3 Review(s)

In our judicial system, a person accused of committing the mostheinous of crimes can go scot-free, while someone booked for a pettytheft can stay locked away for many, many years. It largely depends onthe depth of the defendants pockets and their clout. Those sentencedto death by hanging by the highest court must, according to the law,be executed within two years of the verdict. Those prisoners die everysingle day leading up to date of execution. The stomping of the bootsof the guards doing their rounds of the jail corridors don�t let them rest;they sound like the death knell. Arjun Chatterji was one such prisonerwho had been lodged in jail for fourteen years. Charged with the rapeand murder of a fourteen-year-old school girl living in the apartmentsociety where he worked as a security guard, he was the only personto be sentenced for a crime not related to terrorism in the twentiethcentury. He pled innocence until the moment he was hanged, whichsparked off a public debate over how justice is handed out in ourcountry because the evidence presented in court were inconclusive.This is the story of Arjun Chatterji. Both the acts in this novel- thecrime and the punishment -are inhuman; they are both Amanushik.