What does Tiger Memon’s call to his mother tell us?

The transcript of the conversation that Tiger Memon had with his mother Hanifa on the morning of Yakub’s hanging makes for disturbing reading. Here is a man who is one of the main conspirators in the 1993 Mumbai blasts and who has been hiding in Pakistan all this while. His brother Yakub, whose involvement in the conspiracy continued to be debated till the very end, is due to be hanged within hours of the phone call that Tiger makes.

He makes the phone call out of sympathy, one assumes. But his would count for a very fake sympathy. His tears are little more than crocodile tears. He has known the fate of Yakub all through, yet he has done nothing, least of all surrender, to help the Indian agencies solve the conspiracy and thus exonerate Yakub if the details prove his innocence. Tiger lives in safety in Pakistan and when Yakub’s hanging is finally confirmed, he calls home to express his condolences.

But the nature of his condolence is bizarre. He expresses no sadness for his brother’s fate, nor any guilt for involving him in the conspiracy, an involvement that took the latter to the gallows. Tiger rather intones revenge, a strange reaction that seems to emanate from a place of posturing rather than grief, as if he were part of a Bollywood potboiler from the 1970s. He does not even bother to listen to what his mother has to say, assuming from the word go that she demands revenge for her son’s killing when the poor woman is so broken with grief that she can barely speak.

In fact, the conversation indicates that she was not interested in speaking to Tiger and decided to only when coaxed by the family member who picked up the phone. When Tiger tells her that Yakub’s hanging will not be in vain (“zaya nahin hone doonga”), she pleads with him: “Bas ho gaya, Pehle ke vajah se mera Yakub gaya ab aur nahin main dekh sakti.”

It can be reasonably assumed that her entreaties fell on deaf ears. Tiger Memon made that call not to express condolences but to send out a message to the Indian nation, that he will strike terror in its heart one more time. One wonders why the conversation was made public, since it will seriously compromise efforts to gather more information on Tiger’s threat. The Mumbai police have denied the existence of such a tape but clearly someone there leaked the conversation to the media, which of course went to town with it.

Meanwhile, questions on the rightness of Yakub’s hanging have not stopped. His case got mixed up with the merits and demerits of the death penalty and the media spent much time debating the nuances of his mercy plea. No one can deny that Yakub received a fair hearing. Even in the wee hours before his hanging, the SC, responding to the plea of a battery of senior lawyers, took a final call on his mercy plea which is when it decided that the hanging shall proceed as planned.

While India can be justifiably proud of its strong legal apparatus, Tiger Memon’s phone call frames questions about where our priorities lie. We are no closer to achieving peace with Pakistan than we have been at any time in the past. This in spite of a presumably hawkish Modi making several attempts to reach out to his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif. Recent days have brought to the fore, once again, Pakistani duplicity as it dispatched terrorists to Gurdaspur and Udhampur.

Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to provide safe haven to sworn India enemies such as Tiger Memon, Dawood Ibrahim and Hafiz Sayeed. Even when the terrorist captured in Udhampur sang like a mentally disturbed canary about his Pakistani nationality, Pakistan denied it, expectedly. The problem we are dealing with is grave and no workable solution seems in sight.

The media’s role is worth investigating. Repeatedly over the past few days sections of the media have compared Yakub’s hanging with the bail given to Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi in the Naroda Patiya massacre of February 2002. What happened in Gujarat after Godhra was the gravest tragedy but by clawing to individual cases and seeking to make an example out of them, the media overstated its position.

Both the cases – of Yakub on the one hand and of Kodnani and Bajrangi on the other — reached their current status after the due process of law was followed, yet they were portrayed in the media as reflective of the Indian system’s inherent bias against Muslims. This is highly problematic because if we are going to cast aspersions on the legal system, and in particular the justice dispensed by the Supreme Court, then what do we have left?

This is a serious problem for the media. How do you debate an issue like Yakub Memon without coming across as disrespectful to the President or the Supreme Court? Some news channels were unable to traverse this fine line. The central government has sent out notices to three channels – ABP News, Aaj Tak and NDTV 24×7 – asking them to explain their coverage of Yakub’s hanging. This is a serious threat to media freedom but the government has an upper hand in this argument due to the Constitutional protections afforded the President and the SC.

An Indian Express report says: “The content includes phone-in interviews of Chhota Shakeel on Aaj Tak and ABP News in which he claimed Yakub Memon was innocent and said that four mercy petitions were dismissed in a single day. He also alleged that justice had not been done and that he did not believe the court. NDTV 24×7 had aired an interview of Yakub Memon’s lawyer who spoke about how many countries have done away with the death penalty.”

Similarly, I wonder if it was right on the media’s part to release the transcript of Tiger Memon’s conversation with his mother. What did the conversation achieve apart from alerting Memon to the fact that the landline at his family’s house in Mumbai is tapped and that he needs to be more careful when talking to them in future? This was news that was as deserving of secrecy as critical matters of national security, yet the media did not exercise due diligence.

The communal climate, fortunately, has not been vitiated by Yakub’s hanging, but we will be fooling ourselves if we believed that things are perfectly in order. Pakistan will use every opportunity to set off a communal tinderbox in our country and our civil society, and the media, needs to be careful that it does not become an unwitting participant in that country’s nefarious designs.