The utter mindlessness of it all

It’s a measure of the completely crazy paralysis of governance India faces that even mercy petitions and death sentences are now dependent on electoral cycles. Recently, the President of India rejected the mercy petition of two individuals, Mahendra Nath Das of Guwahati, Assam, and Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar of Punjab. Predictably the controversy about Afzal Guru’s mercy petition, still pending before the President, was also reignited. Guru has been convicted for his role in the December 2001 terror attack on Parliament.

Consider the three men and their lives and crimes. Guru’s death sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2004. The UPA government is reluctant to act on it, and to decide on the mercy petition. The President’s view on a mercy petition is guided entirely by the Union government and the home ministry. The Congress is worried Guru’s hanging could evoke hostility in the Kashmir valley, and a broader Muslim anger in northern India. This may or may not be true, but it has stayed the UPA’s hand.
Bhullar was implicated in a Khalistani terror strike in central Delhi in 1993. He has spent eight years on death row, and has had his mercy petition decided upon only now. Since state elections are due in Punjab in early 2012, both Congress and Akali Dal politicians have protested and urged Bhullar’s sentence be commuted to a life term. In short,  they want the President’s “final” decision reviewed.

Das is not a political extremist. His was a one-off crime. In 1996, he murdered a professional associate in a fit of anger and surrendered to the police immediately, walking into the police station to turn himself in. That even such an open and shut case — one in which the murderer confessed to his crime from moment one — has not reached conclusion in 15 years speaks volumes for India’s justice system.

Das is doubly unlucky. He has spent a decade and a half in prison. He will now be hanged; since he is not an ULFA militant — and for all it matters the Assam election has just got over — there is nobody to take up his cause in emotional, sectarian or regional terms.

Three things stand out. First, if Bhullar and Guru are saved from the gallows it will set a very worrying precedent. It will mean that in a time of regional politics, coalition compulsions and fragmentation of electoral constituencies, it has become virtually impossible to hang any heinous criminal should he be even extraneously associated with a political cause — be it religious nationalism, state separatism, Maoism, whatever.

Second, if Bhullar and Guru (and Das) are indeed sent to the gallows then, equally, it will set an unfortunate precedent. What sort of civilised criminal justice system keeps a man suspended in death row for close to a decade, if not longer? Oxymoronic as this may sound, even a murderer sentenced to death has some residual human rights. He is entitled to a quick and speedy decision on his mercy petition. He deserves to know whether he will live or die.

Third, flowing from the previous point, it is necessary to give the President a deadline to decide upon a mercy petition. If placing such an imposition on the head of state would be considered rude, then the deadline could be transferred to the Union home ministry. As of now, a convict sends his mercy petition to the President’s office. The President forwards it to the Union home ministry. The home ministry forwards it to the state government in the jurisdiction of which the crime took place.

What stops the Union home ministry requiring the state government to get back in 90 days? What stops the Union home ministry requiring itself to get back to the President in 120 days?
A death penalty is a precious privilege that only some democratic countries accord their governments. There is an obligation on the government to handle it with care and sensitivity, lest it be seen as upholding a system and a regime that treats human life — even the life of a person guilty of murder — with crude nonchalance.
In the case of Bhullar, Das and Guru, the delay in deciding on their petitions makes one almost sympathetic to their predicament. It is astonishing what a confused government can achieve.

The writer is a New Delhi-based columnist
Emails: malikashok@gmail.com
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