Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai massacre, will almost certainly be sentenced to death. Kasab's fate was sealed from the moment iconic photographs of him strolling with apparent insouciance through the Chatrapati Shivaji railway station, machine-gun in hand, whizzed through the global telesphere.
Despite media hysteria and rightwing baying for his immediate execution, he has been officially tried and found duly guilty. Yet, unanswered questions hang over the investigation, particularly around the assassination during the shootings, of Hemant Karkare, a counter-terrorism officer who had been investigating Hindu terrorist networks. A death sentence for Kasab, seen to represent Pakistan, will be widely supported in a frenzy of righteous retribution. Presidential clemency is politically improbable.
Kasab and others were charged with the "horrific massacres" of civilians although the actual masterminds of the 2008 Mumbai attacks will undoubtedly remain at large. But will the ritual execution of this 21-year-old bring an end to the cycle of violence across the subcontinent? While India's supreme court famously decreed that capital punishment is to be used only in "the rarest of rare cases", the recent expansion and abuse of anti-terror legislation is only likely to mean an increase in capital sentences for crimes such as "waging war" on the government and "conspiracy" to commit terrorist acts. The case of another alleged terrorist, Afzal Guru, has raised worrying questions about standards of proof in capital cases.
The Indian government, through home affairs minister P Chidambaram, has seized the occasion to pronounce itself "a country governed by the rule of law" and to warn Pakistan against the "export of terror". If, however, the widespread blight of bloodshed and civilian deaths is really to end, more fundamental questions must be asked about the moral implications of visiting violence on others whether through terror attacks, the death penalty or abuse of military force. Chidambaram himself is engaged in the brutal repression of a Maoist insurgency in which anti-terror legislation and the military are liberally deployed against India's own citizenry. "By any means necessary" is now as much the mantra of the Indian state as that of its opponents. Far from rooting out terror, violent repression is intensifying the death-dealing on all sides.
Questions must be asked about the unwillingness of both the Indian and Pakistani states to address the root problems of poverty, expropriation and disaffection that propel mere boys like Kasab into the arms of militias against their own interests. Misery and deprivation afflict most of Pakistan, a country ruled by an unconscionably venal feudal elite that allows its populace to be routinely bombed by American drones. India's track record is miserable, with a quarter of its population suffering from chronic hunger and its already impoverished tribal peoples displaced from their lands by multinational mining corporations like the British-owned Vedanta.
Instead of addressing such issues in partnership, both states find it expedient to demonise the other while routinely quelling civil unrest in the name of fighting terrorism. Until both states are held accountable, it is not only the Kasabs of this world who are doomed to live blighted lives and die squalid deaths.