Dear Friends,
Our Intellectuals are a strange lot. They never made enough noise, if any / at all, about thousands of deaths of pedestrians and others every year. They are worried about the rarest of rare capital punishments.
Capital punishment in rarest of rare cases is not for deterrence. It is just to punish the murderer / terrorist /rapist. Discussing the deterrent potential or otherwise of capital punishment is not correct.
Many Countries which have abolished capital punishment waged / supported many unjust wars. Some of them sell weapons of mass destruction !
It is enough if India provides world class pedestrian infrastructure and health care to prevent lakhs of deaths every year.
Udayashankar
Capital punishment is through court of law to be executed in the rarest of the rare cases. No one can take the role of the court of law.
Dear Friends,
Punishments are neither for deterrence nor for validating vengeance. The one and only one objective of giving any punishment is just to punish the perpetrator of a given crime. Thinking of any other objective of any punishment is only jurisprudential and sociological intellection born out of genuine humane-ness.
Of all, Communists want capital punishment abolished forgetting their own past in India. Don’t they continue to gloat over armed struggles!
Our young Parliamentarian Mr. Varun Gandhi probably learned lessons from the cases he is facing and is in favour of abolishing capital punishment (CP).
If any person kills another person, the right to life of the victim is extinguished irreversibly, there by the killer forfeits his / her own right to life, may not be irreversibly because of the rarest of the rare principle. CP is not same as “eye for eye”. A life legally extinguished is no more a burden to the Nation but a blind person is. Yes, the hanged person’s family, if not involved in any crime, should be given special support by the Government in every possible way.
I respect people who want capital punishment to be abolished. Friends, Budha did not rule!
Centuries of Budhism culminated in murderous Maoism in China and is spreading in India along with cross border terrorism, rapes cum murders and other killings. Can such a Country afford to abolish CP!
Udayashankar
I seem to agree with Tejinder that the two issues are very different and need not be linked and should be debated separately. I would never support Terrorism or Mass Destruction Weapons, but that does not mean I cannot oppose capital punishments.
Issues involved in capital punishments are more relating to (i) do capital punishment provide sufficient amount of deterrent, (ii) do capital punishments make martyrs of the guilty persons, thus giving results totally opposite to what was desired (deterrent) by the capital punishment.
Of course apart from above, ethical questions of taking away life (tit for tat) linger on…
Dear Subhashji,
The elected governments right from 1947 to 2014 have not shown a political will to do away with the capital punishment and I am of the opinion that unless the political parties stop scoring brownie points over the killing of innocents to garner votes, neither the ruling nor the opposition parties would initiate discussion on the abolition of death penalty/ capital punishment.
Regards,
shekar
Though there is a point that we need to take care of pedestrians – and mal nutrition, and terrible public health services – which lead to thousands of deaths every year, the point is that there is a difference between accidental and planned death caused by another. The latter is usually called murder and is far less acceptable ethically. Hence the outcry against capital punishment : which some define as murder by the state.