Death penalty unimaginably evil, sovereignly stupid: book

The death penalty is a “macabre folly” whose continuance is “not just unimaginably evil, but sovereignly stupid”, writes Gopalkrishna Gandhi in his new book on capital punishment.

 Gandhi says abolishing the death penalty is about doing away with the “most sullied symbol of a sullied system” that “mimics and perpetuates” medieval blood sports in crime and punishment.
 In ‘Abolishing the Death Penalty: Why India Should Say No to Capital Punishment’, he acknowledges the surge in popular calls for “collective retribution”.

 He argues that the prevailing social attitude to death penalty, “coloured by a revulsion” over the Nirbhaya case and rage over terrorist attacks, should not influence the state and those at the helm.

 “The death penalty is a macabre folly that swings between tragedy and idiocy. Its continuance is not just unimaginably evil, but sovereignly stupid; its termination will not just be nobly element but wholly and supremely and incontestably intelligent,” the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi writes.

 “To abolish the death penalty is to end the mentality that treats the convict as a toy passed by a public’s insatiable appetite for retribution to a power that indulges that macabre trait,” he says in the book to be released next week.

 Arguing that India has an abolitionist trend, Gandhi feels the opposition to the hanging of Bhagat Singh suggested it. However, he argues the tide changed with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi as it might have “militated against abolition”.

 Several private member bills and resolutions moved in Parliament during the tenure of Jawaharlal Nehru, who favoured abolition, failed and cites the one moved by actor and Rajya Sabha nominated MP Prithviraj Kapoor in 1958 among others.

 Mocking India’s reluctance in doing away with capital punishment, Gandhi says abolishing death penalty and shaming torture into retreat are, “by the state’s light”, not masculine steps. “A state that wants to be in the (UN) Security Council thinks it should be seen as tough on terror, no matter if it is rough with rights,” he adds.

 Lamenting that terrorism has taken execution debate to a “margent hazy with smoke of hellfire”, Gandhi believes that there is a “social sentiment, political compulsion and above all, the state’s izzat (prestige)” that compels it to retain it.

 Public is always “death-penalty minded” and acts like the Dadri killing and the lynching of a prisoner in Nagaland “show a mindset that is entirely comfortable with the death penalty”, he writes.