The Hindu Business Line : What are the thoughts of a man on Death Row?

HOW does it feel to be someone who knows that he will not be alive, say, a month from now, not because he is terminally ill but because he will be killed by the state?

This is the situation in which Dhananjoy Chatterjee, a convicted rapist-murderer of a schoolgirl, Hetal Parekh, finds himself today after the President recently turned down his mercy petition.

Dhananjoy has had a number of reprieves over the past ten years when court cases and mercy petitions have intervened between life and State-directed death, which may perhaps have led him to hope once again that some thing will come up which will either delay his execution or perhaps even put it off altogether.

He may, therefore, not quite fit the description of a man who is in a state of mind indicated by the opening sentence of this piece.

Even so, to the world at large, Dhananjoy has moved a big step nearer to the gallows, and it is legitimate to ask how a person behaves when he knows that he has a specified number of days to live — a specified number of mornings, afternoons, evenings and nights to live and experience before he enters the realm of the unknown.

It is said that many such death-row prisoners have — probably after an initial period of terror and despair — become calm and collected, resigning themselves to their fate, possibly thinking that, after all, there is an afterlife, that "existence" in the ordinary sense of the word will not be impaired although it may take on a different form.

This is probably why many death-row prisoners turn to religious books, especially to passages which try to throw light on "life" after death. Strong and disciplined minds are more than likely to have recourse to such simulated "peace", particularly so if they have transgressed the law of the land when indulging in activity springing from deep ideological (and other) beliefs.

It is not surprising that one reads of such people having gone to their deaths in an extremely calm and collected manner, as though facing death bravely was as integral part of their "mission" as was the job of attaining their immediate objective in the first place.

Not all cold-blooded killers are weak-minded people. Those who are not can be expected to face the gallows in much the same way as their focussed, dedicated "political" brethren.

The law is the great leveller in this case, especially in a situation where the state concerned is itself essentially founded on the principles of arbitrariness and violence which, on occasion, can turn a normal, average person into a fearsome murderer.

What this means in the present context is that even someone like the killer of the blossoming Hetal can withdraw into a cocoon and contemplate with enviable composure on the experience of facing death.

Alternatively, a man can lose his mental balance just thinking about the fact that he will not be alive after a stipulated time period.

One wonders what is going on in the mind of Dhanjanjoy Chatterjee, the erstwhile guard-cum-liftman of a Kolkata apartment building, who succumbed to the temptation of lusting after a young girl, raping and killing her, and who, among other things, must be considering how lucky he has been in having been able to avoid the hangman's noose till now.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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