The hanging on Thursday of Yakub Memon in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case has sharply divided the country. But no less significant than the factors concerning the merit of the sentence is the administrative and judicial mess that attended the convicting, sentencing and the eventual hanging of the accused.
Without disregarding the demands of due process even an iota, the state should have conducted itself with greater certainty and without lassitude in the matter of this horrific terrorist crime that claimed 257 innocent lives. The trial court pronounced its verdict in 2007, 14 years after the crime that shook India. It is preposterous that so much time should have been allowed to elapse. It took another eight years to hang the accused in the midst of heightened drama after a last minute appeal.
As with almost everything else, India’s system of governance and justice dispensation cannot resist the impulse to drag matters to the bitter end, in the process glossing over formalities and in fact not permitting adequate time for arguments back and forth from the full spectrum of public opinion. Something similar also transpired in the case of the hanging of Afzal Guru for the attack on Parliament House.
Steps must be taken speedily to ensure that pronouncing the judgement, especially in sensitive cases, is not permitted to drag on. This is after ensuring standards in the judiciary that takes up matters at the trial stage. The sentencing also appears to have been marred by arbitrariness in the case of Yakub Memon.
The appeals process also deserves to be made tighter without losing the element of judicial fair play. And once the sentencing is done, the issue of disposing of mercy petitions, which in recent years has emerged as an all important factor as it tends to get laden with social and political concerns, must be made subject to a time constraint with a limit on the number of times it is permitted.
In the Yakub case, there appears to be critical failures on all the above counts, leading to the widespread impression that justice was not done although Yakub Memon was guilty. He was, however, convicted on the basis of statements of his co-accused, a provision permitted only under Tada. It might also strike many as extraordinary that just one man — one who did not handle weapons or explosives — was given the death sentence. The Yakub case should become the starting point for removing the death sentence from our laws. Apart from the issue of ethics, that may help fine tune discussions about sentencing and pardoning.
