By The Editor: Siddharth Sehgal

Past few days showed that people will do anything absurd in getting their face in limelight even if it meant defending a convicted terrorist on prime time. Yakub Memon has his hands red with blood of 257 innocent lives, he was as much involved in crime like his brother Tiger along with accomplices like Dawood and Chota Shakeel, if hanging him tilts the bar of justice a little bit in victim’s favor than what’s wrong with it.

 Coming to the debate of Capital Punishment, India’s judiciary is not in a business of hanging saints. We don’t send pick pockets, thieves to Gallows, we hardly even send the most hardened, vicious of criminals to chopping board but some crimes are beyond mercy, which law can show forgiveness to Nirbhayas killers. Given the fact that courts took over two decades to reach this verdict and heard numerous mercy pleas speaks volume about the length up to which the judiciary is willing to go to deliver justice. No bhaijan’s ranting on twitter can eclipse the hours, emotions and energy the law enforcement invested in this case. The new age liberals you see on your TV screen will not understand the suffering of those who lost loved ones to a terrorist attack.  It’s another story that our intelligence agencies don’t go after the bad guys in foreign countries, may be our politicians are scared of reprisals or something else but in this case the punishment was long overdue and hanging one doesn’t mean that this chapter is over.

 Blaming India for vengeful killing is no valid point either, CIA keeps terrorists often without any legal cover in named and unnamed prisons around the world. Russia’s FSB and its predecessor KGB were known to kill state enemies wherever they are, guilty and innocent alike. Mossad has made its name by being best in the business and British are veterans who always have a thing or two up their sleeves in keeping a check on national threats. So why blame India. We are human too, imperfect as all humans are. We feel pain too, we feel wronged and our hearts burn at seeing the enemy smirk at our woes.

Then there are people like Owaisi who would drag down everything to a religious which hunt. Man looks less a politician and more of someone out to incite riots. If Yakub was in fact hanged for being a Muslim then what he would say to family of Muslims who died in 1993 Bombay blasts, 2011 Mumbai bombings and 2008 Mumbai  attacks. Just like families of affected Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and Jews, they also have a right to justice, where will they go. Did he forget that for one life on Yakub, ten other were spared despite the fact that they were every bit as guilty and should have their necks in a noose? Does those ten have remorse over what they have done, I highly doubt it. Politicians say peeving things in order to earn bread and butter but some are just out there to mudsling and malign their own country.

 There is hardly a price that a terrorist can pay to redeem his debt to society, a death penalty was still cheap for his crime.