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.

On this day..

• 1954: Nikos Ploumpidis, Greek Communist
• 2018: Carey Dean Moore
• 1765: Andrew Oliver lynched in effigy to the Liberty Tree
• 1944: Lucien Natanson
• 1878: Ivan Kovalsky, nihilist martyr
• 1679: John King and John Kid, Covenanters
• 1793: Walter Clark, hanged women's father
• 1480: The Martyrs of Otranto
• 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