Chatterjee, a former security guard and lift operator sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Hetal Parekh, in 1990, was hanging lifeless from the gallows shortly after 4.30am. He had spent the past 13 years in solitary confinement protesting his innocence and had exhausted all routes for legal appeal up to the Supreme Court.

Two appeals for clemency had been rejected by Indian presidents, the second decision handed down by Abdul Kalam 10 days before the execution. Despite Chatterjee's conviction being based on circumstantial evidence - the victim's watch found in his village, witnesses testifying they saw him go to Hetal's apartment on the day she was killed - Hetal's former school friends spoke of the justice they felt had been done. 'The hanging was the best thing that could have happened to such a man. Losing Hetal was a horrifying experience,' said one.

A conclusion for some, but Chatterjee's failure to avoid the hangman's noose has breathed fresh life into a capital punishment debate after years of it being almost certified dead.

'In India we make a spectacle of the victim's family, the murderer, or the hangman but fail to take up a case fully,' sociologist Shiv Visvanathan said. 'It will take another two or three hangings before we have that. The rights of the individual are not being protected. If this was about groups, about bride-burning or attacks on [low-caste] Dalits then the response would be far stronger.'

Human rights workers had failed to make their case, he said.

Bikram Jeet Batra, a legal officer at Amnesty International India, expressed concern: 'We are worried this might set a precedent but also we recognise the Supreme Court deals on a case by case basis.'

The European Union on Wednesday had its say, calling on India to reintroduce a de facto moratorium on executions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that the death penalty should be imposed only in 'the rarest of rare cases' and Chatterjee's was the first execution since 1995, when a rickshaw driver convicted for the murder of several prostitutes was hanged in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Although several death sentences have been handed down in the past nine years, none had been carried out, as they were delayed by a slow-moving appeals process or commuted to life in prison by presidential decree. Those executed have been those found guilty of exceptional crimes, such as the bodyguards-turned-assassins of former prime minister Indira Gandhi.

Indian officials defended Chatterjee's killing as an attempt to protect society, but others have been quick to criticise the move as little more than the killing of a poor man to pacify a fearful middle class daily bludgeoned by a media obsession with crime.

'There was a huge groundswell of popular support in favour of Chatterjee's execution,' said one leading rights activist. 'He got caught up in this wave of publicity. I fear this is about retributive justice, a sort of 'hang them all' attitude,' he said.

There are other disturbing elements to Chatterjee's case that have largely been overlooked amid the media frenzy. His more than a decade on death row was largely the result of bungling, negligent state bureaucrats who failed to tell the courts that an appeal for mercy had been rejected.

For eight years, he lived in limbo, while officials did nothing. Protesters say that this alone was ground for the sentence to be commuted. In a judicial system as imperfect as India's, where money and influence all too often keep the guilty from jail while poverty leaves others defenceless, justice is rarely applied evenly.

But when it comes to capital punishment, too much is being left to individual interpretation. On Wednesday, two cases with startling parallels to Chatterjee's were heard by judges in the Gujarat capital, Ahmedabad, and Delhi. Both were found guilty of sexually assaulting and murdering children.

In Gujarat, where the six-year-old victim was first killed and mutilated before being raped, a death sentence was passed. But in Delhi, Supreme Court justices argued the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl was not a 'rarest of the rare' crime and commuted a death sentence to life in prison.

Chatterjee's case was cited as a precedent by the Gujarat prosecutor, but judges at the country's highest court swapped roles and refused this time to endorse an execution. Other killers on death row include the killers of another Gandhi, former prime minister Rajiv, and Dara Singh, a hardline Hindu activist who was found guilty of killing Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two children in 1999. Staines' widow, Gladys, has called for the sentence to be commuted to life in jail. Gandhi's assassins have been in jail for 13 years and President Kalam is yet to decide on their petitions for mercy.

If their sentences are upheld they may not face the noose, however, as the Law Commission has recommended that hanging be replaced by lethal injection.