Unhealed wounds

Finally she is at peace. After more than four decades.

Aruna Shanbaugh was another victim of rape and the terrible state of people’s mentality. The worst wasn’t over, the society had planned out more for her. Her family abandoned her when she needed them the most. For a person who had always loved the idea of caring and helping others and for the very reason became a nurse had no one left to care for her, except the other nurses.

Her death, though is a sad shock, has highlighted a lot of questions that has laid in our midst since long, and have been chose to be conveniently ignored. We have bigger issues like invention of selfie sticks, and the detrimental impact of the court proceedings on our beloved‘Bhai’. So for once ignoring these critical issues, let us look at the ‘trivial’ ones.

Rape: Too much has been said (including girls should pray to not get raped), lot has been analysed and suggested, and nothing has been executed. Hope that happens someday soon.

The victim led a terrible life for 42 years and died recently, while the perpetrator served a two concurrent seven year sentences. The case filed was not even of rape, it was of mere robbery and attempted murder. (At present, this person is living a normal life, working for a Delhi hospital).

Euthanasia: More of a GD topic, only sometimes the members of the GD may not be the usual students, but from a panel of experts on NDTV.

“On behalf of Aruna, her friend Pinki Virani, a social activist, filed a petition in the Supreme Court arguing that the "continued existence of Aruna is in violation of her right to live in dignity". The Supreme Court made its decision on 7 March 2011. The court rejected the plea to discontinue Aruna's life support”.

The court, which made passive euthanasia legal in India, did not do so in Aruna’s case. (Passive euthanasia involves removal of life support systems for the affected. Active euthanasia, which involves use of a lethal injection to end life, is still illegal.)

The “right to die”, when put very roughly, is in direct reciprocation to right to live. The life Aruna had after the incident was no life at all. She lost most of her senses, couldn’t eat or even move herself. Every person has a right to live with dignity and die with dignity.

Wasn’t it something practiced by people dependent on animal meat to kill the prey if it was still alive and struggling? Wasn’t it the practice even among warriors to kill the enemy with a clean stroke to end their pain? It was a simple gesture of being human (don’t go by the now diluted meaning of ‘being human’ here). Why can’t we do the same to ourselves, what we do even for the enemy?

They right to die is very pronounced in the case of Aruna.  Why, or for whom would she have loved to live? Taking even the most optimistic scenario that she would have come out of her coma (although she was there permanently), who would she have liked to see when she recovered? Her family, who chose to forget her? The patients whom she once took care of, but who never came to see her? The country, which was busy worshipping Ammas and praising Aam Aadmis while she struggled day after day for 42 years with numerous ailments?

For this and similar tragic events, It’s time we put to task people responsible– oursleves.