Supreme Court upholds death for Mumbai hotelier

The Supreme Court has upheld death sentence for a Mumbai hotelier, Ajitsingh Harnamsingh Gujral, for burning alive his wife and three children in his apartment in 2003.

“A person like Gujral, who instead of doing his duty of protecting his family kills them in a cruel and barbaric manner, cannot be reformed or rehabilitated,” the court said on Tuesday.

“The balance sheet is heavily against him and accordingly we uphold the death sentence awarded to him.”

Rejecting Gujral’s law suit challenging the Bombay high court verdict that held him to be worthy of only the extreme penalty, the court said he did not act on “spur of the moment provocation”.

There was no doubt that there was a quarrel between him and his wife, Kanwaljeet Kaur. The fact that he had stocked huge quantity of kerosene in  his house was indicative of his planning to eliminate his family in a “diabolical,  gruesome and dastardly manner”, the court said.

According to the prosecution, Gujral, who is from Ludhiana and settled in Mumbai, was a hot-tempered man.

“He was like a dictator in the family and dominated his wife and children in the family.  He used to ill-treat his wife and he had assaulted her twice with a leather belt,” the apex court said.
The couple had married 25 years ago.

Discarding the common perception that a case which is solely based on circumstantial evidence, capital sentence cannot be awarded to the  accused, the apex court stressed on the circumstances, demeanour of the accused and the statement by a witness who claimed to have seen him with his family during the time of the gruesome murders.

“A distinction has to be drawn between ordinary murders and murders which are gruesome, ghastly or horrendous. While life sentence should be given in the former, the latter belongs to the category of rarest of rare cases and hence death sentence should be given to Gujral,” the court added.