Twenty-three years ago, Justice B.L. Hansaria of the Supreme Court described the plight of a rape victim forced to stand trial for the “crime” of attempt to suicide. In his judgment in P. Rathinam v. Union of India (1994), the judge described the trial in one word: “persecution”.
In a passionate appeal, Justice Hansaria asked: “Why persecute the already tormented woman? Have we become soulless? What is required is to reach the soul to stir it to make it cease to be cruel. Let us humanise our laws. It is never late to do so.”
It has taken Parliament over two decades since to pass the new Mental Healthcare Bill.
The Lok Sabha, late last month, passed the Bill which decriminalises a failed suicide. The Bill presumes that the person wilted under severe stress and attempted suicide. Instead of punishing him/her under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code (attempt to suicide) with an open trial, a fine (even though in most cases a token amount) or imprisonment extending to a year, the new Bill reinvents the state in the role of a caregiver to the survivor of the suicide attempt. The goal is to prevent the person from trying the act again.
One clause in the new Bill says the government “shall, in particular, plan, design and implement public health programmes to reduce suicides and attempted suicides.”
In 1985, Justice R.A. Jahagirdar of the Bombay High Court gave four reasons why Section 309 was unconstitutional: Nobody agrees on what constitutes suicide, much less attempted suicide; mens rea is not clearly discernible; temporary insanity, which drives suicide, is a valid defence even in homicides; individuals driven to suicide require psychiatric care.
The Law Commission of India called Section 309 “monstrous”. Criminalisation of suicide was not in tune with the global wavelength, the Supreme Court once said.
Unlike the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench which concluded in the Gian Kaur case that the right to life does not include the right to die, international case laws tolerate even euthanasia. In McKay v. Bergstedt (1990), the Supreme Court of Nevada took the view that the desire of a patient for withdrawal of his respirator did not tantamount to suicide but was rather an exercise of his constitutional and common law right to “discontinue unwanted medical treatment”.
However, the new Bill does not define suicide. Differences among suicide researchers as to what constitutes suicide remain.
