On Punishment

There was a time when the state used to punish its criminals openly — in full public view. The centre of punishment was the criminal’s body. The aim was less to establish justice and more to inflict such severe and painful suffering on the criminal’s body that no one who watched would ever dare think of committing a crime again. The fear of the power of the state would be implanted permanently in their hearts and minds.

If we look at history, in the first century CE, Rome was nailing its criminals to crosses and hanging them there. The Christian cross is in fact a memorial of that very cross on which Jesus was hung for the crime of sedition. Not only Rome — the Bible itself records many such punishments: stone them, cut off their hands, flog them — and do it all in front of the public.

Then in the seventh century, Muhammad’s Sharia, while establishing better judicial laws for punishment and speaking of the rights of prisoners under human rights, did not reject the principle of public execution. For extremely serious crimes, punishments continued to be given in front of the public, and the methods remained almost the same: stoning, whipping, amputation — inflicting visible suffering on the criminal’s body to act as a deterrent for the rest of society.

In South Asia, Jainism and Buddhism spoke differently, but neither of these traditions was aimed at state control. And if we look at Manusmriti’s system of punishment, bodily punishment appears there with even greater severity and emphasis.

Across most of the world, this system continued until the eighteenth century. In France, you can still watch on YouTube heads falling under the guillotine in the streets. But after the Renaissance, as liberal democracies expanded in the West, a sense of self-consciousness grew in people. They began to find it unbearable to witness such brutal punishments in front of their eyes. Gradually, public executions declined.

It is hard to say whether people were truly disturbed by the suffering of the punished, or merely by the fact that their own eyes had to see such horrific scenes.

Just as human weapons evolved from stones, spears, arrows, swords to supersonic missiles and atomic bombs — which appear more civilized, more technical, more refined, but are in reality far more cruel, far more horrific, and far more destructive — the same transformation occurred in the methods of punishment.

If you kill someone with a knife, the dying person gasps in front of you, blood flows before your eyes, death happens through your own hands. And the so-called civilized human being finds this intolerable. He wants a weapon that does the job cleanly. Why dirty one’s own hands?

So now the educated, liberal, modern human being presses a button from far away, and hundreds of people in another country die on their own. No burden of guilt on the heart, no disturbing images for the eyes.

Exactly the same thing happened with punishment. Modern jails are the result of this same desire for cleanliness and distance.

Now you will not see bodies hanging in the streets, because punishment is no longer centered on the body, and because — why burden the public with guilt? If the public protested under the weight of guilt, the system itself could be threatened.

So instead of the body, impose punishment on the soul. Destroy the human being’s dignity. Lock him in jail, strip him naked, force him to urinate and defecate in a small, dark, solitary cell. Abuse him with curses about his mother and sister. Let his body live — but kill him from inside. And do it in a way that no one comes to know. Even if one or two do, they will find it “normal,” because the majority, who will never know, will remain indifferent.

Whether it is Guantánamo Bay in America or Papa-2 in Kashmir, an ordinary person cannot even imagine how one human animal can commit such cruelty against another.

Listen to the stories of the Muslims acquitted after twenty years in the Mumbai blast case about what was done to them in jail — and if even a trace of humanity remains in you, you will hold your head in despair.

And this is just the fate of those who reached the media, who gained some visibility. What must be happening to the nameless, faceless prisoners locked away in jails — even thinking about it is unbearable.