Blood on the sand

After the beheading, comes the silence. Late last week, yet another Indian met with a fate worse than death: a public beheading in a region near Riyadh. This was the punishment meted out to him under Saudi Arabian law for the crime of murdering a Saudi national. Murder is, of course, a heinous crime and must be punished. But this punishment must follow the due processes of a modern justice and abide by universal norms. As usual, the latest beheading was duly noted — without comment — in four lines in newspapers back home. No one still knows who the man was, where he came from, or what became of his family. But what is infinitely worse is that no one cares to know more, certainly not the Indian government. Compare this with the pro-active approach of the British authorities whenever their citizens happen to get caught in the rabbit traps laid in the name of justice in the region and the opportunistic ennui of the Indian external affairs establishment comes into full view.

True, Saudi Arabia is an extremely powerful player in world politics and even the world’s only remaining superpower has found it expedient to genuflect before the world’s largest producer of oil. What’s more, successive US administrations have used Riyadh to further and finance their policies within the West Asian region. India has yet another nexus with the West Asian kingdom, quite removed from oil. It is an important source of lucrative jobs for a large number of Indians. These and other factors have led to the general weakening of international opposition to Saudi Arabia’s barbaric criminal justice system. Yet, there is no getting away from the blood on the sand. Last week’s beheading was the 103rd instance of its kind this year, by a conservative reckoning. Death penalties here are routinely awarded for a broad spectrum of crimes, from murder, rape and apostasy to repeated drug offences. Also, Saudi Arabian law allows the victim’s immediate family to decide whether the offender’s life is spared in lieuof blood money. According to the Saudi interior minister, the execution in the latest instance had been delayed until the murdered man’s children were old enough to decide whether the accused should be beheaded or not. It goes without saying, therefore, that there is great scope for the miscarriage of justice even within the system existing in that country. From available evidence, this is nothing but justice beheaded.

At a wider level there is the question of human rights, which today constitutes something of a universal language. According to Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed and ratified by the nations of the world, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. By this token, Saudi Arabia, with its constant recourse to capital punishment through beheading, fails the test conclusively. Several Islamic scholars have argued that the message of universal justice inherent in Islam transcends the specific laws of an earlier era and that they should be interpreted in accordance with the spirit of the times. As for our ministry of external affairs, it is to be hoped that it will intervene more actively the next time an Indian citizen, wherever he or she may be located, stands in mortal danger of falling victim to a miscarriage of justice.