JUST TEN days before they were to be hanged, Rajiv Gandhi’s killers breathed a sigh of relief with the Madras High Court staying their execution for another eight weeks on August 30, 2011. The stay came after an unprecedented resolution was passed by the Tamil Nadu Assembly urging the President to consider clemency for the three assassins.
Perarivalan, Murugan, and Santhan have been behind bars for twenty years, out of which eleven long years passed in the hope of clemency, as the President along with the Rashtrapatu Bhavan took eleven years to decide on the mercy petition. The case will now see another eight weeks of legal drama.
The otherwise deeply divided Tamil Nadu assembly did not take much time in amplifying the emotional appeal of the convicts and thus passing the above mentioned resolution. J. Jayalalitha who had stated few days earlier that constitutionally it’s not in her hand, strongly supported the resolution claiming to be the custodian of Tamil flame. What the Tamil Nadu assembly has done is merely express a sentiment cutting across party lines.
According to the house the public sentiments in Tamil Nadu are at a peak but India is a country where the judiciary is higher than anything else and we shouldn’t try people at the bar of public opinion. Thus matters of criminal justice shouldn’t become matters of political discussion.
Taking a cue from the motion in Tamil Nadu, J&K chief Minister Omar Abdullah stirred a controversy on twitter, asking if the J&K assembly had passed such a resolution for Afzal Guru (convict in Parliament attack case), would the reaction had been as muted. Reading between the lines one gets a feeling that the J&K CM is trying to regain lost grounds in the state by making such provocative statements. But at the same time one cannot deny that he raised a serious and genuine concern and that there cannot be separate yardsticks for different regions. Thus, the action by Tamil Nadu Assembly and the Madras High court has invited a series of such resolutions that can be passed across the country. If public sentiment is to have bearing in these matters then tomorrow we will have people in Gujarat rising up in arms to demand mercy for those convicted in ghastly murders in 2002 communal riots.
The politicisation of the issue by Tamil Nadu Assembly and Omar Abdullah is one thing but along with it the problem with the president’s house and the central government that take years to turn down mercy petitions needs to be addressed.
In any system based on the rule of law, there is a legal process and courts get to make decisions. In the case of the Rajiv’s assassins there is a legitimate grievance that they have been left between life and death for 11 years and Madras High court is the forum for them to go and voice their grievances. If the lawyers succeed in persuading the Madras High court or the Supreme Court on that matter they will get a reprieve because there is a legal process. But it is not for the assembly to sit around mounting political pressure because everyone will then be asking for clemency of their convict on the basis of their religious affiliation and in the end the criminals will be worshipped like ‘Mahatma’.
The politicians in this country rather than fighting capital punishment on the regional grounds should come together and oppose it on the basis of principles.
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