India’s policy on the death penalty is awaiting review. A hanging may appear to provide ready catharsis after a terror attack but it will not solve the real problems. A meticulously-researched monograph (2009) by lawyer and independent researcher Bikram Jeet Batra tells us that between 1948 and 1949, when C Rajagopalachari was Governor General, his office received 384 mercy petitions from or on behalf of persons sentenced to be executed for committing murder. Out of these, Rajaji commuted 66 to life imprisonment and rejected 318. He went into the cases closely, often asking for clarifications from government.
Among those petitions he rejected, sending the petitioner to the gallows, was the one for Nathuram Godse.
It is important to know what the victim in ‘the instant case’, thought of the death sentence. In 1940, Gandhi was asked: “Do you consider death sentence to be against your principle of ahimsa?” He answered: “I do regard death sentence as contrary to ahimsa. Only he takes life who gives it. All punishment is repugnant to ahimsa. Under a State governed according to principles of ahimsa, therefore, a murderer should be sent to a penitentiary and there given every chance to reform himself. All crime is a kind of disease and should be treated as such.”
Would the history of crime and punishment not have been changed — and for the better — if the assassin of a man who held that view had been sentenced to life imprisonment?
Gandhi’s third son, Ramdas Gandhi, certainly believed so. He wrote to Rajaji, asking the Mahatma’s associate to save Godse from the gallows. I have not seen Rajaji’s reply to Ramdas Gandhi but have the impression that Rajaji explained to Ramdas Gandhi that while he recognised the Mahatma in the victim, the law did not. He also said that pardoning the killer of a Mahatma would be unfair to the killers of those who were not regarded as Mahatmas. And so, he could not interfere with due process. The new Indian State had not claimed it was running the country according to the principles of ahimsa. It acknowledged the Mahatma to be its moral lodestar, but had not recognised him as its law-maker. Godse was hanged in November 1949.
Source:
Hindustan Times, Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor. September 9, 2011
