Dead Against It

The next few hours after the call involved brisk work and desperate anxiety. “We cobbled a petition in about half an hour to 40 minutes and gathered judgments from the internet. We contacted (senior counsel) Colin Gonsalves and some advocates on record. It was past the court’s working hours. The advocates in Delhi ran and contacted the registrars (of the Supreme Court to inform them about an urgent hearing required in the case). Meanwhile, we drafted the petition and emailed it to Delhi. It was printed and then scrutinised by the registrars. By the time we went to the chief justice’s house and got a stay on the execution, it was 11.30 pm.”

Barela, who was pulled away from the gallows just seven-and-a-half hours before he was to be hanged, was among 15 convicts whose capital punishment was commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court, in an unprecedented judgment on January 21. Along with these convicts, Chaudhry, an abolitionist, who lectures against death penalty in law colleges across the country, pleaded the case of Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan — sentenced to death for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi — who too were spared the noose. The SC reduced their death sentence to life imprisonment on February 18, on grounds of inordinate delay (11 years) in the rejection of their mercy petition by the President of India.

Chaudhry contends that progressive democracies across the world have abolished the death penalty. Some countries, including those in Africa and South America, with higher crime rates and lower human development indices, have scrapped capital punishment. There are three main reasons, he says. “It is wrong to kill. There is no justification for taking anybody’s life in such a cold-blooded manner. It is arbitrary in the way it is inflicted and the Supreme Court had itself admitted that. Some get it, others don’t. And it is irreversible, so it can’t be acceptable in an error-prone system,” says Chaudhry, who has travelled to courts across the country to plead for death row convicts. He even filed a mercy petition for Ajmal Kasab.

Born and raised in Mumbai, Chaudhry studied in St Mary’s School in Mazgaon and played cricket for the Mumbai under-19 team. “My father always wanted me to be a cricketer,” he says. His father, who passed away in 1994, owned a stud farm in Gurgaon and lived for the love of horse-racing, he says. But the St Stephen’s College alumnus went on to teach English literature at the same college in Delhi University. In 1994, he left for the University of Oxford to complete his doctorate on the poetry of WB Yeats, and returned in 1998.

An incident at the Gurgaon stud farm, run by his sister, changed his career course as he felt “disillusioned with academia”. His sister’s employees were falsely accused of stealing horses from her stud farm and brutalised in a local police lock-up. “We kept saying they did not do it but we could do nothing to protect our own employees. That’s when I thought I should do law if I have to bring about some change,” says Chaudhry, lighting a beedi.

After securing a law degree from the University of Cambridge in 2000, Chaudhry got a fellowship at Oxford University, following which his book, Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print, was published.
On his return to India, he began practising law in Mumbai in 2001. “I started as a criminal lawyer working on legal aid in prisons and gradually moved to serious cases. I started with theft cases in the magistrate’s court, then moved on to the sessions court, then murder and appeals in the high court, but most of these cases were of those in jail. Then I moved on to death penalty. I had been researching the subject long before I started taking post-mercy petition cases. My first post-mercy death penalty case in which the execution was stayed was that of Mahendra Nath Das from Assam in 2011.”

The SC’s January 21 decision, which he calls a “miracle”, has strengthened his belief that indeed law can bring about change. He is, however, quick to add, “I know I will never be able to match this. Fifteen convicts at one go! This is historic,” he says.

He may have saved many lives but he has met only the convicts of the Gandhi assassination case. “I try not to get personally involved in the case because it makes litigating extremely difficult. It’s easier to be clinical when you don’t meet the prisoner or his family. What may be important for humanity may not be so for legality. Your judgement then tends to blur. Law has got very little to do with justice. Law is a game in which the better player wins,” says Chaudhry, who keeps his cellphone away if a landline is in his vicinity.

While his landline rang incessantly on the day the SC stayed the release of the three convicted for Gandhi’s assassination, one particular phone call perturbed Chaudhry. Sharma had called to say that another mercy petition of a death convict from Jharkhand had been rejected in October 2013. Sharma had basic information about the case. Even as Chaudhry asked Sharma to get more information, he had already started drafting the prisoner’s petition in his head.

According to the lawyer, there is little research on death penalty in India. “It’s just me and a few others who are doing it voluntarily,” says Chaudhry. NGOs, he says, won’t touch such cases. Since death penalty involves even convicted terrorists, NGOs, which need the Centre’s clearance for foreign funding, may not be in a position to pursue this, he says.

The room that Chaudhry shares with his colleague Mahrukh Adenwala, is full of case papers, copies of judgments and law books. A pack of beedis and an ash tray hide behind the clutter on the table. “On most days, I work 12 hours but when I get a frantic call from someone, then I might stay in office for as long as it takes,” says Chaudhry. “If I had a wife, she would have left me by now,” says Chaudhry, with a laugh. He lives in his Breach Candy house with his mother and sister.

It’s reading poetry and literature that he finds “most relaxing and sustaining”. His favourites include the poetry of Yeats, William Blake and WH Auden. Among novelists, he prefers Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Salman Rushdie “until and including the Satanic Verses”.

A non-vegetarian-turned-pescetarian, Chaudhry enjoys various cuisines, including French and pan-Asian. “ I am extremely self-indulgent. I could just live to eat,” Chaudhry confesses. At home, he says, he devotes most of his time to his two adopted stray dogs, Mango Dolly and Rascala.