Terrorists should not be pardoned at any cost
The competitive politics of “misconceived compassion” towards terrorists —as senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Jaitley recently observed —has seriously undermined the security and integrity of the country. This kind of parochial but dangerous trend has been witnessed across the country, and more recently in Tamil Nadu when the State Government announced its shocking decision to set free assassins of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi after the Supreme Court commuted their death sentence to life-term. Thankfully, the Government will not be able to immediately implement its plan because the apex court has aborted the move. There are legal issues involved that have to be settled. It was bad enough that the killers got away with a life sentence because of delays on the part of the executive to dispose of their mercy petitions. For more than 10 years, the Government sat on their plea for clemency, allowing them to move the court for mercy on that premise. They ought to have been hanged, not only because they were killers of the country's former Prime Minister but also that they were hardcore terrorists. They were given the death sentence by a trial court, and the apex court upheld it. This should have been enough reason for the Government to expeditiously decide on the mercy plea after the killers wrote to the President for commutation of capital punishment. Because it did not, it stands accused today of deliberately allowing the killers to get away. But, it was absolutely wrong of the Tamil Nadu regime to take the relief further and decide to release the convicts. Perhaps it wanted to be one up on its rival, the DMK, whose supremo M Karunanidhi had been for long seeking pardon for the assassins. State Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, who has, unlike Mr Karunanidhi, always taken a strong stand against the terrorism unleashed by the liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam which executed Rajiv Gandhi's killing, appears to have succumbed to the demands of regional politics. Terrorists are bound to believe that they can get away with the assassination of high profile personalities, including a former Prime Minister.
An even dangerous fall-out of these compassionate gestures is that it gives rise to a cacophony of demands for other convicts placed in similar positions, and invites serious as well as spurious allegations of bias. For instance, there are people, especially leaders from Kashmir, who have begun vociferously questioning the hanging of Afzal Guru. Their contention is that Guru was not given the benefit arising out of the delay in the disposal of his mercy petition. and that his capital punishment too should have been commuted. While no tears need be shed on Guru's hanging — he deserved the sentence — the same holds true for the killers of Rajiv Gandhi as well.
This brings us to the oft-repeated need for a uniform policy to dispose of mercy petitions, and settle them within an established time-frame. If only the executive had not delayed its decision on the mercy pleas, hardcore criminals such as the assassins of the former Prime Minister and associates of forest brigand Veerappan, among others, would not have escaped the noose and be destined to live life in prison at the expense of the tax payers.