Mumbai: An anxious home minister, an ‘unnerving’ leak to a Mumbai-based reporter, and the ‘quarantine’ of about 10 police personnel — these were some of the factors that made the high-profile execution of 26/11 convict Ajmal Kasab a difficult and stressful process for the Maharashtra government.
Compared to the secretive hanging of Kasab at Pune’s Yerwada Jail, the execution of Yakub Memon — who was convicted for his involvement in the 1993 Bombay bombings — played out under public glare, recalls retired IPS officer Meeran Borwankar.
In her memoir, ‘Madam Commissioner: The Extraordinary Life of an Indian Police Chief’, Borwankar writes that the phase was not easy and events of hangings of Ajmal Kasab and Yakub Memon were etched forever in her mind.
Borwankar, who retired as Director General, Bureau of Police Research and Development, oversaw the execution of Kasab in 2012 and Yakub in 2015.
Kasab episode
Borwankar took over as the additional director general of prisons in mid-2012 when she started receiving legal correspondence about the capital punishment of Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, who was the lone 26/11 terrorist caught alive.
The retired police officer writes that Kasab’s security was an extremely sensitive issue and that the prison staff, including doctors, were careful about his diet and health.
Regarding the reports that Kasab had sought “mutton biryani”, Borwankar refuted saying that nothing such was served in the jail. In 2015, three years after Kasab’s execution, public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam had conceded that he had “concocted it just to break an emotional atmosphere which was taking shape” in favour of the terrorist during his trial.
The former ADG (prisons) writes that initially Kasab displayed aggressive behavior but as time passed, he would be quiet or just smile during the investigation.
Some time in October 2012, then Maharashtra home minister R. R. Patil expressed fear to her that some hostile countries might interfere in the legal process and hence great precautions around his execution should be taken, she recalls.
Kasab was escorted from Mumbai to Pune in a heavily protected convoy about 36 hours before his hanging in full secrecy with a team of Mumbai crime branch officers. Once the team handed over Kasab to Yerwada prison officials, the team was quarantined with their phones taken away, she recounted.
Only about 10 of the officials were aware of the hanging, she says. “It was one of the most stressful moments of my career, no doubt — not because of the actual operation but the state government’s demand that all information was to remain confidential.”
When a reporter from Mumbai got the wind that Kasab was moved to Pune, Borwankar says “in the coolest possible manner, told him his source was wrong. But it unnerved me”.
The hanging was scheduled for 21 November and she was to go to the jail at midnight 20 November but after the reporter’s call, she decided to leave for Yerwada around 9 pm.
She recalls that she rode pillion with another officer on his motorcycle, wearing an official blazer over the uniform, to avoid suspicion. After reaching the office, she first checked whether the news was leaked or not and then reviewed the preparations.
On the day of execution, the atmosphere was grim, she says. “Having lost a lot of weight, Kasab looked like a child terrorist in total contrast to his demeanour on the day he recklessly fired his weapon at civilians.”
She recollects the profound silence when he was hanged. “A painful chapter in the history of Mumbai and indeed the nation had been successfully closed. At last.”
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Yakub chapter
“It was in complete contrast to the secrecy surrounding the execution of Ajmal Kasab in 2012,” Borwankar writes about the execution of Yakub Memon.
During one of her visits, she recalls asking Yakub if he had written his will in favour of his wife and daughter whom he had told her that he had never held in his arms.
To this, he said, “ma’am, they are like my two eyes. Yes, indeed I have willed everything to them,” she writes.
There was a last-minute mercy petition filed in the Supreme Court and despite all preparations done at the jail, the officers were tense because of this, she recalls.
But in the wee hours of 30 July 2015, they got instruction from Mumbai about the hanging as the petition was turned down.
Borwankar says Yakub walked confidently towards the noose. “As opposed to the quietude around Kasab’s execution, in Nagpur, all prison inmates knew about Yakub’s fate yet there was eerie silence.”
Many police officers would want to be in then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who also held the Home portfolio, good books and “showed a kind of enthusiasm that seemed to me rather unprofessional”, she writes.
Yakub Memon, she recalls, while in Nagpur jail had enrolled himself for MA in English literature and political science through Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). He was well versed with legal procedures. The retired IPS officer recalls that she found lots of books and files whenever she would visit him inside his prison in Nagpur.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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