Executions Have Always Been A Hush-Hush Business

By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam

5 December 2023

Kartar Singh and Ujagar Singh were not hanged. Their sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court.

By Ashok Sharma 03/12/2023 09:37:04

So Kartar and Ujagar were hanged to death on 9 October, 1983, while the two lovers who had planned it all, were spared. In fact, two years after the hanging, on 22 July 1985, the Delhi High Court accepted Dr. Jain and his lover's application that they had been punished enough by spending 16 years in jail.22 Nov 2019

"It was apparent that Kartar and Ujagar, who spent their time peacefully in jail, doing mundane work such as carpentry, knew why they had met their fate while the others had got away. In their late fifties, they told me, “If we had a good lawyer representing us, this wouldn't have happened.” The Delhi High Court ruled that the crime of the conspirators, Jain and Chandresh, was “at a lower plane” than the hitmen and enhanced their punishment “to be hanged by the neck till they are dead”. So Kartar and Ujagar were hanged to death on 9 October, 1983, while the two lovers who had planned it all, were spared. In fact, two years after the hanging, on 22 July 1985, the Delhi High Court accepted Dr. Jain and his lover’s application that they had been punished enough by spending 16 years in jail."

Executed for 500 bucks: Tihar's Sorriest Hanging/ Sunil Gupta And Sunetra Choudhury/ The Asian Age/ Nov. 22, 2019

"Justice Kochchar was a visibly distressed man when he signed the black warrants for the two brothers" — Kartar and Ujagar Singh.

"Kartar and Ujagar Singh | On October 9, 1983, contract killers Kartar and Ujagar Singh were executed for the murder of Vidya Jain in 1973. Curiously her husband and his friend, who hired the killer, were sentenced to life by the Delhi High Court. Ujagar and Kartar were sentenced to death."

(India Today, Report: Munish Chandra Pandey, March 20, 2020)

"About the ‘unfairest cut’. It was when we hanged Kartar and Ujagar Singh (for murdering the wife of President V.V. Giri’s eye surgeon Narendra Singh Jain; Jain had been having an affair with his secretary). They had charged only 500 rupees to kill Vidya Jain. After spending 10 years in jail, they were hanged. Jain and his paramour were spared. If you ask about the best-deserved one, I would say it was that of the Indira Gandhi assassins."

Sunil Gupta, former jailer of Tihar, December 14, 2019. Deccan Chronicle

Here, my point is not to prove that I'm right and the learned bureaucrat Mr Ashok Sharma is wrong. Hangings in India have been such a hush-hush business that it's indeed an uphill task to ascertain the exact numbers, reasons and facts related to them (hangings). This whole caboodle of carrying out executions is always very secretive. That's why the great French existentialist, Nobel laureate, atheist, humanitarian and moralist (yes, atheists are also moral beings!) Albert Camus wrote in his extended essay, ' Reflections on the guillotine ' that, ' Every execution, anywhere in the world, is a State's dubious and furtive action to eliminate an individual at an unearthly hour when the world is asleep.'

Since hangings have not been documented, the number of people executed in India since independence in 1947 is a matter of dispute; official government statistics claim that only 57 people had been executed since independence. However, available information from other sources indicates that the official government figures are false, and the actual number of executions in India may run to several thousand.

Research by the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) has located government records of 1,422 executions in 16 states in the decade from 1953 to 1963 alone. PUDR located this information in an appendix of the 35th report of the Fourth Law Commission in 1967. The National Law University Delhi compiled a list of persons executed in India since 1947 and found that at least 752 individuals had been executed, including the period from 1 January to 15 August 1947. Their report was compiled "as per responses received from Central prisons in India. Certain prisons have either provided information only for a limited period or refused to provide any information or did not have any records available." Therefore, the actual number of persons would be much more than 752. While information about the number of executions should be available with individual prison departments within each state, the government has been reluctant to share such information. For example, authorities in Kerala claimed that all records of executions had been destroyed by termites. Andhra Pradesh gave the same reason for not furnishing post-1968 records. Bihar claimed that the state did not maintain records of executions, while Tamil Nadu's Additional Director General of Police (Prisons) refused to provide any records at all. According to Alexander Jacob, Additional Director General of Police (Prisons) of Kerala, "nearly 50 people had been executed in Kerala in the post-Independence period".

Rasha alias Raghuraj Singh, executed on 9 September 1947 at Jabalpur Central Jail, is presumed to be the first person executed in independent India. Akshay Thakur, Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma, who were hanged on 20 March 2020, were the last persons to be executed in India. Rattan Bai Jain, executed on 3 January 1955 at Tihar Jail, is presumed to be the first woman executed in independent India (Courtesy, Wikipedia, List of People Executed in India).

Take the example of Rattan Bai Jain, so far the only woman to be hanged after independence. Despite being documented as one of the 62 executed people in independent India, her name is often not mentioned in the text books of law in India. The issue of proper documentation of executions is everywhere vague and hazy. Even a country like America, where a few States haven't yet abolished capital punishment, is unable to provide a complete list of those executed over the years, nay centuries.

Thousands of Indians were hanged by the Brits but The India House in England shows only 288 hangings. Though the papers in the archives show that Maharaja Nandkumar was the first Indian to be (unlawfully) executed (on the charge of graft!) by hanging on August 5, 1775 in Calcutta, Khadim Shaikh's execution is remarkably absent (or later removed). East India Company executed Khadim Shaikh in Bengal Province way back in 1777. He was executed by firing squad for killing an Englishman. It was arguably the first (and only?) execution by firing squad in India though Indian laws also allow a death-row convict to be shot dead by a firing squad. This is however allowed in limited circumstances and can be carried out only by the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.

It's, therefore, in the fitness of things that death rap and all corporal punishments must be abolished not just in India but all over the world. Humans have no right to call themselves civilized so long as even an insignificant, tiny island in the back of beyond continues to execute people in the name of justice.

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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian.

 

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