Above the Fold: Top stories of the day
1. The Monsoon session will continue to be gridlocked as neither the ruling party nor the opposition seems to want to back down.
2. Narendra Modi will address three rallies next week in Bihar, in preparation for the polls.
3. The Centre has returned the controversial Gujarat Control of Terrorism and Organised Crime Bill, 2015 objecting to a provision that allows authorisation of interception of telephone conversations and their admissibility as evidence before a court of law.
4. Sanjiv Chaturvedi, a bureaucrat who has clashed with the Modi government on corruption, was awarded the Magsaysay award.
The Big Story: The death penalty
Convicted for the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Yakub Memon was hanged at 6.43 am on Thursday in Nagpur jail after a day of dramatic developments.
On Wednesday at around 4 pm, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court confirmed that Yakub Memon would hang by rejecting doubts raised over the legality of the dismissed July 21 curative petition and upholding his death warrant scheduled to be executed on 7 am on July 30. Almost simultaneously, the Maharashtra governor also rejected Memon's mercy petition.
Now all that remained was Memon's second mercy petition with President Pranab Mukherjee (the first was rejected in April 2014).
By 11 pm, with just eight hours to go for the hanging, President Pranab Mukherjee, on the advice of the Union Home Ministry, rejected this plea as well.
But it wasn’t over. A group of lawyers gathered at the residence of the Chief Justice of India, asking him to hear another petition filed by Memon’s lawyers. The petition argued that Memon's execution should not be allowed to proceed for the next 14 days, as per guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court in the Shatrugan Chauhan ruling. The verdict in the case laid down a minimum 14-day period between the rejection of the mercy petition being communicated to the prisoner and his family and the scheduled date of execution.
In an unprecedented move, a three-judge Supreme Court bench heard and dismissed this petition at around 5 am. By 7 am, Yakub Memon had been pronounced dead.
The Big Scroll
Here’s a blow-by-blow account of the unprecedented pre-dawn Supreme Court hearing, which was the last decision taken on the Memon case. The robust response of the justice system in the Memon case raises questions about why the system doesn’t really function as well when it comes to other mass crimes such as the Babri Masjid demolition or the 1993 Mumbai riots? Is there a religious bias built into Indian justice? Even if so, the fact that so many people stood up against this sort of sentiment is a silver lining to a dark cloud.
Politicking & Policying
1. Mamata Banerjee is assiduously wooing British firms to invest in Bengal.
2. In Kerala, the Bharatiya Janata Party has roped in Vellappally Natesan, a leader of the backward Ezhavas caste, who form about a quarter of the state's population.
3. Arvind Kerjriwal wants to bring back a new, improved BRT bus corridor in Delhi.
Punditry
1. In the Indian Express, KPS Gill, berates Punjab for not being prepared for terror.
2. Ira Dugal has some communication lessons for RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, in Mint.
3. In the Business Standard, Mihir Sharma argues that the policy requirements for corporate earnings growth are being ignored.
Don't Miss
An excerpt from S Hussain Zaidi's Black Friday narrates the story of Yakub Memon:
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1. The Monsoon session will continue to be gridlocked as neither the ruling party nor the opposition seems to want to back down.
2. Narendra Modi will address three rallies next week in Bihar, in preparation for the polls.
3. The Centre has returned the controversial Gujarat Control of Terrorism and Organised Crime Bill, 2015 objecting to a provision that allows authorisation of interception of telephone conversations and their admissibility as evidence before a court of law.
4. Sanjiv Chaturvedi, a bureaucrat who has clashed with the Modi government on corruption, was awarded the Magsaysay award.
The Big Story: The death penalty
Convicted for the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Yakub Memon was hanged at 6.43 am on Thursday in Nagpur jail after a day of dramatic developments.
On Wednesday at around 4 pm, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court confirmed that Yakub Memon would hang by rejecting doubts raised over the legality of the dismissed July 21 curative petition and upholding his death warrant scheduled to be executed on 7 am on July 30. Almost simultaneously, the Maharashtra governor also rejected Memon's mercy petition.
Now all that remained was Memon's second mercy petition with President Pranab Mukherjee (the first was rejected in April 2014).
By 11 pm, with just eight hours to go for the hanging, President Pranab Mukherjee, on the advice of the Union Home Ministry, rejected this plea as well.
But it wasn’t over. A group of lawyers gathered at the residence of the Chief Justice of India, asking him to hear another petition filed by Memon’s lawyers. The petition argued that Memon's execution should not be allowed to proceed for the next 14 days, as per guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court in the Shatrugan Chauhan ruling. The verdict in the case laid down a minimum 14-day period between the rejection of the mercy petition being communicated to the prisoner and his family and the scheduled date of execution.
In an unprecedented move, a three-judge Supreme Court bench heard and dismissed this petition at around 5 am. By 7 am, Yakub Memon had been pronounced dead.
The Big Scroll
Here’s a blow-by-blow account of the unprecedented pre-dawn Supreme Court hearing, which was the last decision taken on the Memon case. The robust response of the justice system in the Memon case raises questions about why the system doesn’t really function as well when it comes to other mass crimes such as the Babri Masjid demolition or the 1993 Mumbai riots? Is there a religious bias built into Indian justice? Even if so, the fact that so many people stood up against this sort of sentiment is a silver lining to a dark cloud.
Politicking & Policying
1. Mamata Banerjee is assiduously wooing British firms to invest in Bengal.
2. In Kerala, the Bharatiya Janata Party has roped in Vellappally Natesan, a leader of the backward Ezhavas caste, who form about a quarter of the state's population.
3. Arvind Kerjriwal wants to bring back a new, improved BRT bus corridor in Delhi.
Punditry
1. In the Indian Express, KPS Gill, berates Punjab for not being prepared for terror.
2. Ira Dugal has some communication lessons for RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, in Mint.
3. In the Business Standard, Mihir Sharma argues that the policy requirements for corporate earnings growth are being ignored.
Don't Miss
An excerpt from S Hussain Zaidi's Black Friday narrates the story of Yakub Memon:
By the time Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, the third of the Memon brothers, was in his early thirties, he had already acquired the reputation of being the best read and smartest criminal that the Bombay police had ever known.
But Yakub’s story was unusual. Educated in English-medium schools and college, he graduated with a degree in commerce. He became a chartered accountant in 1990. His accountancy firm was quickly successful, and in 1992 he won an award for the best chartered accountant in the Memon community.