After more than three decades of measured debate in courts and public outrage elsewhere, and after repeated recommendations from the Law Commission, the government has moved to scrap Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalised the attempt to commit suicide. People who are driven to attempt the extreme step, either by illness or extreme adversity, deserve the support of society and the government. Instead, this antediluvian law had heaped insult on injury by turning them into felons.
The logic behind the criminalisation of suicide flows from the presumed sanctity of life. Suicide was deemed to be illegal like murder because humans do not have the right to take a life, not even their own. That was the European tradition talking. In India, the willing renunciation of life is morally accepted in various religious traditions. Besides, to criminalise suicide while extending state support to contraception and the termination of pregnancy is logically inconsistent, since both acts violate the sanctity of life. If India had not invested in family planning, it would have been in the throes of a Malthusian nightmare today. In the meantime, the suicide rate has accelerated, perhaps under the pressures of modern living, and this is a reality that needs to be acknowledged and addressed, not criminalised.
Fourteen states and eight Union Territories are in favour of decriminalising suicide. Of the five objectors, Punjab wants the law to require the state to extend material aid to failed suicides. The rest seek special provisions for people who use suicide not as an exit but as an instrument. These are problematic categories, like suicide bombers and those who kill themselves to erase evidence, and activists who starve or immolate themselves for a cause. The first category is a very tiny minority, which is anyway covered by legislations like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. As for the second, ending the shameful game of cat and mouse that the government plays with hunger strikers like Irom Sharmila would count as progress. It would force the government to seek cures for the political diseases that hunger strikes draw attention to, not cosmetic alleviation of the symptom, which the body of the hunger striker represents.
