Death row dilemmas

In independent India, death sentences have been easy to announce, but difficult to execute. After two hangings in relatively quick succession of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru for waging war against the Indian state, there are 476 convicts that are nervously waiting at the death row. The big question is whether the Indian President clean up these rows or follow his predecessors.

Death sentence is normally reserved for "rarest of rare" crimes that include murder, abetment of suicide and waging war against the state or being part of the mutiny in the army. India has not been a signatory of an international resolve to end death sentence, but it shows reluctance to order hanging due to moral reasons and also due to the fallibility inherent in collection of evidence and dispensation of justice. Before demitting office last year, President Pratibha Patil, who did not want to be called a "hanging President" commuted the death sentence of 36 people to life imprisonment. In her excitement she even granted life sentence to a dead convict.

The incumbent one did not show much coyness in rejecting the clemency petition of one of the accused in the Mumbai terror attack, Ajmal Kasab, and allowed passage for his quick hanging. Although civil society activists felt that Kasab had one more chance to avoid hanging, not many really shed tears over his execution as he had been captured on CCTV moving around with an assault rifle and killing people during the Mumbai siege in different locations. Kasab's hanging also satisfied the blood lust of the right wing who wanted the government to take tough stand against Islamic terrorists. They had been rubbishing the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for lavishing hospitality on a killer whom they claim should have been shot against the wall. Social media had provided ample opportunities to them to rustle together bizarre facts to show how Kasab was more important than ordinary people of the country. Within few months of taking over as President, Pranab Mukherjee sent Kasab to the gallows.

Within three months of Kasab hanging, the country witnessed yet another capital punishment. This time around Afzal Guru, who was accused of helping the terrorists that attacked the parliament in December 2002. His unexpected hanging and the shoddy manner, in which the government went about it, outraged India's noisy civil society. Kashmir, where a tenuous peace holds after years of azadi movement, saw army and security forces imposing a claustrophobic curfew. Social media provide the only glimpse of the seething rage amongst the residents of Srinagar who seemed to give greater credence to conspiracy theories than the strenuous claims of the Indian government about the culpability of Guru in the most heinous crime of waging war against the state. Attack on parliament was considered to be such a rarest of the rare crime.

The government looked anything but surefooted. First, it told the nation that Guru's wife had been informed about her husband's hanging through 'speed post'. Expectedly the speed post reached his wife after he had been executed. Later, his family's demand to send the body to Srinagar for burial was expectedly turned down. The government obviously did not want Afzal Guru's burial to lend greater lung power and anger against the Indian state. New Delhi's response was a strict enforcement of curfew in the valley.

Afzal Guru's conviction has been fraught with controversies. He was one of those unfortunate few who are compromised by both the militants and the government agencies to work against each other. As the writer Arundhati Roy in an interview to magazine, Hardnews, said that the militants and the enforcement agencies share the same body fluids. It is quite similar to the plot that plays out in Leonardo DiCaprio's edge of the seat thriller, "Body of Lies" where the CIA and the terrorists are indistinguishable from each other.  Guru kept complaining that he was asked by a Kashmiri police handler to provide refuge to some people, who later proved to be terrorists on a mandate to attack the parliament. Guru did not get the kind of quality legal help that allowed another accused SAR Geelani to walk free. After this fact came out, Kashmiri bar association and civil society activists have been trading allegations about why he was made to fend for himself. There is yet again another conspiracy theory. This time it is not against the government, but it is targeted against the leaders of the Kashmiri movement, who, the theory goes, wanted a martyr in Guru to add new life to their cause.

What is not really clear is why did the UPA government hasten Guru's hanging and who finally took these tough and unpleasant decision? More so, Guru's hanging was fast tracked as there are so many others on death row, whose petition has been lying with the President. There are the killers of late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and then the unfortunate members of the gang of the forest brigand the famous sandalwood smuggler, Veerappan, responsible for blowing a landmine and killing 20 odd people. By hanging Afzal, all these others on the death row automatically come in that zone where the decision has to be taken. Some of them have to be hanged to ensure that the minorities and the people of the valley do not think that only they were targeted and the convicts belonging to the Hindu community were allowed to go Scott free. There were reports that the members of the Veerappan gang were to be next in the line for capital punishment when they sought relief from the Supreme Court. For six weeks, at least, their hanging has been stayed.

The question about who ordered these hangings remains unanswered. Some believe that giving punishment to the likes of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru knock the plank of the BJP's campaign against the UPA government for its soft handling of Islamic terror. Also, a decision of this nature also takes the wind out of the campaign of BJP's muscular Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who is nursing the ambitions of being the country's prime minister by projecting himself as tough, decisive against terror. Capital punishment to those who attacked Mumbai in 2008 and parliament in 2002 also brings closure to these cases that were giving their own spin to politics. The implications of the demand for death sentence may not be as significant as Bangladesh where the Shahbagh agitation is for capital punishment for those who committed crimes against humanity during the freedom struggle in 1971, but it was empowering certain kind of politics.

Interestingly in Bangladesh the DNA of the agitators is totally different. The demand for death sentence is against those religious elements that came in the way of country's freedom and subsequently threatened to subvert its democracy and national culture. Shahbagh endeavours to create a new narrative that challenges the existing notions of politics not just in Bangladesh, but all over South Asia. India, too, would not remain unscathed by the way people's protests are reinterpreting history and society.

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Sanjay Kapoor is the Editor of Delhi based Hardnews Magazine (www.hardnewsmedia.com). Hardnews is also the South Asian partner of Paris based publication, Le Monde Diplomatique.