The Supreme Court of India has fixed the morning of 22 January as the date to hang four convicts in the Nirbhya case. Ace anti-death penalty activist Yug Mohit Chaudhary urges you and everyone who cares for a humane society to appeal to the President of India for clemency to convert the capital punishment to these four young men from the death penalty to life imprisonment. You are requested to copy and paste the petition below with your signatures and send by email to Mr Chaudhary to be forwarded to the President of India.

HOWEVER FUTILE, IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT CONTRARY VIEWS be registered in the midst of the frenzied blood lust demanding the prompt dispatch of the Nirbhaya convicts – Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, and Pawan Gupta. Executions take place in our names, and under Article 72 of the Constitution of India, we all have a right to petition the President for clemency. Excluding fellow human beings from entitlement to mercy has nothing to recommend it except a very base blood lust that we encourage at our peril.

If we have to become a more humane and compassionate society and leave a better, less blood-thirsty world behind, we have to curb our instinct for retribution.

Please find below a mercy petition addressed to the President of India. Please do consider endorsing it, and should you agree to do so, kindly reply to this email with your full name appended to the bottom of the statement. Please also circulate this statement as widely as possible through email, Facebook, Twitter, etc, and get as many people to endorse it as possible by emailing me [yugchaudhry@hotmail.com] their names and endorsements at the bottom of the petition. Once the convicts submit their mercy petition, I will forward this statement with the signatures to the President of India.

The condemned prisoners have not yet filed their own mercy petitions, but I have been given to understand that they are going to do so shortly.

 

15^th January 2020

The President of India
Rashtrapati Bhavan
New Delhi

Respected Rashtrapatiji,

We are writing to request you to commute the death sentences of the ‘Nirbhaya’ case convicts – Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, and Pawan Gupta – to imprisonment for the remainder of their lives.

They have been sentenced to death for having raped, brutalised and killed a 23-year old woman in an exceedingly cruel and barbaric way. Their executions are meant to promote justice and women’s safety by deterring such crimes. It is our sincere belief that they will achieve neither.

The performance that is an execution —the cold bodies, broken necks, soiled clothes, and the smell of excrement —will not compensate in any way the life lost on 16 December 2012. Neither she nor her memory can be honoured with four more mangled bodies. To honour her, we must address the structural causes of gender violence and crime in our society. Hanging only degrades the sanctity of life that was so inhumanly violated that winter’s night.

“Executions take place in our names, and under Article 72 of the Constitution of India, we all have a right to petition the President for clemency.”

State executions present killing as an acceptable form of condemnation and punishment.  We have reached a point where short of a ritualised execution of these four guilty men nothing will suffice – not even imprisonment for the remainder of their natural lives. These four men, all still very young, will eke out the remainder of their days undergoing rigorous imprisonment and confronting the consequence of their actions. They will never know liberty, nor see the world they have left behind. We need to ask ourselves why imprisonment for the rest of their natural lives will not suffice to condemn what has happened or to assuage our collective sorrow. Excessive and needless punishment to appease a retributive baying for blood lacks moral justification and descends into cruelty.

Family members /victims of heinous crimes will understandably demand the harshest available punishment, but as the final arbiter of morality and justice, you, Your Excellency, cannot be guided by the spirit of retribution alone. To allow public sentiment to determine the outcome of a mercy petition is to abdicate governance and surrender morality. Do remember that it is only the wretched who seek your mercy, and sometimes it is only an accident of fate that decides who the wretched will be. To disqualify them on that count would be to strain the quality of mercy bare.

Violence against women is endemic in our country and popular discourse. It is rooted in patriarchal attitudes perpetuated by our continuing failure to build a society based on equality and human dignity. The world view sanctioning a man’s control over a woman’s life and body is manifested in our refusal to criminalise marital rape, in our tacit acceptance of a Khap Panchayat’s orders to kill a lower-caste groom, and in our endorsement of a father’s right to control his daughter’s matrimonial choices. The high rates of female foeticide and dowry deaths show the extent of the problem.

“Excluding fellow human beings from entitlement to mercy has nothing to recommend it except a very base blood lust that we encourage at our peril.”

This exercise of power over a woman is learnt and normalised at home, at school, and imbibed through Bollywood item numbers. Rape is not merely an act of aggression born of sexual lust. It is a brutal and dehumanising assertion of male power and a willful disregard of a woman’s humanity, dignity and bodily autonomy. It appears even within supposedly safe spaces of home and work through instances of child abuse, marital rape and sexual harassment. A grossly aggravated form is seen in incidents such as the present crime. It is this normalization of patriarchy and rape culture that needs to be addressed. Unless we do so urgently, we cannot claim that we are troubled by the extent of violence against women in our society. As of now, we have not even implemented the Justice Verma Committee recommendations or utilized a fraction of the Nirbhaya Fund.

It is naive in the extreme to think that the death penalty is the solution. It is not a greater deterrent than life imprisonment, as noted by the Law Commission when it recommended its abolition. Even the Justice Verma Committee, constituted in the wake of this very crime, eschewed the death penalty for its futility. Even if we were to execute rapists in the rarest of rare cases, it would do little to address the deep-rooted patriarchal ethos of our society.

“If we have to become a more humane and compassionate society and leave a better, less blood-thirsty world behind, we have to curb our instinct for retribution.”

The death penalty engenders the false belief that killing these men will eradicate sexual violence, or at least drastically reduce it. In fact the State’s use of such ritualized violence may well perpetuate and strengthen a general propensity to violence. Killing by the State sets a poor example, one that is followed all too often, as we have seen in recent extra-judicial killings and public lynchings. Killing in every context – be it the killing of these four men by the state or the violence against women so endemic in our society – is an exercise in asserting power. The death penalty is nothing but power speaking through the language of extreme violence.

The death penalty creates an illusory distance between ourselves and men such as the present convicts as if they were aliens and have nothing to do with us and our society. We shun them, as we do a beggar, not because they disgust us but because they remind us of the worst within ourselves. As a consequence, we resort to the death penalty in an effort to obliterate them—as we would a guilty memory—and cleanse ourselves. Alive, they rebuke us. Do we really believe that an egalitarian society respecting the dignity and autonomy of women can arise from the debris of these four men?

We, therefore, appeal to you to commute the death sentence of Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, and Pawan Gupta.

Yours sincerely