How a lax Maharashtra government let a killer walk free

In West Bengal, Dhananjoy Chatterjee was hanged to death at the crack of dawn on August 14, 2004, for raping and killing a school girl who lived in the building where he worked as a watchman.

Now, more than a decade later, Maharashtra prison authorities demonstrated exemplary generosity and granted parole to Sajjad Mughal, the security guard who was sentenced to life imprisonment for molesting and murdering 25-year-old law professional Pallavi Purkayastha on August 9, 2012.

He then jumped parole and did not return to jail on May 28, when he was required to. Since then, Sajjad has simply vanished into thin air, leaving egg on the face of you know who.

Pallavi, once a national-level swimmer and working as a legal adviser, was soon to get married. Sajjad, a resident of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir’s Baramulla district, was a watchman at the Himalayan Heights apartment complex where she lived.

Sajjad had stolen the keys to Pallavi’s apartment when he had accompanied an electrician there earlier. The electrician was called because Sajjad had purposely switched off the flat’s lights from the main junction, which was accessible to him.

On that fateful night in August 2012, Sajjad entered Pallavi's flat around 1.30am, and found her asleep. He tried to sexually assault her. Pallavi fought back, tearing a tuft of hair off Sajjad’s head, but he slit her throat and fled the building. He was arrested the next day from a railway station.

For everyone living in an apartment and accustomed to community living, calling the guard for everything, including plumbing and electricity issues, comes naturally. Sajjad’s crime sent a shiver down the Mumbai society and across the country because the ruse used by the protector-turned-predator left virtually all urban apartment dwellers vulnerable. His escape has now alarmed everyone.

Some of the authorities in Maharashtra have made efforts to appear shocked. But is there anything really shocking in Sajjad jumping parole? What else did they expect from a remorseless killer? If the Maharashtra prison authorities thought Sajjad would dutifully return to serve his sentence, they should look for flaws in their thought process; and not that of the killer.

Let’s face it; the flawed decision of letting Sajjad avail of parole in the first place, coupled with Maharashtra’s dogged intransigence of not punishing those responsible for letting the killer go off the hook, is too big an issue to ignore.

So who is to be blamed? The man who recommended the parole, or the one who signed the order? Or, shouldn’t the system that punished Peter to allow Paul escape scrutiny be blamed too? Where should the buck stop?

Two years ago, in February 2014, Devendra Fadnavis, as the then state BJP president, had slammed the Maharashtra government for granting repeated concessions (read parole) to actor Sanjay Dutt. Fadnavis had then raised a pertinent question about “granting special privileges to someone serving the sentence for a serious charge of illegal possession of arms.”

Now, Fadnavis was the Maharashtra chief minister when Sajjad was granted parole; and the killer made full use of the “special privilege”. Of course you cannot blame the chief minister for every administrative indiscretion of his bureaucrats, but has his handling of the issue not left a lot to be desired?

Fadnavis has responded to Sajjad’s escape by suspending then Nasik jail superintendent JS Naik, who had recommended parole for Sajjad.

But is this good enough? There is no word on the Nasik divisional commissioner who finally granted parole to Sajjad on the basis of Naik’s recommendations. Was Naik’s recommendation binding on the divisional commissioner? It cannot be. A jail superintendent, a junior officer, can only advise and cannot force a senior IAS officer, who in this case was the Nasik divisional commissioner Eknath Dawle.

How and why did Dawle, an engineer turned IAS officer who often tweets on good governance, accept the recommendation of an irresponsible jail superintendent is still unclear. Did Dawle fail to apply his mind?

The Maharashtra government hasn’t answered this question. But when top officers of Maharashtra recently hinted at the likely withdrawal of the divisional commissioner’s power to grant parole to convicts in the future, both security experts and politicians immediately understood the meaning.

There are some bigger issues as well. Sajjad is not the only one to have benefited from the generosity of the Maharashtra prison authorities. Beginning in 2008 and till 2013, Maharashtra has sickeningly and unfailingly topped the chart of maximum parole jumpers in India. In 2014, Maharashtra was only behind Punjab and Gujarat in this regard. In fact, between 2004 and 2014, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data confirm that Maharashtra alone has accounted for 2,292 parole jumpers against the pan-India figure of 8,900.

It would be worthwhile to check Google images if you find a new person manning your apartment’s gate.