Escaping death the mercy plea way

Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, who is said to have studied up to the fourth standard in his country, has finally written to the President of India asking for mercy. Kasab — who went about shooting indiscriminately, jumping walls and vehicles at will, to cast a spell of terror in the city — has written in neat Urdu telling the President curtly that he wants to be spared the gallows.

An involuntary chill ran down my spine when I saw the four-line note.

It is written on unlined paper and is as cold and clinical as the writer, who has expressed no remorse or offered any explanation for what he did. He knows he need not bother with the pretence as nobody in their right mind will ever feel sorry for him; nor is his plea likely to be accepted by the President. All he is doing is buying time to live.

He made his choice carefully. The other option was to file a review petition in the Supreme Court. Now, that would have come up for hearing and been rejected in a year or two, hurtling him firmly towards the hangman’s rope. Our courts may be famous for prolonging the delivery of justice but the record of disposal of mercy petitions by prisoners facing death sentence is far more frustrating. Looking at the fate of similar petitions up the order, Kasab may get to live a year or another 50 by fluke.

The state government has made politically correct noises saying it will ask the President to expedite this particular case. But, it turns out, the President is under no obligation to be influenced by any such persuasion or pressure. He may well take his own sweet time to decide, either in this tenure or the next, or the one thereafter, but hopefully within our lifetimes.

It is precisely this lassitude that Kasab is banking on. Till the President inks his mercy plea either way, he will live off the state exchequer, probably the only foreigner on death row to benefit from our over-indulgent legal system. Till then, he will be able to continue making faces at curious visitors peeping down the large looking hole in his anda cell as he enjoys doing, and generally thumb his nose at our stupidity and lofty notions of justice.

Kasab wrote out the mercy plea on September 13, just two days after he got the Supreme Court order, well within his seven-day deadline. It reached the home department on September 21 and was despatched to the home minister on the same day with an English translation and a two-page recommendatory note. The home minister will route the file through the chief minister and the governor to the union home ministry and thereon to the President. Each will ponder and deliberate on paper, attempting to bestow a needless legitimacy on the farcical ritual.

If Kasab’s plea is shredded, the Maharashtra Prison Manual 1979 lays down the execution formalities in painstaking, and at times gory, detail. It prescribes the exact length, thickness and quality of rope which is to be tested beforehand. And, in the exacting finality of our laws, it says: “As a rule, a bag of sand weighing one and half times the weight of the prisoner and dropped between 1.830 and 2.440 metres will afford a safe test of the rope.”

Such precision in minutiae seems ironic for a man who mowed down scores of innocents in a blink.