Yakub Memon's execution: How the Indian media reacted

Yakub Memon, the only death-row convict in the 1993 blasts case, was executed a little before 7 a.m. on Thursday after being in jail for almost two decades. The hanging took place only less than two hours after a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court, in an unprecedented 5 a.m. verdict,  rejected a final petition for a stay on his execution.
 

The 1993- Mumbai blasts were the most destructive bomb explosions in Indian history, and the first-of-its-kind serial-bomb-blasts anywhere ever.
 

Memon, a chartered accountant and the younger brother of one of the key masterminds Tiger Memon, was sentenced to death in 2007 by a terrorism court after being convicted of providing material support for the blasts.
 

The decision to hang him now, however, has generated a fierce debate in India on both his guilt/innocence as well as the need for capital punishment. 
 

In an editorial, The Indian Express daily says, “India’s use of the death penalty demeans that most cherished idea on which our republic rests, the idea of justice. The execution of Memon must compel us to question our most fundamental beliefs. The wounds inflicted on March 12, 1993, can be healed only by justice — but what the hangman offers is only a crude approximation of that cherished ideal, the bedrock of our life as a republic and as a people.”
 

The Hindu, in its July 29 editorial, asks whether the “irreversible and inhuman sentence of death the only recourse for a democratic government”?
 

“Carrying out the sentence will only have the appearance of a justice that is retributive and vengeful, not substantial or morally different from the very offence that gave rise to the proceedings,” it added.
 

Eminent journalist Shekhar Gupta posted his views on his public Facebook page, which Huffington Post’s Indian edition collated into one article. Gupta says the Supreme Court has so far settled the debate at granting it in the rarest of rare cases and Yakub Memon case, whatever we may now say retrospectively, fulfils this criterion. 
 

The case going into what is an almost unprecedented fourth round of review in the Supreme Court at one level shows the depth and strength of our system of fairness and justice, but at another level it underlines the rise of the noise factor that our judiciary will learn to deal with. It's an incredible idea that so-called mitigating factors that defence lawyers never mentioned over a 20-year process suddenly surface in the week preceding the execution date, Gupta wrote.
 

Gupta further added that he had investigated the 1993 Bombay blasts in detail for India Today, and there was every evidence that the Memons and Dawood were in contact with the ISI much before the blasts. The real purpose of the attacks were to create mayhem by killing  probably thousands of people and police in Bombay and India would be on fire.  

"Yakub Memon had exhausted all legal options," said the Pioneer in its editorial.
 

Criticising some eminent personalities who had sought a presidential pardon for Memon, it writes  that it is disgraceful that certain people talk of unsubstantiated 'mitigating circumstances' and hold Yakub Memon 'innocent' or a 'victim' of a so-called unethical U-turn by the state.
 

Senior journalist Saba Naqvi, in a piece in Outlook, writes that his hanging is a reminder of the structural prejudice of the Indian state.
 

The hanging of Yakub Memon, conversely reminds some of us of the deeply flawed nature of the Indian police, investigative agencies and politicians, she writes.