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| Speculation over President's line of action | | Kalam unlikely to accept Afzal's mercy petition | | B L KAK
NEW DELHI, SEPT. 28: Kashmiri convict, Mohammed Afzal, sentenced to death for his role on Indian Parliament in 2001, has focused his eyes on the President, APJ Abdul Kalam, who is to decide on the former's reprieve petition. A Delhi court slapped death warrant on Afzal on Tuesday.
This was immediately followed by the outbreak of violent clashes in Srinagar, capital city of Kashmir, between the police and proAfzal demonstrators who took to the streets protesting the Deal court's death warrant. Afzal was convicted by a special anti-terror court in Delhi in 2002 for helping attackers carry out the strike on Parliament on December 13, 2001. Afzal has denied the charges and his wife says he was framed.
The Delhi court on Tuesday fixed October 20 as the date of execution of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militant, who is interned at the Tihar Jail here. Afzal's appeal against the death sentence was subsequently turned down by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court. Now the question being hotly discussed is: Will President Kalam accept Afzal's mercy petition? If the past is any guide, the answer may be no.
President Kalam, as days roll by, will be watched with keen interest by all and sundry, considering that he rejected the mercy plea of a man convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl in West Bengal in August 2004. Despite a massive public opinion campaign requesting him to commute the death penalty, APJ Kalam rejected the petition of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who raped and killed a 14-year-old in 1990.
Officials of the Union Home Ministry say that the number of mercy petitions pending with the President from convicts on death row stands at 20. Many have been pending for years. Of these, 12 were submitted when KR Narayanan was the President. After the Congress-led coalition government assumed office in May 2004, President Kalam referred several of these petitions to the Ministry of Home Affairs for a review of the previous government's decision. The Home Ministry's legal department reiterated the advice tendered to him by the previous government: those cases did not deserve the President's mercy.
Originally, three people, Afzal, his cousin Shaukat Hussein and a reader in Delhi University Prof SAR Geelani, had been given the death sentence for their roles in the Parliament attack. While the High Court acquitted Geelani, the Supreme Court reduced the death sentence against Shaukat to 10-year jail term.
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