Death penalty has to go

In perspective

Many human rights organisations worldwide are marking today, October 10, as the 20th World Day Against the Death Penalty. It is a day to celebrate that nearly 150 countries worldwide are deemed to have abolished, meaning that they have either formally scrapped capital punishment or that they have neither sentenced anyone to death nor executed for so many years as to be considered abolitionist in practice. But it is also regrettable that a few of the largest countries, including China, India, Indonesia,Bangladesh, Iran, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United States are still retentionists. Another large country, Pakistan, has been under pressure from major trade partner and aid-doner, the European Union (EU), to observe a moratorium, but that does not look promising.

The EU requires all members to abolish the death penalty. A salutary result of which was that Turkey, a membership applicant, ditched the death penalty and spared the life of a Kurdistan independence leader it deems a terrorist, Abdullah Ocalan. It is another matter that Turkey’s EU membership is frozen, thanks to anti-Muslim voices in the EU and an understandably miffed president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is threatening to reinstate capital punishment.

Among the more glaring absurdities in the global West is that the Supreme Court of the United States recently overturned its own celebrated 1973 verdict in Roe v. Wade – in the name of the right to life– while regularly endorsing lower courts’ death penalties.

In another large retentionist country, India, and staying in this century, it ought to have been clear to any newspaper reader as far back as in 2004 that an indigent, ill-educated Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was hanged, convicted of rape and murder of a young woman in Kolkata was innocent as he steadfastly claimed, senior researchers from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, having years later determined that he was framed. Then President A P J Abdul Kalam, who signed off that execution, regretted it rather too late.

As for the Pakistani terror convict Ajmal Kasab’s 2012 hanging, India lost the only source of vital information regarding the 2008 attack on Mumbai. The next year, India hanged Afzal Guru – convicted in connection in the 2001 Parliament attack but believed to be an almost entirely innocent Kashmiri, framed. About the travesty of his case, books have been written by the likes of Arundhati Roy and Senior Advocate Nandita Haksar.

Yakub Memon reposed faith in the Indian executive and judiciary and paid for it with his life in 2015, most likely unfairly, convicted in connection with the 2003 violence
in Mumbai.

As for the 2020 hangings of the December 2012 New Delhi gangrape-murderers, the late CJI J S Verma Committee, including the late Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court Leila Seth, set up in the immediate aftermath, recommended non-recourse to capital punishment, an advice ignored by both the Congress and BJP dispensations.

The now blatantly Hindu majoritarian State dares not hang Balwant Singh Rajoana, who assassinated former Punjab CM Beant Singh in 1995, as they cannot possibly face Sikh wrath, not only in Punjab but among the vocal diaspora.

India’s sordid handling of the promise it made to Portugal in seeking the extradition of Abu Salem is a case apart. Briefly, in 2002, the then deputy prime minister and home minister L K Advani had said India would not hang Abu Salem in accordance with Portugal’s conditions. Later, the Congress and BJP administrations tried to renege
on the promise, much to Lisbon’s chagrin.

Meanwhile, there is a need for voluntary organisations such as the US’s Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) to get active in India too to counter blood lust fomented by sections of the media.

The principal author of India’s constitution, Dr B R Ambedkar, said during the Constituent Assembly debates (1946-50): “… this country by and large believes in the principle of non-violence.

It has been its ancient tradition, and although people may not be following it in actual practice, they certainly adhere to the principle of non-violence as a moral mandate… the
proper thing for this country to do is to abolish the death sentence altogether.” Yet, after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, free India’s nascent government disregarded the pleas of two of his sons, Manilal and Ramdas Gandhi, and
of Narayan Desai, son of
Gandhi’s legendary secretary, Mahadev Desai, for sparing
the life of the assassin,
Nathuram Godse.

Admirers of Godse, many among India’s current ruling establishment, might want to reflect on that. And on the words of judge Jyotsna Yagnik, who, while passing sentences on Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi and 30 others for their roles in the Naroda Patiya massacre as part of the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom, ruled out the death penalty, saying it undermined “human dignity”.

(The writer is a senior
journalist)