Certainty over severity

Recently, I was watching a documentary on ‘Save the Tiger’ campaign. This campaign has gained a lot of popularity in the recent few months, with hoardings shouting out the number 1,411 and celebrities’ popping up in your television screen urging you to join this campaign. I felt it was effective to gain attention, as I saw many of my friends who usually don’t care too much about things actually join this movement. So kudos to the effort. However, I have my doubts about how my contribution especially the monetary one is going be of any help as poaching business in India is deep rooted, highly corrupt, and widespread, far worse than what we can imagine.

So coming back to the documentary, apparently it said that the Government of India had increased the imprisonment duration from 7 years to 10 years if found guilty conducting poaching activities. I found this extremely amusing as its said there hasn’t been a single person who has been booked under this law or suffered any form of imprisonment in the last decade for poaching.

Panna, one of the five Tiger Reserves in Madhya Pradesh, merely an hour away from Khajuraho, apparently has just pugmarks to offer. The Panna’s forest officials have been boasting about the Tiger number being 30, five years back. NOT EVEN A SINGLE TIGER IS PRESENT IN PANNA TODAY. Then there was the relocation process, where Tigresses from Bandhavgarh and Kanha were airlifted to Panna. They were radio collared and were followed for a few weeks. Recently, the radio collars are not answering & both the tigresses of Panna are now missing. When the news channels and newspapers reported that the last living Male Tiger in Panna has moved in to some nearby jungle in search of a soul mate, making speculation high that there was no tiger left in Panna. This is not the story of only one park in our country. Everywhere it’s the same. A Tiger goes missing, the local forest officials report the matter and send their report about the missing tiger, the govt. constitutes a team for the investigation, but nothing seems to come out of it.

The year 2009 saw 59 tigers falling prey to poaching and man-animal conflicts, the highest figure in the past three years. A tiger can sell for around $ 1,500, but when its body parts are sold, the value can soar to $ 50,000 in view of ever-increasing demand from countries like China which uses the products for preparing traditional medicines.

Now all these facts put together I wondered what are we expecting from the Indian Judiciary system? The Government did increase severity of the punishment, however will severity alone suffice? Or alongside severity are we also looking for certainty. A certainty that will ensure that severity will be actually practiced and not just retained as a concept.

The 1st week of May, Kasab was found guilty and sentenced to death. There would be no Indian who would be unhappy with this verdict. The immediate next question that was raised was, will he be hanged and when? The last execution in India was held in August 2004 when Dhananjoy Chatterjee, convicted of raping and murdering a schoolgirl in 1990, was hanged to death. It was the first such execution since 1995.

The assassins of India's independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi, and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi were among those executed in the past 60 years. In the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case a special court sentenced to death 26 men and women in 1998. In May 1999 the Supreme Court commuted three of the death sentences to life imprisonment and released 19 others.
I honestly believe that certainty needs to go hand in hand with severity of the punishments. This lack of certainty in policy execution makes people believe that they are above the law and therefore doesn’t deter them for committing crimes.
I wonder if certainty and severity ever become synonymous words? Will penalizing Kasab and saving our National animal becomes a litmus test for our Indian Judiciary System? With severity in place, will certainty see the light of the day?