Hunting for goodwill, with 20 days left

As things stand, Ram Shri will be “hanged till dead” in Mathura jail on April 6. And her one-and-half-year-old daughter Pooja will walk out of jail into an uncertain future.

“My mother died soon after my marriage. My father and brother are waiting to be hanged in Naini jail, Allahabad, on the same day. There is no hope. I have no one left in my family,” says the first woman to be given capital punishment in post-Independent India.

RamShri does not have any visitors, nor does she have a lawyer to file an appeal in the Supreme Court.

“I don’t have anyone who can spend money on lawyers to get me out of jail. I have no contacts,” she says.

Narrating the incident, she said, “Things started going wrong when my chacha married twice. Both his first wife and children from her and the second wife and her children demanded a separate share in the land. We were the third party who also wanted a share in the property.”

She was taken into custody on April 3, 1997, when her daughter was just six months old. She was sentenced to death by the Mahoba additional judge and the Allahabad High Court upheld the verdict.

Her husband hasn’t visited her in jail. “Why should he visit me? With the same money he can get married again. Why would he want to drag himself into a murder case?” Nor has she seen her 8-year-old son for a year. He reportedly lives with her husband in Mahoba village. She does not know what will happen to her daughter after shedies. She has not thought about it. “I cannot think of anything now,” she says.

The jail authorities at Mathura have not thought of it either. They still believe “something will happen before April 6 and the order will be changed.”