Four days before the monsoon session of Parliament started on August 1, the Union home ministry had sent a detailed letter rejecting the mercy petition of Mohammed Afzal Guru, convict in the 2001 Parliament attack, to the President’s secretariat for a final decision.
Guru was convicted by a Delhi court on charges of conspiracy in the December 2001 attack on Parliament and he was given a death sentence by the Supreme Court in 2004. Though the sentence was scheduled to be carried out on October 20, 2006, it was stayed after Guru’s wife filed a mercy petition.
“The mercy petition case of death convict Mohammed Afzal Guru has since been submitted to the President’s Secretariat on July 27 for a decision,” said Mullappally Ramachandran, minister of state for home, in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.
The government has been under repeated attack from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been demanding execution of the SC sentence. Delhi’s lieutenant governor had also rejected Guru’s mercy petition and sent the file to the home ministry.
Ramachandran was replying to a question on why the government was not taking steps to hasten processing of the mercy petition. When asked if there was a provision under the Constitution for deciding upon any clemency petition against capital punishment in the sequence of its submission, he said, “There is no Constitutional provision. It was an administrative decision to ensure fair and urgent treatment of all cases.”