When Waiting Becomes the Punishment: Rajoana's Plea and the Missing Deadline in Article 72

The Power With No Clock: Article 72 and the Cost of Never Deciding Article 72

lets the President pardon, reprieve, remit or commute any sentence, including a sentence of death. It sets out the power in detail. What it never sets is a time limit. The Constitution assumes the executive will decide. It says nothing about what happens if the executive simply does not. That silence is the entire dispute in Balwant Singh Rajoana's plea.

How the

Court filled the gap The Supreme Court did not invent a deadline. Instead it located the cost of delay in Article 21, which forbids depriving any person of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.

The Court has read that guarantee to include dignity even on death row. In Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India (2014), it held that unexplained, inordinate delay in deciding a mercy petition inflicts mental agony amounting to cruelty.

That is a supervening circumstance, arising after the sentence became final, which justifies commutation to life imprisonment. In State of Maharashtra v. Pradeep Yashwant Kokade (December 2024), it applied the principle to a delay of nearly four years and directed that mercy petitions be processed promptly. The text says the President may pardon. In practice, under Article 74 the President acts on the Home Ministry's advice and the Court has made that ministry answerable for its silence.

Where

Rajoana's case sits Rajoana was sentenced to death in 2007. The SGPC filed a mercy petition for him in 2012. In 2023 the Supreme Court declined to commute, leaving the decision to the competent authority to take in due course.

Three more years have passed with no decision. The Centre's position, as reported, is that the prevailing situation in Punjab is not conducive to granting relief. That turns the case on one precise question: Is a security assessment an explanation for delay or is it simply another name for it?

Two readings of "unexplained"

• The Centre's reading: delay is explained when the executive has a reason and public order in a sensitive State is a weighty one. Rajoana's own record supports caution: he never appealed his conviction and the plea was filed for him rather than by him.
• The Article 21 reading: Shatrughan Chauhan asks not whether the State has reasons to fear a decision, but whether it has reasons for not making one. A security concern can justify rejecting a mercy plea. It cannot justify leaving it unanswered for fourteen years, because the prisoner's suffering does not pause while the State hesitates. The second reading is more faithful to the jurisprudence. If an open-ended security rationale counts as an explanation, the delay doctrine would protect every prisoner except those whose cases are politically sensitive, which is exactly where executive delay is most likely. For GS2, Rajoana's case is the cleanest current test of a constitutional principle built entirely by courts: a power without a deadline still cannot be exercised by never exercising it.