Cong’s Tewari backs clemency for Rajoana
LUDHIANA/NEW DELHI: A day after his party colleague and fellow Lok Sabha member Ravneet Singh Bittu urged the government not to release former Punjab chief minister Beant Singh’s assassin Balwant Singh Rajoana, Congress leader Manish Tewari on Wednesday backed clemency for the death-row convict who has been in prison for 26 years.
“Release him from prison invoking Section 432 (power to suspend or remit sentences) of the CrPC. Criminal jurisprudence of incarceration needs to be grounded in reformation and not retribution,” the Anandpur Sahib MP shared on Twitter.
On Tuesday, Ludhiana MP and Beant Singh’s grandson Ravneet Singh Bittu had said that granting clemency to Rajoana “would send a very wrong message and embolden the country’s enemies”.
He was reacting to Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) chief Sukhbir Singh Badal’s request to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his intervention for the release of Rajoana.
Tewari wrote on Twitter that being a terror victim, he understood the anguish of his colleague Ravneet Bittu, but as a lawyer and MP from Punjab, “it is my considered view that Balwant Singh Rajoana having served 26 years in prison his death sentence be commuted to life and he be released (sic)”.
Akalis reiterate demand for release
Meanwhile, the SAD on Wednesday reiterated its demand, and slammed Bittu for letting a “personal family matter” come in the way of Rajoana’s release.
Akali leader Maheshinder Singh Grewal, while addressing a press conference in Ludhiana, appealed to the PM to release Rajoana on Guru Teg Bahadur’s Parkash Purb, claiming that it will go a long way in “healing Sikh wounds and help the cause of peace and communal harmony in Punjab”.
Rajoana was awarded death sentence in July 2007, after being convicted for his involvement in an explosion outside the Punjab civil secretariat that had killed Beant Singh and 16 others on August 31, 1995.