The Quality Of Mercy

Pranab Mukherjee’s troubling record on clemency for death-row convicts

- Amartya Kanjilal

On the first day of this year, President Pranab Mukherjee accepted the mercy petitions of four death-row convicts found guilty of participating in the Bara massacre, in which 34 dominant-caste men were murdered by Maoist militants in 1992 following several massacres of Dalits in Bihar. In doing so, Mukherjee commuted their death sentences to life imprisonment. Reports in the Indian Express and on the website The Wire cited unnamed official sources as saying that Mukherjee did so in defiance of the recommendation of the council of ministers, which, with mercy petitions, acts through the ministry of home affairs. These sources also said that, in September, Mukherjee had similarly rejected the ministry’s advice when he commuted the death sentence of another convict, Jitendra Nainsingh Gehlot. (Disclosure: The Centre on the Death Penalty at the National Law University, Delhi, where I currently work, facilitates legal representation for death-row convicts, including Gehlot.)