RIGHTS-INDIA: Death Sentence Sends Tough – if Delayed – Message

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 7 2003 (IPS) - When a court awarded Congress party politician Sushil Sharma the death sentence on Friday, eight years had elapsed since the night he was caught by a beat constable stuffing the bullet-ridden body of his wife into the oven of a well-known open-air restaurant in the heart of the city.

Keshav Kumar, the manager of the restaurant located within a hotel complex owned by the India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC), was given a seven-year term for helping Sharma carry out his gruesome task instead of calling the police.

The court also directed the prosecution of a top bureaucrat, D K Rao, for sheltering Sharma while the police launched a manhunt for him. Sharma managed to flee to the southern part of the country and actually obtain anticipatory bail from a court there before deciding to surrender, confident that he could bluff, bribe or influence his way to freedom.

That Sharma managed to escape the noose for so long in spite of an open-and-shut case against him appeared to reinforce the widely-held elief – that politicians in this country can get away with a lot, even murder.

True to form, Sharma and his friends did intimidate key witnesses and also try to bribe the beat constable, Abdul Nazeer Kunju, on whose testimony the success of the case depended so much.

After Sharma was pronounced guilty on Monday, there was speculation on whether he would get away with a life term. But political demonstrations outside the sessions court seemed to have convinced Judge G P Thareja that tougher punishment was called for.

With Delhi state just three weeks away from elections that would give it a new assembly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the central government, lost no time in projecting the case as a reason why voters should stay away from the Congress party. This opposition party now rules the state of 14 million people, which hosts the national capital.

”The tandoor (oven) case has brought the political culture spread by the Congress party out into the open,” said BJP leader Madanlal Khurana, who aspires to replace as chief minister the Congress party’s Sheila Dixit.

But the BJP is itself trying to live down the guilt that some of its leaders allowed people to kill some 2,000 people and rape hundreds of women during an anti-Muslim pogrom that racked western Gujarat state last year.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has sworn that those found guilty of carrying out atrocities during the violence in Gujarat would be punished. ” Justice will be not only be seen to be done, it will be done,” he said in an interview to the ‘Financial Times’ newspaper that was available on several websites on Friday.

Vajpayee called the violence a ”tragic aberration” in the strongest condemnation he has made so far of the pogrom perpetrated by leaders of his own party in Gujarat and for which there have been no prosecutions yet.

Significantly, Vajpayee told the ‘Financial Times’ that India’s ‘public, media and judiciary’ were closely watching to see if justice was being delivered to the victims of the Gujarat pogrom.

Those three entities closely followed the Sushil Sharma case and are now busy observing a number of cases involving India’s rather unruly politicians.

There is, for example, the case of Amarmani Tripathi, a powerful legislator from northern Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, who was arrested on Sep. 22 for the murder of his pregnant mistress and poet Madhumita in May.

Tripathi initially brazened it out before press and police, even denying that he knew Madhumita. He even arranged to fix blame for the murder on a young engineering studying in Delhi’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

His arrest became certain only after his DNA samples matched those of Madhumita’s unborn child. He did poorly in a lie-detector test conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the national capital.

Few Indian politicians actually go to jail even after they are convicted.

After former prime minister Narasimha Rao was convicted in 2000 on charges of bribing legislators, he was spared actual incarceration because the special security protection he is entitled to could not follow him to jail.

Politicians have generally ganged up to resist legislation that would bar those with criminal records from contesting elections. One estimate placed the number of state and national legislators who would be disqualified by such a law at 800.

But for the current round of assembly elections that would include Delhi, western Rajasthan, central Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh and Mizoram state in the north-east, the Election Commission has made it mandatory for candidates to declare brushes with the law and their wealth, though they will not be disqualified for it.