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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