and Kashmiri militant Afzal Guru. He has again achieved a rare ‘milestone’ if at all by clearing the way for the first - ever hanging of a woman in the history of independent India. The President has now dismissed the mercy petition of Haryana’s Sonia, daughter of Relu Ram Punia,former Haryana MLA and now she might well become the first woman in India’s history to be hanged. However, there is no reason to suggest that she deserves any special relaxation as her crime was quite gruesome and it was all over a land and property dispute.

According to the case history, Sonia and her husband Sanjeev had murdered Sonia’s parents Relu Ram Punia and Krishna, their daughter Pammi, son Sunil, daughter-in-law Shakuntala and grandchildren Lokesh, Preeti and Shivani on the nights of August 23rd and 24th, 2001 and on May 31st, 2004, at their farm house in Litani Mod in Hisar.

The local District and Sessions Court awarded the death penalty to Sonia and Sanjeev. However, they moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which converted the death penalty into a life term in April, 2005. The family members of Relu Ram Punia then had moved the Supreme Court against the decision, which again awarded the death penalty to both accused.

The prosecution had said that Sonia had connived with her husband to eliminate her entire family in cold blood. This has been described as a cruel, diabolic and dastardly act of crime by the court.

Sonia with the help of her husband Sanjeev mercilessly killed her father Relu Ram, mother Krishna, her sister Priyanka, stepbrother Sunil, his wife Shakuntla and their three children Lokesh (4 years old), Shivani (2 years old) and Preeti (45 days old) by hitting them one after the other with a iron rod when they were fast asleep on the night of August 23rd, 2001.

Experts say this is one of the rare cases where a woman accused had been awarded the death sentence by the court for the brutal murder as it found that her role in the crime was far greater than that of her husband.

“The brutality of the act is amplified by the grotesque and revolting manner in which the helpless victims have been murdered, which is indicative that the act is diabolic of the most superlative degree in conception and cruel in execution,” the court had ruled.

In another instance of ordering capital punishment, the Supreme Court on April 12th, 2013 rejected the mercy petition of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, who was sentenced to death in 2003 for carrying out a bomb blast outside the Delhi Youth Congress party office in 1993.

The President has now dismissed the mercy petition of Haryana’s Sonia, daughter of Relu Ram Punia, former Haryana MLA

The 1993 bomb attack in the national capital had killed 9 security personnel and left 25 persons, including the then All India Youth Congress president Maninder Singh Bitta injured.

Bhullar a terrorist of the Khalistan Liberation Force (KLF) had sought commutation of his death penalty to a life sentence on the ground that there was an inordinate delay of 8 years by the President over his plea for clemency.

Significantly enough, Bhullar has been also admitted into a State-run mental hospital in Delhi for being of unstable mind.
Significantly, within minutes of the judgement, one Ravinder Singh, an associate of Bhullar, dragged the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, a Sikh into the entire episode. “While the legal route has been closed; the political war will be on,” he said. “Now, it is time we will question the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the Akal Takht, the highest seat of temporal authority of the Sikhs in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab. Manmohan Singh is a Sikh and should explain how a man with unstable mind could be hanged; while for the last 30 years nothing has been done in the case of the 1984 anti-Sikh riot cases,” he said.

The verdict has set the stage for the hanging of Bhullar as the President of India has already dismissed his mercy petition earlier. “The mercy petition cannot be revisited by the President,” B Mahapatra, a senior lawyer said.

However, as politics would have it, the Akalis and Congress party from Punjab have demanded mercy for Bhullar. The verdict against Bhullar is likely to be used as a precedence in the cases of other death row prisoners like the three men from Tamil Nadu, who were given the death penalty for their role in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The convicts in the case have said in the past that their death penalty should be commuted because the President of the country took 11 years to reject their appeal and they have already spent 22 years in prison. S Doraiswamy, defence counsel for Nalini, prime accused in the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, said, “The Bhullar verdict will not impact the judgement on the Rajiv Gandhi case though it can be used as a precedence,” even as he maintained that the verdict is wrong.

In February this year, the Government executed Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri terrorist, in a top-secret operation just days after President Pranab Mukherjee turned down his appeal to commute his death sentence.

Swati Deb