Pramod Mahajan dies. After being pumped with bullets, he had been hospitalised in Hinduja since April 22. His family was shocked, so was the BJP. But, death does not end the affair there. Now the TV channels and newspapers will start flashing the breaking news and TRP ratings will shoot like anything. Everyone in the office is glued to the TV. Each and everyone is throwing opinions about how good a politician he was. But, there are so many people dying everyday, does anybody report or care? But Mahajan makes news. So his death is important.
Dhananjay Chatterjee's Execution
Criminal Justice Dhananjay Chatterjee was a guard in a building where a teen-aged girl named Hetal Parekh was found dead in March 1990. He was convicted of having raped and killed her and was hanged on his 39th birthday, August 14, 2004, protesting his innocence until the end. His execution followed a shrill campaign waged by the wife of the then West Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. Chatterjee’s appeals were rejected by the then president APJ Abdul Kalam on the advice of arguably India’s worst home minister, Shivraj Patil, going by historian Ramachandra Guha’s estimation . In a similar situation, his predecessor in Rashtrapati Bhavan, KR Narayanan, had applied his mind wonderfully, as emerges from an anecdote narrated by his secretary, Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Delivering the People’s Union of Civil Liberties’ 35th JP Memorial Lecture in Bangalore on March 23 in 2015 earlier this year, Gandhi described how he had received a call late at night from Chennai regarding
Comments