Last One Week or So

Friends, Last week we saw the return of shocking and horrifying violence of terror in Delhi. With 13 dead and many more injured we will be living with one more trauma to cope with. We hope the affected families and their friends find the strength to carry on as they must.The perpetrators of this ghastly act are yet to be caught. Meanwhile the focus has shifted to political blame games and complex penologies to deal with terror. We have been discussing(from 2nd September 2011 onwards) the issues of effectiveness of capital punishment in our discussions/groups of the university and have had heated exchange of views. Interesting also was an NDTV discussion on 4th of September 2011(We the People episode) which we attended.(This you can look up on the website of www.ndtv.com) The discussion was in the context of rejection of mercy pleas of Rajiv Gandhi assasins(who had been sentenced to death) by the Supreme Court and the President of India .(Subsequently the Tamil Nadu assembly passed a resolution asking for a review).Mr. S. Chaturvedi of the Congress said that it was glaringly clear that the law should take its course and after the rejection of the petition the discussion(ie. this programme) should not have taken place at all.Mr. Chandan Mitra of the BJP tended to agree with him. We feel that here it is important to take in to account the insight of Plato that law has to be onesided and it makes an abstraction of the individual criminal.It is this insight which was taken up by the modern legal systems.This enabled an attempt to create human conditions for the reform of the criminal(in which he himself participated) under modern law.Capital punishment however is a finality which does away with the need to address the creation of this human condition itself. The complex penologies which are under debate today will perhaps need to take this in to account.(SFC,PG IGNOU,with the help of Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)