Blind Beyond Justice

Crackers and sweets, sorry that is not what we Indians were waiting for. Diwali is long over. So he was hung today morning, the only man who was caught. What next? How sure I as a civilian can be that I may not end up facing a bullet on the road tomorrow? If terror is what they intended to spread, it has already enough. By all our judicial process we are invariably and indirectly fuelling it more. But it would be a lie if I say I am not "happy" that he has been executed. Happy in the sense, a criminal was punished for his deed and this now has given us a hope that the law of this land will prevail.  But ‘celebrating’ justice in such cases? There is more to peace, freedom, harmony and all the feel goods that we talk about. Especially in the life of the ones and their families, who dealt, fought and died doing so. 

The real deal for us is to make sure that such events never happen again. I wish we never have to think of ‘celebrating’ another such day this way. It reminds us more of our inabilities and insecurities.  All the more it would be more wrong to think of this as a closure. The system has taken its course and the bigger picture is something else. Associating political intentions of the ruling party, whining about the delay in punishment, going buck eyed at the prison expenses, if that is how we are looking at it, well we deserve this system that we have and all its loopholes too. Our reactions are as inconsistent as them.

Executions are punishments of the highest order for the most heinous of crimes. It does not balance the crime, nor does it remove anything from the world. The worst of the intentions and fears are still looming around. The law and the process is still the same. So are we, the ones who make it. Yes Gandhi did say an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But when one half pretends to be chronically suffering from cataract, and the other half with acute glaucoma only when such attacks happen, blindness is but inevitable. And that is something we should not be happy about.

 

"It’s every man’s business to see justice done"

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

-R.