Chennai: After having exhausted all legal options to come out of prison, Nalini Murugan, a life convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, has knocked on the doors of the United Nations Human Rights Commission seeking its intervention in asking the Indian Government to release her from prison since she has completed her jail term.
In the petition sent to the High Commissioner of the UNHRC in Geneva in Switzerland, Ms Nalini has alleged that she has suffered discrimination at the hands of the government of India and Government of Tamil Nadu for “more than 16 years since I had become eligible to be released from prison as early as in 2001.”
The life convict had filed number of petitions in the Madras high court seeking release from prison on grounds of good conduct, but the Tamil Nadu Government has been opposing her plea contending that she is a life convict and she has to spend her life in jail.
Normally, a person sentenced to life is released in 14 years. Claiming that she is the longest serving woman prisoner in the country, Nalini said even Gopal Vinayak Godse, a conspirator in the Mahatma Gandhi assassination case, was released from prison in 1965 though he was sentenced to “deportation for life.”
“I have been denied the benefit of early release from prison, which is available to all life convicts in the country, only on the ground that I was convicted in the case of assassination of Rajiv Gandhi…I have not been considered for early release from prison only on political grounds, not on legal grounds,” Nalini said in the petition sent through her lawyers.
