Terror attack killed death pen debate

BY ANTO AKKARA

A  suitcase bomb at the High Court in New Delhi on the morning of September 7 claimed 13 lives and left more than six dozen others injured. The victims of the blast at the entry pass counter included a young law intern, hawkers fighting for their vendor licences to be restored, and a senior pilot of a national airline.

However, few noticed a major casualty of a different kind: the blast has virtually snuffed out the fledgling debate on the propriety of the death penalty. The Catholic Church in India, as elsewhere, opposes capital punishment.

With Islamic militant groups claiming responsibility for the blast, media networks instantly switched off the heated live TV debates on the death penalty which had been growing by the day.

Led by the half a dozen English news channels and followed by the many independent news channels in different languages, the death penalty had become “the news” in India in late August.

The hot debate was triggered by twin developments in Chennai, capital of southern Tamil Nadu state, on August 30.

That day the high court of Tamil Nadu state stayed the execution—slated for September 9—for eight weeks of three men convicted in connection with the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The assassination had been carried out by a Tamil woman suicide bomber from Sri Lanka at the behest of the Tamil Tigers, with logistical support provided by the accused.

Simultaneously, the legislative assembly of Tamil Nadu state—with 72 million Tamil-speakers who have close connection with the oppressed Tamils in Sri Lanka—unanimously passed a resolution recommending commuting the death penalty of the accused as the three had already completed two decades in detention.

The next day, Omar Abdullah, the Muslim chief minister of troubled Jammu and Kashmir state, used Twitter to ask how the country would have reacted if the legislative assembly of the Muslim majority state had passed a similar resolution to save the life of Afzal Guru, a Muslim who was sentenced to death for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001.

At the same time, there was also a clamour for sparing the gallows for Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar, a Sikh sentenced to death for a bomb blast in Delhi in 1993. According to human rights activists, Bhullar had resorted to terrorism after his family suffered in the state crackdown on Sikh separatism in northern Punjab state starting in the late 1980s.

Seizing on these political developments, human rights activists promptly demanded that all death row convicts be spared execution.

They highlighted protracted trials and procedural delays as government sat on mercy petitions for years. As many as 22 death row inmates, with their death sentences upheld by the federal supreme court, live with the prospect of execution as the federal government is sitting on their mercy petitions.

Though India executed almost 40 convicts between 1975 and 1995, there has been only one state execution in last 16 years, carried out in 2004 for a multiple murder convict.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a fundamentalist Hindu party, has repeatedly demanded the hanging of Muslims convicted for the audacious attack on parliament. Many see that as part of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda. Nonetheless, public opinion for abolishing capital punishment had been gathering momentum, with the Indian media focusing on the growing number of nations abandoning the death penalty.

When Haritha, the 19-year-old daughter of Gandhi assassins Murugan and his wife Nalini (whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment) appeared on TV to plead for sparing the life of her “loving” father, public sentiment in India seemed to turn against the death penalty.

Presently a second-year biomedicine student at Glasgow University, Haritha had spent her infancy in prison after being born there—Nalini was one month pregnant at the time of the Gandhi assassination.

Then came the Delhi high court bomb blast, and suddenly the screams for the death penalty became shriller.

The competing Indian media—always eager to increase their viewership by playing to the gallery—abruptly put the curtains down on the debate on the death penalty, and switched to the “national security” message.

Hawkish nationalists argue that India cannot afford to be a “soft state” in dealing with terrorists, and argue that only capital punishment can deter terrorists.