By Garga Chatterjee
Yakub Memon was hung at the early hours 30th July 2015, after being convicted for his role in the 2003 Mumbai bomb attacks that killed hundreds of innocent people. His conviction strongly rested on his `confession`™ to the police, that used to be admissible under TADA, an infamous black-law that was widely denounced for being in violation of basic human rights and protection from false framing. This hanging in Maharashtra was preceded by live-telecast hectic activity in Lutyens Delhi. Let`s leave aside for now those who were for or against Yakub`s hanging. The amount of self-congratulation and nation-congratulation among the `unaffiliated` must have made the 68-year old Bharatmata blush. Her eyes must have widened with excitement and moistened with pride as she saw Attorney General and others doing their duty far past the midnight hour. “Grandmother, what big eyes you have!” cried today`™s child who still believes that grand-mothers are necessarily loving creatures. We know how that one ends.
I was late to return home on the night of the 29th of July. Yakub Memon would hang in a few hours. On the streets of Kolkata, very late at night, there were men at work. Human beings, like you and me, were toiling very hard in Kolkata`s streets. This road work, the product of their labour, is something whose fruits I enjoy on a daily basis. From my years of conversation with many of them, I know that their shift often goes on past sunrise, after which they do not necessarily get to rest. That some human beings may work at night when many others are sleeping is nothing exceptional. It is quite common-place. It is another matter that the essential service they provide is grossly under-compensated. It is only when those who never work this hard at any hour of the day, let alone at 3 am or 4 am, deign to do something like that, it acquires the elements of a spectacle. Words like duty and conscience do the rounds. Such selective adulation is an insult to road-makers, truck-drivers, sex-workers and millions of others who spend their nights under oppressive and life-threatening conditions, not for any greater glory to `nation`, not to stealthily `encounter` or `disappear` others, but for mere survival. I remember what my rough-living friend Janam Mukherjee once commented after witnessing an altercation between a Bhadralok in Kolkata (a tribe I belong to) and an auto-driver -`That man (the bhadralok) has not worked a single day in his life`. By work, he meant the kind of toil that an auto-driver and his tribe has to go through `“ hourly, daily, monthly, yearly, generationally. It is no wonder that the heart-warming spectacle of `rarest of the rare` 3 am work has been a runaway hit with people like us here, there and everywhere. Like when gods almost smell the armpit of humans in Dalit villages between exotic vacations. Like when gods embrace and bow to some old woman with high-power spectacles in the crowd between approving the sell-off of entire coastlines to friends-in-need. We rock.
Barring the few men and women who were part of the hectic late-night Lutyens saga not as part of job-description but as part of ethico-moral duty, the rest agreed that justice was done. The Indian Union stands in a minority among UN member nations in having death-penalty. A majority of the countries that have practised death penalty in the last 10 years call themselves `Islamic Republics` of some form. The Indian Union is the sole nation-state in South Asia that does not have Islam as the state religion but also practise the death penalty in law and practice. It is the only one that seriously considered bringing children under the ambit of death-penalty. We must have reasons to be very proud.
But not all citizens of the Indian Union share this kind of `collective conscience`™. Parties with huge support-bases like the DMK, AIADMK, Akali Dal, etc have opposed the death penalty publicly and have led strong movements against it in specific cases. If anything, they were responding to public sentiments against hanging. So not all collectives in the Indian Union have the same kind of conscience. In this nation-state of routine `encounter` killings, unmarked mass-graves, death in custody by torture, `disappearances` and other examples of Khaki manliness that have never been given the death-sentence by any court of the land, the late-night events in Lutyens Delhi will `go down in history` as the `dance of democracy`. We pay for the upkeep of this and we will continue to pay for this. And then we will go to our gods and expect them to be on our side.
Actually, there is already an unsaid ban on death penalty in the Indian Union for certain kinds of perpetrators – something that is barely concealed. While death penalty is the most visible form of murder by the state, `encounter`™ is the commonest form and `disappearance`™ is probably the most brutal form. I am nearly 100% confident that there wont ever be death penalty for `disappearances` in Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Manipur and elsewhere, for any serving policeman for crimes done during performance of duty, for targeted massacres of Dalits by forward-castes, for cases involving crimes by BSF, CRPF and Army personnel, for murder of `Indians`™ who don`™t consider themselves Indians, for a single encounter killing, for `secret killings`™ by the SULFA and the Ikhwan, for air-bombing Indian citizens in the Indian city of Aizawl, for the killers of Thangjam Manorama, for any of the massacres of civilians in Kashmir, for rioter of Mumbai 1992-93, Bhagalpur 1989, Delhi 1984, Hashimpura 1987, Kashipur-Baranagar 1972 and many many other crimes done at the sacrificial altar of Bharatmata. As a Bengali Shakto and a worshipper of Ma Durga, blood-sacrifices in the name of false goddesses sicken me to the core.
The list of innocents whose killers will never get justice and the list of those who are regularly framed in false cases for crimes they didn`™t commit is reason enough not to leave something like death penalty in the hands of the powers-that-be. It`™s not about criminals, it is about the amount of power over people`™s lives that a state that is not worthy to be trusted should have. In such circumstances, the death penalty becomes one more tool of naked power, enforced with supreme confidence by those who are the most powerful in the Indian Union, and best-protected from the consequence of their actions and hence believe that they will never hang.