www.sacw.net | 16 November 2006
We
must leave alone what is not in our power to change
The
death sentence for Mohammed Afzal Guru and the future of barbarism
by
Aseem Srivastava
"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
aseem62@yahoo.com