The Supreme Court has refused to reduce the death sentence of Babbar Khalsa terrorist Balwant Singh Rajoana to life imprisonment.
The Court has refused to commute the death sentence on the ground of long pendency of the mercy petition before the President of India.
Balwant Singh Rajoana who was formerly a BKI operative was convicted for his role in the assassination of the former chief minister of Punjab, Beant Singh, in August 1995.
Justice Vikram Nath reading out the operative portion of the judgment, said that the bench has noted the stand of the Ministry of Home Affairs to defer the decision on the mercy petition
The bench said that this actually amounts to a decision declining to grant the same for the present. We have directed the competent authority to deal with the mercy petition as and when they deem necessary and take a further decision.
The three-judge bench comprising of Justices BR Gavai, Justice Vikram Nath, and Justice Sanjay Karol were hearing a writ petition filed by him.
The lawyer of the petitioner,Senior Advocate Mukul Rohatgi relied on the decision in Sriharan @ Murugan where the Supreme Court had held that long pendency of mercy petition can be a ground to commute death penalty. The bench reserved its verdict earlier this year, in March.
Rajoana was arrested on December 22, 1995, for his alleged involvement in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh on August 31, 1995. The suicide bomb attack at Chandigarh had claimed 12 other lives as well.
Rajoana has come out on parole only once in the past 27 years, for an hour, to attend his adoptive father Jaswant Singh’s death ritual, on January 31 this year.
He was convicted by a local court of Chandigarh in July 2007 and his hanging was scheduled on March 31, 2012.
However, it was stayed after the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) filed a mercy petition with the President of India on March 25 following which, the Union Home Ministry ordered a stay on his execution.
On September 27, 2019, the Ministry had written a letter to Punjab, stating that to commemorate Guru Nanak Dev’s 550th birth anniversary, it was decided to give special remission to Sikh prisoners. The Central government proposed to commute Rajoana’s death sentence to life imprisonment under Article 72 of the Constitution, but even after three years, the proposal was yet to be implemented.
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