The fate of two criminals is in the news. One is the convicted Gujarat minister Mayaben Kodnani, who was sentenced to 28 years for her part in one of the 2002 massacres. She was given bail on health grounds and is out of jail. This month, the Gujarat government said it would side with her and against the special prosecuting body, which wanted her in jail.
The other is Surinder Koli, convicted of one of the most horrific crimes we have heard of India in recent years.
Describing his acts, Harsh Mander wrote in the Hindu that Koli, who was then 33, was “convicted of killing at least 16 children, raping them dead or alive, chopping them into pieces and eating their flesh.”
The Supreme Court has stayed Koli’s execution till October 29, but the fact is that India’s state has been executing people at a high rate under the current president Pranab Mukherjee. The president is the final arbiter in death penalty cases and his rejection of appeals means that the convict is killed. A national daily reported on February 11, 2013, that Mukherjee had sent more people to the hangman in his first seven months than in the previous 15 years.
Koli’s lawyers say that his confession was taken through torture and that even if true it shows a man who is disturbed.
Mander wrote: “does even such a man merit any kindness? Is this not one case in which the world is better off without him? But his case — gruesome as it is — only reinforces my resolute opposition to the death penalty. If a crime results from a psychological disorder then, however gruesome and abhorrent the transgression, surely the humane, civilised, socially decent and constitutionally valid recourse would be to treat the problem, not eradicate the victim. What Koli needs desperately is clearly a doctor, not a hangman.”
I agree with Mander and don’t think hanging people solves anything. I would also say that Kodnani, who is in her 60s, being given bail is not a bad thing.
I’ve written about this before and in India, the demand for death to convicts ensues from a desire for vengeance not justice. This is a sign of a primitive society, and we must accept that even educated Indians are not exempt from the feeling. It would not be incorrect to say that some of the more savage solutions for curbing crime originate from them.
In our parts, public lynching is not uncommon and, like the awful incidents with Blacks in the United States a century ago, it is acceptable by the public to wound or kill those who offend by stealing or by misbehaviour. This is also a product of that same desire for vengeance, and the emotion is felt strongly and collectively.
The crowd takes offense even when it is not the victim, and feels entitled to join in handing out punishment. Mobs form dangerously quickly on the subcontinent and carry with them a primitive like-mindedness which makes them lethal.
This attitude extends to politicians and political parties who legislate law against such behaviour, but are helpless before their emotions.
An example is the incident in 2005 when a former minister, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ravishankar Prasad, was shot in the arm by a man, Munna Rai, on a stage during a rally. The BJP men on the stage battered Rai, who died from his injuries.
A parallel phenomenon is the coming together of middle-class groups who show up at protests against violent crime. These are not identified as being mobs, because they are immediately less violent, but actually remain equally savage in their intent. Their demands are for such things as hanging and castration.
After the conviction of those accused in the infamous case of rape and murder in Delhi, CNN reported: “The same crowd outside the courthouse that cheered Friday’s death sentence for the four adults turned their ire on the juvenile. The crowd chanted, ‘Hang the juvenile.'”
In 2012, Frontline magazine reported that 14 judges sent an appeal to the president seeking his intervention to commute the death sentences of 13 convicts in various jails. The report said that the judges “have appealed to the president because these 13 convicts were erroneously sentenced to death according to the Supreme Court’s own admission.”
The president was also told that two men had in fact been wrongly killed. Ravji Rao and Surja Ram, both from Rajasthan, had been executed on May 4, 1996 and April 7, 1997 after flawed judgments. Given this, it is remarkable that our politicians and our media should be clamoring, as is obvious to any observer, not for clemency but execution.
My beat as reporter was sessions court and I can say from experience that judges are drawn from society and feel its prejudices and emotions. We have a strange qualifier for the death penalty. It is only to be invoked in cases that are “rarest of rare”. But it is difficult to explain or understand what this means and why one murder is different from another.
Writing in Mint, my friend the abolitionist Yug Mohit Chaudhry wrote: “In the Bachan Singh case (1980), five judges of the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. At the same time, they severely limited its use and held that the death sentence can only be given in the rarest of rare case, where the alternative option of life imprisonment was “unquestionably foreclosed”, where there are no mitigating circumstances, and where evidence on record eliminates the possibility of the convicts’ reformation. Youth, a quintessential indicator of the potential for change and reform, was recognized as a mitigating circumstance, and the court explicitly stipulated that “If the accused is young or old, he shall not be sentenced to death.”
Poverty and the personal circumstances of the offender (childhood abuse, abandonment, etc.) have also been held to mitigate the offense and merit the lower punishment by subsequent judgements.”
He continues: “What purpose does the death penalty serve? There is no evidence that it deters murder more than imprisonment for life. In fact, the evidence shows the contrary. Hanging a few rapists will not make the streets safer for women, or make them more secure in their own homes.
It will, however, camouflage governmental apathy and provide a much needed distraction from the core issues of women’s safety. It will allow politicians to say that they are tough on crime against women and get away without doing anything at all to address the causes of such crime. It will also allow us to vent out righteous indignation, and then rest content with the misogyny around us. It is not surprising therefore that most feminists oppose the death penalty for crimes against women.”
I would like to end by quoting from Shakespeare. We were taught to memorise these lines Portia in Merchant of Venice without thinking in school. They make more sense to me as an adult.
“The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
(Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist)
