For many years now, The Hindu has opposed the death penalty on
principle — often in the face of intense public disapproval. We oppose
it for ordinary killers and mass murderers, communal pogromists as well
as terrorists like Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab. Ever since that traumatic
night we now denote by the veiled abbreviation 26/11, Kasab has
justifiably been the face of evil for millions of Indians. He took part
in a monstrous plot against the people of India and Mumbai, killed
innocent people with abandon, and showed no remorse for his actions. It
is no surprise, therefore, that his execution Wednesday morning has been
greeted with approval across the country. No loss of human life,
however despicable the individual might have been, ought to be a reason
for celebration. Instead, this should be a time of national reflection:
reflection about crime, about punishment and about that cherished
bedrock of our republic, justice. For several reasons, the hanging of
Kasab is at most a crude approximation of this quality, more closely
resembling an act of vengeance. Kasab was neither the architect of 26/11
nor its strategic mastermind; the men who indoctrinated and controlled
him remain safe in Pakistan, where most will likely never see the inside
of a courtroom. The haste to hang Kasab makes even less sense when
others guilty of hideous terrorist crimes have secured deferment of
their sentences because political lobbies acted on their behalf — among
them, the assassins of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Chief Minister
Beant Singh of Punjab. It is also a sobering fact that criminals
responsible for claiming more Indian lives than Kasab did — among them,
the perpetrators of countless communal riots — live as free men. Not one
of these things excuse or mitigate Kasab’s crime. But they do make it
imperative to ask: is the hangman’s justice the only kind we can
conceive of?
The arguments against the death penalty are well known. There are
pragmatic ones — in this case, that Kasab could have provided valuable
testimony in future trials of yet-to-be-arrested 26/11 perpetrators.
There are moral and technical ones; even in the United States, with its
highly-functional criminal justice system, new forensic techniques have
shown dozens of innocent men were executed, though this argument does
not apply to Kasab whose guilt is proven well beyond even unreasonable
doubt. The most compelling argument, however, is this: the application
of the death penalty is, as the Supreme Court itself acknowledged
earlier this week, increasingly arbitrary. Capital punishment has
become, as the medieval philosopher Maimonides many centuries ago warned
it would, a matter of “the judge’s caprice”. It is also simply not true
that capital punishment is integral to fighting terrorists. The absence
of the death penalty in, say, France and the United Kingdom has not
made these two nations softer in their ability to combat terror than the
U.S. The grief of 26/11 was personal for many in this newspaper; like
others, members of staff grieve for lost friends. Yet, the horror of
26/11 ought not stop us from dispassionately debating the need for the
death penalty.