A less ‘masculine’ justice?

Women are intrinsically compassionate. It is often believed that they have a capacity to forgive acts of violence more easily than men, even if the act has taken a terrible personal toll.

But it now seems that it is not always possible, even for women, to abandon their longing for retributive justice. Three days before the first anniversary of the Mumbai terror attack, Kavita Karkare and Smita Salaskar, wives of slain Mumbai Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare and encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar respectively, met UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi at her residence. After the meeting, the two widows told the media that Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving captured terrorist, should be hanged.

It was difficult to overlook the paradox of that meeting. Here were three widows — wives of the two policemen and Sonia Gandhi herself — and each had been a victim of unbridled violence fuelled by revenge. Each had suffered tragically. Karkare and Salaskar said the conversation was personal and that they reiterated to Gandhi that “families of the victims and those of the martyrs wanted Kasab hanged”.

Few will forget how Sonia Gandhi, after losing her husband in a coldblooded terrorist assassination, granted clemency to Nalini, the assassin. She had Nalini’s death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Like Kasab, Nalini was also the sole surviving conspirator of the five-member squad responsible for Rajiv Gandhi’s murder. Compassion for Nalini’s five-year-old daughter had clearly taken precedence over Sonia's personal longing for retributive justice.

Priyanka Gandhi was in her teens when her father was blown up. Seventeen years on, treading in her mother’s footsteps, she went to meet Nalini in the prison to “come to terms with the violence haunting the entire family”. Later, she said: “I don’t believe in anger, hatred and violence. And I refuse to allow it to overpower my life.”

Perhaps it is different right now for Karkare and Salaskar. Perhaps images of the violence that took away their loved ones remain vivid and the wounds it inflicted on their lives still bleed. One year, after all, is barely enough time to recover from such irremediable loss. The desire for “an eye for an eye” appears to be stoked by raw grief.

In today’s increasingly brutalized world, we come across many striking examples of women turning inwards to come to terms with personal tragedy, letting go of their desire for vengeance. Forgiveness, while liberating, is also a way of making the transgressor own up to his/her terrible actions. It also does not mean absolving oneself from remembering.

Gladys Staines forgave Dara Singh, the man who torched to death her missionary husband Graham Staines and their two young sons while they were asleep. Was it her religious faith or her gender that made her so brave? “It (forgiveness) opens up the channel of healing in our lives. Instead of bitterness, we have love and healing and peace. It also releases the person to be forgiven,” Staines had said.

At 10, twins Eva and Miriam Mozes were taken to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp where Dr Josef Mengele used them for medical experiments. The sisters providentially survived Auschwitz and the infamous doctor. Separated from their mother at the camp, the twins were sometimes injected with doses of poison, virus or bacteria. Miriam never really recovered from the torture and died in 1993. Eva survived and later forgave her torturer.

In a film Forgiving Dr Mengele, Eva said, “What the victims do does not change what happened. And the best thing about the remedy of forgiveness is that there are no side-effects. And everybody can afford it.”

However, there are many women who have chosen violent redressal methods to avenge injustice done to them. Nalini was just one of the many, ready to play with people's lives for what she believed was the ‘greater good’. The politics of violence and retaliation spawns more ‘soldiers’ to the cause and many of them happen to be women.

But these so-called ‘warriors’ seeking to right historic and systemic wrongs by spilling blood help instead to keep intact the very structures of violence they loathe.

Meanwhile, law-makers and victims alike resolve to meet violence with more violence. The destruction of the twin towers in New York on 9/11 by terrorists and the inhuman treatment meted out to the law-breakers by the state at Gunatanamo Bay are part of the same philosophy of merciless punishment, shutting the door on any alternative discourse which is perceived to be “less masculine”.

Nelson Mandela was brave enough to risk wearing the scoffedat ‘emasculating’ tag. His Truth and Reconciliation Commission, no matter its problems, spoke the language of healing in post-apartheid South Africa. Victims of horrifying acts of discrimination faced their aggressors at the hearings, sometimes breaking down as they spoke.

But the act of forgiveness is undoubtedly fractured by complexities. In no society can there be a unilateral, uniform response to brutality. Coping differently with trauma is just one part of the human psyche. In that sense, there can be no ‘total’ forgiveness or ‘total’ revenge.

Co-existing with the concept of the unforgivable, forgiveness derives its strength from the fact that ‘absolute’ forgiveness is almost impossible in individual human terms. But it is not dissociated from delivering justice.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission got the torturers and murderers to admit their crimes but the process of national cathartic healing could be completed only when forgiveness was lodged in the South African psyche. The act of reconciliation still remains heartbreakingly brave.