Should The Death Penalty Be Banned For Mohammed Afzal?
Mohd. Afzal Guru, the jihadi terrorist, played a leading role in the joint attack by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) of Pakistan on the Indian Parliament in December, 2001. The attack was thwarted by an alert security force guarding the Parliament, but not before ten members of the security force, including a lady constable, had been killed by the terrorists in an exchange of fire. He has been found guilty by the trial court and sentenced to death. His conviction and sentence have been upheld by higher courts. He has exhausted all judicial avenues for having his conviction and sentence set aside and the competent court has passed orders for carrying out the death sentence against him on October 20,2006.
For the simple reason that capital punishment is a violent punishment and for the state to resort to capital punishment is to legtimise the use of violence as a means to an end - which is what the terorrist does as well. For the simple reason that hanging Afzal will only give the terrorists a martyr to idolise.
His execution could add to the anger against the Government in J&K and thereby, create difficulties at a time when the Security Forces have been bringing the activities of jihadi terrorist elements under control. This could lead to a rash of new terrorist strikes. One saw how the award of the death sentence to Maqbool Butt of the J&K Liberation Front (JKLF) in the early 1980s led to the kidnapping and murder of Ravi Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted at Birmingham, by the JKLF elements in 1983. The assumption that death penalty acts as a deterrence has not been conclusively proved. Narcotics smuggling continues to take place despite the award of dozens of death penalty in many countries every year. In the US, which rigorously enforces the death penalty against those guilty of certain heinous crimes, such crimes continue to take place. Fear of death penalty has not deterred compulsive criminals from indulging in heinous crimes. We saw a recent incident in which a 53-year-old man took hostage some young girls studying in a US school and sexually assaulted some of them. In terrorism-related situations, death penalties often make heroes of the terrorists in the eyes of their communities and prove counter-productive.
There is no doubt that terrorism has to be crushed with unflinching resolve and the sternest of action. It has ravaged, and continues to ravage, Kashmir, where the latest victims of the terrorists' guns and bombs were innocent children. But, then, do we need laws like POTA, which can be, and indeed are, misused by politicians to settle personal and political scores.
Life in prison is a worse punishment and a more effective deterrent. For those of you who don't feel much sympathy for a murderer, keep in mind that death may be too good for them. With a death sentence, the suffering is over in an instant. With life in prison, the pain goes on for decades. Prisoners are confined to a cage and live in an internal environment of rape and violence where they're treated as animals. And consider terrorists. Do you think they'd rather suffer the humiliation of lifelong prison or be "martyred" by a death sentence?
It creates sympathy for the monstrous perpetrators of the crimes as we can in case of Afzal. Criminals usually are looked down upon by society. People are disgusted by the vile, unconscionable acts they commit and feel tremendous sympathy for the victims of murder, rape, etc.
It is useless in that it doesn't bring the victim back to life. Perhaps the biggest reason to ban the death penalty is that it doesn't change the fact that the victim is gone and will never come back. Hate, revenge, and anger will never cure the emptiness of a lost loved one. Forgiveness is the only way to start the healing process, and this won't happen in a revenge-focused individual. At the end of the day, capital punishment or no capital punishment, violence and trauma in a society can be controlled by a leadership that can sell the mantra of peaceful co-existence. But, then, what hope do we have of this at a time when the apostle of non-violence, the Mahatma himself, has not too many admirers in his own land?
* JAI HINDH *
- Manish Sati
