On July 30, India executed a once-successful chartered accountant Yakub Memon for his role in the Mumbai (Bombay) bombings of 1993.
Yakub was pronounced guilty of planning, financing, and coordinating the blasts that killed 253 people and injured over a thousand.
Had the saga that unfolded been as straightforward and simple as the pronouncement of guilt, the death of Yakub at the hands of the Indian State should not have aroused much controversy. But that was not to be.
Yakub, the defence argued, was only indirectly associated with the crime, and was done in by his elder brother Ibrahim (Tiger) Memon, a hardened criminal who had a history prior to the bombings in money laundering, smuggling, and other underworld activities.
Tiger Memon (as he is popularly known), along with Dawood Ibrahim, India's most wanted gangster and the chief accused for the Mumbai blasts, fled India two days prior to the bombings along with their immediate families and have been long claimed by the Indian government to be living under the patronage of the Pakistani Intelligence Services in Karachi.
Yakub Memon and his newlywed wife fled with them, too.
From their new base in Karachi in Pakistan, Dawood and Tiger are said to have seamlessly continued their money laundering and smuggling activities by obliging their local masters.
But Yakub, cultivated in the mannerisms and skills of English higher education, felt suffocated and demeaned by the new lifestyle and the constant unfriendly scrutiny of the Pakistani intelligence.
His mind was also burdened by reminders of the high business stakes he abruptly left behind in Mumbai when he fled. When the Indian Secret Service (RAW - Research and Analysis Wing) got scent of this growing frustration in Yakub, it found connections to him in Karachi. Yakub was gradually persuaded into believing that it was better for him to seek justice in India than to live a meaningless and empty life on the run in Pakistan.
And so he returned to India via Nepal hoping that the advice meant that he could prove his innocence in the Indian courts and return to being a chartered accountant once again.
But in a staged Indian intelligence operation Yakub was arrested on a busy Delhi railway station never again to walk a free man.
Reams of paper have been spent by the Indian media discussing the morality of the acts of the Indian establishment in offering hollow assurances to Yakub to entice him back to India and then punishing him with death.
But Madhu Trehan, a Columbia University-trained Indian journalist, the only one to have interviewed Yakub Memon, and openly hostile to him, had the most revealing perspective on what the Indian services meant when they assured Yakub that he would find justice in India.
According to Trehan, it meant that he would not be killed in a fake police encounter.
Fake encounter or not, the Indian superstructure was determined to take Yakub Memon's life.
In the electronic tabloid
Scroll.in, Somashekar Sundaresan writes that thousands ignored the Indian authorities' explicit instruction to the Memon family to keep the funeral a strictly private affair.
The government was concerned that mass hysteria would provoke communal tensions once again in Mumbai.
Ignoring government directives, ordinary Muslims lined the streets of the vicinity of the Memon ancestral home in Mahim, Mumbai and waited patiently for the body to arrive. And when the ambulance arrived with Yakub's mortal remains, young and old in their thousands, spontaneously crowded around it to pay their respects and to express solidarity.
Yakub's mortal remains were promptly placed in a coffin bedecked by snow-white lilies and red roses transforming the grim moment from despair into triumph, signalling the journey into paradise for one of them that the Indian State had executed.
One Indian Muslim politician spelt out what many privately held about Yakub: he was now in jannat (heaven; in God's presence).
Sundaresan observes that this act of defiance against Indian authority was borne out of a growing distrust among India's Muslims of the Indian State. India had sent yet another Muslim to the gallows within just three years after the executions of the Pakistani militant Ajmal Kasab in November 2012 and later the Kashmiri professor Afzal Guru in February 2013.
But India did not similarly bring to justice Hindu leaders who were directly responsible for encouraging the tearing down of the Moghul era mosque Babri Masjid, and ordering the merciless slaughter of Muslims on the streets of Mumbai in 1992, a year before the Mumbai blasts.
Sundaresan draws readers' attention to the findings of the Justice Srikrishna Commission that categorically pointed a finger at Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva) who openly instructed Hindu hooligans to devastate the homes of Muslims and to drench Mumbai's streets with their blood.
Sundaresan, like several other journalists and social scientists, blames extremist Hindu politicians for the Bombay blasts of 1993.
Prepared for a hostile reaction the Indian State had put its police and paramilitary on high alert in parts of Mumbai and other cities. Police contact with community leaders ensured that peace would be maintained especially during the crucial hours of the last rites when passions were likely to be at their highest.
Social analysts observe that the decision to hang Yakub Memon was emboldened by the overwhelming cry of the Indian masses for the convict's blood. New Delhi Television reported that about 90 per cent of Indians on social media called for his hanging, and the meagre 10 per cent that wrote against capital punishment faced insult, ridicule, verbal abuse, and even bodily threats from some of those who bayed for Yakub's blood.
Non-Hindus among the 90 per cent were rare.
Interestingly almost none of the 90 per cent would similarly call for any punishment on those Hindu leaders who indulged in attacks on Muslims and even Christians as in the case of the burning to death of the Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in the rural hinterland of the eastern state of Orissa.
The Indian legal system has not been consistent in interpreting laws and meting out punishments, especially capital punishment.
While three Muslims in the recent past have somewhat hastily been sent to the gallows for their involvement in acts of terrorism, similar and even more gruesome acts of terrorism by non-Muslims haven't invited the capital punishment.
Those who successfully conspired to kill the young and dynamic former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh in separate incidents are still alive and well in Indian jails in spite of their offences being political assassinations at the highest level.
Though seemingly inconsistent, there is a definite pattern to the way India has meted out justice at the highest level in recent years. Two factors have clearly stood out: No.1 the weight of majority opinion, and No. 2 an anti-Pakistan sentiment.
The Akalis, a major force in Punjab politics have consistently opposed the hanging of Balwant Singh Rajoana, one of the two Punjab policemen who successfully planned the assassination of former Chief Minister Beant Singh.
Similarly nearly all Tamil political parties have consistently been opposed to the execution of those who participated in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. Political observers say the lack of such a majority mass base for Muslims in the country has been to the disadvantage of those such as Yakub Memon.
The second, and even more worrying and discomforting angle to the recent state executions of Muslims in India is that all three men have had a connection one way or another with Pakistan and have been accused of acting on its behest to destabilize India.
Their execution then is indirectly a message to Pakistan, or to certain elements within it, that the meek, impoverished Gandhian India is a thing of the past, and that their plans to hurt India will not succeed and will be pinned in the dust.
While a triumphalistic approach may help pamper inflated egos in the higher echelons of political power in India and pander to mass Hindu bloodlust, it does nothing to assure the average Indian Muslim, that his life and status in the country of his birth is secure, and that he is considered equal with all others, especially Hindus.
India prides in being the world's biggest democracy. But what kind of a democracy is it? Once known for being a nation of kaleidoscopic beauty for its multiculturalism, India is increasingly bearing evidence of becoming a country only of the majority people.
How long can such a democracy last?
That's a troubling question India's lawmakers, ideologues, and visionaries face. They must sooner than later realize that a kingdom that is divided against itself cannot stand.
Reuben Gabriel is an instructor at the College of New Caledonia.
