The Solicitor General Tushar Mehta on Thursday said to the Supreme Court that Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit would decide on state government’s recommendation for the remission of sentence of AG Perarivalan, a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, in three to four days.
The top court had asked the Tamil Nadu government to request Purohit to expedite his decision on the state’s recommendations for the remission of sentence of Perarivalan.
During an earlier hearing, the Supreme Court had expressed displeasure over the state governor for not taking any decision on the remission plea for over two years.
Perarivalan had applied to the governor for pardon in December 2015. In September 2018, the Supreme Court asked the governor to decide the pardon plea as he deemed fit. Three days after that, on 9 September 2018, the Tamil Nadu Cabinet recommended to the governor to remit Perarivalan’s sentence and release him forthwith, but the governor is yet take a call on the same.
“I still firmly believe that the State government will take efforts for the quick release of my son Perarivalan,” Arputham Ammal, mother of A.G. Perarivalan tweeted.
Governor Banwarilal Purohit should not waste any more time and immediately order the release of Perarivalan and six other life convicts in the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi assassination case after the Supreme Court observed that the delay in deciding the petition was ‘extraordinary’, the DMK said in a resolution passed at the meeting of its district secretaries at Anna Arivalayam in Chennai on Thursday.
Arrested at the age of 19 in the case, Perarivalan had been sentenced to death in May 1999 on the charge of purchasing an 8-volt battery used by the assassins to trigger the belt bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi. In 2014, his sentence and that of two others, Murugan and Santhan (both Sri Lankans), was commuted to life.
