Why Yakub Memon's hanging won't quench India's blood thirst

A certain gloating has accompanied the rejection of each appeal and every petition that lawyers and counsels for Yakub Memon put up before the Supreme Court over the last few days. From some members of Parliament to journalists - leave alone the understandable anger of families of 257 victims of the 1993 Mumbai blasts - a certain bloodthirstiness has taken over the national mood. Yakub Memon, actually, stood little chance.

Restraint

Perhaps it is for the best that he has been hanged. As India becomes richer - although that can be contested, considering the way the economy is going - and more powerful, it is also becoming much more vengeful. Interestingly, it is the much more aspirational urban middle-class that seeks an eye-for-an-eye. Somehow, when you're poorer and need to depend on each other in times of trouble, you're probably much less likely to enjoy the cathartic drama involved in watching a man unwillingly walk to his death.

That is why only six members of Parliament, from a full 900 or so in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, attended the Law Commission's public consultations on the abolishing of the death penalty in early July - Kanimozhi of the DMK, Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor of the Congress, Varun Gandhi of the BJP, Majid Memon (and early counsel for Yakub Memon) of the NCP and Ashish Khetan of the Aam Aadmi Party.

It is not known what the influential Law Commission is going to say when it gives its report next month. Suffice to say that most of those who participated in the consultations, with the exception of the Supreme Court lawyer Dushyant Dave (no relation to Justice Anil Dave who rejected Memon's curative petition a few days ago) were against the death penalty. The gathering also included people like Julio Ribeiro, the man who successfully dealt with the insurgency in Punjab in the wake of Operation Blue Star, as well as the first chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah.

Even if the Law Commission believes that India should abandon the death penalty in keeping with the belief that death-by-hanging only plays to the gallery and is never a deterrent, it will be too late for Yakub Memon. However there are others on death row, including those like Devinder Singh Bhullar and Balwant Singh Rajoana whose mercy pleas have been rejected - the first, accused of conspiring to kill the Congress leader Maninder Bitta in 1993 is so traumatised from his many years in prison that he has become schizophrenic and needs to be restrained in a mental hospital in Delhi.

Justice

This is not the time or place to go into the Yakub Memon vs Afzal Guru cases. Suffice to say that justice has hardly been seen to be served on both counts. Afzal Guru was even denied the last-resort curative petition; it was one more reason for the people of Jammu and Kashmir to feel that there exist separate rules for people from that state.

As for Yakub Memon, nobody, not even Ujjwal Nikam, can answer why Memon returned from Pakistan in 1994, with bag and baggage and a pregnant wife. He told his handlers in the CBI that he experienced "ghutan" or suffocation in Pakistan. His brother Tiger Memon told Yakub that he was welcome to return to India if he wanted to become a Mahatma.

Of course the commutation of death to life sentence was never a serious option. Narendra Modi's BJP was elected to power last year to take decisive action, not indulge in bleeding heart reconciliation. The fight against terror begins at home, which is why attorney general Mukul Rohatgi, over the last week, fought tooth and nail against the idea of forgiveness.

Struggle

In fact, to all those, especially in his own party as well as in the RSS who seemed worried that Modi's reaching out to Pakistan, for example at Ufa, went against the party's hard-line on Pakistan, the hanging of Yakub Memon is sure to dispel those doubts.

As for the Congress, the less said the better. Considering the party chief forgave her husband's assassin, a brave act if there was one, it is mystifying why she didn't find the moral courage to take on the BJP on Memon. The Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi's metaphorical applause of the rejection of his mercy petition is proof of the fact that the quality of mercy escapes him.

Only the Communist parties, with their mercy petition to the president to save this man from this bloodthirsty death, which was also signed by a number of judges and eminent lawyers as well as civil society, have shown that the fight is worth fighting. That even if you lose, all is not lost.

The truth is that the hanging of Yakub Memon will change India. For some it may be the beginning of a brave, new world. For others - like me - a bit of our souls have been lost forever.