DEATH row confessions, like beads of sweat, reek of fear. It is natural for any human being, faced with the prospect of execution, to unburden his or her soul before catching up with it lighter in the hereafter.

Dr Samuel Johnson once said: “When a man knows that he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The MQM activist Saulat Mirza has been on death row since his conviction in 1999 for the murder of Shahid Hamid, the managing director of KESC — as K-Electric was then known —– in 1997. Saulat has had not a fortnight but 15 years to concentrate his mind wonderfully. With less than a few hours left to live, though, he decided to divulge confidences that would otherwise have been interred with him.

His revelations are incendiary. They involve alleged complicity of the MQM chief Altaf Hussain and the sitting governor of Sindh Ishratul Ibad in that murder. Saulat Mirza intended that his self-serving distribution of culpability would have the same terminal effect on the MQM leadership that director general Federal Security Force Masood Mahmood’s did when he turned approver and claimed that he had received orders to murder Ahmed Raza Kasuri from prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto died on the gallows for the death of Kasuri’s father; Masood Mahmood died in the anonymity of a US witness protection programme.

The president granted Saulat a reprieve just hours before the time of his execution, presumably to encourage him to reveal more. The government then decided otherwise. It asked for a second black warrant, which has been granted. Saulat now faces the gallows again. Like all condemned prisoners, he will be offered a last supper. Who knows what that meal will comprise?

American academics study everything to death, including death itself.

There is no such mystery in American state executions. American academics study everything to death, including death itself. A recent study by Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab analysed the final meals of 247 people executed in the United States between 2002 and 2006. The study concluded that “those who perceived themselves as innocent would request fewer calories or decline to receive a last meal altogether” than those who admitted guilt. The innocent die hungry; the guilty prefer to travel on a full stomach.

It was perhaps unavoidable that the chef preparing that last meal for such convicts should reveal his recipes. Brian Price, a former inmate of a Texas prison, wrote an unusual book titled Meals to Die For (2004) in which he discloses the sort of dishes he devised.

His culinary inventiveness bordered on the morbid. He named his dishes Posthumous Potato Salad, Post-mortem Potato Soup, and Old Sparky’s Genuine Convict Chilli that offered three degrees of spiciness — 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000 volts. One wonders how many on death row presented with such a menu on their last night shared his macabre sense of humour.

More recently, an innocuous dish — mutton biryani — has assumed a sinister connotation in Indo-Pak relations. Ujjwal Nikam, the public prosecutor in the 2008 Mumbai attack, announced some time ago that Ajmal Kasab (the only surviving accused) had asked for mutton biryani. The insatiable Indian press swallowed Mr Nikam’s story; its ravenous readership digested it.

‘Mutton biryani’ suddenly became a synonym for Paki-pandering. It so permeated the Indian psyche that when on New Year’s eve 2014, a Pakistani vessel was spotted off the Porbandar coast, a zealous Coast Guard DIG B.K. Loshali gave orders to his subordinates to “blow the boat off,” adding caustically: “We don’t want to serve them biryani.”

Within hours, Loshali had to eat his own words. His admission was quoted by the same Indian press that had earlier carried his taunt: “The operation was classified in nature and its details were not shared (with me) … it was (my) boss Inspector General, North West region, Kuldip Singh Sheoran who was in charge of the operation.”

Now suddenly, close to three years after Kasab’s hanging, the Mumbai public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam has felt obliged to make a belated confession: “Kasab never demanded biryani and was never served by the government … I concocted it just to break an emotional atmosphere which was taking shape in favour of Kasab during the trial of the case.”

Poor Kasab. Left behind by his accomplices, disowned by his handlers, mocked by his enemies, he became another victim, yet another sacrifice on the butcher’s block of Indo-Pak animosity.

In Pakistan, since the moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in December last, around 40 convicts have been hanged. Whether guilty or innocent, they must have taken many unspoken secrets to the grave. Saulat Mirza’s desperate, frantic accusations though could well remain behind him, to haunt an MQM leadership as Teflon-coated as Bhutto once thought he was.

The writer is an author and art historian.

Published in Dawn March 26th , 2015

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