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Yakub hanging: Change the law, don't condemn death penalty

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Pawan Khera
Pawan KheraJul 31, 2015 | 08:39

Yakub hanging: Change the law, don't condemn death penalty

Yakub Memon was hanged early Thursday morning following a long and arduous legal battle which continued right up to the wee hours of the morning of his execution. The twitterati and to borrow from a leading voice in the media, the liberati worked hard too in fighting their battles on different platforms against the execution. Those in favour of the execution too did their bit to pay their hosannas to the court. The reasons on both sides are either humanitarian or political or communal.

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Those battling from the humanitarian ivory towers offered convincing arguments against death penalty. "If rape is not the punishment given to a rapist, why should death be the punishment for a killer?" asks a leading lawyer on twitter. On its own merit, this is a strong argument except that rapists may not have been ordered to be raped by the law but they have been awarded death penalty in some of the more heinous cases. An eye for an eye is not the premise on which capital punishment is based. India does not follow the Code of Hammurabi. It is not about retaliatory justice but it is about preventing private citizens from taking the law in their own hands if they see the state not rising to the occasion in punishing the perpetrator. Death penalty is given in heinous crimes, not only as a deterrent but also in order to assuage the sentiments of millions who get outraged on the heinousness of a crime against humanity. The communal narrative around Yakub Memon is so shrill that even sane humanitarian voices end up stoking the narrative. The case is a simple terror case where justice was meted out to one of the perpetrators of the ghastly bomb blasts in 1993. Most of us are not equipped with the legal technicalities to opine on the conclusions drawn by the Hon'ble Supreme Court. Some of the political voices sounded ethically confused. If you have an ethical issue with capital punishment, as law makers do something to change the law instead of condemning death sentence on a particular case, and in the process muddying the waters by rendering to the case political and communal overtones. Where were these "sane" voices when urban India was baying for the blood of Nirbhaya's killers? I would like to see how many of us would find it politically correct to participate in a candlelight vigil for her killers, when they are about to be hanged.

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"There is no evidence that death penalty serves as a deterrent…" stated a popular politician on Twitter. Fair point. Just because no crime has come down because of punishment, should we abolish all punishment? Do we have an alternative which has been proved to be a more effective deterrent? If the bad ones in the society should not be punished, should the good ones get rewarded? Only the crimes that are committed get recorded and noticed. For every terror attack, there are several which have either been foiled by effective and preemptive intelligence or aborted by terrorists themselves fearing stringent crackdown. The effectiveness of a law lies in crimes not committed for fear of that law.

Another politician demanded death penalty for the demolition of Babri Masjid, 1984 riots and 1992-93 riots. He perhaps forgot to add 2002 riots and encounter killings of innocent people in Gujarat. There may be several perpetrators of several heinous crimes deserving the gallows and the complicated judicial system may have often got delayed or subverted in some of these cases. Does this mean we should methodically subvert the law even when it is meting out justice? Because several surgeries go wrong in hospitals, should we question them when they perform a good surgery?

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Right wing loonies feeling macho-istic did their bit in robbing the discourse of an ethical dimension and attempted to reduce it to a communal one. Just as there are no good terrorists, there are also no good riots. If rioters and terrorists go unpunished by the state, there is always a danger of private retaliation. That is true for all rioters and terrorists - Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi, Colonel Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya included.

Those among both communities trying to communalise death penalty deserve this piece of data. Of the 170 odd executions that took place in independent India, only 16 were Muslims.

And finally, in the run-up to the much debated execution of Yakub Memon, India has shown a large heart in some of its finest minds standing up to defend the right to life of a man who was responsible for killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children. Instead of running such people down, we need to salute them and perhaps learn from them a thing or two about magnanimity.

Last updated: July 31, 2015 | 11:16
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