President Pratibha Patil has rejected mercy petitions from two convicts – four days after the supreme court expressed surprise over the delay. The obvious questions:
 
* Does the president need prodding from the apex court to decide on a mercy plea?

* If it takes eight years – after the conviction is upheld by the apex court – to take a call on Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar’s fate, when will parliament attack convict Afzal Guru's turn come? Can't we have a policy-mandated fixed timeline for this?

* And, more importantly, isn’t this the right time to debate doing away with capital punishment, as several advanced countries have, especially since Bhullar and Mahender Nath Das may not polarise public opinion as Afzal can?

According to reports, Rashtrapati Bhawan have sources confirmed that the president had rejected Das's plea last month while she denied Bhullar's mercy plea on Wednesday. This is the first time after 2004 – when the BJP attacked the government for sitting on Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru's mercy plea — that the President has given the nod for executions.

Bhullar was sentenced to death by a trial court on August 25, 2001, for plotting terror attacks on Punjab SSP Sumedh Singh Saini in 1991 and then Youth Congress president M S Bitta in 1993, leading to several deaths in Delhi, the Times of India reported.

Bhullar's lawyer K T S Tulsi urged the supreme court to either decide expeditiously on his mercy petition or commute his death sentence.

Tulsi’s argument essentially calls for a fixed time line to decide on mercy petitions. Home minister P Chidambaram, on the other hand, maintains there is no time limit on decision and the only process rule we know is that the ministry considers petitions serially – first in, first out.

 Afzal, in a media interview a few years ago, had famously said that this in-between state of hoping for reprieve while preparing for gallows is worse than death itself.

Currently, apart from Afzal, three people sentenced to death in the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and two others are in that in-between stage with their fate locked in a home ministry file which does not know when it will move.

This is Kafkaesque, to put it mildly. If we have not reached the stage where we can dispassionately debate the need to do away with capital punishment, we surely (should) have maturity to deal with matters of life and death more dignity.