June 10, 2008	Tuesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 05, 1429

New Delhi, June 9: Kashmiri death row convict Afzal Guru has said BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani should become India’s next prime minister in order to carry out his swift execution because the ruling Congress party was dithering over his fate.

“I don’t think the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government can ever reach a decision. The Congress party has two mouths and is playing a double game,” said Afzal, convicted for the December 2001 Indian parliament attack in an interview to IANS news agency in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

“I really wish LK Advani becomes India’s next prime minister as he is the only one who can take a decision and hang me. At least my pain and daily suffering would ease then,” said Afzal, who has been in solitary confinement in the capital’s high security prison.

Mr Advani has slammed the delay in carrying out Guru’s death sentence even as a mercy petition is pending with the Indian president. There are dzoens of death row convicts languishing in different jails across India but the BJP wants this case to be hastened ahead of others.

“I fail to understand the delay. They have increased my security. But what needs to be done immediately is to carry out the court’s orders,” Advani had remarked in November 2006.

In his rare interview, Afzal’s first since he was convicted by the Supreme Court in 2004 that was subsequently upheld a year later, he says that the death sentence had made him delusional. He, too, has filed a mercy petition — along with 40 others — that is pending before the president. Legal procedures and prolonged periods of solitary confinement were inhuman and cruel, he said.

Psychologists call this condition the ‘death row’ phenomenon, in which prisoners spending years awaiting their execution go through excruciating mental torture, a fact that was recognised by the European Court of Human Rights in 1989.

“Life has become hell in the jail. I requested the government to take an immediate decision over my sentence just two months ago. I don’t wish to be part of the living dead,” said Afzal, whose moods swung frequently between being stoic and being defiant.

“I have also requested that till the time they (government) take a decision, they shift me to a Kashmir jail,” said Afzal, who now sports a long black beard, according to the IANS text published in the Hindustan Times.

Afzal, who is in his mid-30s, said he sympathised with Sarabjit Singh, an Indian lodged in Pakistan prison for nearly two decades, but said no parallel could be drawn between the two of them. “Please don’t compare me with Sarabjit. The issues are separate. My sympathies are with him, but my fight is for the Kashmir conflict.

Now, I am not even seeking any clemency and have no objection to the government deciding my fate.” It was not clear what purpose the authorities were seeing in facilitating Guru’s interview at this juncture.