Hi friends in this article let us discuss about a very serious issue and this is not very easily accepted in India and the article is about Death sentence in India. India is a Democratic country and not very often we see a person being hanged for his mistake.
India has been very soft and very rarely we see a person being hanged in India for his mistake. But whenever we consider any Arabic countries, we might see that people are being punished and that too very cruelly and most often we can see convicetd people being beaten to death.
When we consider the statistical data, it is believed that, more than 95 countries have abolished death sentence and this is a very positive move, provided the culprits not make advantage using this. Mainly Human Rights play a vital role for a country to abolish death sentence and as a matter of fact even India we can say that death sentence is hardly used but still it is not abolished, because in big countries like India, problems will arise, when we abolish death sentence.
It is good to know that more than 35 countries, which haven’t abolished death sentence, have not used the death sentence for more than 10 years, which is a very good sign, and it indicates that crime level is also reduced I these countries and use ofdeath sentence is also controlled, and both indicates that the value of mankind is understood there.
Still there are 58 countries in the world, use Death Sentence. Now when we consider which cases that comes under death sentence, and everyone can guess, it will be murder cases and terrorist activities. But still there are countries, who give death penalty even for drug related crimes.
2008 is considered as the worst year by Human Rights, because more than 5700 people were sentenced to death in more than 25 countries. This is an alarming rate as we kill more than 5700 people officially, for the mistakes they have done.
China, which is considered as the fastest developing nation in the world has more number of death penalty than another countries and it is said that more than 87 percent of the death penalty in the world takes place in China. Among the 5700 people killed last year, China has the maximum number of death penalty of around 5000, which shows that China is very strict and that is why it is very fast becoming one of the leading economy of the world, where the crime rate getting reduced year by year.
China is followed by Iran with around 346 death sentence. Even recently we heard in the news about the death sentence in China due to milk scandal which happened last September. The report says that two Chinese, who were responsible for this scandal, were hanged. It is also said that that they missed water and also some chemical in milk, thinking that they can earn more money with less investment.
It is said that they used a chemical called melamine and this is most often used for plastic preparation. Even a higher officer (General Manager and Chairwoman) was also given life sentence for this scandal and apart from the twodeath sentence , 21 people were punished. Due to this Milk Scandal, around 6 children died and more than 3 lakh children become ill all over China.
When it comes to death sentence in India, the Supreme Court has ordered in 1883 stating that death penalty can be implemented only in the rarest of rare cases. The total number of death sentence in India is not exactly known, where one report says that there were around 40 death penalties from the year 1975 to 1991.Recent known case is that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was execute don August 14, 2004 and he is convicted for the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl.
This case was said to be in court for more than 13 years, where the incident took place in 1990. Apart from that in 1995 the serial killer Auto Shankar was executed on April 15 1995 in Salem. Herein India we can see that a person may be given death sentence punishment at a lower court, and most often his punishment gets reduced when the case goes to the Supreme court, where it will become a life sentence instead ofdeath sentence.
And more importantly the court won’t come to a decision very quick and they want to make sure that an innocent never gets the punishment There is a famous film dialogue which states that even 100 culprit can escape, but not even a single innocent people should be punished. I guess the courts herein India act according to that and at one point it is very good in making sure that innocent people never die.
Human rights often have a policy which states that everyone in this world has the right to live and they work hard for the abolition of death sentence in the world. But practically speaking this is very difficult, because many culprits will take advantage of this and we can go for some alterative punishment that doesn’t kill the people but also make them realize about the value of human life so that the murderers can understand that they had done a big mistake by killing a human life. I guess this kind of punishment will have of criticism, where people have a feeling that why should we excusea person who has killed innocent life.
I guess many would have watched a Tamil film called “Virumandi” starring Kamal Hassan and the theme of the movie mainly concentrates on theabolition of death sentence. So there is a strong debate, regarding the abolition of death penalty in India and I believe that the government will take their own time if they want to take any decision , because this is a very sensitive problem and hope that in future Government takes a very good decision regardingabolition of death sentence.