Capital punishment has been the most polemical subject in India over the decades. This article is not for the motion or against the motion. Its an amalgamation of several angles of viewing death penalty.
In India, death penalty is prescribed for murder, gang robbery with murder, abetting the suicide of a child or insane person, waging war against the government and abetting mutiny by a member of the armed forces. Capital punishment is also awarded under some anti-terror laws for those convicted of terrorist activities. Death sentence is imposed on the convict only when the court comes to the conclusion that life imprisonment is inadequate having regard to the facts and circumstances of the case. In 1980, in the Bachan Singh case, the Supreme Court propounded the “rarest of rare” doctrine and since then, life sentence is the rule and the death sentence the exception.
There is no statutory definition of “rarest of rare”. It depends upon facts and circumstances of a particular case, the brutality of the crime, conduct of the offender, previous history of his involvement in the crime, chances of reforming and integrating him into the society etc. The crime has to be viewed from various angles – manner of commission of murder, motive for commission of murder, anti-social or socially abhorrent nature of crime and magnitude and personality of the victim of murder.
The manner in which the death penalty is being given in a large number of cases raises a serious question. Are trial courts in India giving a go by to the ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine?
The number of death sentences pronounced has been very high despite the “rarest of rare” doctrine that limits the scope of awarding capital punishment.
According to an Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) report — The State of Death Penalty in India 2013 — Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 370 death sentences, followed by Bihar (132). But sentences for 4,321 convicts were commuted from death penalty to life imprisonment during this period.
The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is – Do we deserve to kill?
India is the largest democracy in the world with the privilege of having a parliamentary form. The history of actual executions divorces India’s strength. When we talk about heinous crimes like rape, terrorism or serial killing, the first thing which comes to our mind is to hang them. But, hanging is neither the solution nor a trademark for justice in India.
April 27, 1995, Auto Shankar, a serial killer, was executed in Salem, Tamil Nadu.
Dhananjoy Chatterjee (2004) was hanged for the murder and rape of a 14-year-old girl in Kolkata. Only one rapist has been hanged in India till now and then so-called Beti Bachao and women empowerment slogans are chanted.
Thereafter, there have been only three executions – Mumbai terror attack case convict Ajmal Kasab in 2012, Parliament attack case convict Afzal Guru in 2013 and Mumbai serial blasts case convict Yakub Memon in 2015.
Also, another notable fact is that the first execution in Independent India took place in 1995. Why was no criminal hanged between the period of 1947-1995? Nobody has answers to this question.
Don’t we Indians believe that actions speak louder than words? Then why have only four criminals been were executed out of those thousands waiting in death row? This just shows India’s vulnerability by letting criminals free. Most of the criminal cases in India are also led free in the court by bribery where not abolishing death penalty forms a utopia of justice. Even the four executions which took place did not make a difference in society. You might argue that it’s quite obvious as the quantity is very less. However, it should have created a certain amount of fear in the citizens before committing such barbarity. Even after the hanging of a child rapist and murderer in 2004 about 17,728 rapes were reported in 2004 itself. Whereas, most of the cases of rape are unreported.
Even after the execution of other criminals, did the crimes stop? Did the heinous individual think twice before committing? No, rather the crime increased in respective years of the four executions.
So what difference is death penalty creating? None, because the history of India’s interaction with death penalty governance has lost the common man’s faith perhaps has embarrassed the ideology of 1.3 billion. Until and unless Indian courts will improve their dealings and governments of central and state level will improve its tracking, death penalty is like icing on a half baked cake. In this critical scenario, in a country like India, the debate shouldn’t be on how brutal or how deserving death penalty is for a criminal, the debate should be on the misuse and implementation by death penalty.
A version of this post was first published on State Herald.