For the n’th time, an Indian court has held suicide attempt a criminal act. The utter absurdity of section 309 of the IPC, a colonial hangover that the colonisers themselves have shed as archaic, is once again on parade in the Irom Sharmila case.
The IPC section flows from the judicial wisdom that a human life belongs to God and then State (King in Britain). Despite several flip flops, many a judge and even a five-member bench have held that ‘The right to life under Art 21 of the Constitution cannot include the right to terminate one’s own life’. In their view, it cannot be likened to, say, right to speech which includes the right to remain silent. Such simplistic legal open-and-shut approach is in sharp contrast to the complicated moral, religious, psychological, humanitarian, medical or scientific angles. After all, a suicide candidate’s mental process too is very complex.
So, whatever the polemics, there is no justification to penalise a person who failed to take his, or her, own life – on top of the probable failures that first pushed him/her to suicide – and add to the woes through a stigmatic jail term! Trying to thus confine someone eager to take the extreme step of exiting the world itself is plain stupid. A suicide survivor needs nuanced counselling and care that does not however pamper his suicidal instincts, not surely punishment and condemnation – unless of course we are dealing with suicide bombers who bungle with the timer. Suicide attempt is less an L & O matter and more a personal dysfunction that is fast becoming a social epidemic the world over, particularly in India and more so in South India. Suicides need a humane touch, not a legal pitch. Prospect of punishment will only spur successful suicides!
But the ‘crime’ of a failed bid at suicide aside, can a fast-unto-death be declared a suicide attempt? The ridiculous judicial position gets glaring if you stretch the legal logic. If the one who commits a crime is called ‘criminal’ in simple semantics, those who attempt the ‘crime’ of suicide are criminals too. So where does that place the father of the nation and all his fasting fellow freedom fighters and followers, for after all, the Raj legal rationale, then was the same as it is in free India now? Or the Anna Hazares and assorted activists or fast-hungry politicos and angry, agitating citizens? Is our nation born, brought up and built up on a suicidal psyche?
Criminalising fasts is a self-goal. As with suicides for personal reasons, the penal tag will only have the opposite effect of making martyrs out of misguided folk on fasts. Whatever the legitimacy of a cause, fasts cannot succeed in extracting concessions or consensus. Those trying to pull an emotional fast one will only come up against the stone-wall of the impersonal State. The British for instance did not run away from India fearing Gandhiji would die. There can be no rational response to a person who refuses to perform the basic biological routine of eating. For, hunger is a weapon that anyone, from a puerile child to the profound champion, can employ against anybody, be they oppressors or those with just different opinions. Again, if a public cause is so worthy, it makes far more sense to live and fight for it than to die for! And in a nation wherein natural hunger itself is so rife, high profile fasts seem downright farcical. Above all, fast is the weapon of the weak, one that saps the strength of a society. It is a futile and fossilised means of protest. Law must not impart its seriousness and sense.
The paradox of this penal law is more pronounced in the grey area of abetment, which is also a crime. While in individual instances, abetment can take any form, in the case of fasts, it is the State which will be in the dock. For if it does not heed to the demands of the fasting crusader and the latter dies, is not the State deemed to have cooperated in the death? Or what of farmer suicides wherein the State stands as first accused? Or student suicides spawned by a stressful academic regimen? Or the most recent suicides of an old couple in Chennai who could not survive the delay caused by … the Court admin …. in giving them the compensation for their son’s death in the Prathiba ship tragedy? Judicial abetment?
All of us come with a self-destruct button. Life offers adequate provocations to press it. Ideally, one should let them pass, or at least, pause. Still, to push and perish is a personal prerogative, whatever the subjective debates. But to punish a survivor is akin to snatching the gift of life that providence has so graciously granted as a second chance to a tormented soul.
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