Assassins of former PM Rajiv to hang on Sept 9

Three men convicted of the 1991 assassination of then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi will be hanged early next month, a senior jail official has said. The announcement late Friday that the executions would be carried out on September 9 came after President Pratibha Patil rejected mercy pleas from the three men earlier this month. If they go ahead as scheduled, the executions will be first in India since 2004, when a former security guard was hanged for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Kolkata. “The three men have been informed about the date of the hanging,” said S Arivudainambi, chief of the prison in Vellore, where the convicts are being held, west of Tamil Nadu capital Chennai. The three men, Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan have now appealed to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha to save them from the gallows. Students and lawyers have also been protesting against the executions. All three men belonged to Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) militant group, which was accused of plotting the May 21, 1991 murder of Gandhi by a female suicide bomber. Gandhi had become India’s youngest ever prime minister after his mother, former premier Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in October 1984, and ruled until losing an election five years later. Gandhi was killed by a female suicide bomber in the town of Sriperumbudur, in Tamil Nadu, on May 21, 1991 as he was addressing an election rally. The shredded clothes and the shoes Gandhi was wearing when he was killed remain on display in a museum in New Delhi. The Supreme Court confirmed the death sentences of the three men and a woman Nalini Sriharan. But the court later commuted Nalini’s sentence to life imprisonment. In 2006, the LTTE expressed regret over the assassination, calling it a “monumental historical tragedy.” The LTTE, wiped out by Sri Lankan forces in 2009 following a bloody offensive by government troops on the island, always denied its hand in Gandhi’s assassination. But the militant group’s now-slain leader Velupillai Prabhakaran went on to honour the assassin’s father as a “great person who contributed to the Tamil cause.” Gandhi’s killing was seen at home as retaliation for a 1987 Indian government pact with the Sri Lankan government to disarm the guerrillas, who had been trained and armed by New Delhi in the early 1980s.After that pact, the LTTE fought Indian troops deployed to the island by Gandhi’s government to supervise the accord. India withdrew its troops after 32 months in which it lost 1,200 soldiers at the hands of the rebels.Ten Indians and nine Sri Lankans sentenced to death by a lower court for their involvement in Gandhi’s assassination were freed after they were acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1999.In May, India’s president rejected a mercy petition from a murderer in the northeastern state of Assam, leaving the state scrabbling to find a hangman. Many of the small number of known hangmen nationwide have either died or retired in recent years. An anti-death penalty lobby group condemned the rejection of the clemency petition.“It has been well established that capital punishment does not help to reform society,” said Kirity Roy of the privately-run South Asia Network Against Torture and Impunity.“If India wants to portray itself as a civilised nation and aspires to fulfil its obligations to international norms then it must abolish the practice,” Roy said in Kolkata.“There were 12 rapes almost immediately after the guard’s hanging and so it proves the death sentence is not a deterrent,” argued Roy, urging President Patil to re-think her decision.In Chennai, Tamil Nadu Congress chief K V Thangkabalu said the law should take its course and the three men should be hanged.“There should be no travesty of justice,” he said. “If the convicted are allowed to go without punishment, there will be utter anarchy in the country. One cannot allow people coming from anywhere and killing people here.”Leaders of various political parties, including the Dravida Munnetra Kazahagm which is an ally of the Congress, have demanded that the death sentences be overturned.“Those who oppose the punishment are questioning the supremacy of the law,” Thangkabalu said.“Rajiv Gandhi was not (just) an individual,” Thangkabalu said. “He was the Congress president and the former prime minister. He was killed in Tamil Nadu by a Tamil group. This fact is still burning in the heart of every Indian.”However, DMK chief and former Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi appealed to Congress president and Gandhi’s widow Sonia to spare the lives of the three convicts.