AMN /
New Delhi: Senior Congress Leader and former Home minister and Finance Minister P Chidambaram has opened a pandora box with his statement over Afzal Guru execution.
In an interview to Economic Times Chidambaram, said he felt it was possible to hold an “honest opinion” that the case was “perhaps not correctly decided” and that there were “grave doubts about the extent of his involvement” in the 2001 Parliament attack.
Nearly 3 years after the UPA govt ordered the hanging of Afzal Guru,
He was responding to a question on whether the courts had reached the correct conclusions in the Afzal case and also whether execution was the appropriate penalty. “I think it is possible to hold an honest opinion that the Afzal Guru case was perhaps not correctly decided,” he told in the interview.
“But being in govt you cannot say the court has decided the case wrongly because it was the govt that prosecuted him. But an independent person can hold an opinion that the case was not decided correctly.”
Further it is wrong to project that anyone “who holds that opinion is anti-nation”. Chidambaram was home minister from 2008 to 2012, before being switched to finance. Afzal Guru, who was found guilty of involvement in the attack on Parliament in 2001, was executed in 2013, when Sushilkumar Shinde was home minister.
“There were grave doubts about his involvement (in the conspiracy behind the attack on Parliament and even if he was involved, there were grave doubts about the extent of his involvement. He could have been imprisoned for life without parole for rest of his natural life,” he said.Terming the sedition charges against JNU students as “outrageous”, the veteran Congress leader said the court will throw out those charges at the first hearing. “Free speech is not seditious speech. Is your speech a spark in the powder keg (inciting violence) only then it amounts to sedition,” he said.Chidambaram also said the anti-national slogans allegedly chanted on the JNU campus earlier this month did not amount to sedition. “It is an age where students have the right to be wrong.