Final wish, last meal – Why remaining hours of Dec 2012 convicts will ride an emotional wave

All four convicts in December 2012 gang rape case will be hanged Friday morning. For Asha Devi, who has spent 7 years waiting for this moment, will it bring closure?

The four convicts who were hanged Friday morning | Image ThePrint

What would you choose as your last meal in this life?

It’s a question that has been on my mind lately, not just because of the coronavirus pandemic, but also the scheduled hanging of the four remaining convicts in the December 2012 Delhi gang rape case at 5.30 am Friday. This may not be the most obvious question when you think of the rapists. So many Indians want to see them dead, and just in the last few weeks, they must already have gone through a hundred deaths. No matter which side of the aisle you are on death penalty, there is no question that their hanging will be a huge emotional moment for all of India tomorrow – not just for the victim’s family and the rapists and their families, but also for scores of rape victims and survivors, and the December 2012 protesters at India Gate.

Over the past few months, Indians have watched — some impatient, some enraged, some cynical and dismissive and some just plain exhausted — the dizzying whirl of review petitions, curative pleas, mercy pleas, reviews of mercy pleas, death warrants, suspension of death warrants and even appeals in the International Court of Justice.

But legalities aside, as the rapists are hanged tomorrow, there will still be some emotional rituals that are likely to be followed.

The last meal

Photographer Henry Hargreaves’ series on the last meals of death row inmates in the US provides a strangely intimate, oddly sweet look at the last-meal choices of prisoners and what that says about them – from a former KFC manager ordering a bucket of his brand’s fried chicken to a man ordering a single olive (with the pit in it – he hoped an olive tree would sprout from his grave as a peace symbol).

In India, while there’s no last-meal ritual stipulated in the prison rules, jailers do reportedly allow for a condemned prisoner’s final meal to be a little special. Food is practically every Indian’s way of showing that they care, and jailers as well as convicted criminals are only human. So if Ajmal Kasab wanted his last meal to be a solitary tomato, his wish was, it was reported, granted. He was condemned to the gallows; surely the state could afford to give him a big, red, juicy tomato.

Riding an emotional roller coaster

This is not a plea for sympathy or an argument against or for death penalty. But one can only imagine the desperate fear these convicts must have felt, and the equally desperate hope that they have clung to. Just as the victim’s mother, Asha Devi, has.

Whether you call it justice or bloodlust, if you were faced with imminent death, it is natural to try every trick in the book to delay it, to buy yourself more time – even in prison.

The district court of Aurangabad in Bihar is also seized of a divorce petition filed by the wife of one of the convicts, who said that while she believes her husband is innocent, she doesn’t want to live with the tag of being a rapist’s widow. Many speculate that this is yet another tactic employed by the convicts’ lawyer to delay the execution. At Delhi’s Patiala House Court on Thursday, a physical altercation took place between the convict’s family and a group of people supporting the death penalty, after which the convict’s wife started hitting herself with slippers, saying someone should kill her because “I don’t want to live”. There is no denying that the past few months have been an emotional hell for everyone involved in this case.

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High drama outside Patiala House Court as the wife of one of the Nirbhaya convicts, Akshay, beats herself in public ahead of the order on the death warrant. She has also moved the local Court in Bihar asking for divorce. The 4 convicts are scheduled to be hanged tomorrow at 5:30. pic.twitter.com/VIoOdVTrLi

— Nalini ? (@nalinisharma_) March 19, 2020

Legal battles aside, the convicts’ families are and will forever be branded and defined by a crime they did not commit. They have even approached President Ram Nath Kovind with a common euthanasia plea for themselves. Even if they know what their son did was monstrous, this couldn’t have been easy for them.

On the other hand, the victim’s mother, Asha Devi, has spent the last seven years battling for this moment, but when the hanging finally does happen, will it bring her the closure she has so desperately sought? She may fear the convicts will find a new loophole to exploit. And she, too, has been defined by the fact that her daughter was raped and murdered.

Convicts’ final moments

And finally, how the convicts spend their last day is something that will cross everyone’s mind. Remorse, praying for forgiveness, self-pity, anger, resignation – their last conversations and thoughts must be shaped by at least some of these emotions.

In fact, leave aside these convicts – what would you want to do if you knew you were to be executed tomorrow? Think of the books you regret never having read, the movies you might like to watch again, the song you would play on loop. That one person you would like to meet for the last time and what you might say to them.

And yes, the choice of that last meal.

Views are personal.