Abolish Death Penalty India: Court hands death sentence over deadly 1984 anti-Sikh riots (Delhi)

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Court hands death sentence over deadly 1984 anti-Sikh riots (Delhi)

20 Nov 2018

A court in India has sentenced to death a man convicted of murder during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that left nearly 3,000 people dead, following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The 1984 carnage erupted just hours after Prime Minister Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards. The violence, which occurred mostly in the capital New Delhi, lasted three days when Sikhs were raped, murdered and burned alive, while their homes and businesses were torched. Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey on Tuesday handed the death sentence to Yashpal Singh and a life sentence to Naresh Sherawat, both for murder, rioting and other charges.

A Sikh man being surrounded and beaten during the anti-Sikh riots in 1984

The pair were convicted last week of killing Hardev Singh and Avtar Singh, two men in their 20s, during the riots. The verdict was pronounced in the high-security Tihar Jail due to security concerns after the convicts were attacked on a New Delhi court's premises last week. Singh and Sherawat "took out the victims, who were hiding inside a room, injured them with dangerous weapons with the intention to kill and threw them down from the first floor", causing their deaths, the judge said while delivering the punishment, according to The Hindu newspaper. Relatives of victims rejoiced after the judge announced the ruling, the first since 1996, which follows the setting up of a special probe in 2015. They said they were relieved that "justice has been finally served" and hoped that next up would be two former Congress ministers, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar.

1984 Delhi Anti-Sikh Riots: Yashpal Singh Awarded Death Penalty, Naresh Seharawat Life Imprisonment

Government-appointed commissions in the past failed to prosecute more than a handful in minor cases. India's top investigating agency blamed Kumar for inciting the mobs, but he was acquitted by a court in 2013. Amarinder Singh, Punjab's chief minister, welcomed the ruling in a Twitter post, saying that he hoped "others involved in the attacks are also soon brought to book for their horrendous and inhuman acts". Welcome the first conviction by a Delhi court in the 1984 riots case. Justice has finally been meted out to the perpetrators of the heinous crimes. Hope the others involved in the attacks are also soon brought to book for their horrendous and inhuman acts.— Capt.Amarinder Singh (@capt_amarinder) November 20, 2018 Harsimrat Kaur Badal, a politician from Punjab, said the verdict gave Sikhs "a ray of hope". "We will not rest till the last murderer is brought to justice," she added in a post on Twitter. At 20 million, Sikhs make up a little under two percent of India's population of 1.25 billion.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/india-court-hands-death-sentence-deadly-1984-anti-sikh-riots-181120140514754.html (Accessed 25 December 2018)

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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

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Court hands death sentence over deadly 1984 anti-Sikh riots (Delhi)

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