Amazingly, many of the very same social groups who are taken in by the Gandhian approach to problems—as depicted in the film—are also the ones hot for Afzal's death by hanging. Altogether a rather gruesome contradiction. One would think you can either have Gandhi or you can have hanging.
Here is what Gandhi had to say on the subject of capital punishment: "I cannot in all conscience agree to anyone being sent to the gallows. God alone can take life because He alone gives it."
Given the high regard in which the Supreme Court of India is held for its competence and probity, few ought to question the determination of guilt it has made in the case of AfzalGuru. After all, it is to that competence and probity thatS.A.R. Geelani owes both his life and his freedom, having been earlier sentenced to death by the trial court in the very same criminal case.
Gandhi's allusion to "conscience" here does, however, seem to rebuke a phrase in the text of the judgement delivered by the Honourable Court upholding the death sentence. The Honourable Court has averred that only the death sentence would satisfy the "collective conscience" of the country in the matter. One must ask as to which order of conscience ought to have taken precedence in the matter of sentencing—one that abhors taking life or one that seeks it to propitiate popular sentiment. In that conundrum, we stand with the Mahatma.
As we also know, Gandhi's rejoinder to the Code of Hammurabi ("eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth") was a witty and telling one: eye for an eye and surely one day it would be a blind world!
Staying with Gandhi for a minute, perhaps his most discomfiting moment in relation to capital punishment was to come when the revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Sukh Dev and Rajguru were sentenced by the British to be hung.
The question has often been asked: Did Gandhi do all he could to seek their reprieve from King George, with whom he was then preparing to share the first Round Tableconference? No easy answers here, although Gandhi did point out to the colonial government that the sentence was not an "irreversible" one. He was on several occasions to plead that there is little he could do. What, however, is on record in the matter is the following statement from Gandhi:
"The government certainly had the right to hang these men. However, there are some rights which do credit to those who possess them only if they are enjoyed in name only."(Collected Works, Ahmedabad, Navjivan, Vol.45, pp.359-61, Gujarati)
The direction from "Gandhigiri", then, is explicit enough: you may have the right to sentence AfzalGuru to death, but it would do you credit not to exercise that right.
The problem may be that India's highly meritorious forward classes are as severely brutalized by events as any in America. Thus a certain tribalism seems to have overtaken their view of things. It remains a thought, nonetheless, that the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" dictum does not obtain in most crimes committed. For example, no country yet has a law that decrees that an arsonist must be punished by an official bonfire of all his belonging, nor a rapist be punished by being required to offer his womenfolk for retaliatory rape (except in some tribal communities). The instinct, therefore, to seek death for murder seems to answer to some residual animality wholly repugnant to civilized life.
The most forcefully telling indictment of the practice of capital punishment that I know of is that of AlbertCamus: