BJP Should Call Jaya’s Bluff; Her Plea To Release Rajiv’s Killers Is Fit For Dustbin

There cannot be anything more cynical and hypocritical than the letter written to the Centre by the Tamil Nadu Chief Secretary (no doubt, with the concurrence of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa), asking for the Centre’s support in releasing all seven people convicted for Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991.

This follows the script of February 2014, when, almost as soon as the Supreme Court commuted the death sentences of three convicts – Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan – to life, the Jayalalithaa government announced their release in unseemly haste. This brazen move forced the Centre to oppose their release, and the Supreme Court decided finally that state governments could not unilaterally release life convicts. Hence the Jayalalithaa missive now to Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

If Rajnath Singh and the Modi government have any sense, they should send the Tamil Nadu government letter to where it belongs – the dustbin.

Quite apart from the fact that this letter is about playing to the gallery ahead of the state assembly elections scheduled for April (the dates were announced today, 4 March, by the Election Commission), Rajnath Singh should note that it has larger implications for the fairness and even-handedness with which justice is meted out in terrorist cases.

Under the UPA, the state had already flunked this test of fairness when two terror convicts – Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab – were executed in 2012 and 2013, but five others, Balwant Singh Rajoana (assassin of former Punjab CM Beant Singh), Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar (convicted in the 1993 Delhi blasts case), and the three killers of Rajiv Gandhi – were spared due largely to political pressures from Punjab and Tamil Nadu.

In other words, the only terrorists to face the gallows were three Muslims, with Yakub Memon being the third having been hanged last year for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

If, now, the three killers of Rajiv Gandhi, and four others (Sri Lankan Tamils who were also convicted in the Rajiv case) are freed purely because it is expedient in the context of the forthcoming assembly elections, it will become clear that only convicts without mainstream political support will be sent to the gallows. Hardly an advertisement for the fairness of the Indian justice system.

There is clearly no case for freeing the seven people convicted for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and 17 others on that fateful day in Sriperumbudur. This is particularly true since three of those death sentences were commuted. They have already got the best possible deal.

The BJP would be courting folly if it listens to Jayalalithaa. Even politically, the assumption that Tamil voters are excited about freeing these convicts is flawed. Tamil voters probably could not care less about the convicts, just as they did not raise a murmur when the Sri Lankan army eliminated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) systematically. The only people who may want to give this issue top billing are the remnants of LTTE sympathisers in Tamil Nadu – and these may be just a handful.

The BJP has little to lose politically in Tamil Nadu by pandering to Jaya’s whims. In fact, the Centre should call her bluff, and also that of the other holier-than-thou Tamil parties like the DMK, and say a firm “no”. There is no case for showing further leniency to assassins of a former Prime Minister. If it does, the BJP will have no moral case for dealing firmly with any other act of terrorism in the country, now or in the future. And there are many such cases winding up through the courts right now.