir Police, he said Guru was implicated in the December 13, 2001 Parliament attack case.

"He had no lawyer to represent him when the trial court convicted him without any direct evidence and yet the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in the name of satisfying 'the collective conscience of society' even as the high court and the Supreme Court passed adverse remarks on the shoddy nature of investigation and dubious quality of evidence produced by the police," the Left leader said.

"Nobody has ever been hanged in this country for the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, for all the anti-Muslim violence including the horrific Mumbai and Surat riots of 1992 and the 2002

Gujarat genocide, or for the massacres of dalits, adivasis and other oppressed sections by private armies or the state."

"Far from satisfying the 'collective conscience' of the Indian society, the hanging of Afzal Guru only exposes the double standards of justice," Bhattacharya said, adding that the democratic movement in the country "will reject and resist this Congress-BJP collusion and intensify the battle for justice and democratic rights".