The Supreme Court has dismissed Yakub Memon's latest petition and it is almost certain that he will be hanged till death. Memon may be dead even before this newspaper reaches you. The idea behind writing this piece is not to justify or criticise the death penalty. The judges sitting in the Supreme Court have made the decision and I believe they were in the best position to make the decision after painstakingly going through thousands of pages of records before them.
I was one of the reporters who covered the 1993 bomb blasts case. We saw Yakub Memon, the man who has not seen the world outside jails for past 21 years, in flesh and blood and sometime even interacted with him in the designated TADA court at Arthur Road jail. There is a story of Yakub Memon that does not exist in any of the court records and it needs to be told.
The 1993 bomb blast trial was one of its kind. Two barracks in the Arthur Road jail were converted into a court. The barrack which was earlier used for political prisoners was used as the designated TADA court. There were 123 accused facing trial, including actor Sanjay Dutt who had to visit the court every 15 days because he was out on bail. Even on days when he attended the court as part of the procedure, he would be least interested in the court proceedings. This applied to almost all the accused facing trial, but for Yakub Memon. Yakub attended court everyday. He not only attended the court, but paid attention to details. He would know who would be the next witness in the box. He prepared his own notes, listed questions to be asked to witnesses, and handed them over to his lawyers.
One of his lawyers once told me that not all his questions were important and some of them were not even legally tenable. But for 13 years, Yakub took a keen interest in preparing his defence, because he believed that he had achance.
He was represented by several lawyers, including Majeed Memon, his assistant Subhash Kanse, and Farhana Shah, who was also the lawyer on record for Sanjay Dutt. Finally, he hired another senior lawyer Harshad Ponda to appear for him. He expected his lawyers to sit with him before appearing in the case and discuss the strategy with him. He always carried all the relevant papers with him. It was around 2003 that the final arguments were about to start. Advocate Majeed Memon was still appearing for Yakub, but he felt that Majeed Memon did not give him sufficient time to prepare his defence. So he decided to change his lawyer and hired services of Mr Ponda, who made the final arguments for Yakub.
It was around 1996 that he started suffering from schizophrenia. Once in a while he would become very aggressive and start abusing people. The last time I saw Yakub getting excited in the court was the day when the then TADA judge Pramod Kode pronounced his sentence. “Tiger bola tha tu ch#**#* hai jo wapas ja raha hai”, Yakub yelled as he was being escorted out of the court by policemen.
Apart from these sporadic incidents, he was a soft-spoken, cool-headed guy. He spoke to everyone and still kept to himself.
It was well known in TADA court that Yakub Memon was not arrested near New Delhi railway station. Rather, he was arrested by the Nepal police in Kathmandu, transported across the border in India by road and secretly flown to Delhi. While the CBI maintained that he was arrested it August 1994, Yakub claimed that he was in CBI custody since July that year. He also convinced seven of his family members to come back and face the trial. But nobody knows why the Memons decided to come back after staying away for more than a year. Yakub always said that he came back because he was innocent and he would get justice. His wife Raheen's affidavit filed to the Indian embassy in Dubai in 1994 said that the family felt their lives were in danger in Pakistan. Why Yakub, who otherwise took so much interest in his case, did not make too many efforts to bring the facts of his return to India on court's record will probably remain one of the unsolved mysteries of this saga.
