A SIMPLE test is possible these days that can define the communal prejudices of an Indian or a Pakistani. Consider this. Anyone who wants the instant hanging of Sarabjit Singh, the alleged Indian spy on Pakistan’s death row, but presses the government in Delhi not to execute Kashmiri convict Afzal Guru is most likely a communal person.

Likewise, those who want the Kashmiri convict to be put to death for his alleged role in the attack on India’s Parliament House but make demands on Pakistan to free Sarabjit Singh are in all probability communal too. Plenty of such people are ranged on both sides of the border, shouting: ‘Sarabjit good, Afzal bad’ and vice versa.

Gandhian icon Nirmala Deshpande who passed away in Delhi last Thursday was working in her own quiet and effective way to save the lives of both. Even at 79, she had been working closely with Afzal Guru’s friends, lawyers, MPs and government officials to get him clemency. On the other hand, one of her last engagements before she died peacefully in her sleep was a flurry of petitions to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and other leaders to spare the life of Sarabjit Singh.

Both convicts are so far alive and if, with some luck, they are able to dodge the hangman’s noose for good it would be in no small measure due to Nirmala Didi’s work behind the scenes. Her approach may not have displayed the court craft of Shakespeare’s Portia who saved Antonio’s life by a clever sleight of mouth, but the Gandhian in Nirmala Deshpande was just as tenacious and resolute in her purpose.

That’s why I thought that a well-compiled report on India’s death penalty cases circulated last week by Amnesty International and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) should have been dedicated to Didi’s memory. Death penalty in both countries, other than the fact that it is morally reprehensible, is essentially anti-people. Let me explain why this is so with India’s example. Out of our billion-plus population the state’s favoured market economy has 200m to 300m stakeholders. It means that 70 per cent of Indians, constituting mainly the poor and the marginalised, are outside the economic power structure that controls politics.

The majority of people the Indian state is fighting militarily belongs to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The award of death penalty follows similar contours, of targeting the dispossessed. The last man to be executed in India was a lowly watchman albeit a Brahmin. To the naked eye, therefore, an overwhelming number of the death sentences that are given as well as fatal police and army encounters carried out target people from among the 70 per cent people who are kept away from the levers of political power.

This should seem odd because in a democracy 70 per cent can vote out 30 per cent. However, socially divisive viruses like religious and caste upsurge are injected into the system that then manages to neutralise the brute majority of the poor. Amnesty’s report, of course, draws its own conclusions that may be at variance with mine.

Nowhere was the nexus between the ruling classes and their interest in retaining the death sentence better reflected than in South Africa. It was only natural, therefore, that within a year of the black majority winning power from the Apartheid regime in April 1994, South Africa’s supreme court abolished the capital punishment.

The Amnesty report is interestingly titled Lethal lottery: The death penalty in India, a reference perhaps to the observations of South Africa’s Justice Ackerman. “For one person to receive the death sentence, where a similarly placed person does not, is, in my assessment of values, cruel to the person receiving it. To allow a chance, in this way, to determine the life or death of a person, is to reduce the person to a cipher in a sophisticated judicial lottery.”

And who are the people demanding the reinstatement of death penalty in South Africa? They are mostly the rich white farmers.

Although Nirmala Deshpande’s opposition to the death penalty was rooted in the questionable morality of it she did share the platform with the more logic-driven Justice Krishna Iyer.

The former supreme court judge, an icon of India’s very poor, framed the issue with his compelling reasoning. “Law must be honest to itself. Is it not true that some judges count the number of fatal wounds, some the nature of the weapons used, others count the corpses or the degree of the horror and yet others look into the age or sex of the offender or even the lapse of time between the trial court’s award of death sentence and the final disposal of the appeal? With some judges, motives, provocations, primary or constructive guilt, mental disturbance and old feuds, the savagery of the murderous moment or the plan which has preceded the killing, the social milieu, the sublimated class complex and other odd factors enter the sentencing calculus.”

As the world gets subjected to brainwashing with howls for instant justice, India’s supreme court, shepherded among others by Justice Iyer observed as early as 1980: “A paranoid preoccupation with the horror of the particular crime oblivious to other social and individual aspects is an error. The fact that a man has been guilty of barbaric killing hardly means that his head must roll in the absence of proof of his murderous recidivism, of curable criminal violence, of a mafia holding society in ransom and of incompatibility of peaceful co-existence between the man who did the murder and society and its members.”

The natural propensity of the poor and marginalised anywhere to oppose capital punishment is perhaps best reflected in the intervention of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar in a debate on the issue in India’s constituent assembly. Accepted as the messiah of the downtrodden, Dr Ambedkar piloted free India’s new constitution.

He asserted unambiguously: “Although (the Indian) people may not be following it in actual practice, they certainly adhere to the principle of non-violence as a moral mandate which they ought to observe as far as they possibly can, and I think having regard to this fact, the proper thing for this country to do is to abolish the death sentence altogether.”

This is the dominant Dalit view. The Brahminical view is more complex. Take rightwing journalist Arun Shourie, for instance. He demands “two eyes for an eye, and a jaw for a tooth” in his war against terrorism. Nirmala Deshpande too was a Brahmin. But then, like so many of her ilk, she was a different kettle of fish. n

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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