Abolish Death Penalty India: Cabinet clears Bill allowing death penalty for hijackers

Friday, February 6, 2015

Cabinet clears Bill allowing death penalty for hijackers

Cabinet also approves changes to Companies Act, 2013, a move designed to make it easier for companies to do business in India

FIRST PUBLISHED: WED, DEC 03 2014. 12 05 AM IST

Tarun Shukla | Prashant K. Nanda | Shreeja Sen

New Delhi: The Union cabinet on Tuesday cleared a strong anti-hijacking Bill that provides for stringent punishment, including the death penalty, for the hijack of Indian airplanes, 15 years after an Indian Airlines aircraft was commandeered by terrorists during the tenure of a previous Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) government. Also approved were changes to the Companies Act, 2013, a move designed to make it easier for companies to do business in India. “The (anti-hijacking) Bill provides death punishment for the offence of hijacking, where such offence results in the death of a hostage or of a security personnel; or with imprisonment for life and the moveable and immoveable property of such persons shall also be liable to be confiscated,” the government said in a statement late in the evening. Indian Airlines (now Air India) flight IC-814 was hijacked on its way back to Delhi from Kathmandu half an hour after take off on 24 December 1999.

Taken over by five Pakistani hijackers with 180 passengers and crew, the flight was forced to make a detour to Kandahar in Afghanistan. The hijacking drama continued for several days with family members of passengers pressuring the Indian government to help free the hostages. An agreement was reached for the release of the passengers in exchange for three jailed militants—Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar. Then foreign minister Jaswant Singh personally escorted the freed militants to Kandahar—a move that was widely criticized. “After the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 in December, 1999, it was felt necessary for providing the award of death penalty to perpetrators of the act of hijacking. The incident of 9/11, where aircraft were used as weapons, also created the need to further amend the existing Act,” the government added. The Anti-Hijacking (Amendment) Bill, 2010, was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in August 2010.

The cabinet on Tuesday also approved the introduction of the Companies (Amendment) Bill, 2014, in Parliament to make changes to the Companies Act, 2013. The amendments will make it easier for companies to do business, a major goal of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Once approved by Parliament, it will also ensure severe punishment for those collecting illegal deposits from the public. The 14 proposed amendments, which were approved by the Union cabinet on Tuesday, also include provisions to ensure that fraud beyond a certain threshold be mandatorily reported by the auditors to the government. Another highlight of the changes proposed is the removal of the requirement of the minimum paid-up capital for companies. An aspect which could question the transparency regime is the proposal to remove public inspection of board resolutions. Yet another provision suggested is to allow writing off of past losses prior to declaring dividend. The cabinet also cleared draft legislation on coal block auctions to replace an ordinance that was promulgated to auction coal mines cancelled by the Supreme Court.

The Bill to replace the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Ordinance, 2014, is likely to be placed before the Parliament during the ongoing winter session. “Cabinet has approved the bill,” Press Trust of India quoted an unnamed person familiar with the matter as saying after the Cabinet meeting in New Delhi. The Supreme Court had in September cancelled allocation of 204 coal blocks, including 42 operational mines and another 32 ready-to-start blocks. The government, through the ordinance, started the process of auctioning at least 74 operational or ready-to-operate blocks with the target of allocating them by March, well before the deadline set by the Supreme Court for companies operating mines to wind up operations. The ordinance has been opposed by the central trade unions, including BJP-affiliated trade union Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh.

Trade unions have jointly opposed the government’s proposal to allow private companies to mine coal and sell it in the open market, a right till now reserved with the state-run Coal India Ltd. Meanwhile, the government has already said that the 74 coal mines, which the government plans to auction to specific end-users in the first phase of bidding on 11 February, will not require any environmental clearances. The auction will be for the private sector, while state-owned companies will be allotted mines. The government had last week announced auctioning and allotment of 74 blocks in the first phase of bidding.

These blocks have the potential to produce 210 million tonnes of coal. The government had already made it clear that the number of mines a company can bid will be capped to avoid monopoly. Until 9.15pm on Tuesday, the government hadn’t issued a formal statement on this. The cabinet also approved amendments in the Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) Act, 1976, to enhance authorized and issued capital to strengthen their capital base and to bring flexibility in the shareholding between the central government, state governments and sponsor banks. The term of the non-official directors appointed by the central government will be fixed not exceeding three years, a cabinet note said. “The amendments will ensure financial stability of RRBs which will enable them to play a greater role in financial inclusion and meeting credit requirements of rural areas and the Board of RRBs will be strengthened,” the cabinet note said.

