Two Years of Silence: When Not Deciding Becomes the Decision

The Ethical Failure Is Not the Answer

• It's the Silence Every debate about Dara Singh's remission plea that you have likely encountered argues about the answer: should a man convicted of burning a missionary and his two young sons alive ever be released, however many years he has served? That is a real and difficult question. But it is not the question the Supreme Court was actually pressing the Odisha government on this week. The court's frustration was aimed at something narrower and, in its own way, more damning: for two years, the state did not answer either way.

Why Indecision Is Its Own Distinct Failure

A government that grants remission takes a position defensible on reformative grounds. A government that denies it takes a position defensible on retributive grounds, on the gravity of a crime that shocked the country's conscience.

A government that does neither - that simply lets the file sit - escapes having to defend either position while imposing the cost of both kinds of harm at once. Dara Singh remains in a state of unresolved uncertainty about whether his 24 years in prison will ever be weighed against the reformative theory that his sentencing framework promises him.

And Graham Staines' family and the wider public that watched this case become a marker of religiously motivated violence in India, are denied the closure that even an unfavourable, reasoned decision would provide.

The Structural Reason Delay Is the Easier Path It is not

hard to see why indecision is administratively convenient. A grant of remission in a case this prominent invites public and political backlash; a denial invites legal challenge on reformative-theory grounds, given the convict has crossed the 14-to-20-year threshold typically considered.

Silence invites neither - until a court forces the question, as it has now done twice, most recently threatening to summon the state's own Secretary.

What the Ethical Standard Actually Demands The Sentence Review

Board's obligation was never to reach a particular outcome - it was to reach a reasoned one, on a defined timeline, that either side could then contest through proper legal channels. A decision delayed for two years is not neutral; it is itself a choice, just one made without ever having to state or defend its reasoning.

That is the specific ethical standard this case tests: not mercy versus retribution, but whether an executive body discharging a quasi-judicial function can be permitted to avoid discharging it at all. For an aspirant, the lesson worth carrying is precise: administrative accountability is not satisfied merely by eventually acting under judicial pressure.

The two-year gap itself, not whatever decision follows it, is where the ethical failure already occurred.