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The Death Sentence For
Mohammed Afzal Guru
And The Future Of Barbarism

By Aseem Shrivastava

16 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org


“The vision of justice is God’s delight alone.”
- Artur Rimbaud

“It is not the eternal in man that kills. It is not the eternal in man that dies.”
- The Upanishads

Our moral exhaustion today

A soldier, in fidelity to the orders of his commander, the peer pressure of his fighting mates, and the despairing heat of the moment, shoots down innocents. The realization hits soon enough, and yet too late. Because, on impulse, he is led to carry out further atrocities, as if they would absolve him of his first crime. This happens all too often in wars, though such facts – lined as they are with psychological subtleties – are not easy to record.

When you are “programmed to kill” and the efficient weaponry to implement orders is at hand, killing becomes a self-perpetuating affair. Once the thick first line is crossed the ones that follow are too thin and invisible to meet the eye of conscience. Only the other side can perceive the horror and feel the pain and trauma. And, often, seek revenge.

What does one say? What does one do? So often nowadays it appears that we quickly reach the point where there is little left to say, almost nothing that can be done, plenty to undo and, most ominous of all, the lurking risk of further wrongs piling up, of hell getting ever more hellish and of the world moving further down the precipitous slope of barbarism from the tragic to the farcical. There may have been times and places in the human past when violence might actually have meant something. Howsoever things may have stood in the past, what is on offer today is mostly a nihilistic spectacle of the absurd, a cowardly martial routine which only awakens our conscience when we ourselves or one of our own are the aggrieved party.

Every child knows that two wrongs don’t make a right. But every adult seems to forget it. Revenge is not the same as justice, no matter that some jurists and moral philosophers have lavished plenty of ink on tomes about retributive justice. However, only the other day, the Dalai Lama told Japanese reporters “the death penalty is said to fulfil a preventive function, yet it is clearly a form of revenge.” “However horrible an act a person may have committed, everyone has the potential to improve and correct himself”, he said.

Revenge has no future – because it thinks of none. It is driven by the past and appears to be innocent of the savage demands that a wounded conscience may impose later on. In fact, in the shadow of revenge, justifications or even further wrongs must almost inevitably follow, precisely to deceive oneself, above all, about the absence of the commands of conscience, and of the prior wrongness of one’s deeds.


Can we escape moral illusions?

The moral fantasies that so many of us live – and what is more important for us than to persist in maintaining our moral appearances! – become necessary illusions for our day-to-day survival, indispensable parts of the psychological kit of our hardened capacity to live with ourselves. Short of an unlikely collective expiation on all sides, there is no reprieve from this unacknowledged nightmare. Hypocrisy is inevitable and becomes, as Oscar Wilde was led to remark, “the debt that vice pays to virtue.”

Perhaps, as some philosophers have pointed out, therein lies hope: that we must be, in some ultimate remote corner of our lost hearts, after all, good by nature. Otherwise it is a bit difficult to understand the trouble that we take to not merely appear good before others, but to want to feel good about ourselves even in the privacy of our souls, after having done some wrong or having been complicit in one. Our misdeeds trouble us in some mysterious spot of the soul, hence the need to justify and, if at all possible, overlook or forget. Call it preferred “blindsight” if you will.

It is no easy task to be a good human being. Strange that we seem to so readily take it as an article of faith that we are, by definition, and by the mere virtue of our existence, good. The corollary that others are, pari passu, evil, almost follows as a moral reflex that preserves our deluded self-image, justifying our own evil through the logic of moral sloth and practical convenience. Thus, unsurprisingly, history knows more blood to have been shed in the name of the good than for evil. Moral self-righteousness is a lot harder for us to recognize in ourselves and uproot than is plain self-interest.

The hard thing is to know oneself to be morally imperfect and to abide the sight of one’s imperfection without succumbing to the tempting impulse to “run away” from one’s past by actually repeating the misdeeds, thereby perpetuating the “rightness” of one’s actions in one’s moral self-image. Human beings appear to find it very difficult to neither justify nor condemn their misdeeds. Memory and habit are the devil’s accomplices here. Moral reasoning – and the faith and patience that command it – are so easily enfeebled by that devastating logic of the heart which seeks to wash one’s wrongdoings in a cleansing ritual of lies, illusions and self-deceit, even shedding further blood if necessary and contributing all along to the social edifice of mendacity.

A forgotten story, worth recalling

Setting aside the terrible memories of the past, and the nasty realities of the present, there is an urgent need today to rediscover the liberating power of forgiveness and the merits of mercy. One shining – and rarely remembered – example of this is provided by South Africa under Nelson Mandela’s leadership in the mid-1990s. As long as the wrongdoers from the Apartheid era were willing to publicly and candidly confess their crimes, they were offered amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was not a perfect solution to a problem of breathtaking moral complexity. At the hands of the White Apartheid regime, Blacks in South Africa had suffered over decades and centuries every inhumanity and humiliation imaginable – from judicial torture, murder and rape to bloody massacres. Many, such as Steve Biko’s family, felt betrayed by the general amnesty offered to so many of the killers and rapists. Apologies from many privileged white families, such as De Klerk’s were qualified. Others, such as P.W.Botha, did not even go that far. All this had predictable ripples on the other side.

