We must set the moral example, not adjust our behaviour to reflect that of murderers. On 13 September, the Additional Sessions Judge Yogesh Khanna will sentence the four men he convicted of rape and murder in the Delhi gangrape case. The people, we keep being told, want the death penalty. “The common man will lose faith in the judiciary,” newspapers reported the special public prosecutor as saying, “if the harshest punishment is not given.”
We have all seen the pictures of the protests both now and back in December, the posters calling for everything from chemical castration to death. Judge Khanna is in the unenviable position of having to deliver both justice and national catharsis.
Let’s not try and do his job. Whatever his judgment, the law will take its long-winded course. But what should be addressed is the growing belief that the death sentence is some sort of healing salve. Executing criminals, however depraved, is society’s way of letting itself off the hook. Despite the daily headlines, we should not confuse the world with horror movies — demons can’t simply be exorcised; a stake through the heart of the vampire doesn’t rid us of evil.
For decades, India had more or less stopped executing people. Dhananjoy Chatterjee was hanged in 2004 (incidentally, for rape and murder) and before him it was the serial killer ‘Auto’ Shankar in 1995. Since Chatterjee though, both Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru were hanged within a few months of each other. And in April, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Devinderpal Singh Bhullar, the engineering professor-turned-convicted-terrorist, to have his death sentence commuted. According to a report in The Hindu, 18 other death-row prisoners are next in line, having had their “mercy pleas” rejected by the President.
You don’t have to be a so-called bleeding heart liberal, a jholawalla, an idiot (a worrying number of people with Internet connections think that these are synonymous) who wastes his tears on terrorists and rapists, to think it’s time now — as we become increasingly comfortable with the idea of hanging as fitting punishment for certain crimes — to, once and for all, abolish the death penalty.
As a society, with the likes of land acquisition, food security, NREGA, we are ready to acknowledge (with legislation) that economic progress cannot leave behind, or be achieved at the expense of, the poor, the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised. Capital punishment, of course, disproportionately affects the poor, the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised. Rich, powerful people are not hanged. If we are striving for a modicum of fairness, for somewhat equal opportunity even for those most discriminated against, how can we, as a society, continue to tolerate the death penalty?
In commuting the death sentence of a tailor who murdered his family, Supreme Court Justices SJ Mukhopadhaya and Kurian Joseph — on the same day that the four rapists were found guilty — ruled that “poverty, socioeconomic, psychic compulsions, undeserved adversities in life” were “some of the mitigating factors”. Their judgment, even if specific to a particular case, acknowledges the role society plays in the formation of criminals.
Chat show and dinner table talk of atavism, of bestiality, of the rapists’ particular savagery, is the easy way out. It absolves us of responsibility; it enables us to continue the illusion that by excising one tumour we have cured ourselves of cancer, that tumours don’t metastasise.
Then there is the question of what effect capital punishment has on criminals. What effect has our collective outrage had on incidences of rape? Certainly, rapes haven’t stopped, even if we argue that the media is reporting incidences of rape more assiduously, or indeed that victims themselves are more emboldened to report rape. In the same way, hanging terrorists will not stop politically or religiously motivated terror.
Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and human rights activist, wrote that in the case of terrorism “the death penalty serves only as a catalyst for the larger psychosis of lawlessness, revenge, and savagery”. His point is simple. Society must set the moral example, not adjust its behaviour to reflect that of murderers.
Whatever Judge Khanna’s sentence, death penalty or not, let’s do something that politicians never do, that the media never does — shut up and introspect. What kind of society do we want to create? Is working towards that goal more useful than howling imprecations in the wind? Crime and rape cannot be eliminated but a number of things from better policing to better education can help. Killing people, however satisfying, will not.
