There is little doubt that the only woman among the convicts in the death row has drawn special sympathy, all the more for the fact that her seven-year-old daughter faced an orphan's fate. The quality of mercy, however, cannot be strained. To deny it to Nalini's male comrades in political crime -- her husband Murugan, Perarivalan, and Chinna Santhan -- will be to deny the more fundamental reasons that should compel a review of the sentence. And, indeed, of the provision for capital punishment itself.

The emergence of a peculiar political line-up on the issue ofthe sentence has been noted. Before Sonia Gandhi decided to act in an unvindictive manner, the Congress was the leading opponent of the demand for commutation of the sentence, which it seems to regard as a mark of disrespect to Rajiv Gandhi's memory and of leniency to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Support for the Congress stand has been forthcoming from the party's offshoots like the Tamil Maanila Congress and the Tamil Nadu Rajiv Congress, a member of the National Democratic Alliance. AIADMK chief J. Jayalalitha too could hardly disagree more with the demand that ignored the dire need, according to her, for a deterrent punishment for perpetrators of "horrendous crimes". The plea for commutation, on the other hand, found support from two segments of the political spectrum. George Fernandes apparently spoke for the anti-Congress and anti-`Family' sections in the NDA, in appealing for clemency for the four. Lingering sympathies for the Eelam cause, if not the LTTE, were bound to be seen in theendorsement of the appeal by the Pattali Makkal Katchi and, in a more guarded manner, by the DMK, both of the NDA. It was a trivialisation of the Rajiv tragedy that the Congress-led clamour represented. The special pleading for the commutation, on the other hand, distorted the demand as pressed by others with no petty-political concerns.

The mercy petition merited a sympathetic consideration and a positive response not because the case against the convicts was not established. The point was that such a pardon, far from amounting to an acquittal, would be a more effective answer to a terrorist crime than the enforcement of the final sentence. The point needs reiteration.

The debate over abolition of capital punishment is inconclusive as yet, and the provision for the "rarest-of-rare-instances" exception may be considered realistic. But whether a political crime can be included in this exceptional category is open to question. Even more so is the assumption that capital punishment can be a deterrentagainst crimes of this kind, committed in this particular instance by a "human bomb" on behalf of an organisation that routinely uses suicide squads. Justice would not be any less done in the long-drawn-out Rajiv assassination case for being tempered with mercy.