Opinion Justice Bin Done?

Was justice done to Ravana?

May 8, 2011 01:25 AM IST First published on: May 8, 2011 at 01:25 AM IST

Was justice done to Ravana? He took revenge on Rama for the disfigurement of his sister Surpanakha and abducted Sita. Was that reason enough to destroy Lanka,kill many hundreds of Lankans,all his sons (including Meghnad) and himself? Could Rama not have negotiated a surrender? After all,he did not even care enough for his wife to accept her immediately.

Of course,this is a futile question. Ravana embodies all evil. We celebrate his death every Dassera by burning his effigies. The courts of justice have never opened his case; even Amnesty International has not appealed.

Our notion of justice involves some idea of just punishment. Punishment has to be proportional to the crime. The Old Testament injunction (not all that different from the Quranic) is an eye for an eye. Retribution is part of the popular view of justice. Jesus believed in forgiving his enemies. Gandhiji would have forgiven Godse,but there was no way Godse was going to escape hanging.

So with Osama bin Laden. For the Americans,he embodies pure evil. He is the man who contracted not only the mass murder of 9/11 but also USS Cole,Kenyan Embassy bombing,Bali massacre and Londons 7/7. Many of the terrorist groups in India which have operated since 9/11 have been inspired by al Qaeda,including Lashkar-e-Toiba which was behind 26/11.

So is it alright to kill Osama as the Americans did? Many people believe that it is the Americans who are the problem and not the al Qaeda. Some Congress secularists came close to defending bin Laden as a wronged hero. But that was only to secure the Muslim vote bank for the UP elections; Congress secularists obviously think that all Muslims identify with Osama and not with the thousands of Muslims killed in many al Qaeda battles in Iraq,Afghanistan,Pakistan,Indonesia,India,UK,Kenya etc.

Americans argue that this was part of a war in which America was engaged with al Qaeda. They say that it is legal to kill an enemy general in combat. But was it right to kill him the way it was done?

Here,the story keeps changing and may not have settled down yet. After all,John Kennedy died in broad daylight in 1963 and we still have doubts about who killed him and how. In open societies,there will always be yet more truth to be unearthed. Osama bin Ladens death happened almost in real time 24×7 media frenzy. First,US President Barack Obama told the world what he knew. Then slowly,the story trickles out and gets more complicated.

Could the soldiers have arrested Osama and taken him away and then tried him? Was there time for that? The Americans had snuck in below Pakistani radar. By the time their copter crashed,the Pakistanis had begun to suspect something was up but they thought it was India (one-track mind?). So the soldiers had to decamp before long. They shot him and went away.

Justice is about proportionality and about procedure. Due process was obviously not followed. Could Osama have been tried? In what courtan American court or an international court? Slobodan Milosevic,Radovan Karadzic,Charles Taylor and many others are still being tried legally with no end in sight. So a trial for Osama,if possible,would have taken a few years longer than Ajmal Kasabs.

Osama bin Laden changed the way we live for the worse. We go through security checks and fear terror attacks everywhere we go. He argued that this was just war in retaliation for what the West had done to the Arab world for much of the 20th century,if not since the age of the Crusades. His reading of history was Manichean; Us versus Them (among whom were Indians). The Americans also have a Manichean view of al Qaeda. They have broken their own law in Guantanamo,used torture illegally and gone to war. The Cold War had some ideological veneer; the war against terror did not.

Where there is war,there can be no justice. But there is no final word either.