Sallekhana is Not Suicide

SR No.: 001568
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T K Tukol
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad
Publication Year: 1976
Total Pages: 124
Language: English
Classification: Book_English & Religion
File Size: 8 MB

Page 89

Suicide and the Law
It is common experience that with the State undertaking many commercial activities as in India, new offences are being created in the fields of public communications, transport and welfare standards.
“ The state of the criminal law continues to be - as it should - a decisive reflection of social consciousness of a society, what kind of conduct an organized community considers, at a given time, sufficiently condemnable to impose official sanctions, impairing the life, liberty, or property of the offender, is a barometer of the moral and social thinking of a community. Hence, the criminal law is particularly sensitive to changes in social structure and social thinking." 4
The correctness of these views can be borne out by what has been happening in our country and the other parts of the world. Child marriage was not an offence in India until 1929 when the Sharda Act was passed making marriage of a boy below 18 years of age and of a girl below 16 years of of age an offence. Abortion has been an offence for ages. Recently with the introduction of the schemes of Family Planning, abortion under certain circumstances by a married or un. married woman has ceased to be an offence due to the enactment of “ Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971." Adultery is not an offence in many Western countries. Marrying during the lifetime of a living wife is an offence amongst the Hindus, though it is not so amongst the Muslims in India itself.
W. Fredmann has quoted many instances of strange prac. tices which would have been normally offence but were not so treated in a particular country. The Spartans killed their weakling children by exposure so that vigour of the race was not impaired. In National Socialist Germany, whole groups of people who were considered as inferior in vigour and sanity or otherwise useless were exterminated or kept under confinement.5 Different theories have been propounded as to why the 4. Ibid., p. 143.
5. Ibid., p. 144.