A nation of over one billion people and not a hangman to slip the noose over death row’s Mahendra Nath Das, who has exhausted all his pleas and can only wait for the lumbering bureaucracy to find a trained hangman who can do the knot properly and according to custom.

This is no easy task and with executions becoming rarer the family business has died out with sons no longer ready to take over daddy’s business. The irony of a sliver of gallows humour in this impasse is not lost on any of us but there is something patently cruel about ordering a sentence by government that government cannot carry out. If the appointment with the executioner cannot be kept for a lack of proper personnel then the government has missed the date and must revisit this case, regardless of how heinous the crime.

No one has been hanged in Assam for 20 years. Only two people in India have been legally lynched in the past 15 years. Das is guilty of having decapitated his victim. The president has not agreed to clemency.
 
At a time like this it is also necessary to see into the validity of the killing process. If the country wishes to continue the option of capital punishment perhaps it is time for legislation to be passed that updates and modernises the options for legally taking a life.

Nowhere is it said that the Shylockian element of blood with the flesh is allowed. By sentencing someone to death in a procedure that takes years and becomes so far removed from the crime to make it almost obsolete as a tit for tat, neither suspense beyond the ordinary nor pain are inclusive codicils. Therefore, the law cannot accept a nation’s bureaucracy haring around looking for a volunteer. By this token, the agony of the death is not something that the law demands. Death per se is final enough. Consequently, it stands alone. Against this canvas perhaps India should move into the 21st century and think of lethal injections as a more humane way of killing a man or woman…at least there is no shortage of syringes.