Crime and punishment

It was a long time ago in what now seems like another world, that I read Dostoyevsky. It was not a voluntary act; it was forced upon me by a syllabus designed by people who had nice ideas but no sense of time and absorption quotient – of the teenaged brain, that is. We lived in a neat apartment in Geneva, Switzerland, at the time, the small living room chock-full of heavy dark brown-leather upholstered furniture complete with nicely covered flat buttons which were nice to twist and wiggle in moments of any kind of stress, especially because they didn’t come off easily.

I tucked myself almost upside down in a winged armchair and started reading soon after a bath one Saturday morning, with a large glass of Evian for company. Some hours later I was disinterred by a fond parent and fed, then allowed to go back to my book. I stopped when I was done, painfully untangled myself from the chair, tenderly rubbed all the dents caused by the buttons and yawned widely, stretched all my kinked muscles and wandered towards dinner. Raskolnikov and his adventures had kept me rapt for hours. And I was done with my assignment for the dishiest English teacher that side of the Danube!

Today, after growing up and having read and seen and heard and reacted to a lot more than just a book that was part of a school curriculum, crime and its punishment means something quite different, not the angst faced by an accidental murderer after his crime has been committed and covered up, albeit not terribly successfully. Even as I write this, there are protests being clamoured all over the country to free Mohammed Afzal, a man who masterminded an attack on the Indian Parliament in Delhi, when many were killed and many more injured. There have been letter campaigns, protest marches, sit-ins, even riots, just because the man has been sentenced severely for his crime. He is to hang at the end of the year, the courts have decided. The people want otherwise. Even politicians, who should know better than to get involved in such matters, want otherwise.

How harsh should punishment for a crime that has resulted in a number of deaths be? Is it a story of like begets like? Or should it be all about equal and opposite reactions? Murder deserves more than a jail term, doesn’t it? Or have we all become so hardened to crime that we are willing to forget and forgive and forego the punishment that should follow?