Ajmal Amir Kasab, the Pakistani terrorist who killed scores of people during the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, was on Thursday sentenced to death.
Special Judge M L Tahaliyani gave Kasab, 22, death sentence on five counts of murder, conspiracy to murder, waging war against the country, abetting murder and indulging in terrorist activities.
The death sentence for Kasab has been welcomed all over the country. But Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Jaitley said that justice would be fully delivered only when the masterminds of the attack are convicted and punished, and Kasab is hanged. Jaitley spoke to CNN-IBN after Kasab was sentenced to death.
CNN-IBN: Mr Jaitley, you described in your statement in the Rajya Sabha that the judgment which has been delivered today is a national disappointment. Why do you call it a disappointment?
Arun Jaitley: I think the conviction of the prime accused was an obvious matter. No judge in the world in a fair trial had any other option. He (Kasab) was caught on the spot with a weapon. He killed people, perhaps his offence has been captured by eye witnesses and cameras and so on .The question is that you have one set of accused in Pakistan. You have little hope of reaching them. You have two accused in the US. The US has already gone soft on them. You may perhaps be denied custodial interrogation; you can only have a formal questioning of them. You had two more accused in India who have been acquitted on a finding of doubtful evidence thereby de-linking that chain from the chain which links itself to Pakistan. Now under these circumstances if 161 people are killed or perhaps more and many others are injured, in a case where dozens of people participated in the conspiracy, we have finally a conviction of one man, it may be the maximum punishment. There has to be a nexus between the enormity of the crime and the punishment of the people who planned it and executed it and I believe that it is not the investigator's fault, it's not the prosecutor's fault. The legal infrastructure or the legal architecture we have provided in terrorism cases to our prosecutors and investigators is highly inadequate.
CNN-IBN: So would you say that actually this is not justice, contrary to what many are saying?
Arun Jaitley: Well justice has been done with regard to one gentlemen. Justice with regard to a number of others who planned, who helped and assisted this conspiracy is certainly a failure. They are all outside the realm of law. Remember when the late Shree Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated you had the TADA, you had the rules of evidence under TADA. It's only those rules of evidence that enabled the conviction of the accused because of admissibility of confessions. There was POTA when Akshardham trial took place, there was POTA when the Parliament trial took place. If you didn’t have those special rules of evidence people would have gone scot free.
CNN-IBN: are u satisfied with the pace of the trial sir?
Arun Jaitley: I think going by Indian standards the pace of t he trial was good and I think that's one point where I will take a positive note.
CNN-IBN: Would you support this argument that’s been made by some that Kasab should not be kept in any cue as far as his execution is concerned, just because there are some 30 odd people already put on the death row?
Arun Jaitley: The queue argument is a fake argument because the queue is a queue created by a government in lethargy and that lethargy of the government is prompted by a fact that there are some people in that queue whom you don't want to convict, whom you don't want to punish with death sentence. Therefore, what do you require in that queue. You require a comment of the State Government, you require a comment from the prison, you require a comment from the Home Ministry and then an advice to the President. That can't take a decade .And if it takes a decade in the Home Ministry let's take the power away from the Home Ministry and put it in some other judicial commission which will do it expeditiously. Now people have committed a crime, they have murdered people, hundreds of lives have gone and then if it becomes impossible to even execute death sentence because of the lethargy of the Home Ministry I think it speaks very poorly of the system.
CNN-IBN: Do you see any parallels between what has happened in the Parliament attack case and this case?
Arun Jaitley: Well if the present rules of evidence had been applicable to the Parliament attack case, POTA had not been there, perhaps India would not have secured a conviction.
CNN-IBN: The fact is that these two co-conspirators have been let off. Would you support that there should be reopening of the file against them?
Arun Jaitley: There is no provision for re-opening a trial. You have a legal remedy of filing an appeal.
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