Government has taken a bold step of decriminalizing ‘attempt to suicide’ by removing the Section 309 from statute book. Until now attempting suicide was a criminal offence which led to a fine or an imprisonment of 1 year. This step by the government leaves me in two minds.
One is, the government is actually moving forward by removing this act because it looked very irrational in the first place itself. If someone is committing suicide then why do you want to put him behind the bars rather than counselling him? Enforcing punishment didn’t look as the best of solutions. Most of the western democracies don’t have this section in their book because of this very reason. Only countries in the sub-continent region, where the suicide rate is very high, decided to stick with this law and now India is also out of that league. So has India actually crossed this threshold is what I am wondering.
On the other hand what I can’t stop thinking about is euthanasia, high rate of suicide, and activists who use fasting as a weapon to fulfil their unreasonable demands.
Right now euthanasia is not completely legal in India, only passive euthanasia is possible. Injection of drugs and compounds in the body to cause death is a punishable offence. This leaves euthanasia on a see-saw in our society. The question which now arises here is if you are decriminalising the act of a person using external measures to kill himself, then how do you explain criminalization of euthanasia. Perhaps the need of death is way more in cases of patients suffering from terminal illness than a healthy person trying to deal with tragedy, no matter how big it is.
Now let’s look at another aspect of the consequences of removing section 309. Government has given every citizen the right to protest but that right is not absolute, it has its limitations as well. In the current scenario when people use fasting as a tool to get their unjustified demands fulfilled, the government can take action against them on the grounds of section 309. But now the state has made itself handicapped to deal with such problems.
What generally happens is, when a person goes on hunger strike, a lot of media attention is being given to him. No matter what the demand is, people get sympathetic about it and start blindly supporting him. This is where it gets problematic for the government, now there is no law which can put an end to it. Earlier when such cases used to happen, government would take the baton in their hands and use this act of criminalization of attempt to suicide, to tackle all such cases. Now this is no longer possible.
One of the major reasons why this law was is in place in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was to keep a check on the number of suicides happening in these countries. Since the law is now being scratched out, there no longer remains a fear in the minds of the individual that if he/she fails in the attempt to suicide he will be convicted. What used to happen was that if someone was found guilty of attempting a suicide, he would get punished and the idea of suicide would get eradicated to some extent. More often than not, idea of suicide is a momentarily thought; no one actually lays out a plan for it. It happens in the heat of moment and since it was against the law people always had that fear somewhere in the back of their minds.
Agreed that decriminalization of ‘attempt to suicide’ is indeed a step forward but our country is not ready for it. The status of the society needs improvement before dropping this section from Indian Penal Code. By the look of it, the situation is more likely to get worse rather than improving. Rehabilitation and counselling is indeed the best way to deal with a problem like suicide but a country like India needs stricter measures to tackle it. We cannot blindly follow the footsteps of western liberal democracies. The situation is completely different in those countries.
It will be very interesting to see the consequences of this motion and how the government deals with its after effects.
