TV JOURNALIST Sagarika Ghose said those worried
words in a column last week. She was referring to
a controversial verdict in which a hundred
persons were handed stiff sentences, including
death, by an anti-terror judge for alleged
involvement in a string of blasts, which killed
257 people in Mumbai in 1993.

It must be a record of sorts. Of the 123 actually
accused, 100 were sentenced, 12 to death, 20
given life terms, 15 of them with rigorous
imprisonment. And what are the names of those who
will die? The question was vestigial. Ghose and a
majority of Indians who have followed the murky
trial know the answer. In her own words: "Among
others, Memon, Turk, Tarani, Shaikh, Mukadam,
Ghansar, Malik, Pawle, and Khan. What are the
names of those who will serve life terms with RI?
Among others, Shaikh, Khairulla, Qureshi, Memon,
Rehman and Kadar. In the 1998 Coimbatore blast
verdict this week, the main accused Abdul Nazar
Mahdani has been acquitted, but SA Basha, founder
of al-Umma has been found guilty, along with 157
others. Muslim after Muslim has stepped up to be
convicted and sentenced. Soon India’s jails will
be choc-a-block with Muslims."

One of the convicts in the Mumbai case was
popular film star Sanjay Dutt. He got six years
RI, admittedly for possessing a gun to protect
himself from a nightmarish communal carnage,
which preceded the blasts. Shiv Sena hordes and
policemen owing allegiance to their leaders had
summarily killed most of the 900, mostly Muslims.
The Justice Srikrishna Commission investigated
the carnage and specifically named 31 policemen
and Shiv Sena activists, all based on eye-witness
accounts. It was to be in vain.

Ghose has written a brave column. She knows the
consequences. "To voice any doubts about the long
delayed (blasts) trial is considered
’anti-national’, ’unpatriotic’ or
’pseudo-secular’." Yet she and senior lawyers she
has quoted have cast doubt on the blast case and
how it is a shame on the judiciary. "How can
justice be thoroughly done through the mountains
of documentation, the sheer bulk of facts and
contradictions, the long delayed trial and lapses
in human memory that must have faced poor Justice
PD Kode?“Lawyers have called the case a”mistrial“and a case of”playing to the gallery".

Writing in the Sunday Express, respected
journalist Maseeh Rehman recalled how several
members of the convicted Memon family had in fact
returned from Karachi, where they had reportedly
fled, to prove their innocence. The father of
Tiger Memon, the man who actually masterminded
the blasts, was livid over the cold-blooded
murder of fellow Indians by his son.

Rehman was the chief correspondent for India
Today in Mumbai when the blasts occurred. He
recalls how Tiger Memon, who had fled to Dubai
had become an outcast in his own family after
they learnt of his involvement in the serial
blasts. "After the bombings, Tiger turned
evasive, and it gradually dawned on them that the
reports from Mumbai were true - a Memon was
behind the outrage.

"This provoked father Abdul Razzak to physically
thrash Tiger in front of the others soon after
they landed in Karachi. The strongly built,
hot-tempered Tiger took the beating quietly (just
as he later accepted their decision to return to
India), though, as Yakub said in court, Tiger
warned him: "Tum Gandhiwadi ban ke ja rahe ho,
lekin wahan atankwadi qarar kiye jayo ge (You are
going as a Gandhian, but over there you will be
labelled a terrorist)." The upshot is that Yakub
Memon faces the hangman’s noose for keeping his
faith in India’s fabled democracy and judiciary.

A dozen death sentences in one trial is not a
joke. Has India become a more bloody-minded state
than its founders had envisaged? An Indian judge
perhaps sought to correct this nagging perception
in his own awkward way. He had to order the
deportation of a suspect wanted by the British
police for raping and killing an English girl.
The judge set an implausible condition. The
deportation, he declared, should not lead to the
man’s execution in UK! Now either the judge is
not aware that unlike India, Britain abolished
the last remnants of death penalty in 1998, or
the reports quoting his condition for deportation
were wrong.

Actually, there is a persistent trend
internationally to abolish the death penalty and
India is among the countries that retain it. A
pity in Gandhi’s land. Studies cited by Amnesty
International suggest that death penalty is more
likely to be imposed on those who are poorer,
less educated and belong to the marginalised
segments of society. Moreover, since death
penalty is irrevocable, there is an inherent risk
of error in its application.

In the 1983 India’s Supreme Court ruled that the
death penalty can only be applied in the "rarest
of rare" cases. Since this is not further defined
and no clear guidelines exist, the use of capital
penalty is largely dependent on the
interpretation of this phrase by individual
judges.

There is room for bias too. Indian authorities
have opposed the death penalty in some cases but
condoned it in others. In 2004, the government
requested mercy for Indian national Ayodhya
Prasad Chaubey, who was executed in Indonesia on
August 5, 2004 on drug-trafficking charges, but
the government is understood to have condoned
other executions of Indian citizens.

Even more seriously, Amnesty says the number of
executions carried out in India is unknown. PUDR,
an Indian human rights group, called on the
government in 2005 to make public all information
on executions since independence in 1947. Indian
media have reported that there have been 55
executions since independence. PUDR has
challenged this figure, stating that according to
a 1967 Law Commission report, at least 1,422
people were executed between 1953 and 1963. Who
were these people? It would be interesting to
find out.

There is no consistency across Indian states with
regard to disclosure of death penalty statistics.
The Delhi Deputy Director General of Prisons
stated it was not “in the public interest” to
publish such figures. Well-known death sentences
in India are of persons convicted of
assassinating major political leaders, as in the
killings of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and
Rajiv Gandhi, or for crimes under ’terrorist’
laws, as in the attack on the Indian Parliament
in 2001. These sentences were by their nature
very well known throughout the country but
hundreds of other sentences have been awarded
without considerable attention.

The recently published legal casebook, Can
Society Escape the NooseŠ? The Death Penalty in
India, contends that of the thousands of murders
committed each year in India, it is the poor and
underprivileged and persons belonging to minority
groups who eventually receive the death sentence
and are executed for their crimes.

The point raised by Sagarika Ghose appears to
blend with the overall state of affairs. But
neither she nor Maseeh Rehman seemed to be
perturbed by the fact that India is a rare
democracy to retain capital punishment. Even its
mistaken role model in the controversial war on
terrorism - Israel - had declared capital
punishment illegal way back in 1954.

The important question raised by Ghose about the
inequality of justice and implied communal bias
can be addressed without being bloody-minded in
our own version of retribution. She herself asks:
"As Muslim after Muslim has walked to his death,
as ’terrorist’ after ’terrorist’ has been taken
away for life, what about the Hindu mobs and
Hindu police officers who were named and indicted
by the Justice Srikrishna Commission that
inquired into the bloodcurdling 1992-93 riots of
Mumbai in which 900 died?" It’s a valid question.
Justice Srikrishna indicts 31 “trigger-happy”
policemen: among others, the names here are
sub-inspector Vasant Madhukar More, police
inspectors Patankar and Wahule, Jt Commissoner of
Police RD Tyagi, not to mention political names
like Gopinath Munde, Madhukar Sarpotdar and Ram
Naik of the BJP, all accused of inciting mobs.
Aren’t riots too not an act of terror? A
terrorist is defined as one who kills innocent
civilians for a political purpose. So aren’t
those Hindu rioters too not ’terrorists’ and
shouldn’t they too face the same law as Muslim
’terrorists’? To answer the key question raised
by Ghose, yes, riots too are an act of terror.
But can they be addressed by spilling more blood
even if by supposedly legal means?