India, July 23 -- Something tells me that Nimisha Priya will not be executed. The Sharia law operating in the part of Yemen ruled by the Iran-backed Houthi forces has sentenced the 38-year-old nurse from Kerala to death for murdering her Yemeni business partner. Every plinth in that regime's politico-legal edifice has confirmed the sentence. The Palakkad-born Christian has for the many months now since her arrest and sentencing, been ready to face the firing squad, Yemen's preferred mode of enforcing the death penalty. But whether because India matters, or because Nimisha's case drew almost immediate world attention, or because Iran and Saudi Arabia counselled against the execution, the bullets meant to kill Nimisha have not left their casings yet. The Save Nimisha Priya International Council which has been coordinating her legal defence and Islamic clerics and scholars of repute in Kerala have been active publicly and through personal channels. It seems to me that these efforts will not go in vain and the following four factors will also weigh in for her being spared the firing squad. First, it seems beyond belief that despite the Sharia and the understandable fury of the dead man's family, the powers that be in Sanaa are not aware that death-for-death and blood thirst are looked down upon by the world's gaze. Second, though the authorities in that part of Yemen are not accountable to international norms for human rights, and carry out the death penalty in prodigal numbers and in public, they cannot want to be seen as impervious to world sentiment. Third, the government of India, led as it is by Narendra Modi, with high-achievers by his side such as national security adviser Ajit Doval and minister for external affairs S Jaishankar, is not going to let itself be perceived as one that could not save the life of an Indian woman held in captivity in another country. Likely non-ostentatiously, New Delhi will do its maximum possible to secure her life. Fourth, since one major part of the proceedings is now said to be about blood money, India as the fourth-largest economy in the world, is not going to let itself be seen as short in cash, whether the government participates in the transaction or not. When, for all the reasons cited, Nimisha Priya is saved from death and, with further luck, she returns to India, she will be given a great welcome and there will be many claimants for the credit for her being saved from death. But I could be proved horribly wrong and the foregoing paragraphs will look stupid if Nimisha Priya is executed by the regime in Sanaa. If the worst does transpire, what should India do? It should give Sanaa a taste of its displeasure. Let no one say, "Oh, this case was not like terrorism, it was not aimed at India, it was not an act against the Indian State or people". It may not have been that, but if Nimisha is executed, an Indian expatriate would have had her life ended by the action of a political order the world does not recognise as enjoying legal status. And someone belonging to the respected profession of nursing would have been put to death. Is India and are we Indians as a people to let such an outrageous act pass un-responded to? India's status as a country with a booming expatriate population, with nursing forming a notable segment, will look weak in the eyes of all the countries with Indian workers in different capacities. Nimisha's crime is not to be condoned or wished away. Far from it. The way the dead man's body was disposed of was gross. But the extenuating reasons underlying it are not to be ignored either. In a similar thing happening in India, it is reasonable to assume that even if she had been given the death penalty by the lower court, the sentence would have been modified to life imprisonment by the relevant high court or the Supreme Court or, at the highest level of the President of India, acting under the advice of the Cabinet, been commuted. That being so, if Nimisha is executed by a firing squad in a part of Yemen under the control of forces not recognised as the country's legal government, what should India do? Under Operation Raahat, the government of India brought a large number of Indians back from that region. Should India consider getting all Indian nationals still remaining in that part of Yemen - said to be a few thousand - back to India? Even if not all of them are willing to return? Will that hurt Yemen? Whether it does or does not, the point would have been made that India does not trust the safety of its nationals there. And we should drastically restrict trade with that part of Yemen, insignificant though it may be. US president Donald Trump's sweeping tariff restrictions can give us a model to apply in cases where our self-worth has been trifled with. But let me hope my gut feeling is vindicated and these grim responses are not needed. There is, however, another thing that the Nimisha case must make India do, irrespective of how her tragic fate ends. This is to re-energise our demand for the return to India of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who is facing the death penalty in Pakistan. Nimisha's case, especially if her execution does not get stopped, should not be allowed to embolden the authorities in Pakistan to execute Jadhav. This is vital. Beyond that, it must make India, a death penalty 'retentionist' albeit in the rarest of rare cases, see how that form of punishment is just wholly out of step with the evolving norms of penology....