Direction: Read the following passage and answer the questions given below.

The Indian Penal Code, which was in force in many states when the Constitution was made, contained more than one offence punishable by the death penalty. The Constitution makers formulated some articles with reference to the death penalty. Article 72 allowed President and Governor to show clemency to convicts sentenced to the death penalty. Article 134 provided for appeal to Supreme Court if High Court awarded a convict the death penalty after reversing a trial court judgement. But we shall not overlook the reality that the constitution makers could not be expected to go into the various aspects of each punishment provided in the penal statutes which were then in force. When they shaped Article 13 of the Constitution, it declared that any law in force at the time when it came into effect that was violative of any of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution was void. 

During the first five years after the Constitution was made, the death penalty remained the normal punishment for murder. If a session’s judge was to depart from it, he was bound to set out reasons for not awarding it to a convict for murder. Cr. P.C. was amended in 1973 by which Parliament directed that special reasons shall be shown if the Sessions Judge imposed the death penalty on the convicted person. This change was made evident to convey that the normal punishment for murder was life, and the death penalty was only an exception. 

The situation was again changed subsequently. This time it was not because of any legislative exercise but because of the pronouncement of the majority judgment by the Supreme Court of India in the Bachan Singh case in 1979. Most judges declared that the death penalty could be imposed only in the “rarest of rare cases in which the alternative sentence of life is unquestionably foreclosed”. Thereafter, that became the law as binding on all courts in India because of Article 141. However, this drastic power curtailment to impose capital punishment remained on paper. The Supreme Court began to dilute the rigour of the condition imposed in the Bachan Singh case. What is meant by the words “rarest of rare etc.”? The judges of High Courts and the Supreme Court used to employ semantics whenever and wherever they wanted to impose the death penalty.