Nalini Sriharan, serving a life term in Vellore Central Jail for her role in former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991, got a reprieve from the Madras High Court on Wednesday.
The court directed the prison’s Advisory Board to reconsider her plea and of those of two other convicts in the assassination case for early release.
Justice S. Nagamuthu quashed the earlier orders of the Advisory Board and the Tamil Nadu government, which had rejected her plea for premature release.
The court said the orders rejecting the pleas were procedurally flawed.
Without going into the merits of the state’s rejection of Nalini’s plea, the judge directed the jail and state authorities to reconsider her application.
The state government had recently told the court that it opposed Nalini’s plea and those of two others on the ground that the offence was “grave”.
Nalini married Murugan, a member of the banned Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who was handed out the death sentence in the assassination case. She was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to death in 2000. The Supreme Court had upheld the sentence but commuted it later to a life term after Congress president Sonia Gandhi appealed for clemency.