Death Rattle

A man was sent to the gallows yesterday morning for his involvement in the attack on parliament. I guess judging by the kind of gloating by the political cabal and sundry news anchors, the ‘’collective conscience of the society’’ in the words of the Supreme court, must have been satisfied. The general reaction to Afzal Guru’s hanging was reminiscent of the blood lust you hear about the days of Roman Empire. The purpose of this piece not about the specific case of Afzal Guru, but about the larger issue abolishing the death sentence from the statute books. What is so distressing in all this, is the collective howl of indignation of a vast section of the middle classes and the media at the mere broaching of this question. If you are against capital punishment, you are termed a wooly headed liberal and worse, an anti national. My contention is we must move away from this medieval and barbaric practice of allowing the State to take away life of its citizen no matter how vile that person has proved to be and opt for the kind of sentencing where the guilty convict is made to spend time in prison till the end of his natural life in the case of murder. The whole purpose of punishment and sentencing brutal and hardened criminals is that the society is free of the fear of his presence on the streets and we can do that by compromising on his basic human right to life by taking him away from our midst and putting him in jail. All the evidence suggests that death penalty is hardly a deterrence against crimes like murder. I know I’ll be thrown arguments like how would I feel if I had a loved one who was subjected to murder and other heinous crime. This is the kind of loaded and hypothetical argument proffered by those who have run out of any coherent argument in favor of retaining capital punishment and whose only aim is to guilt trip you into agreeing with their point of view.

After all, more than one hundred and fifty countries have abolished death penalty in order to move their society and people towards a more humane form of justice and even in US where it is a matter governed by individual states, the fact that seventeen of the fifty states of the union have stricken off death sentence from there books is a clear pointer to the fact that a lot of people are disgusted with this method. But the most poignant example of a country and a society’s commitment to the compassionate human values is Norway where a couple of years ago, a rabidly right wing lunatic youth called Anders Breviek mowed down over one hundred and seventy young boys and girls who were part of a youth summer camp organized by the opposition labor party on an island, he stealthily approached the camp as if on a commando mission and launched himself with grenade and assault rifle, unleashing a horrifying carnage. Can it be anybody’s case that those who lost their near and dear once did not feel the pain and hollowness of their loss? Even during his trial, he did not show even an iota of regret or remorse. But it is a tribute to the resilience and commitment of its people and judiciary to stick by the values of compassion and decency that it did not allow the emotion to get the better of it and make an exception by giving him death, but stuck to its mores and convictions and handed him 70 yrs in jail. So for all practical purposes, he will not emerge out of jail alive. What does it tell about them and what does it tell about us.