Barman. Picture by Abhijit Chakrabarty

Balurghat, Aug. 12: A woman, close to 60, was putting a fresh coat of cow dung on her mud hovel. Her face seemed drawn and tense with the strain of a poverty-stricken 13 year period, since the day in August when her son was hanged in Alipore Central Jail.

That was the last time that hangman Nata Mullick had pulled the lever sending anyone plunging down the end of his rope.

“Why have you come to me now, when my son Sukumar was hanged, there was no one to file a mercy petition for him, nor were there any activists clamouring for the hanging to be commuted to life imprisonment,” said Romita Barman, of Paschim Raynagar, around 2 km from here.

Sukumar along with a friend, Kartik Sil, was sent to the gallows on August 21, 1991. His father, Nagen, was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in jail after serving 11 years.

“Today some of you are very concerned about Dhananjoy Chatterjee, I feel so sad when I hear people talking about the man in the marketplace and debate over the sentence on television,” said a visibly agitated Barman.

Sukumar, Kartik and Nagen were found guilty of killing eight persons, including an old woman and a child, all of them relatives.

Nagen and his elder brother, Habul had been locked in a dispute over the division of their mother’s property. Matters came to a head on a stormy July 31 in 1987, when the trio went on a killing spree.

They used sharp weapons to murder Habul, his wife Saila, sons, Mintu, Hiku, Tinku and Daktar. They also did not spare an eighteen month-old female child, Furfuri. Nagen also killed his old mother.

One of Habul’s sons, Biswanath, had managed to escape the carnage by hiding and it was on the basis of his eye-witness account that the sentences were passed. Biswanath died of cancer two years ago.

“I too spent four years in jail, and today it pains me to see the hue and cry over Dhananjoy. Why was my son’s crime any more than that of a person who has killed and then raped a young girl, where were the rights’ organisations then?” Romita asked.

She alleged that when her husband died, the authorities at the jail in Behrampore did not part with the money her husband had earned by working in prison.

Speaking in a hushed voice after the outburst, Romita said that of her four surviving sons, two worked as labourers in Mumbai, and the others stayed with their families nearby.

A neighbour of Romita’s, Hiranbala Pramanik, was of the view that when a person was hanged, he was given a chance to escape his guilt. “Spending a life in jail would have made them realise their crime and they would have repented till death. Hanging is easier in a certain kind of way,” she said.