2004: Dhananjoy Chatterjee, the last hanged in India … for now
August 14th, 2009 Headsman
On this date in 2004, Dhananjoy Chatterjee hanged at Calcutta’s Alipore Central Jail for the 1990 rape-murder of 14-year-old Hetal Parekh.
Chatterjee’s hanging also brought into the limelight the garrulous, publicity-hounding 84-year-old executioner Nata Mallick, who conducted the hanging with his son and grandson and told anyone with a microphone stories of the hangman’s glory days.
Those days are long past on the subcontinent.
Among death penalty countries, India is the anti-Singapore: despite its billion-plus population, death sentences are vanishingly rare. Chatterjee is not only the most recent person hanged in India as of this writing, but the only one hanged there since 1995.
One actual hanging in fourteen years for a billion-person country? The only lower execution rate would be actual abolition.
Chatterjee may be relieved of his milestone distinctions in the not-too-distant future, however. (Where “not-too-distant” by the standards of the Indian death penalty might still mean years away.)
Mohammad Afzal, condemned for the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, has become a political lightning rod; India’s conservative Hindu party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has made political hay pushing for Afzal’s execution.
Update: A different Pakistani terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, became the next hanged after Chatterjee in 2012. Afzal Guru got his in February 2013.
Also on this date
- 1820: Amasa Fuller, the Indiana hero
- 1949: Husni al-Za'im, Syrian president
- 1860: John Moyse, the Private of the Buffs
- 1936: Rainey Bethea, America's last public hanging
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,India,Milestones,Murder,Rape,Ripped from the Headlines
Tags: 2000s, 2004, alipore central jail, august 14, bjp, calcutta, dhananjoy chatterjee, famous executioners, hetal parekh, mohammad afzal, nata mallick
August 14th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Weren’t the people that perpetrated the shootings in Mumbai last year sentenced to hang?
December 14th, 2009 at 9:09 am
[...] 10. Dhananjoy Chatterjee, 2004 [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 6:33 am
HANG MOHAMMAD AJMAL AMIR KASAB AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. PLEASE.
October 31st, 2010 at 10:35 am
[...] 37. May 10, 1994: John Wayne Gacy – Democratic machine operative, amateur harlequin, serial killer 38. Aug. 14, 2004: Dhananjoy Chatterjee – The only person hanged in India in the past generation … though he doesn’t seem [...]
May 23rd, 2011 at 6:33 am
Dhanjoy chattarjee has no political background and there is no any community activicst came for support, So, his excution was took place.We are not to forget that, Mazod azzar to whom we released on khandhar. All the hanging let go on pending but why it for Afzal Guru and Kasab .
Our democrasy can answer it ?
November 3rd, 2012 at 2:25 am
[...] 38. Robert Francois Damiens (March 28, 1757) 39. The Belsen war criminals (December 13, 1945) 40. Dhananjoy Chatterjee (August 14, 2004) 41. Maximilien Robespierre (July 28, 1794) 42. The Stoning of Soraya M. (August [...]
November 21st, 2012 at 12:07 am
[...] first man executed in India since 2004, Ajmal Kasab was captured alive after the deadly November 26, 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. The [...]
November 21st, 2012 at 1:22 am
[...] been a recipe for virtual death penalty abolition: the last hanging prior to Kasab’s was in 2004, and the last one before that was in 1995. This is in a country with one-sixth of the world’s [...]
February 9th, 2013 at 4:53 am
[...] at the time, actual executions were an extreme rarity in [...]
May 4th, 2013 at 4:28 am
[...] was among India’s last hangings prior to the near-moratorium in India in the first years of the 21st [...]