On Feb. 11, 2010, I returned to Mumbai after a reporting assignment
in Hyderabad. A rare weekend off with family, it was also my niece’s
birthday. I switched my phone to silent mode to avoid work-related phone
calls and tried to play host to a bunch of kids who were home.
At around 10 p.m., I returned back to my phone to find 50-odd missed
calls and an equal number of messages. Anticipating some kind of news
emergency, I pressed on the last message from a journalist friend, who
asked, “Could you confirm if Shahid Azmi is dead?”
My friend Shahid was 32. He had been killed. He had met the fate that
he had so often discussed over telephonic conversations, samosas at the
Army restaurant next to sessions court or our last lunch at Café
Samovar, the iconic restaurant adjacent to the Mumbai sessions court.
“Let’s see, how long am I allowed to live?” he would often say,
casually.
Shahid was gunned down by members of a lesser known off shoot of the
infamous Chhota Rajan gang–a mafia group, whose relationship with a
premier intelligence agency of the country was no secret. The motive for
his killing was said to be his representation of the alleged co accused
in the 26/ 11 terror attacks of Mumbai.
I first met Shahid in 2008. Journalists and writers fascinated him,
which is why he felt compelled to study journalism after he was released
from Tihar Jail in New Delhi. Fate had a knack of being unkind to him.
In the aftermath of the communal violence in Mumbai in 1993, Shahid
had escaped to Kashmir and spent a few months there. On his return in
1994, Mumbai police arrested him, charged him as a terrorist involved in
the Kashmir insurgency, under the draconian Terrorist and Disruptive
Activities (Prevention) Act. The act was repealed a year after his
arrest on account of its blatant misuse.
To strengthen its case against Shahid, the police charged him with a
conspiracy to kill radical Maharashtra leader Bal Thackeray and Farooq
Abdullah, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. The evidence
against him was a confession he never made. It was the intervention by
the Supreme Court in 2001, which had him acquitted of all charges after
having spent six years in jail on the charges of being a militant.
UTV Motion Pictures Raj Kumar Yadav in the film “Shahid”, directed by Hansal Mehta.
On his release from the prison, he studied law at Mumbai University.
In 2004, he began practicing as a lawyer in Mumbai courts, taking up
cases of civil rights abuses. Over the next few years, he rose to be a
revered figure among other lawyers and the legal staff at Mumbai courts.
They mostly addressed him as Shahid bhai, the brother who could do the
impossible.
His childlike face hid his burning desire to reach out and offer some
sense of power to the powerless. He was a consumer of ideas, and that
explained his insatiable love for reading; his cabin was stacked with
Tolstoys, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Vivekananda. A copy of the
Koran was placed above one of the cupboards.
“I have had my phases — I have been an atheist, a believer, a man who
would fast 30 days a month and offer the tahajjud (late night Islamic
prayers),” he once had told me during one of our courtroom
conversations. “Jail made me religious. They mock you when you fast and
refuse to give you food at dawn for Ramzan.”
When he was arguing the case of an alleged Maoist rebel sympathizer, I
could barely hear him during the trial; he was so soft spoken. But I
could see the judge listen in rapt attention. This judge wept bitterly
when I met him after Shahid’s assassination. Such was the impact Shahid
had on most lives.
As I began to interact with Shahid, I sensed a growing
disillusionment in the man who would bring hope to hundreds of people.
He was bogged down by the silent witch hunt carried out against him by
small-time underworld dons at the behest of intelligence agencies that
benefited from putting an end to his efforts to represent those accused
of being terrorists. In a legal career that lasted seven years, he
secured seven acquittals, a rare feat especially in cases that police
and intelligence agencies believed to be foolproof.
Shahid fought high-profile cases like the 2006 Mumbai train blasts
case. He secured acquittals for several accused in by convincing the
courts that the accused were wrongly booked under the controversial
Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act, which allows confessions
acquired in police custody to be used as evidence against the accused.
While addressing students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
he would remark, “Injustice was not just in criminal cases; it was
everywhere.” He was a guest lecturer on human rights at the Tata
Institute. He had grown up in a poor family near the premier institute
and aspired to study there.
Those days, I had been reporting on Faheem Ansari, an Indian man who
had been arrested for alleged involvement in the 2008 Mumbai terror
attacks. Convinced of her husband’s innocence, Mr. Ansari’s wife,
Yasmin, had been running around to get legal assistance for her husband,
but had little resources. When she got in touch with me, I recommended
several famous human rights activists and lawyers. They shared her
belief that Mr. Ansari might be innocent, but justice had to come at a
cost. Their fee was in the range of 300,000 to 500,000 rupees ($4,900 to
$8,200).
Around that time, Shahid was gaining prominence for securing
acquittals for those wrongly arrested in the 2006 Mumbai blasts. Yasmin
met him and discussed the details of her husband’s case. Shahid agreed
to represent her husband. A few months after Shahid’s murder, a Mumbai
court acquitted Mr. Ansari.
At Shahid’s funeral, as Yasmin sat next to me, she asked me gently,
“Why did Shahid bhai have to die?” I did not have the heart to tell her
that this was a destiny Shahid had embraced.
I met Shahid a week before he was assassinated. He had just returned
to Mumbai after meeting the Maoist rebel leader Kobad Ghandy in prison.
Dozens of students in the interiors of Gadchiroli and Chandrapur in
Maharashtra had been arrested on charges of being Maoist insurgents. And
what was the most prominent evidence against them? They had stacked
books on Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar azad, both revolutionaries of
the Indian independence movement.
Last week I saw Shahid again—in Hansal Mehta’s biopic, “Shahid” which
tells the story of the slain lawyer’s life. Rajkumar Yadav, the actor
who plays Shahid, brilliantly essayed his role. It is a brave and worthy
tribute to his work and courage.
Read this article about Shahid Azmi and have represented it here with due credits to the original author Rana Ayyub*.
*
Rana Ayyub is a Senior Editor with Tehelka magazine.
