On October 30, 86 years ago, Lala Lajpat Rai received lethal blows at the hands of the British Police while protesting against the Simon Commission in Lahore.
In less than a month, Rai succumbed to injuries, and the nation plunged into mourning. Some, like Bhagat Singh, vowed to do more than just mourn. To avenge his death, Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev plotted and killed John Saunders, a British police officer. For this, and other ‘acts of terror’, the radical patriots were sentenced to death stoking a raging debate back home in Madras.
According to reports in The Hindu , the city’s intelligentsia strongly lobbied against capital punishment, making it one of the few centres which championed this progressive stance so vociferously as far back as 1931.
In a public meeting convened by the Madras Mahajan Sabha (MMS) on February 22, a resolution was passed seeking the commutation of Bhagat Singh’s death sentence. More importantly, a plea to abolish judicial executions was put forth by S. Muthulakshmi who was chairing the meeting. She said, “One act of injustice cannot correct another, and (I) consider it a wrong and unjust law that takes away a life of a man because he had taken that of another.” S. Narayanaswami Aiyar added “… as a people evolving towards a more humane and civilised state of existence, they must also see the relic of barbarism removed from the statute book.”
The reportage of the vernacular press brought up the question of fair trials. The Tamil newspaper Swadesamitran, for instance, wrote, “…the public demand is not without justification. The accused have been convicted by a Special Tribunal on the evidence of the prosecution alone. The accused did not get a chance to defend themselves or cross-examine the prosecution witnesses.”
Despite widespread support, Bhagat Singh and his comrades were sent to the gallows on 23 March 1931.
In a public conclave organised on Tilak Ghat (Triplicane beach), Krishna Bai of the MMS underlined that by upholding the death sentence, the British Government was complicit in an act of brutality “It means that the British Government stands for violence… the government stands self-condemned in this act.”
While the anti-death penalty campaign gained momentum in the State in an institutionalised way in the early 1990’s (in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination), the precedent had been set much before independence.
