A hanging in public glare
When I had read media reports describing the last moments of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, in vivid microscopic detail, I remember feeling strangely uneasy. At the time I had assumed the reaction sprang from the sympathy I felt for the man and his family. But this confused me. All along I had maintained that people who commit such henious crimes should be liable for death punishment. Why then did his hanging make me uneasy? Exams and other committments forced me to put the thought aside. Yesterday, while reading this article by Karan Thapar, I understood the answer.
As Thapar says,
I did not need to know that Dhananjoy Chatterjee was depressed or cried the day before he was hanged. Nor what clothes he wore or what food he ate for his last meal. Those were personal details. More importantly, they were moments of anguish. Moments that should have remained his and his alone.
May be we had a right to kill him. But not in a fish bowl. Not as entertainment. Not as spectacle. And we definitely did not have a right to commercialise his death"
Bull's eye!
posted by Priyendra at 5:18 PM
9 Comments:
Media is the culprit.
But the hanging is justified.
Not just to teach him a lesson but to set an example)
(fear)for his types.
Vandy
11:49 PM
Thanx Vandy for stopping by! :-)
1:28 AM
Well we don't know whether the publicity was really that painful to the family and Dhananjoy in his last days or whether they initially welcomed the public glare as a means to further their cause :: an appeal for pardon of capital punishment!
The very fact that he was able to survive the last decade on several pending mercy appeals goes to say what was his and his family's mindset, understandably so from their point of view...
As Indian citizens it is then left for us to decide what should be given more importance - what the criminal was accussed of, why the President denied his appeal and what future aspirants of such crimes (namely child rape, rape + murder, cooking wives in a tandoor) should await in their future or whether we should be bothered about what he wore the last day and so on....
The press in India as we no, has of late given up the facts based ethics code for tabloid journalism and fast sales!!
5:07 AM
As Thapar said, discussing what Dhananjoy ate before he died furthers no one's cause - not Dhananjoy's, not his family's. IMHO it seems a bit insensitive to suggest that the family would have welcomed the media spotlight on Dhananjoy as he died. Not everyone is so coldly rational and I am fairly certain that most families would have been utterly distressed had one of their kin's last moments been subjected to such intense media scrutiny.
5:41 AM
IMHO the family was distressed at the very end and may have found the media scrutiny in distaste at that point but during the last few months when his fate was unknown it made perfect sense for them to gain public sympathy inorder to influence the President's decision!
Anyways, I think while Thapar is highlighting an important point about the human right to privacy and the the role of media; he and the press are still not highlighting the real point that needs to be drawn out and dwelled on...
The fear of capital punishment should be ingrained especially since the rate of crime/atrocities against females in India is 7 times higher than reported according to a recent publication..this might even be more in remote India and poor law and order states like Bihar, UP, etc..
People might disagree with me. Then again, I am a highly opinionated feminist!
4:30 PM
Quoting a rape victim "I was harboring a secret that was eating away at my insides. I felt guilt and rage and sorrow and hatred. I thought of myself as damaged, spoiled, like a piece of rotten fruit that should be thrown away. I felt that the pain would only stop if I were dead.
These feelings lock most rape victims in silence. But rape is not about sex, passion or lust. Rape is about fear, humiliation and control.Rape is worse than murder as the victim has to live with the humiliation. "
Whose last few moments were more miserable, the man whose last few personal details (or 'moments of anguish') were made public, that man who knew from 14 years that one day, he will be punished for the crime he had committed or that girl, who was raped before being murdered, that girl who was not at fault?
"In India a woman is raped every hour. Even if a rape is proved, the sentence ranges from one to 10 years.Most convicts get away with only three to four years of imprisonment." (From India Today).Hopefully this 'public' prosecution will bring the statistics down.
Why point out the mistake of the media??
What I feel is that if that 14 year old girl was closely related to Thapar, he would not have written this article. It is easy to sympathize, difficult to understand.
4:55 PM
Hey Anon,
So true! U echoed my thoughts competely..
5:42 PM
Seeing the level of interest the press and the public has displayed in the ghastly drama, I feel we are much closer to those Arabic societies (where stonings are mass spectacles) than I ever imagined. To kill a person who has committed an inhuman crime is one thing, to ourselves become inhuman in the process is a completely different thing!
About comparing the miseries of Dhananjoy and the rape victim - if the point is only to inflict greater misery on Dhanjoy than what his victim felt, why not amputate his arms and let him bleed to death? Why not gouge his eyes out before hanging? The point being that a certain punishment was decided by the courts. Nowhere in the sentence was it written that Dhananjoy and his family must be publicly humiliated. And hence we had no right to subject them to this additional agony.
I do not wish to question the debate about rape penalties and about capital punishment which has started as a result of the whole affair. But there's a certain section of the press which made money by playing on our sordid desire to know how Dhananjoy walked to his death. That desire and that section of the press both need to be condemned.
7:41 PM
I fully agree that " That desire and that section of the press both need to be condemned.". But even the judicial system in India should be condemned,
the final verdict of the case was given after 14 years!!
Making this case public was necessary to generate fear in our society, where such cases are not rare.(9 out of 10 rape cases go unreported because of the fear of humilation)
Time is the best healer. Our(read public) wounds have been healed, because we were not deeply affected, we are no kin to her. That girl is no longer with us, we do not know what she felt before dying. Did she(like many other victims)prefered death to a life of self-pity, self-hatred or did she still had a desire to live.
The only thing I am trying to say is that none of us (Karan Thapar, Upasu, Vandy, me or you) can really understand these complicated things because this is nothing but a case study for us.
5:48 PM
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