A moment to salute Ramchandra Gandhi's noble vision

Chennai: The Rajya Sabha on August 8 passing the long-pending ‘Mental Health Care Bill’, which among other vital issues takes away suicide bids from the purview of punishment under Section 309 of the IPC — decriminalising suicide attempts — has dealt a blow to a ‘cruel and irrational’ penal provision in the Law, as termed by the Supreme Court in the P. Rathinam Vs Union of India case.

“Notwithstanding anything contained in Section 309 of the IPC, any person who attempts to commit suicide shall be presumed, unless proved otherwise, to have severe stress and shall not be tried and punished under the said code,” says one of the key lower-down sections of the New Bill, which is to be subsequently taken up by the Lok Sabha.

In a related sub-section, the new Bill also enjoins upon State and Central governments to “provide care, treatment and rehabilitation to a person having severe stress and who attempted to commit suicide to reduce the risk of recurrence of attempt to commit suicide.”

It underscores a crucial preventive aspect to spike apprehensions that decriminalising the act may lead to more of it. The passage of the legislation is not just a victory for humanistic jurisprudence. Notwithstanding major world religions straight disapproving of any act of suicide even under the most trying existential circumstances, there are, nonetheless, problematic issues.

These include, for instance, whether an act of ‘Jal Samadhi’ in Hinduism, or the voluntary fast-unto-death — the practice of ‘Santhara’ or ‘Sallekhana’ as it is called in the Swethambar and Digambar sects of Jainism respectively — as an ostensibly spiritual way of withdrawing from the affairs of the world by individuals, could be construed as ‘acts of suicide’ in the first place. Again, the issue of ‘euthanasia’ or mercy killing is of a different class altogether.

However, what seems magical about the decriminalisation in the new Bill is that its effect in terms of relief to litigants is universal. And that is how laws ought to be, as legal luminaries would affirm, implying a secularsation of human predicaments irrespective of the religion/caste or class one may be born into.

It is in this context that, as a student of philosophy, my memory instantly harked back to the astonishingly gifted contemporary Indian Philosopher, the late Prof Ramchandra Gandhi (he passed away on June 13, 2007 in New Delhi, a year in which India lost another of its great contemporary thinkers in Prof Daya Krishna), whose metaphysical vision may be even more relevant to young Indians of today.
Ramu Gandhi, as the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Rajaji was popularly known in philosophical circles, hit the nail on its head on the issue of suicide in a chance, but hugely enlightening personal conversation this writer was lucky to have with him as a research scholar then working under Prof Daya Krishna at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur, under a UGC fellowship.

Incidentally, I have written about it in some detail in a small memoir titled, A Gandhi and A Socratic Gadfly - In Memory of Two Indian Philosophers, published in January 2008, thanks to my generous teachers and friends.

Professor Ramu Gandhi’s alacrity on that occasion was simply astounding — he had then come for a philosophy seminar at the University of Rajasthan — when I nervously broached the issue of suicide, trying to argue that it may be justified under some extreme circumstances.

Aside from the facts of an impulsive/compulsive moment of ‘pulling the trigger’, what is it that is extinguished in an act of self-killing? His initial remarks ran in that vein and then instantly sprung an unforgettable gem from Prof Ramu Gandhi: “If the self is necessarily the body, then suicide is futile or redundant. If the self is not necessarily the body, then suicide is impossible.” Even his Oxford Professor, Peter Strawson, would have been stunned by the truth of that logic.

Extending Prof Ramu Gandhi’s liberal outlook, trying to ‘punish’ an act of suicide — read Section 309 of IPC — logically ought to be equally futile or needless. The remedy of healing lies elsewhere. Prof Gandhi’s unflinching response reflected a spark of that deep intuitive truth that untiring philosophers like him must have glimpsed and thought through in their long journey, a very long, often painful yet at times rewarding ‘adventure of human thought’, as Prof Daya Krishna put it on another occasion.

Purveyors of metaphysics are today at a deep discount. But the Rajya Sabha passing this Bill seemed an apt moment to recall the visions of contemporary Indian thinkers like Ramchandra Gandhi and Daya Krishna.