A Legend of Ganga

The River Ganga is exalted as someone who provides salvation to even those who are utterly unfit. The Padma Puran tells us that while sons may abandon their parents, wives their husbands and friends, their dearest friends, the Ganga abandons no one. A legend associated with Pandit Jagannatha stands as a testimony to this all embracing nature of the River.

Jagannatha, a Brahmin from the 17^th century was declared an outcaste on account of his love affair with a Muslim woman. So, the Pandit went to Varanasi to try and restore his status as a Brahmin. However, shunned by all and devoid of all hope of acceptance, Jagannatha sat atop the Panchganga Ghat alongwith his beloved and composed an ode to the River Goddess. Poetically, his composition had 53 verses to correspond to the 52 steps of the Ghat and the stepping ground

The poetry begins

You were sent for the salvation of the world by Shiva, Lord of Lords….

It continues

I come to you as a child to his mother

I come as an orphan to you, moist with love

I come without refuge to you, giver of sacred rest

I come a fallen man to you, uplifter of all

I come undone by disease to you, the perfect physician

I come, my heart, dry with thirst, to you, ocean of sweet nectar

Do with me whatever you will

It concludes

Take us into your embrace for ever for Moksha sublime bliss for ever

The legend says that as Pandit Jagannath composed his 53 verses of Ganga Lahari, the river rose step by step. At the penultimate hymn, the waters touched the feet of the poet and his beloved and at the last verse, purified them, embraced them, and carried them away.

The River is the Mother who loves and claims the child who has been rejected even by the outcastes, criticized even by the madmen and rejected by the other tirthas. There are plenty who care for the good, but who cares for the Sinner except for the one who has only Love in her heart.

The entire Ganga Lahri can be accessed here

Adopted from: India, A sacred Geography by Diana L Eck

The Tragedy of Devbhoomi

For someone who was fortunate to have had safe darshan at the four holy sites only weeks earlier, the tragedy of Uttarkhand seems a little bit more personal. The scenes of devastation unfolding on TV screens and gut wrenching tales of survivors make the eight days spent on criss-crossing Devbhoomi seem so surreal now. 

It is heartwarming that though the Central Government has refused to declare this tragedy a National Disaster, the common citizens of our Nation have displayed no such hesitation and are coming together to help the victims. At the same time, the near absence of the ‘local’ factor in the prevailing discourse raises disturbing questions. Very certainly, the presence of pilgrims from across the country made the tragedy seem closer to people from other states. Surely, each one of us prayed for the safe evacuation of hapless pilgrims stuck without food and water at various stretches of the pilgrimage route and cheered boisterously as the television beamed images of the Indian Army evacuating the victims heroically.

But why has our concern not extended to the residents of these lands – the ponywallah who made the trek at Kedarnath possible, the pitthoo from Nepal who carried the infirm on his back and those dandies who transported people in maximum comfort. Why is there little attention to fate of those dhabawallahs, those hotel staff who lined up the roads and those residents of those villages which dotted the mountainside? The pilgrims lost a lot and many will probably remain scarred for life. But that should not have, in any way, eclipsed sufferings of the Uttarakhandi from public images. Many villagers lost everything – their material possessions and even more tragically, their bread-earners who got swept away by those swirling masses of angry waters, mud and rocks. The pilgrims did not deserve to suffer and neither did the local residents deserve to get pushed to corners of our consciousness. What is the update on those thousands of local residents present at Gaurikund, Rambara and Kedarnath. What about those present in Pithoragarh, at Gangotri, at Badrinath and those numerous other villages and towns which dot the devastated landscape? They seem to figure neither in the list of the dead nor the list of rescued. Surely, they couldn’t have vanished overnight!

As with any tragedy, questions on ‘could this have been averted’ started reverberating soon after the devastation had stuck. At one end, we have the rulers claiming that the devastation could not have been averted and at the other, the group of environmentalists pinning the blame on unplanned ‘development’. Sadly, lack of sensitivity seems to bind both these stands – the rulers stand indicating brazen disregard for common sense and the environmentalists ‘I told you so’ stance being a little too smug to be palatable.