However, Mandela’s rejection of retributive justice was emphatic and his setting aside of bitterness was an unparalleled act of mature statesmanship, seen rarely in history. It saved humanity from what would have been a certain and unforgettable bloodbath. Given how hard it is for justice to be done once vengeful atrocities of this scale are unleashed, and how tempting it must have been to allow them to take place (witness Mugabe) Mandela’s was an act of astonishing moral foresight.

A permanent paradox

If you kill one man or woman you are a murderer. If you do so again, you are a murderer twice over. You kill 10 and you are a serial killer. For all these crimes the law lays down due punishments. But if you are responsible for the killing of a thousand or a million people the crime is rarely acknowledged, let alone punished. (Notice the reluctance in Turkey to allow discussion of the Armenian genocide or in the US of the genocide of native populations.) It appears that somewhere between the number of 10 and a thousand, murder mutates into a moral imperative. States are often founded on the bloodshed. The rule of law is thenceforth established and all that lies behind and beneath is forgotten – without any public confessions or reconciliation with the wounded. Little wonder that history repeats itself with disturbing regularity.

Mandela’s searing insight was to recognize the futility of revenge for historical injustices on a national scale. Humanity is able to punish only the small and petty crimes. The truly big ones elude our moral eye and, given our frequent penchant for the pragmatic – of sharing in the spoils of war, conquest and great injustice – ever so often become the basis of states and societies that are seen to be, ironically, legitimate.

Mandela’s actions demonstrated humanity’s utter helplessness in the matter of delivering precise justice in matters that truly matter. Where even the best of men have humbly accepted the limits to the justice they can offer, lesser men ought not to try. There is a lesson here for all those states and governments and terror outfits so keen to teach the other side a lesson.

“You never teach life anything”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written. Punishment only hardens criminals and has never stopped new ones from undertaking similar ventures in the future. As has been noted by some philosophers, that evil exists in the world is undeniable. But that the existence of evil is itself an evil can be disputed. Further, that it is possible to eliminate evil from the world – without oneself staring into the same darkness – is a lethal illusion that has led us to our present global predicament. If we continue to take moral shelter in the alleged crimes of others, almost instinctively overlooking our own, we will only continue to delude ourselves about our own putative goodness and in the end there will be no shelter from facts.

There is still time

All this is far from irrelevant to Afzal Guru’s death sentence by the Indian judiciary. As has been pointed out by some commentators, there are many directions in which the circumstantial evidence points that have not been investigated at all, not to mention the repeated provocations and assault on human rights for which Indian military and paramilitary forces in Kashmir are responsible. Under such conditions, to carry out the sentence would be an act of ignorant haste with predictable repercussions in Kashmir. Even if Afzal’s guilt is established, the Indian state must find the maturity to learn from countries like South Africa – which abolished capital punishment 11 years ago – rather than the US, where so many states, including Texas, send criminals to the gallows every year.

The use of force is in fashion today. We have become too morally lazy to think before we act – especially when we wield power. States and governments so easily forget the imitative repercussions that their organized, visible and “legitimate” violence has on those restless, disgruntled or aggrieved groups who might be keen to resort to violence to resolve human conflicts. When killing is used – often in deep ignorance of facts, thus even more unjustly – by the state, it legitimizes the use of violence in the administration of justice. Terror groups then do not have to restrain themselves and exercise their moral imagination to find peaceful approaches to their grievances. They take the law into their own hands. They are only too happy to put their fingers even closer to the trigger. Recent observations from the experience of the US in Iraq, of Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, of the Indian state itself in Kashmir come readily to mind.

The methods of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela evoke interest even today precisely because they provoked ethical thought by the dignity and efficacy of the actions that they carried out and inspired. If the movements they represented used excessive violence they would not only have been readily suppressed by their much more powerful enemies, but also been forgotten by now. The secret of their success was their principled eschewal of the methods of the powerful.

Mandela opened the door to a moral and spiritual universe whose existence was not even suspected. It shows us that there is indeed a vision which transcends human conflicts and which helps us accept with fortitude and grace the inerasable facts of the past. It sets human life as it is outwardly lived on this planet in its proper – puny –perspective. It humbles us into recognition of our own moral limits. What we cannot cure we must endure. We cannot pretend to know all there might be to know about the matter of good and evil. Our knowledge is limited, our ignorance infinite. Hence public remembrance and forgiveness may be our best bet for living peaceful, even satisfying, lives.

Mandela is reported to have said “for all people who have found themselves in the position of being in jail and trying to transform society, forgiveness is natural because you have no time to be retaliative.” He also said “one of the most difficult things is not to change society - but to change yourself.” Mercy alone liberates us from the shackles of revenge and false justice.

Indian leaders ought to regard this truth in their deliberations over the fate of Mohammed Afzal Guru.


Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer. He can be reached at [email protected]

 


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