When law strikes terror
News reports about cops publicly flogging some persons accused of disrupting a garba event transported me back to 1990, when I had visited Saudi Arabia.
It was an eye-opening experience, being my first trip to the Middle East. I marvelled at how disciplined the people there were in comparison to India. The taxi that took us from the Riyadh airport to our host’s residence patiently waited at the traffic lights for over two minutes — the clock was nearing 2 am and there was no other vehicle moving in any direction. I enquired why he didn’t just ignore the lights at this time of the night, as we would back home, to which his reply was: The road camera would record the traffic violation and he would be subjected to public flogging the next day, as per the local law.
The next day, I found that local banks barely had any security personnel, and dollar bills were stacked openly outside the counters. Our host explained that all of this was possible thanks to the strict enforcement of Sharia laws. Any thief would have his hands cut off, so theft and other crimes were almost non-existent in the country, he claimed.
A week later, the television started carrying news of an upcoming beheading of a woman who had killed her husband.
Later that Friday, our host took us to the local mosque where the beheading had been scheduled. After the completion of namaz, thousands of persons sat outside the mosque in a circle. After a few minutes, officials brought the accused in a police van. The burqa-clad woman had her hands tied at the back. An official read out the crime and the judgment through a loudspeaker.
The woman seemed to have been drugged as police personnel moved her around without any resistance. She was made to kneel, with her head towards the ground. As soon as the officer signalled, the executioner beheaded the woman with one stroke of his sword. After a while, doctors certified the execution, and the remains were taken away in the van, along with relatives of the deceased. The people witnessing the execution raised cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and rushed towards the execution spot to collect the blood-soaked soil as a ‘good omen’.
We left the venue horrified at what we had just witnessed. The initial appreciation of the virtues of the local laws was nullified by an abhorrence of the medieval nature of the practices. In the discussions that followed, I recall asking our host why crime still existed in his country despite such harsh laws, to which he had no clear answer.