And yes, it is true that motor cars clog the highways and leave behind a trail of empty chips packs, pet bottles and general refuse. However, it is truer that any attempt to clamp down the number of pilgrims the way many environmentalists are suggesting, will not impact those who dirty the hills. The well off will still come – for their share of darshan and if nothing else, for fun. What it will certainly impact is that multitude from all parts of the country which saves for years for the yatra, that which performs arduous trek on foot simply because it cannot afford a pony and sleeps in buses for it cannot afford hotels.

While it may not be possible to prevent natural calamities, it is certainly possible to plan for mitigation and even more critically, adhere to norms which will minimize casualties. One does not need to be an engineer to realize that structures constructed on pillars and platforms reclaimed from mountainsides and overhanging river banks are fragile and prone to collapsing. Likewise, any person concluding that the cumulative impact of kilometers of tunneling across mountains could lead to loosening of rocks and soil would only be someone with common sense and not an Einstein. Certainly, human activity has contributed to the disaster. It was not many months back that flash floods had hit Uttarkashi or when cloudburst had damaged Rudraprayag. The damage was high then and has multiplied exponentially now. Sadly again, no lessons will be learnt. Across the country, the burgeoning growth of cities and towns has made them sitting ducks for disaster. Our own capital city has seen court sanctioned encroachment of the Yamuna floodplains while Rajarhat has come up choking the water outlets of Kolkata. Who will be to blame if God forbid, these cities get flooded as a result of a deluge?

That said, the story of Uttarakhand cannot be dismissed as a tragedy compounded by human greed. The region is desperately poor and the images of young kids hauling fodder over long distances and running dangerously after speeding cars asking for 1 rupee are nothing if not a testimony to the financial state of the people. Concern for environment pales into insignificance if the trade off is a decent human existence. The Char Dham Yatra presented the only opportunity for many locals to make their earnings for the year. The burgeoning of hotels, rest houses, dhabas only indicate existence of demand and where demand exists, the human brain devises ingenious means to meet it. Add personal need to human ingenuity and you have a situation where people will find ways to disregard governmental norms.

It is more than likely that the current tragedy of Uttarakhand is being seen as a god-send by those who blast mountains, dam rivers back to back and create rickety buildings on fragile mountain scopes. After all, a relief and rehabilitation effort in India presents immense opportunity of both rent-seeking and legal business profits. Is it any wonder that Indians love a good calamity?

Giving credit where none is due!

Tucked in corners of some newspapers today was a small news item. ‘Ram Navami not celebrated in Ayodhya’. The small reports explain that owing to a 19 year Supreme Court order, which prohibited religious activity in the 67 acres plot adjoining the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple, the District Administration prohibited observance of the festivities this occasion. Strange are the ways of our rulers. A court ruling had supposedly been violated 18 times in the last 18 years, starting from 1994 when the passions over the temple restoration on one hand and belligerent secularism on the other were still high. Yet, the state administration under Mulayam Singh Yadav allowed celebration of Ram Navami at Janmabhoomi and the age old tradition continued without a break.

A moot point to be noted here is that the celebrations used to be observed in the areas adjoining the mosque, primarily near the Ram Chabootra and the offerings made at Sita Ki Rasoi, areas which were not a part of the disputed land and had been in possession and worship of Hindus for centuries. It was these among the many properties gradually acquired by the VHP led Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas and later taken over by the Government. That the then ruling of Supreme Court in clubbing this land with the core temple for matters of litigation was curious without doubt, it seems curiouser that an annual event which had been performed for ages and even after the reclamation of the temple was prohibited all of a sudden.

This act follows the UP Government’s stoppage of the longest running Ramlila at Ayodhya by that most simple of means, simply depriving it of funds. Very certainly, the twin acts, the first much more serious than the other are neither isolated nor innocuous. The SP Government, buffeted by a belligerent Muslim community demanding a greater pound of flesh for their support and accusations of being inept in handling of communal riots (which incidentally had much more Hindu casualties), what better way to signal to the bellicose Muslim that it stands with it shoulder to shoulder in its wars. After all, wasn’t it the SP (then Janata Dal) which ordered the cold blooded massacre of unarmed Kar Sevaks on two separate occasions in 1990?

