Hangman sulks, convict's family rejoices stay on execution

Family members of death row convict Dhananjoy Chatterjee rejoiced as his hanging Friday was stayed, but his would be executioner sulked fearing his grandson might lose a job the authorities had promised.

Family members of death row convict Dhananjoy Chatterjee rejoiced as his hanging Friday was stayed, but his would be executioner sulked fearing his grandson might lose a job the authorities had promised.

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Chatterjee's elderly parents and relatives offered prayers of thanks as news reached their Kuludi village in West Bengal's Bankura district that the Supreme Court had stayed the execution.

Bengali TV channels showed the convict's parents, enervated from grief, thanking god and hoping that their son's death sentence would be commuted to a life term.

Villagers of Kuludi, who had campaigned for remission of Chatterjee's capital punishment, also celebrated the decision.

But the news made hangman Nata Mallick feel denied as he sat at his home in south Kolkata with all preparations made for the execution that was not to be.

Though he said he did not feel either "good or bad" about the reprieve granted to Chatterjee, he appeared ruffled and irritable.

"I was ready. The government vehicle was to have picked me up at dawn (Friday). But now I hear he won't be hanged," Mallick told reporters.

"There is nothing good or bad in this. It is like a policeman doing his duty on the road and then he is suddenly asked to go home."

Mallick also sulked and expressed his fears that the state government would not give his grandson a job it had promised in return for the hanging of Chatterjee.

Chatterjee was held guilty of raping and killing a 14-year-old schoolgirl on March 5, 1990 in Kolkata.

He fought his case up to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower courts' death verdict against him.

Chatterjee's hanging was stayed following the intervention of the Supreme Court and President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam late Thursday.

While Kalam forwarded a mercy petition to the home ministry seeking its opinion on the matter and asked the West Bengal government to put off the hanging, the Supreme Court stayed the execution to hear an appeal from Chatterjee's relatives Friday.

Mallick, who would have been paid Rs.10,000 for the hanging, had got the government to agree to give his grandson Prabhat a job in the social welfare and jails department.

"He was to join from July 1, but now I don't know what will happen. They can't take away the job now, can they?" asked Mallick, who had waxed and lubricated with ripe bananas and soap the rope that would have been used to hang Chatterjee.

Four "trials" with sandbags had also been carried out in the past few days.

It was not known who had moved the latest petition before President Kalam that he had sent to the home ministry. The president usually goes by the advice of the ministry on clemency pleas.

A body of eminent Bengali intellectuals and a rights group campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment had recently written to Kalam, asking him to remit Chatterjee's sentence.

But the stay on Chatterjee's hanging also sparked off anger among a section of society here.

The school where the victim, Hetal Parekh, studied held a special prayer for her Thursday.

"The stay order is shocking. When Hetal was crying for mercy, did anybody hear her? We thought she would get justice," said Gillian Rosemary Hart, principal of Welland Gouldsmith School where Parekh studied.