Certainty, Remorse and the Death Penalty

By the time you read this, Ram Jethmalani would most likely have walked away with a stay of the execution of three assassins of Rajiv Gandhi. You might not hear of it in the English and Hindi news channels - they're too busy monitoring Anna's health - but the Tamil media is crawling with news, analysis and opinions. Opinion is divided, obviously, for the issue is rather thorny. Is there a case for showing any mercy to three persons convicted of assassinating the Prime Minister and taking the lives of at least fourteen bystanders, even after the President has rejected their clemency petition?

I was reminded, yesterday, of a passage from Dosteovsky's The Idiot (It is a long passage, bear with me):

But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man— and that this is certain, CERTAIN! That’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.

‘This is not my own fantastical opinion—many people have thought the same; but I feel it so deeply that I’ll tell you what I think. I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. The man who is attacked by robbers at night, in a dark wood, or anywhere, undoubtedly hopes and hopes that he may yet escape until the very moment of his death. There are plenty of instances of a man running away, or imploring for mercy—at all events hoping on in some degree—even after his throat was cut. But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die,—is taken away from the wretch and CERTAINTY substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary—why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man!’

What these three prisoners have faced is far worse. The Supreme Court confirmed their death sentences in 2000 - eleven years ago. They filed a petition for clemency before the President immediately. With no discernible timeline for when the President would consider and pass an order on their application, they have been waking up for eleven years without knowing if they will be alive in the evening. Every book they read, they aren't sure if it will be their last. Every meal they eat, every piece of music they hear, every sunrise they witness, they wonder if they will once more. Surely, this is a far worse punishment than death itself.

These are people willing to die for a cause, yes. They have shown no remorse, yes. They are still considered heroes amongst their ilk. If twenty years of jail and twenty years of uncertainty of existence hasn't reformed them, what will?

But then, our criminal justice system doesn't deal with remorse. Our strongest justification for the death penalty is still retribution. Let me use the cruder term - revenge. Is it possible to feel remorse when an avenger hovers over you, holds you captive and takes painfully long to shut every exit door? We aren't giving our criminals the space to feel remorse.

What of the families of the victims in Sriperumbudur? A friend who did a report on them says they are all struggling to make ends meet, that they are still recovering from the loss. Our criminal justice system has nothing to make them a part of the process; a crime is seen as an offence against the state and not against an individual or a community. The state acts coldly, the state even eliminates the victim from the process, except as witnesses. How can Murugan feel sorry for his actions when he doesn't know what suffering he has caused? Our system doesn't make an offender face up to his wrongs, it only gives him a chance to defend himself against them. Telling a victim that you did nothing wrong is much harder than telling the State that you did nothing wrong.

The 187th Law Commission Report speaks of the death penalty in the most scathing terms, it tells us of everything that is wrong with it. It also deals with this issue - of prisoners on death row, for interminable periods. Our Supreme Court has dealt with cases like this in the past in favour of the offender, but these are quick-fix solutions. Cases where clemency petitions are pending with the President for decades are not unknown.

The first step we need to take is to recognise that revenge cannot and should not justify criminal punishments anymore. The death penalty is heinous, it is violent, it is morally unjustifiable, and it is random. It must go.

Father, Child and Holy Dinosaurs

In the last five days, I have watched two movies that portrayed a father-child relationship and featured dinosaurs. Apart from this superficial and slightly freakish similarity, I think I can confidently state that Deivathirumagal and The Tree of Life come from two different universes.

The former approaches the subject like a sugarcane juicer would approach sugarcane, extracting every little drop of sugary sweetness it can from the story of a childish father and an too-smart-for-her-age child. The latter, ah, well... The latter approaches the subject with a microscope, a syringe and fine piece of forceps; digging into the cane, showing you little nuances, droplets of saccharine, strands of rough fibre and unexpectedly zooming out, to explore the existence and relevance of the sugarcane itself. Deivathirumagal is about the unordinary, it is about special people in special circumstances, but it is told in the most ordinary of manners, milking the specialness of the situation for every cheap teardrop, being needlessly cute, needlessly melodramatic, needlessly obvious, needlessly over-the-top. The Tree of Life, on the other hand, is about normal people, everyday relationships, regular emotions, jealousies, happinesses and freedoms, but it is about finding the magic in that normality, and still asking questions of it, it is about valuing those emotions, validating them, almost, but still placing them amidst a tremendous canvas. The Tree of Life is a meditation, it is a probing, self-indulgent journey, it is an artist's quest to understand his own emotions, and their place in the cosmos around him.

In Deivathirumagal, as a result, there is constant chatter, the father and daughter have a family-whistle, they have cute duet acts, he tells her stories, and gets proud of her reciting nursery rhymes. In trying to show that special people are normal, the movie forgets that normal people don't have any of this. The love between a parent and a child manifests itself far more subtly, in the way parents look at their children, in the way they discipline them, in their inherent protectiveness, in their pride, their disappointments and their desires; in the warmth of their touch, in the way they hold their them, in quiet intimacy. The Tree of Life captures that - and this is its greatest achievement.

Ultimately, The Tree of Life is Syama Sastry asking Goddess Meenakshi difficult questions in Ahiri; Deivathirumagal is the Backstreet Boys telling you which way they want it.

Twenty-buck Meal

Apparently, there is a regulation in Tamil Nadu, which makes it mandatory for restaurant owners (from what I gather, the regulation applies to the Bhavans - Saravana Bhavan, Vasanta Bhavan, Balaji Bhavan and so on) to supply some "meals" for Rs. 20. (Just as an aside, the word "meals" is always plural. "Oru meals kudunga." "Have you taken your meals?" "Meals saapudlaama?" Even the menus in the restaurant offer only "Chennai Meals", "Banjabi Meals", "Chineese Meals". This is like caste names. "Saar, neenga Brahmins aa?" I'm tempted to say, "Ille saar. Naa oru Brahmin daan.") Today, instead of ordering "Limited Meals" (misleading name, the meals have enough food to cure famine in a small village), I order the twenty-buck meals. It felt a little cheap, initially, but when the food came, I was very satisfied.

The "Limited Meals" features a mound of rice that's as big as (and looks like) one hemisphere of a football on a plate. The plate also has various (replenishable) bowls of poriyal, kootu, karakozhambu, sambar, rasam, two sweets, buttermilk, curd and more-molaga. Oh, I forgot the appalam. When I finish eating this, I usually come back to office and collapse for a while. It is a highly satisfying meal, I agree, but sometimes it feels too satisfying. Priced at Rs. 55, it is an overwhelming avalanche of food. It makes you feel like one of those vaadyars who has to attend, conduct and eat food at weddings everyday.

The twenty-buck meal is perfect. The rice is about half the amount. There's only a sambar, rasam, kootu and buttermilk (and I suspect these bowls aren't bottomless). A mini-coffee at the end of it, and the world seemed like a good place to be. I know I'll feel hungry in some time (the Limited Meals makes me run away from food for the rest of the day), but there are yummy momos close by.

This is what I love the Tamil Nadu Government for. Things like the 10-buck movie tickets - if you didn't know, you can walk into any movie theatre in Tamil Nadu and ask for a 10-buck ticket. Yes, any theatre, even the Sathyams, the Inoxes and the PVRs of the world. Free mixies, grinders, laptops, TVs, 4 gms of gold (for marriageable women - I'm neither a woman, nor marriageable, but still), free cattle (I'm not kidding you)... What a great place to live!

In the end analysis, this twenty-buck meal is good for my waistline. People describe me today as "well-built", and I can sense that they're politely implying that I'm plump. I don't want them to graduate to saying "plump" when they mean "fat", or "fat" when they mean "gargantuan".