However, this is the SP, an offshoot of that cabal of former socialists who jettisoned their socialist legacies to embrace an electorally rewarding but highly toxic philosophy of blatant minority appeasement. So successful have they been that the original fountainhead of this philosophy, the Congress (I), with able guidance from its foreign born supremo was forced to join this race of competitive appeasement of only one segment of our Nation.

But, what about our communal parties and lunatic groups aka the BJP and the VHP? The former hijacked a movement launched by the latter to reap electoral benefits while the latter lost control of a mass mobilization which could actually have yielded results. The BJP is known by various monikers - the Indian Ku Ku Klux clan, the Hindu Supremacist party, the Far Right Party of India and so on. The VHP has lesser luck and is nowadays simply described a group of lumpen elements, those Hindu fundamentalists who only engage in moral policing. Hardly has a squeak been uttered on the new developments by those who had taken up cudgels on behalf of Rama not so long ago, in the process promising to apply balm to our damaged psyche.

While the label of a Hindu party has stuck to the BJP, what exactly is Hindu about the BJP? Post the agenda on Ram Temple liberation, what has the central leadership of the BJP done in the last two decades which would justify its reputation or notoriety? The last elections which were fought on the matters revolving around the Hindutva agenda were the assembly polls of 1993 and to a small extent in the Maharashtra assembly polls of 1995.  The 5 General Elections in between 1996 and 2009 had only one conspicuous aspect on Hindutva – its absence! True, at the grass-roots, the average BJP worker believes in the agenda which attracted him/her to the party in the first place and still, hoping against hope, dreams of a day when the Nation will deal with its people on equal terms. But that is only the average worker! Since 1995, BJP’s central leadership has steadily moved away from what they proclaimed and has used every available soap (even Jinnah Brand) to scrub themselves clean of the stain of past ‘sins’. If they do manage to come close to power, another soap, proselytizer family scion Jagan Mohan Reddy, will be used remove some more old stains. 

Then we have our flavor of the season, Narendra Modi – the Hindu Hriday Samrat! One will be excused if he gets an impression that our mainstream media is desperately short of people who are discerning, those who can observe and analyse and then report. It is true that Narendra Modi appealed to the Hindu hurt in 2002 elections, which followed the riots triggered by the ghastly burning of innocent men, women and children by marauding Muslim mobs at Godhra.  

But that was 2002. By 2004, Narendra Modi had decided that he had no further use of those emotions which led him to power and not only were the Hindu grass root organizations steadily squeezed and made defunct Modi sidelined all those who had pronounced Hindutva sympathies; Gujarat is probably the only state where such a large number of people have been convicted for participation in communal rights. Strangely, or perhaps not so much, even though the riots had over 30% Hindu casualty with over 40,000 Hindus taking refuge in relief camps, except for the Godhra train burning accused, hardly any Muslim rioter figures in the list of convicts. Does it indicate that only Hindus rioted and that the Hindus dead, either got killed by other Hindus or committed suicide, only to give a bad name to the hapless Muslims of Gujarat? But, selective justice is a proven way of endearing oneself to the bully. An appeal for death penalty to Mayaben Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi is only another step towards that journey of finding acceptance where he is shunned. Modi’s drive against roadside encroachments swallowed temples, but stopped when Muslims rioted at Vadodara. Certainly not an act of a fanatic Hindutvavadi! Why is the media then hell bent to anointing him with honorifics he clearly has not striven for?

What exactly had Narendra Modi done in the last decade to justify the title of Hindu Hriday Samrat? True, he has achieved a lot and will at least provide a solid alternate to this utterly corrupt and inept UPA Leadership. People may or should vote for Modi (or whosoever the NDA Prime Ministerial Candidate is), if for nothing else, simply to punish the Congress for what it has gifted us!

But, the point under discussion – Is the BJP a Hindu party or is Narendra Modi’s moniker of Hindu Hriday Samrat justified. Sadly or otherwise, the answer is an emphatic no. These are people who have been working hard to obliterate their old links and claims to fame (or infamy). So, why credit them with emotions they don’t possess? It is then, perhaps poetic justice that all their efforts have not yet succeeded in winning a seat on the high table of secularism (as it is practiced in India).

