You can’t help marvelling at how multifariously inept we are in matters of life and death. First, the President turned down two appeals for pardon — of pro-Khalistan militant Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar, convicted for killing nine people, and Assam’s Mahendra Nath Das, convicted of beheading a man in a fit of rage. The political process snatched up Bhullar’s cause, while the only thing keeping Das from being hanged was the lack of a hangman.

But this week, responding to an appeal by Das’ mother, the Guwahati high court temporarily stayed the execution and asked the Centre and the Assam government to explain why it took 12 years to respond to his mercy petition. Meanwhile in Delhi, oblivious of the dearth of hangmen, Baba Ramdev demanded that all corrupt ministers be hanged. If you put your ear to the ground, you could hear the mercy plea of our beleaguered justice system.
Of course our judicial process can be efficient, too. Why, just this week a Delhi court sentenced four youngsters for stealing `740 three years ago. “Keeping in view the young age of the convicts a lenient view is taken”, the court said. So two of them got seven years’ rigorous imprisonment. The other two got just four years in jail. Wasn’t that awfully kind? After all, they did steal `185 per head.
The guilty must be punished. We want justice, we bellow. Meaning we want justice for people like us — look at the sparks in our eyes, the flickering flames of our candles, our animated street marches and feisty TV appearances.
So this week there was a Bihar bandh to protest the police action against Ramdev’s rally in Delhi. Curiously, the same day as Ramdev got bullied, Bihar cops shot a boy in Forbesganj, jumped on his face and kicked him to death for taking part in a rally opposing land acquisition. Police guns and boots had killed four protesters in Forbesganj, including a child and a woman, but they were too poor, too downmarket to merit big protests.
These murderers in khaki will not get even the seven years’ rigorous imprisonment that the petty thieves got. And no question of the death penalty — that’s for the “rarest of rare” cases.
Not that we know what “rarest of rare” means. It depends on the judicial mood. The Supreme Court tried to define it as murder “committed in an extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical, revolting or dastardly manner”, or if the motive betrays depravity and meanness, etc. Didn’t help. Similar crimes got dissimilar punishments as power games took over.
So Das got death. He had charged up to Hara Kanta Das in a busy marketplace one morning in 1996, beheaded him and cut off his right hand. Then turned round — reportedly screaming “I have killed him!” — and walked to the nearest police station with the severed head and bloody machete to surrender. Where should he put the head and the weapon, he asked the cops. The cops proudly seized the weapon and arrested Das.
In 1997, Das was sentenced to death. In 1998 the high court upheld the verdict. In 1999 the Supreme Court turned down his appeal to commute it to life imprisonment. The SC said the murder was “extremely gruesome, heinous, cold-blooded and cruel”. It was “atrocious and shocking”. The court was particularly shocked by Das carrying the victim’s head “through the road to the police station (‘majestically’, as the trial court put it) by holding it in one hand and the blood dripping weapon on the other hand. Does it not depict the extreme depravity of the appellant?” It was thus a “rarest of rare” case and deserved death.
So a man who kills someone in a rage, doesn’t harm anybody else and voluntarily surrenders deserves to be hanged. We don’t know why he killed his victim.
Even after 15 years, we know very little about Das and the circumstances leading to the beheading. But his jailors and fellow prisoners like him. So much that the inmates have appealed for mercy. In December, Das had started a fast unto death to end the agony of waiting indefinitely for the gallows, but was forced to break the fast in hospital.
What aggravating and mitigating factors did the court examine before dealing out death? Or did it forget about them while dwelling on the blood-dripping head and machete? We know from the recent judgment on Dara Singh, Bajrang Dal leader convicted of burning alive Graham Staines and his sons Philip, 10, and Timothy, six, that these are important.
As the Staines slept in their car at night, Singh and his people had crept up, doused it with petrol, set it afire, and blocked their victims’ escape. “The court has to take note of the aggravating as well as mitigating circumstances”, the Supreme Court had said. And because “the intention was to teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity”, Singh deserved life, not death.
Similarly, last year the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of Santosh Singh, convicted of the rape and murder of Priyadarshini Mattoo, to life. The murderer is a lawyer and the son of an inspector-general of police. The court believed that because the murderer had meanwhile married and become “the father of a girl child” he deserved to live.
So our justice system believes that Dara Singh’s or Santosh Singh’s planned, spine-chilling, brutal murders were
not depraved acts but the beheading by Das, blinded by rage, was.
And it took 12 years for the President to reject Das’ mercy plea. If Das had political clout he would have been saved, of course.
In a democracy, we cannot have different standards of justice.
Whether you live or hang depends more on your class, your counsel, stereotypes, biases, public passion and political demands than your crime. As a mature democracy we must move from retributive to corrective justice. And abolishing capital punishment is the only civilised option.
 
Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com