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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia says that there are currently 488 people on death rows in independent India. Meanwhile, the UK hasn't had death rows for 60 years by now, because death penalty was de facto abolished in the 1960s.

If you are an opponent of the death penalty, I cannot see how the current situation is better, much less why gods should be thanked for that difference.

If the only thing that matters to you is that it is a native hand that wraps a rope around the condemned's neck, well, in that case I understand where you are coming from, though I don't agree with that.

Here in former Czechoslovakia, the death penalty was applied both by occupation powers and our own authorities. Same bad shit, I am glad that it is over, hopefully forever.

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488 people for a country of nearly 1.5 billion is a pretty slim number. The US has 6x the death row inmates despite having less than 1/4 the population.

India is pretty far behind the rest of the world, but to be fair, they were enslaved for centuries then dropped and left to build a society from scratch less than a century ago. There are going to be problems, but on many fronts, India is doing better than a lot of countries in some aspects. Instead of comparing them to Western/Central Europe, it's better to compare them to other countries in their class. Countries in Central America, Subsaharan Africa, etc.

As someone who just visited a few weeks ago, one thing really impressed me about India: government hospitals provide free service. I had a medical emergency, a total foreigner who pays no taxes, and they helped me without hesitation in my time of need and refused to take a single cent. That's something I can truly admire about their country and something the world could learn from India.

This is a kind of racism.

Brown people have every capability to be just as cruel, heartless and devilishly cunning as white people.

We don't know who invented slavery and we'll never know but when European explorers arrived they did not introduce the concept. Nor did they introduce war, superstition, poverty, starvation or inequality. There's no such thing as the "noble savage".

>We don't know who invented slavery and we'll never know but when European explorers arrived they did not introduce the concept.

Wrong; the System of Racism as it is known today is entirely an invention of White European Countries. Prior to their institutionalizing of Racism on pseudo-scientific lines it was merely simple enslavement of the loser by the victor on a case-by-case basis. Also not all Countries/Kingdoms engaged in this. It is only with the expansion by Europeans that the idea of "Races" some of which were considered inferior by birth/definition because of skin color(black/brown/yellow/red), facial features(Caucasian/Negroid/Mongoloid), lack of understanding of native cultures(civilized/uncivilized), etc. became Systematized/Institutionalized and given legitimacy using what we know today as pseudo-science.

> Nor did they introduce war, superstition, poverty, starvation or inequality.

But they increased it exponentially, devastating entire countries/civilizations/cultural groups/social groups/etc. Much of the mess in the World today particularly in Africa, Middle East and South Asia has its genesis in their colonial past.

Well, first it was _not_ banned when India became independent, and if anything, the British system was quite trigger happy with it. If you look at just the history of British executions pre 1967, you'll find a massive number of wrongful convictions, being overturned or pardoned decades later.

After independence, the use has declined over the decades, and in the last 20 years, it was used seven times - three convicted terrorists (one of whom may have been innocent) and four gang rape convicts (not much doubt about guilt there). It's quite rare that the sentence _isn't_ commuted in the modern era.

So, if Britain improved over time, that cannot be used to argue that the situation isn't better in India over the same time; maybe not ideal, but definitely better than at the point of Independence.

I'm opposed to the death penalty. Thankfully the death penalty is rare in India. But that is not the point I wanted to make. It's that the casual cruelty to Indians was rampant in way that it was not for British. It's not that the the British of that era suddenly became more moral when they went back to their own country. It's that in a democracy, the rulers dare not do what imperial rulers can.(they don't need to be British to be cruel. There were plenty of Mughal and Hindu rulers of equal cruelty.) Independence from British rule gave us our independence and allowed us to become a democracy, and flawed though it may be, democratic India never had famines that killed tens of millions every decade. Freedom and democracy are precious and I think we Indians have started to take it for granted after 75 years of it.

Precisely said. It is simple psychology. I would rather have painful experiences with my own people, with whom we can grow together (hopefully, possibly), rather than an Imperialist who sees me as an other, and who I see as an other.

Imperialism is undoubtedly a trauma. We can get past the experience and even do commerce but the distaste and unpleasantness (on an aggregate) will never really go away.

I wouldn't tolerate cruelty from my own people either. That's the whole point of a democracy. It holds rulers accountable for their actions. (to some extent.)

Also, as Mahatma Gandhi pointed out, we should distinguish between British rule of India, and the British people themselves. Indians and India have no problem with the latter, only with the former. Once British rule ended, we have no enmity with Britain. We parted as friends. Indeed Lord Mountbatten is still revered as the first governor general of Independent India. (Apt considering tomorrow is Republic Day.)

Neither would I. I never said I would tolerate cruelty from my own people either.

Neither did I say that I hate the British people. But if someone from the country goes around saying that the Raj was a favor to Indians, I wouldn't like this person either. I would think they are an idiot.

As for Mr. Mountbatten I am not sure what sort of a person would "revere" this man. He probably wasn't a bad person but he wasn't great enough to be revered either. Just some bureaucrat in the right place at the right time.

You can't know what India would be like if British rule continued to this day. Any comparison is effectively meaningless. The parent comment was arguing against nostalgia for the British Raj, and it's no less justifiable.

"You can't know"

You can't, but you can at least compare and guess. There are still some colonies extant (e.g. Falklands, Gibraltar, French Guinea, New Caledonia), and when it comes to big stuff like death penalty, they all followed the metropolis. Even former British dominions (Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) abolished the death penalty on a fairly similar schedule.

The scale of those colonies is kind of absurd when compared to any even moderately larger territory, leave alone the entirety of India!

You're so focused on capital punishment as an indicator of social health that you're missing the original point, which is that life was awful for many Indians under the British Raj.

> "Since 2000, eight executions have been carried out in India, all executions have been carried out by hanging." (Wikipedia)

One ought to to check out the offenses committed as well. These are no ordinary crimes. Public opinion matters. It's a large and extremely complex place and "system".

Does it matter if you are on the death row? Some of those who are there will be executed, and waiting for decades if you hang or not is pretty inhuman. Once there is a legal sentence of death on you, it is a matter of policy if you actually hang or not, and policy may change with a different PM/governor etc.

That feels very bad to me. If a retentionist country wants to hang people, it shouldn't add endless insecurity on top of the punishment.

Edit.: interesting that this is controversial enough to be downvoted. Remember Trump signing the death warrants of 13 federal death row inmates during the last 6 months of his presidency? Yeah, once you are legally condemned to death, your actual execution is a matter of electoral random walk, which is pretty nasty.

You should understand, that of those 488 currently in DR, only a small fraction will ever be actually executed. It's practically the same as life term. I hope you are not against that either? The "endless insecurity" is actually deliberate, because people (majority) will actually oppose the abolition of capital punishment.

Tangentially, how should a country (read US) deal with terrorists (in the strictest possible sense of the word) who planned and carried out significantly impactful attacks against their citizens?

Its probably not being downvoted for that reason. Rather because you're just being plain wrong here.

" only a small fraction will ever be actually executed"

How can you know? It is entirely possible that a change in policy will result in all of them hanging within a month. Once you are condemned to death, the only thing between you and the gallows is policy that can be unilaterally changed by whoever decides to carry out the executions or not. The court has spoken, you won't be sentenced again. You are a dead person walking and someone in the executive branch can always decide to let you actually hang. An election of a politician who wants to look tough on crime may result in precisely that.

Tangentially, more than half of the world abolished the death penalty even though terrorism does not spare them. Spain lets Basque butchers live behind bars, so does France with its jihadists.

>It is entirely possible that a change in policy will result in all of them hanging within a month.

It seems to me you dont have the faintest clue how the Indian justice system works, I'm not even sure you're aware that India does have law and order like a civilized democracy. It has major problems within it, but it's not entirely nonexistent.

About the second point, I'd just add again, that public opinion matters.

OK, so if I am a condemned person sitting on an Indian death row, who can order my actual execution?

As far as public opinion goes, yes, it matters, but it may not be decisive. Quite a few European countries would probably re-introduce the death penalty if the question was left entirely to the population (via a referendum). I am sort-of glad that they don't go down this road; not even Ukraine sentences Russian war criminals to death.

Practically the president. The appeal process is deliberately long, except in cases with strong public or international pressure.

A series of more or less automatic appeals ends up at the desk of the President. It's a deliberate act of commission by the President of the time to actually order an execution. And overwhelmingly, they tend to commute.

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