Amanushik - Bengali

In our judicial system, a person accused of committing the most heinous of crimes can go scot-free, while someone booked for a petty theft can stay locked away for many, many years. It largely depends on the depth of the defendant’s pockets and their clout. Those sentenced to death by hanging by the highest court must, according to the law, be executed within two years of the verdict. Those prisoners die every single day leading up to date of execution. The stomping of the boots of 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 prisoner who had been lodged in jail for fourteen years. Charged with the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old school girl living in the apartment society where he worked as a security guard, he was the only person to be sentenced for a crime not related to terrorism in the twentieth century. He pled innocence until the moment he was hanged, which sparked off a public debate over how justice is handed out in our country because the evidence presented in court were inconclusive. This is the story of Arjun Chatterji. Both the acts in this novel— the crime and the punishment — are ‘inhuman’; they are both ‘Amanushik’.