Regional Rural Banks were established under Regional Rural Banks Act, 1976, to create an alternative channel to the cooperative credit structure and to ensure sufficient institutional credit for the rural and agriculture sector. RRBs are jointly owned by the central government, the concerned state government and sponsor banks, with the issued capital shared in the proportion of 50%, 15% and 35%, respectively. The cabinet committee on economic affairs, which also met on Tuesday, approved four-laning of three national highways—Singhara-Binjabahal section of National Highway-6 in Odisha, Nagina-Kashipur section of National Highway-74 in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and Lucknow-Sultanpur section of National Highway-56 in Uttar Pradesh. These projects will cost the government over Rs.3,870 crore. The cabinet also approved signing of a treaty on transfer of sentenced persons between India and Qatar. It will facilitate Indian prisoners imprisoned in Qatar or vice-versa to be near their families for serving the remaining part of their sentence and will facilitate their social rehabilitation. PTI contributed to this story.

Source: http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fySchfV0x3qEiy0RyQycFJ/Cabinet-clears-Bill-allowing-death-penalty-for-hijackers.html [last accessed 06.02.2015]

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The Death Penalty Scenario in India

India is one of the 193 countries that retains death penalty. There has always been a few imminent judges who have pronounced compelling verdicts upholding the rights of prisoners on death row. There has been increasing debate in various platforms advocating abolition of death penalty or at least to rethink sentencing policies in India. The Indian government has however always been committed to the retention of the death penalty, irrespective of their political ideology. India has voted against a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) draft resolution on the use of death penalty, saying it goes against the statutory law of the country where an execution is carried out in the "rarest of rare" cases. India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. Most recently, there is an outrage over child rape and murder.

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement. Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

In the recent past, there have been a few empirical studies (mainly four) conducted with prisoners on death row. This has highlighted the situation of prisoners on death row.

(1) Most recently the India Exclusion Report 2017-18 found that fair trial rights and guarantees are reduced to a nullity and seeks to breach the citadel of the collective silence. It further said that Convicts on death row in India belong to groups marginalised along the axes of caste, religion, economic vulnerability and educational deprivation, and their fair trial rights, though a part of the Right to Life guaranteed by the Constitution, are invariably non-existent, a survey of 371 out of the 385 persons living under the death sentence and their families has revealed.

(2) Another study was The Death Penalty Research Project (2015) which was conceived with an aim to document the socio-economic profile of prisoners sentenced to death in India and map their experience within the criminal justice system.

There were two other academic studies that were done conducted by Dr. Reena Mary George –

(3)“Voices of prisoners surviving the death row in India” (2014) done through the University of Vienna under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinprecht (Sociology) and Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak (Law and Ex-United Nations Rapporteur on Torture). George’s research highlights three salient features, namely: poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation are antecedent to death penalty; death penalty is a constructed account by the state machinery; and prisoners on death row situate dignity higher in the juxtaposition of death and dignity.

(4) Another one “Death Penalty – A Human Rights Perspective” (2009) done through the University of Mumbai under the guidance of Retired Justice Hosbet Suresh. This was a study in Maharashtra with the objectives to firstly study the impact of death penalty on the social, mental, and physical being of the inmate and secondly, to study the perception of opinion leaders on death penalty with reference to human rights. All the above reports are public documents.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics 2015, there are 101 prisoners sentenced to death. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 49 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period. As of today, almost in 2019, the figures are unknown through government statistics, however, research centres claim this figure to be around 371 convicts. During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Most recently while commuting a sentence in Supreme Court (2018), Justice Joseph did not seek the reconsideration of the Bachan Singh judgment, but only sought to re-examine the purpose and practice of the death penalty, and whether as a punishment, it serves any goal at all. In other words, the death penalty can continue to remain constitutionally valid because of the Bachan Singh judgment, but its application in substantive cases coming before the court must be restricted to only those cases which meet the criteria laid down in that case.

While updating the blog and conducting my own empirical studies, I observed the heinous nature of the crimes that were committed and thought about the families, about their loss, about the victims who for no fault of their own died. If I lost my relative or a dear friend, would I still oppose death penalty and would I still advocate to abolish the death sentence? Having worked in the criminal justice system and also having the seen the other side, where often it is the marginalized, vulnerable and oppressed who are on death row makes me want to advocate for abolition of this punishment. Victims should definitely get justice for their loss, for their pain. No one should escape the rule of law. As long as humanity exists; crime will exist. Should we not re-consider our sentencing policies?

Reena Mary George

Abolish Death Penalty India

Friday, February 6, 2015

Cabinet clears Bill allowing death penalty for hijackers

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