MANOJ JOSHI - Yakub Memon Should Not Be Hanged
in cases of terrorism, courts and officials usually respond to the blood lust of society. People accused of terrorism, even those peripheral to the crime, are sentenced to death and hanged. In this category comes Afzal Guru, who, as the evidence clearly showed, was a side-show in the Parliament House attack case. Yet, somebody needed to hang since the actual perpetrators had been shot dead..
Don’t get me wrong on this, I support the death penalty –
for rapist-murderers, child killers, terrorists and even acid-throwers. But I
go with our Supreme Court’s caveat, that it should be reserved for the “rarest
of rare” cases. Yakub Memon, who could be executed on July 30th for
his role in the Bombay blasts of 1993 does not fit that criterion.
Punishment in a civilised democracy must balance
between retribution on behalf of the victim and the possibility of the
rehabilitation of the criminal. And, of course, it must meet the requirement of
proportionality, in other words, the punishment must fit the crime.
In my view, Yakub Memon was a second-level actor in
the conspiracy and not deserving of what is called the “supreme” punishment.
The main conspirators are Dawood Ibrahim, his brother Anees, Yakub’s elder
brother Mushtaq “Tiger” Memon and the unknown ISI officers who helped them to
stage the horrific Bombay blasts of 1993 that took the lives of 257 people. All
of them are hiding in Pakistan. There were also others, such as the ten
small-time hoods who actually planted the bombs, others who were involved in
landing the RDX explosives and storing them at various locations in Mumbai.
Yakub is not innocent. He was aware of the conspiracy and
even aided it, but he was not the main player. More important was his behaviour
subsequent to his escape from India and his role in exposing the Pakistani hand
in the blasts.
Yakub’s return
Just before the blasts on March 12, 1993, the Memon family
slipped out of Mumbai on a flight to Dubai via Karachi. During the Karachi
stopover, they slipped out and entered Pakistan without any immigration
formalities. As the heat built up, they were whisked away to Bangkok and
brought back to Pakistan after a few days, traveling on Pakistani passports
with new identities. Nearly 17 months after they fled, in August
1994, Yakub was dramatically arrested in New Delhi along with six members of
his family, which included three women. However, Tiger and another brother,
Ayub, remained in Pakistan.
The government hailed it as a big catch. Before the
magistrate who remanded him, Yakub said that he had returned of his own
volition to surrender before the Indian authorities. The police, however,
showed him as being arrested at New Delhi railway station and the
media was told that he had been sent on a clandestine mission to trigger blasts
on Independence Day. Privately, police sources acknowledged that Yakub had been
“arrested” in Kathmandu. In reality, he and his family were pushed across the
border on July 28 and interrogated by the Intelligence Bureau.
Thereafter on August 5 he was taken to New Delhi railway station and
formally arrested.
Helping nail Pakistani role
The value of Yakub in proving Pakistan’s complicity in the
Bombay blasts was invaluable. Subsequently, Yakub persuaded six other members
of his family to return and face the law – his brothers Essa and Suleiman and
his wife Rubina, his own wife Raheen and his mother Hanifa and father
Abdul Razzak.
Between March 12, 1993, and Yakub’s return,
Pakistan played a cat and mouse game with India, first denying the presence of
the Memons in Karachi, then acknowledging it when evidence was provided. But
they claimed that the Memons, who had no visas for Pakistan, had left for
places unknown.
Yakub provided the Indian authorities with knowledge of the
Pakistani officials who assisted the family in Dubai and Karachi, as well as
details about the Pakistani passports and other identity documents issued to
them by the Pakistanis, thus nailing Islamabad’s lies. He also had a few
micro-cassettes of conversations of Tiger and his associates that he had taped
surreptitiously in Dubai and a few other items of proof. The information he provided played an important role in
the trial of the accused but instead of being treated as an approver of sorts,
he became a fall guy. Since the authorities did not have Tiger in their hands,
they wanted another Memon to hang.
There has been a pattern in India in relation to the death
penalty. Sometimes, really nasty criminals get amnestied, either by the
Supreme Court or the President. In March, President Mukherjee commuted the
death sentence of Man Bahadur Dewan who was sentenced to death for killing his
wife Gauri and two minor sons, Rajib and Kajib, in September 2002. The
President did so at the recommendation of the Home Ministry which sought
leniency because of Dewan’s poverty-ridden background. His predecessor,
Pratibha Patil commuted 30 death sentences, including seven to murderers
who had also raped their victims, several of whom were children. The Home
Ministry recommendations that must have led to this Presidential action would
probably make nauseating reading.
Politics in command
However, in cases of terrorism, courts and officials usually
respond to the blood lust of society. People accused of terrorism, even those
peripheral to the crime, are sentenced to death and hanged. In this
category comes Afzal Guru, who, as the evidence clearly showed, was a side-show
in the Parliament House attack case. Yet, somebody needed to hang since the
actual perpetrators had been shot dead and the main conspirators were out
of our reach in Pakistan.
In the Rajiv Gandhi case, too, Indian investigators only
managed to lay their hands on some Indian Tamil dupes of the main conspirators.
The chief villains – Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief, Pottu Aman –
were in Sri Lanka, the main culprit dead while her support team led by
‘one-eye Jack’ Sivarasan and his team committed suicide when they were
surrounded by the police.
So Nalini, Murugan, G. Perarivalan and Chinna Shanthan were
sentenced to death. Nalini’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in
2000, and earlier this year, the sentences of the other three were also
commuted by the Supreme Court. The commutation had more to do with the
political pressure brought by various political players in Tamil Nadu, rather
than some change of heart of the system.
Politics is playing a role in the death sentence awarded to
Balwant Singh Rajaona, convicted for the assassination of Punjab Chief Minister
Beant Singh. His execution was scheduled for March 2012, but has been
stayed by the Home Ministry following appeals by the SGPC and various Sikh
notables of Punjab.
To reiterate, Yakub is not innocent, but neither does he
deserve the death sentence, given the background cited above. The charges
against him are not of participating in the military training that was given to
several of the conspirators by the Pakistanis, or of landing the RDX and
placing the explosives. He was charged with financing the blasts, though his
co-accused Mulchand Shah got just five years for the same charge. Indeed, his
co-accused in the three charges he faced have all got lesser sentences for the
same offence. Don’t forget, of course, that the conviction took place under
TADA, a law which has since been discredited and repealed. In Yakub’s case, the balance has shifted too much towards
retribution and is disproportionate to his crimes.
It is for the Indian judicial system to reflect
on whether the death sentence has become a whimsical lottery, tilted a bit
against the Muslim community. Heinous criminals get away with barbaric crimes,
terrorists who are politically convenient are given the benefit of doubt,
but to make up for it, peripheral players in Islamist terrorist conspiracies
feel the full might of the law.
http://thewire.in/2015/07/17/why-yakub-memon-should-not-be-hanged-6662/