Capital Punishment in India - History

History

Between 1975 and 1991, about 40 people were executed. The number of people executed in India since independence in 1947 is a matter of dispute; official government statistics claim that only 52 people had been executed since independence, but the People's Union for Civil Liberties cited information from Appendix 34 of the 1967 Law Commission of India report showing that 1,422 executions took place in 16 Indian states from 1953 to 1963, and has suggested that the total number of executions since independence may be as high as 3,000 to 4,300. At least 100 people in 2007, 40 in 2006, 77 in 2005, 23 in 2002, and 33 in 2001 were sentenced to death (but not executed), according to Amnesty International figures. No official statistics of those sentenced to death have been released.

On 27 April 1995 Auto Shankar was hanged in Salem, Tamil Nadu.

About 26 mercy petitions are pending before the president, some of them from 1992. These include that of Khalistan Liberation Force Bhai Davinder Singh Bhullar who was not convicted of any crime, the cases of slain forest brigand Veerappan's four associates—Simon, Gnanprakasham, Meesekar Madaiah and Bilvendran—for killing 21 policemen in 1993 ; and one Praveen Kumar for killing four members of his family in Mangalore in 1994.

It appears that judges in the lower courts are also getting increasingly averse to use capital punishment. For example in 2007 several high profile cases involving pre-meditated cold blooded murders, rape and murder of minors during rioting, terrorist bombings, etc. have not attracted the death penalty. But activists reveal a flaw, that due to the absence of sentencing guidelines in what constitutes "rarest of the rare", in some less gruesome murders, the lower courts have awarded death sentences possibly due to poor defence presented by the lawyers of the economically backward.

Afzal Guru was convicted of conspiracy in connection with the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of India upheld the sentence, ruling that the attack "shocked the conscience of the society at large." Afzal was scheduled to be executed on 20 October 2006, but the sentence was stayed. The Afzal case remains a volatile political issue.

On 3 May 2010, a Mumbai Special Court convicted Mohammad Ajmal Kasab of murder, waging war on India, possessing explosives, and other charges. On 6 May 2010, the same trial court sentenced him to death on four counts and to a life sentence on five other counts. Kasab has been sentenced to death for attacking Mumbai and killing 166 people on 26 November 2008 along with nine Pakistani terrorists. He was found guilty of 80 offences, including waging war against the nation, which is punishable by the death penalty. Kasab's death sentence was upheld by the Bombay High Court on 21 February 2011 and by the Supreme Court on 29 August 2012. On 21 November 2012, Kasab was hanged in the Yerwada Central Jail in Pune. His mercy plea was rejected by the president on 5 November and the same was communicated to him on 12 November. The events of his hanging were shrouded in secrecy.

On 5 March 2012, a sessions court in Chandigarh ordered the execution of Bhai Balwant Singh Rajoana, a singh from Babbar Khalsa, convicted for his involvement in the assassination Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. The sentence was to be carried out on 31 March 2012 in Patiala Central Jail, but the Centre stayed the execution on 28 March due protests from Sikhs all around the world for unfair execution and denial of human rights by the government.

On 13 March 2012, a court in Sirsa, Haryana, condemned to death the 22-year-old Nikka Singh for raping a 75-year-old woman and later murdering her by gagging her mouth with a shawl and strangling her neck with her salwar on 11 February 2011. "The imposition of the death sentence was most appropriate in this case. The court has held that it was a cold-blooded murder and where rape was committed on an innocent and hapless old woman," said Neelima Shangla, the Sirsa additional district and sessions judge. "The rape and cold-blooded murder of a woman, who was of grandmother’s age of the accused, falls in the rarest of the rare case." The court held that Nikka Singh was a "savage" whose "existence on earth was a grave danger to society" as he had also attempted to rape two other village women.

In June 2012, it created quite a storm when it became known that Indian president Pratibha Patil commuted the death sentence of as many as 35 convicts to life near the end of her 5 year term as the president including 4 on the same day(2 June). Further, it caused embarrassment to the government when it came to light that one of these convicts Bandu Baburao Tidke- convicted for the rape and murder of a 16 year old girl- had died 5 years ago due to HIV.