The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Tamil Nadu government to file a report on the status of a plea for pardon filed by Rajiv Gandhi assassination case convict, A.G. Perarivalan, before the State Governor.
The order from a Bench led by Justice L. Nageswara Rao came after the court found that not much progress has been made by the CBI in its probe into whether the assassination was the culmination of a “larger conspiracy”.
Justice Rao remarked to Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand that the report on the status of the investigation submitted in the court merely makes vague allusions to enquiries abroad in places like London, Hong Kong, etc. It has no specifics.
Turning then to Perarivalan’s lawyers, senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan and advocate Prabu Ramasubramanium, the Bench asked what relief did they really want from the apex court. Mr. Sankaranarayanan pointed out that his client has been in prison for nearly three decades. They drew the court’s attention to a short order passed by the Supreme Court on September 6, 2018.
The two-paragraph order referred to the application filed by Perarivalan under Article 161 (power of the Governor to grant pardons, etc, and to suspend, remit or commute prison sentences in certain cases) of the Constitution before the Governor of Tamil Nadu.
The court had observed in the 2018 order that “the authority concerned will be at liberty to decide the application as deemed fit”. On hearing about this order, the court, on Tuesday, ordered the State government to enquire and report back to the court in two weeks.
Perarivalan, who is in mid-forties, has spent about a quarter of a century inside jail serving his life imprisonment. He was 19 years old at the time of his arrest. Perarivalan had sought an order from the court to stay his life sentence till the MDMA probe into the larger conspiracy is completed.
He contended his role in the alleged crime, stretched to the maximum, would be that of supplying two nine-volt batteries without the knowledge of what it was going to be used for. He said his confession under the lapsed TADA to a police officer was not a valid evidence.
