The media is reeking of blood. They want to show it live – each moment of it. A frenzied audience has committed to stay tuned. They won’t go away from in front of the screens as reality unfolds scene by scene.
More perplexing than the chicken or the egg ruse, is whether it is the media that orchestrates fury within the public, or if it is the public that incites the media into vehemence.
The widespread public outrage over the recent rape and murder of a young girl in Delhi dissipated when the four men were sentenced to death. It was a gratifying day. Until, news of the five-year-old girl raped by one or more maniacs in Lahore broke, the very same day.
Whoever occupies whatever stance, the media and the public are unanimous that criminals shall be done to death in most horrid of ways – shot in the forehead point blank, beheaded with a jerk of sword, hanged in public and dragged out on the roads – and all of this is demanded as if from that day onwards no one would dare even think of committing such a heinous act.
However, there is sorry news for this audience. The crime that they abhor does not end this way. This is one of the most strongly held yet highly erroneous perceptions that ‘an exemplary punishment’ has a great deterring impact on prospective criminals. Countries with low crime rate do not punish their convicted criminals in horrible ways, and the countries that do that are not crime free, not even in comparative sense. It is simple. And it is universal.
China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are the top five executioners in the world, according to Death Sentences and Executions 2012 by Amnesty International. China alone accounts for more executions than the rest of the world combined. In recent years, there have been many high profile cases punishing the financial corruption of government officials and businessmen with death. Saudi Arabia implements death sentences in ‘the most gratifying’ of ways: beheading. In 2012, it executed at least 79 persons or three every fortnight. But the sheer fact that each of these countries continues to convict and award this ‘exemplary punishment’ belies the claim that it acts as a deterrent. Had it had any preventive effect, these countries should have registered a steady decline in such cases.
And if you think that I am being obscure, here is what has been happening in our homeland. Public hangings, introduced by Gen Ziaul Haq, were in vogue all through the 1980s. The practice was ostensibly started under the popular theme – the severer the punishment, the lesser the crime. (That the General used his military courts and ‘the exemplary punishments’ they awarded quickly and abundantly to actually deter political opposition, is another story.) Here are some of the news clippings that I sifted from the library of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. These pictures and news are about public hangings in Mianwali, Gujranwala, Sahiwal, Lahore and Faisalabad between 1985 and 1988. The punishment was abandoned after the restoration of democracy in 1988 as it had resulted in no social good.
