There is only one way to be born, but many ways to die. Both remain a cosmic mystery despite the best efforts of atheists to reduce them to banality. That is where the similarity ends.
Birth is a symphony of joy. Death orchestrates a range of atonal emotions. Grief is only one of the many narratives surrounding death, and it is contained. Even those who have lost an anchor of love recognize that food must return to the table of lament. Religion offers its rationale; as in the Quranic verse, from God we come, to God we go, a belief shared by all the Abrahamic faiths. But human beings do not leave all death to the will of God. They kill, singly and collectively. The individual does so for criminal reasons; the state in the pursuit of justice.
The first story in the Bible deals with the complicated morality of knowledge, and its primal consequence, birth and the flowering of earth. The second story is about murder. Cain, son of Adam and Eve, kills his brother Abel out of jealous fury. Murder, in any dimension, has remained a magnetic fact ever since. Societies have invested huge repositories of finance and intellect in weapons; man has split the atom and mobilized the biological germ in his inventive efforts to kill in as many ways as possible. There is a vast literature of death, from warfare disguised as history to the less-than-innocent pleasures of a murder mystery novel. In either case we hope to reach calm through turbulence through the road map of justice. An eye for an eye establishes the balance of fear. Deterrence cuts through the knot that cannot be unraveled. It is not necessarily equal retaliation, but it must be effective retaliation. The dead cannot be resurrected but the killer must be found and punished.
War was kept exempt from the rules of murder. The Romans understood the arbitrary nature of the battlefield and introduced decimation: a victorious general could send a ruthless signal by lining up prisoners of war and dispatching every tenth man in the queue. It was one man playing dice with another man's destiny. The only thing that could be said in its favor was that it was better than the reverse, nine dead to one alive. But as the savagery of even war crossed limits that were inconceivable by the 20th century, war crimes were invented. They were widely advertized as evidence of civilization. Then terrorism came along. We still have not secured rules for this brutality.The progress of civilization is a bundle of questions in search of an ever-elusive ideal. We have left the monarch's absolute authority over life and death behind. Gone are the days when theft of a sheep was a hanging offence. Most of the world has either adopted a rule of law where evidence must be produced and confirmed, or is moving towards it. Reform has even come to religious law: no one cuts off the hands of a thief anymore. If theft can be eliminated by lesser punishment, then the purpose is served.But one area where reform has paused for intense debate is in capital punishment. The argument for abolition is persuasive in the genteel atmosphere of liberal values. Systems of justice are human, and therefore prone to error or bitter degrees of bias. Far better that ten guilty persons are declared innocent at the end of a trial than one innocent person dies.
This begs a question. Should the generosity of civilized behavior extend to those who have deliberately, maliciously chosen to be barbaric? We understand different grades of murder. The crime of passion is even celebrated in high drama or poetry. But the terrorist and the tyrant emerge from the same seed. Both gorge on the blood of innocents. This is all the more reason why we should define both with moral and intellectual rigor. To do less would be to dilute their evil.Abolition of death penalty for them would create an equivalence that cannot be sustained in theory or practice.
Darkness is the best friend of a terrorist; stealth and deception his preferred strategy for it helps him escape through the fog of theories spun by pseudo-analysts. When, occasionally, a terrorist works in the open he still craves for the mantle of a jurisprudence created for civilians who have abandoned civility. Liberal nations like India do not deny this privilege to their worst enemy. But India cannot withhold justice when a judge has made his call on terrorism. Such complacence would weaken the liberal safety net to the point of disintegration. Ajmal Kasab's mentors are safe, beyond the reach of Indian law. Kasab could not be allowed to escape the rope of Indian justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment