TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,
Thiruvananthapuram: A protest was organised in Thiruvananthapuram against the execution of Mumbai blast convict Yakub Memon on July 1 by human rights activists, under the aegis of the ‘Solidarity Youth Movement’ and Pouravakasha Samara Samithi, a collective of activists, which literally means Citizen Rights Protection Committee, organised a gathering in a protest against the hanging.
Activists, several media persons and students expressed emotions, despair, helplessness, and anger in online spaces through hashtags, #YakubMemon and #deathpenalty. Most of the FB and Twitter posts expressed mounting frustration against what they termed as the injustice of the judiciary as well as the statement by Tripura Governor Thathagatha Roy, who termed the mass attending the funeral in Mumbai as “potential terrorists”.
Meanwhile, no funeral prayer in abstentia was reported anywhere in Kerala like Chennai or Kolkata.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and MLA VT Balram were conspicuous by their positions against the death penalty. The former had tweet urging to stop the death penalty while the latter said, on his Facebook page, “the death penalty of Memon should be the final capital punishment in the country”.
“Death penalty is not befitting the democratic credentials of the country, which boasts of the same. The country shouldn’t fall in prey to the shouting of the masses and the stances of the democratic should be in a far sighting and genuine manner,” Balram wrote on Facebook in Malyalam.