Capital punishment in India has been debated for a long time now. It has been almost three decades when the Supreme Court said that the death penalty should be awarded in “rarest of the rare” cases only. Almost two-third countries in the world have abolished death penalty and nudging the rest of the countries to do away with this inhuman practice. Numerous organizations and NGOs led by Amnesty international have championed the cause of a total ban on death penalty. However, their campaign has not got the momentum it should have as countries like USA, China and India have refused to jettison capital punishment.
The world is divided into three categories as far as the death penalty is concerned. The first comprises of countries which have abolished death sentence like most of Europe, the second group is dominated by countries that uses death penalty often as a prominent type of punishment such as the USA, China and most Arab countries. Countries like India fall into the third group where capital punishment is mostly awarded in very rare cases.
The problem lies here. India although rarely uses death penalty as punishment, however, what constitutes the rarest of the rare cases has become a debating point amidst calls for a total ban on death conviction. India is perhaps the only country where a method of punishment is so much politicized and lingers for years.
Whenever a convict is sentenced to death, it becomes a big news which is natural considering the seriousness of the matter. Since it’s rarely used, the crime has to be of utmost grave nature to be deemed fit for the ultimate punishment.
Indira Gandhi’s assassins were charged under Section 302 of the IPC and hanged soon. The last execution in our country was in 2004 when Dhananjay Chatterjee was hanged for the rape and murder of a minor school girl in 1992.
One can see that Dhananjay Chatterjee committed the crime in 1992 and he was executed in 2004. It’s a gap of 12 long years. This is the crux of the problem. We all know that our judicial system crawls slower than a leech, it takes ages for a petition to be heard in a court of law in India, forget about early disposal of the case. Currently, there are over 2.2 crore cases pending in our courts. Things become even more complicated and frustrating if someone is on death row, for the convict can appeal to the higher courts until the Supreme Court upholds the punishment. In the case of capital punishment the Supreme Court is not the last door of hope. A convict can appeal to the President of India for clemency even if Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence. It’s in this stage when the case becomes a topic of debate and invariably turns into a potential political tool. The President has to act upon government’s advice on the issue and the government waits for the “right time” to give a Yes or No.
A glaring example of this was there for all to see when the President rejected the mercy pleas of Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan, sentenced to death for killing former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in May,1991. The trio’s request for clemency was filed on 26th April,2000. The President took 11 years to decide on their mercy petition. The reason for such long delay was political equations. No government wants to jeopardize their support base in Tamil Nadu where the public sentiment is largely against the death sentence as the three in question are Tamils. The government at the centre still could not escape the embarrassment as the Tamil Nadu Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that the death sentence should be commuted, the same day (30th August,2011), Madras High Court put an eight-week stay on the execution. The court wants an explanation as to why so much time was taken to decide on their mercy petition.
The Tamil Nadu state assembly’s resolution gave cue to other states from where some of the high profile convicts are on death sentence. Soon after Tamil Nadu assembly’s resolution, Jammu and Kashmir CM Omar Abdullah tweeted that the reaction would not have been as muted had J&K Assembly passed a similar resolution on commutation of the death sentence to Afzal Guru. Afzal Guru has been awarded capital punishment on charges of attack on the Parliament in December 2001. In the meantime, reports came that Punjab government was also mulling over the idea of tabling such a resolution in the state assembly against the death conviction of Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar who masterminded a bomb attack on the then Youth Congress President M S Bitta in 1993, 9 people had been killed in the attack.
Although capital punishment in India still “exists”, it’s rarely awarded.
So, why should we continue with death penalty when it’s so rarely used and invariably becomes a political ballgame? If eventually the President has to decide if a convict is to be hanged or not then why to involve the Supreme Court. A convict may be allowed to request for clemency if the High Court rules in favour of death sentence, by superseding SC in cases of capital petition we would save a lot of valuable time of the apex court. Why not amend the law and set a time frame for the President to decide the fate of a convict on the Death Row.
Indifferent to the trauma the convict, his family and the victim’s family go through, the government prefers to delay the decision as long as possible giving a faint hope to the convict and augmenting the agony of the victims’ families.
While political parties harp on someone’s claim to live, or for that matter, to die, no consideration is heeded to the sufferings one endures.
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