Both were acts of terror but the case of Afzal Guru is very different from that of the three Tamils condemned to death for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The belief in Tamil Nadu is the ending in the two stories need not be the same. Many political parties and social outfits here insist the three convicts must not meet Guru’s fate.
The most striking difference between the two cases is that while a majority of political parties, particularly BJP, have been braying for Guru’s death for involvement in the Parlia-ment attack of December 2001, none is asking that the hangman be called for the three Rajiv convicts — Perarivalan, Santhan and Murugan. In fact, the general demand from parties is that they either they should be set free or their sentences should be commuted to life imprisonment. However, a few Congressmen in Tamil Nadu occasionally make noises about the delay in carrying out their executions but nobody takes them too seriously.
The national refrain is that Guru was hanged for political reasons since the Congress wanted to deny the BJP a campaign plank about national security, which was why the saffron party was repeatedly asking why Guru had not been hanged yet. In Tamil Nadu, political observers believe that carrying out the death sentence of the three Tamils would scuttle whatever chance the Congress and its allies in the state stand in 2014 general poll.
The courts deliver the death sentence but the executive, for pure political reasons at times, decides on the execution. “This decision on Guru too could have been for creating a jolt and diverting attention. Ironically, the government which has been indecisive on scores of major issues and events is at last claiming decisiveness through this act of sheer cowardice”, says Sadanand Menon, writer and rights campaigner.