by A. J. PHILIP
One of my lady friends wrote on her Facebook Timeline a day before the special court awarded death penalty to the four who gang-raped and killed a paramedical student in a moving bus in New Delhi in December 2012: “Tomorrow the judge will pronounce the sentence on the creatures who mauled our darling girl last Dec 16. What do you suggest, folks, that the court should order? Life or Death?
“But I have my verdict ready: Have iron rods inserted into their respective ‘private parts’ and rip apart their internal organs. That’s what they did to her. So let us have poetic justice here!” The first question that arose in my mind was: If we treat them the way they treated the innocent girl, then what is the difference between us and them?
I know my friend who would not kill even a chicken and would not touch an iron rod even with a barge pole. It is her anger that manifested in her comment. A couple of years ago Anna Hazare suggested that every corrupt person should be hung from the nearest lamp post. I am sure all the lamp posts in the country would not be sufficient for the same.
Fortunately, we live in a society where a person — however criminal he or she may be — can be punished only after a due process of law. That is what happened on September 13 when the four were given death penalty. Another of the accused, whom also the court found guilty, had allegedly committed suicide inside a cell in Tihar jail. The sixth accused — a juvenile who was yet to attain 18 — had already been given the maximum punishment of three years’ detention.
Reports said that all the four had complained about ill-treatment by fellow prisoners. Once I interviewed a person, who spent a few years in jail. He said there was a grading system in the jail where murderers commanded the highest respect and rapists, particularly rapists of children, were treated like dirt. The latter were subjected to the worst form of indignities, worse than what the law prescribes for the crime. The situation is much the same in all jails.
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