The right to die with dignity - An Indian perspective

The right to die with dignity

The Indian perspective

by

Sharad Bailur

When most of us are confronted by the concept of dying with dignity in a manner of our choosing rather than being forced into a process of death with major consequences in terms of pain and torture, our reaction is often to put it aside and hope that it never happens to us. Those of us who think and act on the matter are invariably those who have had the misfortune of seeing death and the process of dying up close. Hence the recounting of personal experience, almost as a kind of catharsis.

The difficulty one faces in the Indian context in resolving the need for a right to die with dignity is manifold. First, extreme poverty often means the denial of proper medical treatment and the inevitable death that results. This is something rarely seen in developed countries. Second, the pressure of population on hospitals and the need for treatment to those who are treatable is so strong that hospitals often tell relations to take the patient home to die in peace. In other words they abandon the patient to a death by negligence. This is perhaps not such a bad thing in view of the heroic measures now possible, since they don’t necessarily offer comfort to the artificially extended life of the patient. In other words death by deliberate negligence by doctors and hospitals is a common fact of life that most of us would rather not talk about.

Strictly speaking both these situations are unlawful, in that in the first case it is the duty of a state agency to save a life even if it is extreme poverty that is killing him. In the second case the reasons given by hospitals to deny help to patients who are past a treatable condition amounts to little more than triage. And triage is not sanctioned in law. The fact that the state lets it pass by looking the other way means that by implication, if not by assertion, it accepts the need for a law by which people can choose to die the way they wish in the sort of comfort they choose.

And yet we are stuck with vestiges of laws that make the voluntary choosing of death a matter of abhorrence. Take the case of the law on suicide. An attempt was made recently to change the law on suicide and it appeared that human rights had slowly, if hesitantly, come of age. It was not to be. The new law making suicide legal was overturned. The law on suicide, quite apart from the manifest ridiculousness of a law that comes into effect only when the crime is unsuccessful, is against the basic principles of human rights. Both capital punishment and the law on suicide are vestiges of an absolutist past in which it is presumed that the citizen is an arm of the state to do with as the state chooses, not a contractual entity that decides how a state should run.

A person may own nothing. But no mechanistic contractual law of the state in which the state contracts to protect society has a right over human life, for the simple reason that it is that very human life that gives birth to the concept of the state itself. If it is accepted that citizens are contractual entities that comprise and create a state, their right to life is superior to anything that the state might make in terms of laws to protect citizens. Human life is thus anterior to, and therefore, by definition, supra-state. Strictly speaking a contractual state which is what a modern state running according to a laid down constitution is, cannot have the right to either kill a citizen for crimes committed or deny a citizen the right to kill himself if he so chooses.

These “peripheral” issues, of capital punishment and the law on suicide are in fact central to any hope for improvement regarding the right to die with dignity. Till such time as suicide remains illegal and the law on capital punishment stands there is little chance that any progress will be made on death with dignity.

There is no question that means should be found to make the voluntary ending of life possible subject to adequate safeguards. But till such time as lawmakers and constitutional experts do not look at human life with true compassion the chances for such a law seem to be remote.