How Kasab might change Mumbai's take on capital punishment

Abdool Karim bin Narayen had a “listless, uninterested” look in court, even when he was sentenced to death. He had behaved the same manner in jail, refusing a maulvi’s services. The only person he asked to see was his mistress who, he said, had driven him to kill a broker named Isaf Jan Mahomed, but this was denied to him. It was only on the gallows that he broke his silence and called on the crowd “to pity a woman’s victim.”
Two Parsis, Nusserwanjee Byramjee and Cowasjee Buxonjee were more vocal, sobbing and screaming that they had only meant to take the property of Dhunbai, the Parsi woman they were convicted of killing, and that they were innocent of the actual murder.

Koopchund, a young Gujarati man convicted of killing a five year old girl for her silver ornaments, pleaded that he had been under the influence of bhang, and had to be supported up the gallows. Jetha Ramchunder, who had also killed a child for her ornaments, and Ameen Tyub, who had murdered his brother-inlaw in a dispute, were both more dignified, walking up the steps unaided and saluting the crowd before the white caps were drawn over their heads, the ropes adjusted around their necks, the trapdoor opened and their bodies fell a distance of between three and a half to four feet. Sometimes death was instantaneous, sometimes the bodies twitched for a few minutes.

All these executions, reported in The Times of India between 1874 and 1885, took place in public, the way some politicians are demanding that Ajmal Kasab be hanged. The British vacillated, sometimes setting up a bamboo screen to block the view or have the ground before the gallows filled with soldiers, so the public couldn’t see. But at other times the public could see the whole show, and it was always a draw including, the Times reporter noted in disgust, for some European women, “one so far forgetting her gentler nature as to go to door of the gallows to get a closer glimpse of the hanging corpse.” Such reports might confirm that Mumbai’s citizens have always been as determined to see the death penalty delivered as seemed to be the case after the Supreme Court confirmed Kasab’s sentence. TV channels, Twitter and comment forms on news websites were flooded by the views of politicians, lawyers and “ordinary people” from Mumbai all expressing satisfaction at the verdict on India’s “most hated man” and demanding that it be carried out soon and, some added, in public.

Yet it is possible to write a less execution enamoured narrative. This city in fact was one of the first to do away with capital punishments altogether to see what effect this would have on crime. Sir James Mackintosh, who was Recorder (chief judge) of Bombay from 1804-1811, oversaw a complete halt in executions for those seven years and the result was that there were just six murder cases where capital punishment was decreed (but not carried out), compared with, in the previous seven years, 16 such cases, 12 of which resulted in executions.

The experience made Mackintosh, who was to become a leading liberal British jurist and writer, a fervent opponent of the death penalty. “Two hundred thousand men have been governed for seven years without capital punishment, and without an increase of crime,” he wrote, and this example was cited in British Parliamentary debates. As one MP noted: “If the experiment ever was to fail its failure might have been expected in such a place – a crowded Indian sea-port of mixed and shifting population.” Yet suspending – no pun intended – capital punishment seems to have worked.





Mackintosh’s successors were not convinced though, and the gallows came back to Bombay, but seem to have been exercised with some restraint. In the past they had been used for even trivial thefts or odd offences, like being found in disguise in the Mint. Now it was mostly kept for murder or violent revolt, as with the two sepoys who were tied to cannons and blown to pieces after the 1857 Rising (The monument vandalised in the Azad Maidan riot recently was erected to commemorate that event).

It helped that Bombay was not a feudal city, like Delhi, nor one like Calcutta where the British enjoyed great wealth and superiority over the natives. Until the Cotton Boom of 1863-65, Bombay was not a rich place and native and British businessmen worked quite closely together. This relative closeness between the authorities and the native communities meant that justice was less likely to be arbitrarily administered and the death penalty, in particular, was not lightly handed out.


