India’s Mr. Death

Associated Press On a beach in Puri, India, a snack vendor walks past a sand sculpture of Afzal Guru, who was executed on Feb. 9.

NEW DELHI â€" Last year it seemed the death penalty might be on the way out in India. But in just the past two months, since the new president, Pranab Mukherjee, took office, it is being enforced again. Two men have already been hanged, and Mukherjee rejected the petitions for clemency of five death-row inmates.

In India, only the president may grant clemency to a prisoner who has been sentenced to death. The president’s decision is subject to judicial review by the Supreme Court but only to determine whether the act was ithin the president’s mandate. The law also allows the president to indefinitely delay considering a mercy petition and so, in effect, to indefinitely stay an execution.

Three successive presidents â€" K.R. Narayanan, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Pratibha Patil â€" used these prerogatives to ensure that from 1999 to 2012, only one hanging took place in India. Most notably, Patil granted clemency to 34 people, and Narayanan stalled on all the petitions that came up before him.

But since the beginning of the year, Mukherjee has ensured that Ajmal Kasab (convicted for the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008) and Afzal Guru (convicted for the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001) have been hanged. He has also rejected the mercy petitions of Mahendra Nath Das, who was sentenced for murdering a man by beheading in 1996, and four men who killed 22 policemen in a landmine blast in 1993, the so-called Veerappan Gang.

This recent severity has rekindled the deb! ate over capital punishment in India. Former President Kalam, who was not entirely soft â€" he refused to pardon Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was executed in 2004 for raping and killing a 14-year-old girl â€" has called for a national debate on the issue.

I oppose the death penalty under any circumstances, but even Indians who are willing to consider it in some cases have become concerned recently about the cruelty and arbitrariness of its application.

The delays are staggering. Das has been in jail for 17 years, with his petition for clemency pending for 12 years. The members of the Veerappan Gang have served 19 years. They had been awarded a life sentence by a lower court; it is only after they appealed the verdict that they were sentenced to death. All five men now await hanging, having already served longer terms than most prisoners convicted for life, who usually serve about 14 years.

Not all death-row inmates seem to have the same rights. After the Veerappan Gang’s mercy petitions wer rejected, the four men were given a chance to ask the Supreme Court to review the president’s decision and their executions were stayed. But Guru, whose petition was rejected on Feb. 3, 2013, was hanged just a few days later, on Sat., Feb. 9, and was informed that his application had failed only hours before the execution. His family was not notified until after his death.

And that’s to say nothing of the subjectivity displayed by judges at sentencing. Last year, in her judgment against the former B.J.P. minister Maya Kodnani, on trial for leading a mob that killed 97 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, Jyotsna Yagnik observed that, although the death penalty may “bring justice” and it was desirable to reduce crime, she could not overlook the fact that 139 countries have repealed the death sentence. “This court believes the use of death undermines human dignity,” the judge wrote and sentenced Kodnani to life in prison.

Yet Guru â€" who was convicted on questionable evide! nce â€" w! as sentenced to death because, according to that judge, the 2001 attack on Parliament in which he participated had “shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”

When the application of a death sentence so depends on the discretion of a judge and a president, the punishment is not just inhuman, it is intolerable.

Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of “A Certain Ambiguity.’’