As Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju has joined Akali leaders in demanding mercy for Devinderpal Singh Bhullar, and others may join issue in the run up to the actual hanging of the Khalistani terrorist, it is relevant to understand the reasons behind the Supreme Court’s decision to reject his plea for commutation of death penalty to life imprisonment, on April 12, 2013. One of the convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, P Perarivalan, has already upped the ante with an application under the Right to Information Act, demanding to know the grounds on which his clemency petition was rejected by the President.
The Bhullar judgment is significant as the Supreme Court has upheld the “enormity of the crime” as a valid ground for denying mercy, tweaking the restrictive concept of “rarest of the rare” which is inadequate to cope with burgeoning organised crimes against innocent citizens. This has restored the fundamental premise of justice, namely, that punishment must be linked to the crime itself, and not awarded as a proportion of penalties for crimes of a specific genre.
Briefly, the September 10, 1993 attack on the car cavalcade of then Youth Congress president Maninderjit Singh Bitta involved 40 kgs of RDX and caused the death of 9 persons and injuries to 17 others; Bitta survived. The designated court found Bhullar and four associates of the Khalistan Liberation Front responsible. Bhullar tried to escape to Canada, but was arrested at Frankfurt Airport and deported to India. Thereafter his death sentence was upheld by superior courts; the President rejected his mercy petition in 2011, after which he sought relief from the apex court on grounds of inordinate delay in carrying out the sentence.
The apex Court rejected the medical reports which said Bhullar had become mentally disturbed while living on death row for eight years. His advocate KTS Tulsi presented records from Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital and the Institute of Human Behaviors and Allied Sciences of Delhi to show that Bhuller’s sentence could not be carried out. Important death row cases likely to be impacted by the verdict include those sentenced in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, Beant Singh assassination case, and 15 others.
A bench of Justices GS Singhvi and SJ Mukhopadhya observed that the apex court’s earlier judgements allowing long delay as a ground for commutation of death sentence (Triveniben, 1989) cannot be invoked in cases where a person is convicted for offence under TADA or similar statutes. “Such cases stand on an altogether different plane and cannot be compared with murders committed due to personal animosity or over property and personal disputes,” the bench said.
This is the crux of the matter. Terrorism is the wanton, premeditated killing of innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, viz, a bus stand, market place, roadside eatery, cinema hall, train, religious place, and so on. It aims at maximum casualties, and a gory spectacle to strike terror in society at large. The scale of premeditation involved in planning and executing such crimes – from buying guns, bullets, bombs, reconnoitering the site – place it in a different category from ordinary human crimes of greed or anger; hence there is no legitimate ground for compassion in such incidents of brutality. Men in uniform routinely sacrifice their lives battling with this scourge. Citing Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab (1994) 3 SCC 569, the Court made special mention of the spread of terrorism in the world in general and India in particular: “The monster of terrorism has spread its tentacles in most of the countries. India is one of the worst victims of internal and external terrorism”.
Recognising this reality, the Supreme Court has undertaken a necessary course-correction in the public discourse on death penalty, mostly run by foreign-funded human rights organisations. It rightly pulled up activists for raising the bogey of human rights for terrorists who had shown no respect for lives, yet expected mercy for themselves. The Judgment is a landmark as the Court has taken the view that the use of bullets, bombs and other weapons of mass killing for achieving perverted political agendas and waging war against the State will be viewed with displeasure.
Thus, in Devender Pal Singh Bhullar Vs. State of N.C.T. of Delhi [Writ Petition (Criminal) D. No. 16039 of 2011], the august Court emphasised that human life is the most precious gift of the almighty, and hence it is said that if you cannot give life, you have no right to take it. It cited Justice Fazal Ali, member of the Constitution Bench in Maru Ram v. Union of India (1981) 1 SCC 107 (main judgment by Krishna Iyer), that deterrent sentences are imposed to “(1) to protect the community against callous criminals for a long time, (2) to administer as clearly as possible to others tempted to follow them into lawlessness on a war scale if they are brought to and convicted, deterrent punishment will follow, and (3) to deter criminals who are forced to undergo long-term imprisonment from repeating their criminal acts in future”.
It is pertinent that in its 35th Report, the Law Commission of India had said India cannot risk the experiment of abolition of capital punishment, and that “crimes are only to be measured by the injury done to society”.
Finally, as a kind of salutary warning to those seeking commutation on grounds of inordinate delay, the Court pointed out that one reason why the Bhullar case lingered in the President of India’s office from May 2005 to May 2011 was because of the numerous mercy petitions made on his behalf by various political and non-political functionaries, organizations and individuals from other countries. The Court did advise the Government of India of the need for speedier action in future.
NitiCentral.com, 16 April 2013
