Did Dhananjoy Chatterjee who was hanged on 14 August 2004 for the rape and murder of schoolgirl Hetal Parekh deserve to die?

He had already spent 14 years behind bars at the Alipore Correctional Home. He was waiting for presidential clemency for a long time and honestly hoped he would get it. His was the first death sentence imposed and applied on a civilian in independent India where the convict was sentenced to death solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence. His body, after execution, was not handed over to his family.

Why? Twenty seven years after the gruesome crime on 5 March 1990, this particular case appealed to the cinematic and social instincts of filmmaker Arindam Sil to create a fictionalised account of the events leading to the execution of Chatterjee, which he has made into a full-length feature film called Dhananjoy, produced by Shree Venkatesh Films. Why was Sil suddenly inspired to make the unique case into a film?

“I was sent a book entitled The Court, Media, Society and Dhananjoy Chatterjee's Death Sentence in Bengali authored jointly by Paramesh Goswami, a human rights activist, Debashish Sengupta, and Probal Mukherjee who are professors at the Indian Statistical Institute. These three were deeply involved in researching the entire case. Fimmaker Atanu Ghosh sent me the book.

He suggested I make a film on this unique subject from a different perspective. “These three authors visited Dhananjoy’s family again and again, spoke to them and went through sheaves of documents during their research. They also helped them regain some of the land Dhananoy’s father was forced to sell off to pay the legal costs to defend him. My scriptwriter Padmanabha Dasgupta, myself and our research team created a file that ran into 5,000 pages of research material. I asked Padmanabha to bring out the core and write a full-length script for a film. He managed to do it and now the film is ready,” said Sil.

Dhananjoy is slated to release on 11 August, a few days before the 13th anniversary of his execution. “Both our research over several months and the book convinced us somehow that this story is open to a different interpretation and can be narrated from a different perspective. We are not trying to establish Dhananjoy’s innocence or guilt at any point in the film.

We are only opening this strange story to the audience and leaving it to them to draw their own conclusions about whether he should have been executed at all or whether he should have been freed after having served 14 years in solitary confinement,” said Padmanabha Dasgupta.

Sil has gathered a formidable cast of 48 characters. Veteran actors like Paran Bandopadhyay who portrays Dhananjoy’s father, Sudipta Chakraborty who plays the victim Hetal Parekh’s mother, Kanchan Mullick as the public prosecutor, Koushik Sen as the Supreme Court advocate and Masood Akhtar as the liftman. Then there are relatively young actors such as Mir Afsar Ali and Mimi Chakraborty.

Complete newcomers, more than the established names, expressed their reservations about acting in this film in the beginning of their careers but compromised in the belief that it was not just a film but had a larger social agenda. The main cast and technical team have been to Chhatna, the village where Dhananjoy’s family resides and spoke to them. The actual shooting was done on sets constructed within a studio setting with some location shots within Kolkata. Anirban Bhattacharya, a theatre actor who has recently made a mark in films, plays Dhananjoy Chatterjee.

He said that this has been the most challenging and difficult role of his career. He said, “There were times when I felt I just could not take it anymore because there was no frame of reference to fall back on while fleshing out the real Dhananjoy. Firstly, I had never met him in person. Second, he was sentenced for a grievous crime that comes nowhere close to my personal life or professional career as an actor. Third, I had to pick up the dialect, diction, body language, pitch, way of dressing based on the director’s vision and my own internalising of the character.”

Some years ago, MS Sathyu made a documentary called The Right to Live jointly produced by PSBT and Doordarshan under the auspices of the ministry of information and broadcasting. The film questioned the validity of the death sentence using the Dhananjoy Chatterjee case as a frame of reference. In the film, PP Rao, senior Supreme Court advocate, cited a case about some Naxalites who went to a timber merchant disguised as dealers and stabbed and killed him the minute he turned around to bring them tea.

But the singlejudge High Court bench did not grant the killers a death sentence because “they had killed for an ideology and they were not ordinary criminals.”“Has society changed in any way because of their ideology and the killing?” Rao asks. Sathyu’s film also carries interviews with Dhananjoy and his father.

The most pertinent argument placed by Nitya Ramachandran was that awarding the death sentence to a person, never mind the gravity of the crime, is tantamount to punishing the family of the convict that is completely innocent. Dhananjoy’s parents, brother, sisters, wife whom he had married just a month prior to the crime, are in a devastated state financially, emotionally and socially. Why? Is not the state that has awarded the death sentence also responsible for the care of the family he leaves behind?

The death sentence in this country is completely skewed. On one hand, a dangerous, self-confessed rapist and killer like the boy among the five rapists of Nirbhaya was set free though his partners in crime were sentenced to death.

On the other, a young man like Dhananjoy Chatterjee was hanged for a crime that was never physically proved in any court of law.

The debate will be opened up once again with the theatrical release of Arindam Sil’s Dhananjoy.