“When Nalini, the A-1 (prime accused), could be pardoned for political reasons, why is my innocent son, who is only A-18, on the death row? He has spent the last 20 years of his prime life in prison for no fault of his and now this news that
President Pratibha Patil rejected his mercy plea is shattering”. Arputham Ammal, in her early 70s, has trekked to dozens of political leaders, courts, prisons and newsrooms in these last two decades to plead the case of her son Perarivu, one of the three men on the death row for involvement in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.
When the Tada court in Poonamalee near Chennai in 1998 pronounced the verdict sentencing to death, all the 26 accused, half of them Sri Lankan Tamils and the rest locals, there was shock among not just the rights activists, but even jurists. There were many doubts regarding the course of investigation. On appeal, the Supreme Court confirmed death for four and acquitted the rest. Not just that; there is still a “multi-disciplinary monitoring agency” supposedly going into the “wider conspiracy” behind the assassination — it was constituted in 1998 based on the final report of the Jain Commission and no one knows if this is still active.
To quote from the mercy petition from Perarivalan, “death row prisoner 13906” in Vellore prison, addressed to President of India soon after the SC confirmed his death sentence in 1999, he was “tortured” to make a confessional statement that he had procured the nine volt batteries for the belt-bomb of suicide woman killer Dhanu and helped assemble the bomb.