Show me the man...and I will show you the Law

A group of people commit murder and mayhem. A friend of theirs knows of the plans and helps them to safekeep the arms and ammunition meant for this act and in the process treats himself to some of the grenades and an assault rifle. Another person, a woman, handles these arms before they finally reach this fiend.

The slaughter done, the henchmen move away to safer lands while this friend remains their friend.  Unfortunately, the police sniff out the perpetrators and this friend too gets implicated, arrested and jailed. Only, this friend happened to be a Bollywood star, son of successful Bollywood stars who transitioned as successful politicians. So, not very long after his incarceration, he gets bail while most of the others apprehended for either committing, abetting or having knowledge of this carnage deservedly continue to serve time in prison.

Curiously, while all the other accused including the woman handler were convicted under TADA, this son of destiny was convicted only under Arms Act, which ensured that the punishment handed out to him would be lesser in quantum. Then, the highest court of this land reduced quantum of his punishment to the bare minimum prescribed under law! But worse was to come – his Bollywood fraternity striking up a powerful chorus in his support; politicians falling over each other to hand out good character certificates for him and an ex Supreme Court judge, now more famous than he ever was, pleading for clemency on grounds of his playing a role in some movie on Mahatma Gandhi! It probably escaped this ex-distinguished gent that this same accused had played a criminal in many of his movies. Does that mean that he be punished for those celluloid crimes?

Sympathising with a person is one thing but trying to unduly influence public policy is a different ballgame altogether. In the instant case, a pardon to this criminal will mean that each and every convict be pardoned for each of them has spent many more years in prison and have undergone as much, if not more of mental agony in the twenty year long conviction process. Even more seriously, this pardon would mean that there would be very few crimes which would demand punishment. For, on the scales of justice, few crimes committed by individuals would equal the act of a war unleashed on unsuspecting civilians, destroying lives of those who died and those who survived. Why should a roadside rowdy or a bootlegger then be punished when his crimes pale into insignificance when compared to this carnage?

The saving grace of this nauseating spectacle of the elite and the ruling classes conspiring to help out of their own is the visible lack of public support for this ill-advised drive. For a Nation prone to deifying celluloid heroes and vapid sportsmen, it is remarkable that not only are there no processions of fans demanding pardon, online discussion forums and comment boards across the web display a rare unanimity of opinion in wanting the sentence to be executed.

Public opinion is notoriously fickle but for now, it seems to be the only bet which may prevent the elite from playing with the law yet again.

For details of Sanjay Dutt’s role in the blasts, read here

Capital Punishment: Death by Pronouncement

The recent executions of two terrorists convicted of waging a war against the Nation have raised multiple questions. One, whether these executions were just and the second larger question, whether capital punishment as a concept should continue in the country? While it would be easy to paint the abolitionists as loonies who have unfortunately come to dominate public discourse in India, a cursory study of evolution of death penalty over the ages would strengthen the argument that reducing barbarity of this punishment should follow the course of civilization.

Death penalty has been observed to be a part of the legal system of almost all societies since the dawn of civilization. Perusal of historical tales of any land speak of executions conducted in gut wrenching manners - through the breaking wheel, boiling / burning to death, flaying, disembowelment, crucifixion, impalement, crushing (including crushing by elephant), stoning, sawing, decapitation, devoured by hungry beasts, forced drowning, throwing over a cliff, blowing on a cannon and still many other forms which are too grotesque to record. Not infrequently, these executions were public spectacles with remains of the executed getting quartered and hung across various points of the city as a warning to other potential mischief makers.

Today, civilisational progress has ensured that except for a few societies, executions are more ‘humane’ now. However, while the case for reducing barbarity of executions finds a large general acceptance, the same is not true with the case for abolition of capital punishments altogether.

Quite often, executions are condemned as being infinitely worse than murder. In words of Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize winning author and proponent of ‘absurdism':

“An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. [...] For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life”

The premises which Camus and other abolitionists follow are:

·        Execution is murder by another name

·        Rather than redressing the previous crime, it adds to it

·        Demand for death penalty is nothing but a cry for revenge

·        The absence of details of the execution (on how the criminal suffered) in public discourse, is a manifestation of our subliminal revulsion at administered death

While it may be tempting to summarily dismiss the above objections as being personal beliefs of people who dwell in a make believe ideal world, each of the points raised deserve careful consideration.

