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From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Fri Jul 30, 2004 Subject: To hang or not to hang [Mrinal sen, Aparna Sen, Mahashweta Devi and scores of other prominent intellectuals of Kolkata have taken active part in demanding reprieve of death penalty for Dhananjoy Chatterjee, not as a special case but based on the general stand against death penalty, per se, being considered incompatible with civilised society. Even Jyoti Basu has publicly expressed similar sentiments. However, that does not alter the fact that the W. B. government has taken an extremely retrograde stand, sharing common ground with the fascists of all varieties.] http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040730/edit.htm#4 To hang or not to hang Clamour for capital punishment unwarranted by J. Sri Raman ???WHERE were those people who talk about human rights when Parekh??™s family had to leave the city after the ghastly incident???? This is a rhetorical question Mrs. Mira Bhattacharya, wife of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, is reported to have asked. She can only be answered with more rhetorical questions. Mrs. Bhattacharya was participating in an ???open debate??? on ???to hang or not to hang??? in Kolkata on that Saturday. The Hamletian poser was about the punishment that Dhananjoy Chatterjee deserved. There was no Hamlet-like ambiguity in her response. The man has been convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Hetal Parekh, in 1990; and so, according to Mrs. Bhattacharya and everyone else in the so-called ???debate???, he had to die. She was supplying arguments to back her husband??™s earlier official assertion that the convict must be executed, with no consideration of Presidential clemency. To answer her with counter-questions does not, either in law or outside it, amount to an abetment or a defence of what was doubtless a heinous and horrendous crime deserving the harshest punishment ??” the harshest that a civilised society can contemplate. With that clarification and caveat, we can proceed to ask the questions. Where were and are Mrs. Bhattacharya and her friends, when similarly heinous and horrendous crimes were and are committed, say, in slums and against non-bhadralok victims? Where were they when unspeakable atrocities were and are committed against Dalit women in villages? Where did they stage demonstration or ???debates??? to demand exemplary punishment for the culprits in the Best Bakery and Bilkis cases or, at least, a speedy process of justice in these and other grisly crimes committed with state connivance in Gujarat? The law as laid down by the Supreme Court, we have been reminded umpteen times (as though no law can be or has been questioned in the least), allows resort to capital punishment ???in the rarest of rare instances??? ??” where the crime is so heinous as to invite the extreme ???indignation of the community???. Did not the crimes, committed with the complicity of the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat, provoke the indignation of the large community of decent Indians? Why, oh why, is it that such hysteria is whipped up over crimes and criminals only when the victims belong to the holy middle class? The last time such a clamour for hanging assailed the nation??™s ears was when the Billa-Ranga case in New Delhi hit the headlines. It was, again, a heinous and horrendous crime against two schoolchildren. And, again, it was a middle class outrage at what ???they??? had done to ???our kids???. The respected citizens of the Capital, who revelled in their indignation at the sickeningly ugly crime, had never responded ??” and never were to respond ??” to crimes, no less heinous, against the city??™s lesser inhabitants. Mrs. Bhattacharya also asked: ???Why are some people talking about the human rights of such a criminal???? May we ask: why not? Are not human rights the rights of human being including hardened criminals? Is not that the rationale of all prison reforms? How can there be human rights that deny any section of people the right to life? Can any democratic society or school of thought give the State the power to take away the right? The heinous villains, talking of human rights violations, have pointed out that Dhananjoy was convicted only on circumstantial evidence. They have also said that the convict had already spent 14 years in under-trial detention. An additional life sentence, in their view, would have more than met the ends of justice. The question, however, is: even if the trial had taken less time, and he had been convicted on copious evidence, would capital punishment have been all right? Would the clamour for it have been warranted? Did not the provision for such a punishment deserve to be removed entirely from the statute book of any civilised country? Could the rulers of West Bengal, which used to boast of thinking ???today??? what the rest of India thought ???tomorrow???, be unaware that capital punishment is as obsolete as tooth-for-tooth-and-eye-for-eye justice and jurisprudence in much of the rest of the world? Do the rulers of West Bengal prefer the state of the US, which considers capital punishment as legitimate as the crusading war on Iraq, as their role model? Mrs. Bhattacharya said she was ???speaking as a mother???. How did she react as a mother and a social worker to the much-televised campaign to mobilize schoolchildren in favour of the hanging? Many mothers ??” and fathers ??” elsewhere ask: must children be brutalised in this manner? Hangman Nata Mullick, her fellow-???debater???, was for the creation of a hereditary caste of hangmen. ???After my death my son will do the job, and we will not spare a man who has no love in his mind, which itself is a crime??? Were he and his applauders activated by an abundance of love in their hearts? Were there no dissenters in the ???debate???? Are there none in what once called itself the intellectual or cultural capital of India? Is there no one to speak up for human rights in the city that once prided itself on its humanity? The ???Communist Manifesto??? may have been a youthfully impatient expression of an ideology that was to find wide appeal including in West Bengal. But did Karl Marx and Frederick Engels have in mind the kind of hypocrisy and holloness displayed in Kolkata??™s ???debate??? when they poured scorn over ???bourgeois law and morality???? |
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