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The convicts’ zealotry was visible in the emotionless way they executed the plot and in their total lack of remorse at the hearing on quantum of sentencing. The chief conspirators, possibly the Bhatkals, who renamed themselves after a Karnataka town and who displayed hardened criminality in hatching not just the attack in Hyderabad but elsewhere too. The quality of mercy is obviously not to be shown to such inhuman tactics as running a war against the State and in the process killing innocent people who probably had nothing to do with the grievances, real or imagined, of the terrorists.Here the argument isn’t about whether the death sentence should exist or if it should be abolished as a humanitarian move. As the NIA special judge noted, this was among the “rarest of rare” cases, with logistics plotted in Karnataka and done in cold blood in a multi-ethnic, multi-religion metropolis.

The convicts are apparently all prepared to file appeals in the high court and Supreme Court, which is their right, and all due legal processes must be followed before the sentences are confirmed and then carried out. While the death sentence may seem like closure to many whose lives were turned upside down by terror, the important point is that justice must not only be done but also be seen to be done, which is why the appeals must be considered with judicial earnestness before a final verdict is pronounced. To those affected, such time-consuming processes may appear to take forever, but the rule of law must prevail as much as the majesty of the court in determining the final outcome.

A candid admission of the burden of governing a multi-religious, multi-ethnic country that owes its unification to colonial conquest might save India from the usually unspoken charge of hypocrisy. Verma Committee’s recommendation to do away with prior sanction for prosecuting security personnel for sexual offences.Allowance must always be made for national biases and vested interests. An attorney-general is paid to project his government’s point of view, but Mr Rohatgi would have earned greater respect for his high office by distinguishing between country and people.We are not yet a developed nation and need not pretend to be one.It might be understood if India explained all this, adding that public opinion was not yet reconciled to repealing Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code on “unnatural sex” and that India lacks the resources and expertise to prevent child labour or provide drinking water and sanitation to all village homes. The US refused to see any wrong in the Pakistani military crackdown on helpless Bangladeshis in December 1971.

Likewise, India should proclaim that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act is necessary for the security of the Northeast, that a terrorist threat looms over Jammu and Kashmir and that only the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act can prevent sabotage by subversive NGOs.If the NDA government regards human rights as an administrative obstacle it should say so instead of waffling about the Supreme Court’s 2016 order against blanket immunity for the security forces and the Justice J. Roosevelt’s supposed comment about Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, that “he may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”. But 112 speakers from nations as different as Norway and Turkey, Italy, the United States, Australia, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia may not have asked so many probing questions in Geneva if it hadn’t been for what John Connell called in his account of the 1956 Suez Crisis “a priggish and sanctimonious consciousness of moral superiority” that is a “dominant trend in the Indian character”. He was absolutely right to claim that “India is a secular state with no state religion” (although some might add “as yet”), but that cannot be said of Indians who set fire to the railway coach in Godhra, went on a three-day killing spree in Gujarat and now lynch people on suspicion (often unfounded) of eating beef.