It is not difficult to in principle agree with the assertion that net result being the same, i.e., extinguishment of life, executions can indeed be equated to murders. It is the second premise however, which shows the limits to this similarity. A non-judicial murder is generally driven by motives of a gain (personal or for a larger cause) together with the desire to inflict grievous harm on the victim. An execution, on the other hand is punishment for a crime which was heinous enough to distort the principles of human existence.

Likewise, while it cannot be effectively denied that death penalty is a form of revenge, this acceptance does not negatively impact the desirability of executions to be conducted for the simple reason that justice has to be consequential, retributive and restorative (wherever possible). If revenge is to be frowned upon, it would be difficult to argue in favor of any form of punishment; even a rap on the knuckles as punishment, by its very nature is a form of revenge.

Camus’s arguments on the ‘silence’ surrounding executions are factually correct but seem to confuse its causal relation with the latter. Murders are repulsive and it is natural that normal human beings would find the spectacle of death abhorrent. Except for those instances, where enlightened souls give up their lives, having ritualistically abjured food, death is rarely, if ever, a pretty sight. In case of death penalties, the sadness of death and disgust which it evokes co-exists with the general relief that the execution followed a just retributive process! It is here where a strong case exists to find more humane means of administering death so that our natural urge to adhere to humane boundaries get addressed.

The basis arguments on death penalty rest on the premises that fundamentally, execution is a form of Judicial Murder and stands in violation of basic Human Rights. 

As indicated earlier, executions are certainly killings for they are judicially legitimized acts of extinguishment of human lives. However, this reality does not ipso facto make capital punishment abhorrent. While there can be little doubt that the Right to Life is a basic universal right, premise that Human Life is inviolable under any circumstance has doubtful validity. Killing in valid instances of self defense is considered generally acceptable. Many societies accept controlled euthanasia as valid and more commonly, abortion of an unborn fetus is both legal and valid. Lest such comparison be seen as unseemly, due cognizance must be taken of the fact that these instances too violate what is otherwise believed to be inviolable. Particularly inexplicable is the status of abortion where the State sanctions a killing not because of any crime the unborn has committed, but because the parent(s) of the unborn do not desire that birth to happen. It is more even more inexplicable that in the debate on Capital Punishment, the abolitionists are generally those in favor of abortive ‘rights’ while the otherwise pro-lifers speak in favor of executions!

Moving beyond comparisons, if one were to evaluate Judicial execution on its own merit, it becomes necessary to account for various principles governing the concept of justice which defines it to be ‘retributive’ – punishment should be proportionate to the crime, be justly imposed and considered as morally correct. Not only does this principle appear intuitively fair, another factor which strengthens the case for retribution is the reality that civilization and rule of law means that the State takes over responsibility for ensuring safety and well being of ordinary citizen and the latter recourses to the State defined mechanisms to seek redress rather than taking up an avenger or a vigilante role. The intensity and depravity of all crimes are not equal and there are crimes innumerate where anything less than the death of the convict fail to meet the tests of fairness and equity. 

Finally, on whether Capital Punishment is a deterrent; contentions and questions on its deterrence value are irrelevant for unlike in nature where consequence of any act is pre-determined and certain, there is no certainly of punishment being inflicted for any crime. The person who commits a crime, irrespective of its magnitude, invariably does so with a belief that he will escape the consequences of punishment. If however, retribution, divine or man-made was to follow each lapse, the human civilization would be spared the need of maintaining an expensive and an only partially effective apparatus of law enforcement and justice. Presence of a large number of laws dealing with an even larger number of crimes is a potent proof that existence of laws and punishments has only a limited deterrent value. The course of justice cannot be served by not punishing convicted criminals only because there could be others who have escaped the dragnet of law.  Hence, if a person, after being through a due process of law, is found guilty of committing a crime so heinous that none other than death penalty is a proportionate punishment, the punishment, howsoever abhorrent it may seem to a few, must be carried out!