It is all very well for India to seek the extradition of Mumbai terror accused David Coleman Headley into this country to stand trial for the ghastly events of 26/11 of 2008 when a group of Pakistan-trained terrorists virtually held the country's financial capital hostage.
But going by the painfully slow process of the Indian criminal justice system and the proclivity of many hardened criminals to secure acquittal by browbeating the witnesses not to depose against them or to turn hostile at crucial stages of the trial, one is left wondering whether it would be prudent for Headley to be pulled out of trial in a country (the US) where trials are much more clinical and swift.
There have been specific cases in the past of dreaded terrorists extradited to India from Dubai being allowed to go scot-free because the charges against them could not be proved due to witnesses being too scared to depose against them. In terrorist-affected Punjab at the height of insurgency in the 1980s, there was not a single conviction of a terrorist by the courts due to the fear psychosis that they generated and the failure of the establishment to protect the next of kin of innocent victims of terror. In the circumstances, the credibility of the criminal justice system in India in seeking convictions is abysmally low. Dreaded gangster Abu Salem was extradited by Portugal after protracted Indian efforts in 2005 but the cases against him are yet far from being decided.
As it stands, while capital punishment in India is given out in the "rarest of rare" cases, life imprisonment in India, though on paper meant to last the convicted man's lifetime, usually comes to an end in 14 years or even earlier after commutation for good conduct. Contrast this with the United States where Jack Ruby, who gunned down the suspected killer of Lee Harvey Oswald who in turn was the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was sentenced to 500 years in prison in the 1960s. It is, therefore, imperative that India, while interrogating Headley in the US to expose his links with other terrorist offenders, allows him to be sentenced there for exemplary and swift justice to be meted out.
