JUSTICE v/s VENGEANCE
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You know what, it bothers me. I can't let it go.
For believers in the death penalty:
No death penalty for Bilkis Bano's rapists and death penalty for Nirbhaya's rapists?
How does this sit well with you at any level?
For those who believe justice is about vengeance - has even vengeance been served for Bilkis?
What vengeance do you want served for Bilkis Bano?
What is the principle of reciprocity here?
HOW EXACTLY will vengeance be rendered?
How many Hindu women should be raped in this eye-for-eye vision of your justice, that sounds exactly like your enemy's ?
How many Hindu men should be castrated?
Remember that some Dalits participated in the Gujarat riots too? Should they be castrated too?
Or are they now "the popular minority" we all want to protect, after having forgotten about them for decades.
Should we put non-Dalit criminals in 3 feet by 7 feet boxes for the rest of their lives?
Should we give free rein to all our "human emotions."
Is that how Justice nee Vengeance works?
Or should we just kill them all? So what if get one or two wrong? The "greater good" will be served after all? So what if we find out 7 or 8 years later that we killed 1 or 2 or 10 innocents?
We TRIED to do the right thing, didn't we? That's all that matters, doesn't it?
That we feel better about ourselves? In the moment?
Of course, we know that ALMOST EVERYTHING is based on witness testimonies, a criminalized and inefficient police force and a damn near non-existent forensic department.
The Innocence Project in the U.S. has found even DNA evidence unreliable in an astonishingly large number of cases. It has managed to reverse judgments on a number of them.
Yet we are happy to blithely sentence people to death, with not even an agreed upon LEGAL definition of "rarest of rare."
THAT is why half the time some people get a death sentence and some don't.
That's what happened even BEFORE the BJP came to power. Because some Brahmins judges refused to believe Brahmin boys could rape Dalit girls, for example.
So Dalit rapists got death sentences and Brahmin rapists didn't.
How is that for Justice?
Unequal laws are not laws at all.
No bad law can be justly applied in the long run.
I hate quoting Gandhi, or anybody else for that matter, unless forced to. He was also probably quoting someone when he said
-- "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Justice is NOT about vengeance.
Vengeance is private business. Exact it in your own time, at your own cost -- in my humble opinion.
Justice is a moral idea. It's an idea of law and political philosophy.
Criminal Justice has to be rational. It has to be proportional. It has to make room for error. And it has to apply to everyone equally. Or to no one at all.
Bhanwari Devi - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhanwari_Devi
Bhanwari Devi (also spelled Bahveri Devi) is an Indian dalit social-worker from Bhateri, Rajasthan, who was allegedly gang raped in ... In 1987, she took up a major issue of the attempted rape of a womanfrom a neighbouring village. ... reluctant to record rape cases and show callousness and indifference towards women .
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