By Deepa Majumdar
This article is dedicated to Bisheshwar Das, Shanbor Hashah, Sunil Roy.
It is also dedicated to the memories of Vikash Nandwal and Vidya Devi Chokhani.
Winter has arrived in Northern Indiana. The lake is frozen and wild animals march across the ice. Etched against the stone-gray firmament, a flock of Canada Geese flutters in an arrowhead … Unlike man, the Geese are not solitary. Their clamorous honking fills the air with palpable peace. Indeed, there is a strange existential repose in nature. Despite their savagery to one another, wild creatures neither fret nor fume … Yet, they cannot do what we humans can … At one extreme, they cannot meditate or attain the highest levels of consciousness, even if they adore the Divine in their own ways … At the other extreme, they cannot devise diabolical instruments of hatred like nuclear arsenal. Indeed, Aristotle was right when he claimed: “For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice … when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals …” (Aristotle, Pol. 1.1253a).
Among animals, since man alone is capable of moral consciousness, man alone is culpable. Therefore, it is man alone we punish for crimes committed against individuals or societies. We do not haul animals to court. Yet, for punishment to be non-violent, it must fulfill its twin teleological purposes of redemption and reform. Only then does punishment advance the cause of social justice. Otherwise, it degenerates to the violence and carnage of revenge. The great Plato defined the essential form of Justice as Justice-in-itself, or the pure quality of justice, instantiated in every instance of visible, earthly justice. Our human forms of justice … personal, or in courts of law … whether national or international … approximate this pure Justice-in-itself, just as all legality approximates … or should approximate … morality.
Yet, in a sense, all formal judicial punishment is redundant, for crime is its own punishment … both in the immediate psychological sense and in the delayed karmic sense. Inasmuch as all acts of violence boomerang back psychologically to the perpetrator, the first punishment lies in the immediate psychological impact the crime has on the mind of the criminal. Crime is its own punishment also in the sense of karmic fruition of actions at a future date. Thus the Buddha warns in the Dhammapada: “Speak or act with an impure mind/And trouble will follow you/As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart” (Ch. 1). The Buddha also warns against the worst form of violence … harming the harmless: “But as dust thrown against the wind,/Mischief is blown back in the face/Of the fool who wrongs the pure and harmless./Some are reborn in hell …” (Ch. 9). Moreover, the gentle Buddha warns in a rare display of divine wrath: “Nowhere! Not in the sky,/Nor in the midst of the sea,/Nor deep in the mountains,/Can you hide from your own mischief” (Ch. 9). As for the karmic punishment in store for one who harms the harmless, this is what the Buddha has to say: “He who harms the harmless/Or hurts the innocent,/Ten times shall he fall -/Into torment or infirmity,/Injury or disease or madness,/Persecution or fearful accusation,/Loss of family, loss of fortune./Fire from heaven shall strike his house,/And when his body has been struck down,/He shall rise in hell” (Ch. 10). Indeed, it is this dire warning that stands out as the best rationale for compassion for the enemy. Why should we feel such compassion? Because, even in the embodied state, the enemy sinks into a mortal hell, all his own, as a result of his dastardly deeds … He falls into an abyss far worse than the worst pain he can inflict on his victim.
At this juncture, I am reminded of a young American soldier who returned home after his share in the war … and committed suicide. In the days before he took his own life, he would keep washing his hands. When his mother asked him why, he said he was washing off the blood he had shed.
From all this we can conclude that man’s punishment of fellow-man is indeed an addendum … When justice is served, punishment becomes an expression and conduit of Divine Grace … Nevertheless, all conscious and formal punishment is unavoidably redundant. For, even if a criminal is not caught by man’s laws, he will meet a fitting cosmic punishment that foreshadows his crime from the start. In the end, nobody … absolutely nobody … can escape divine, expiatory karmic punishment or the inexorable Law of Karma. This world is therefore, as Plotinus said, “The Inescapable.”
It is in the light of this background that I muse about the “miscreants” who used arson against Bisheshwar Das, the owner of Babua tea stall, now languishing in a burn ward … and against Shanbor Hashah and Sunil Roy … and took the lives of city trader Vikash Nandwal and Vidya Devi Chokhani. How old were these arsonists? What kind of punishment would be proportionate enough to match the enormity of their crimes and punitive enough to bring about redemption? Do they have parents? If so, how have their mothers (in particular) faced the fact that their offspring have set fire on live human beings and attempted murder? What kind of dreams do these “miscreants” have … Surely, by now, their deeds have penetrated into their subconscious minds? Can they sleep at night? Do they stand out as a condemnation of the “demon” of identity politics, as my friend Janet Moore terms this type of politics? Or have they fallen for the worst of all traps … the legitimizing of “legitimate” violence … a far more dangerous form of violence than that which is committed in offense (not defense)?
Regardless of whether they are arrested or not, these “miscreants” who have tainted the good name of the Khasi community, threatening it with the karmic fallout of their crimes, cannot escape the weight of their deeds. Like the “nine-eleven” “miscreants” who thought they engaged in “legitimate” violence … the actions of the pro-ILP arsonists will have boomeranged upon their own souls. Indeed, they have singed their souls with far greater wounds, than those they branded on their innocent victims. All who stand by in silent support of these deeds, share in their karmic repercussions. After all, these “miscreants” have harmed the harmless …
(The author is teaching at Purdue University, USA)