At some point in the last century, executions within Bombay itself stopped altogether, with the gallows being moved to Yerawada Jail in Pune. It isn’t clear when the actual last execution in the city took place, but the last in Maharashtra was in 1995 when Amrutlal Joshi was executed for murdering three members of the Sadarangani family in Bombay’s Khar suburb. That execution was the 100th conducted by Arjun Jadhav, the state’s hangman, but nearly all were done in Pune. Kasab will have to be taken there too, unless the authorities decided to build temporary gallows at Arthur Road jail. Joshi’s execution was the second last in India (Auto Shankar’s execution in Salem is considered to be the second last, but it was on April 27, 1995 and ToI ‘s report dates Joshi’s execution to July12).

After that Dhananjoy Chatterjee was executed in Kolkata in August 2004 and since then, despite the furious promises of politicians and appeals by TV anchors, there have been none. It is called for, of course, after every violent crime, and the sentence is often passed, yet it is not carried out.

Kasab will probably change that. The scale of the crime he was involved in was so horrific and public, amounting almost to armoured invasion, that it almost demands a symbolic response and the Supreme Court’s verdict reflects this. Cynical calculations also suggest that the General Election of 2014 makes it likely, since elections and executions share a dubious history. Politicians have long used executions as a way to show their toughness – for example, French President Giscard d’Estaing was accused of allowing the last executions in French history, in 1977, to help his dwindling re-election prospects.

But will Mumbai really cheer when Kasab hangs? Certainly, many like the politicians, aggressive TV anchors and, more understandably, the families bereaved by 26/11 will. And for all the trends away from capital punishment noted above, it should be remembered that this is also the city which tacitly approved of the era of encounter killings staged by the police. These de facto executions helped bring an end to the worse of gang violence, but it also very probably killed off a few innocents, which is exactly what the long judicial process for capital punishment is meant to avoid.

To which many in the city would shrug, and say it is sad, but overall it worked, and there were none of the delays and wildly escalating costs of the Kasab trial. For a city always on the run and in pursuit of wealth, it is this part of the trial that has been the most annoying (along with the security restrictions on the neighbourhood near Arthur Road jail). But there is another uncomfortable result of the delay and that has been Kasab himself. Because while it is very easy to see Kasab-the-Terrorist as the “most hated man” in India, the reactions to Kasab-the-Kid-inthe-Dock are a bit more complex.

You can see this in the reactions of the police who have been guarding and dealing with him. While never failing in their strict duty, it has been possible to see a slightly softening in their tone as they describe his evident ignorance and naivety, his often disarmingly simple requests and even childishness, which can be seen in the fact that he is alive at all: while his comrades understood they would probably die, and did, when the moment came Kasab clung to life, which is why this drama is with us at all.

None of this should suggest that the police or lawyers have become fond of Kasab, but he is a familiar and understandable type, unlike cold and determined ideologues like Abu Jundal.
Unless he’s managed the most amazing of acting jobs, Kasab is the simple small town kid who came to a big city and got caught up in things beyond his imagination. He could be the kid whistling in the cinema at the latest Eid blockbuster, or riding on top of trains, or hustling you into buying a dubious cellphone on the street or, for that matter, stealing your own cellphone, or maybe even becoming shooter with a gang, but always something recognisable to Mumbai.

And yet he did what he did on 26/11, which is a chilling thought since it suggests how easily people can flip. But if, to modify Hannah Arendt’s phrase for Adolf Eichmann, he embodies not the banality, but the sheer ordinariness of evil, it still puts him somewhat short of that completely black bogeyman that all those vengeful voices in the media want to see strung up.

Some might even acknowledge that Kasab is what Mahatma Gandhi meant when he explained, in his magazine Harijan, in April, 1940, why he opposed capital punishment: “Under a State governed according to the principles of ahimsa, a murderer would be sent to a penitentiary and there given every chance of reforming himself. All crime is a kind of disease and should be treated as such.” When Kasab walks up those steps, at least some in the city that he attacked will remember what Gandhi said.