(a) Can one's right to life be absolute ? Answer with reference to the idea of Capital Punishment. (20 marks) (b) How does the…

(a) Is the right to life absolute? The case of capital punishment

The right to life is not self-evidently absolute: if absolute, no state could lawfully take life; if qualified, it may be restricted by due process and constitutional morality. Retentionists defend capital punishment on retributive grounds: the murderer forfeits life and justice requires proportionate punishment. Kant himself was a strict retributivist: in the Metaphysics of Morals he held that a murderer must die, because respecting him as a rational agent means holding him to the law he chose. Abolitionists instead read the formula of humanity (persons as ends, never merely as means) as forbidding the state to kill. Bentham’s utilitarian calculus asks whether death deters, incapacitates, or serves the greatest good; if it does not, it is wasteful cruelty. Abolitionists stress human dignity, error, arbitrariness, and Amnesty International’s data and the Law Commission of India's 262nd Report (2015), which found no credible evidence that the death penalty deters murder more than life imprisonment; the Commission recommended abolition for all crimes except terrorism-related offences and waging war. Internationally, the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR aims at abolition. Retentionists argue that for the most heinous crimes, life imprisonment fails to express societal condemnation. Indian constitutional morality under Article 21 permits deprivation of life only by fair procedure established by law; Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab upheld death penalty for murder but confined it to the “rarest of rare” cases, and Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab elaborated that test by examining manner, motive, anti-social circumstances, magnitude, and the personality of the victim. This doctrine is a compromise: it preserves the right to life as a qualified right while limiting state power. Thus the absolutist reading of the right to life is philosophically defensible but constitutionally qualified; capital punishment remains the decisive test of whether human dignity can be reconciled with retribution.

(b) Reconciliation of opposites in Tagore's humanism

Tagore’s humanism reconciles opposites by treating the individual not as an isolated liberal atom but as the bearer of the “surplus in man” that rises above mere biological and material existence through creativity, culture, and spiritual aspiration. In Sadhana and The Religion of Man, he presents human life as a dialectical synthesis: freedom is not licence but self-realisation within order; tradition is not fossilised custom but a living source of modern renewal; the individual is not opposed to the universal but finds identity in the larger life of humanity. His humanism is relational: the self is formed in community, nature, and moral responsibility, so that personal freedom and social harmony are not contradictions but mutually completing. Evaluated against Western liberal humanism, Tagore’s position is distinctive. Liberal humanism often centres rational autonomy, individual rights, and material progress; Tagore critiques this as narrow when it becomes nationalism, industrial exploitation, or the worship of power. He also critiques nationalism as a false universal that divides humanity. Yet his humanism is not anti-modern; it seeks to modernise without losing spiritual depth, synthesising East and West by drawing on the Upanishads, Buddhism, and the Baul and Bhakti (Kabir) traditions while accepting science, reason, and universal human dignity. Thus his reconciliation is not a vague compromise but a moral vision in which opposites are held together in a larger human unity.

(c) Reconciling development with tribal values

Tribal value systems—communitarian land tenure, sacred ecology, and oral knowledge—often conflict with mainstream development metrics that equate progress with GDP growth, industrialisation, and market integration. Yet reconciliation is possible when development is understood as capability and dignity, not merely output. Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 provide institutional mechanisms: PESA empowers Gram Sabhas in scheduled areas to plan, manage, and protect local resources; FRA recognises forest dwellers’ rights over forest land and community forest resources. Kerala’s tribal sub-plan, Jharkhand’s MGNREGA (now succeeded by the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025) tribal participation, and the Niyamgiri movement show different forms of reconciliation: planning around tribal livelihoods, wage work that strengthens community assets, and Gram Sabha consent that limits extractive mining. The critique of development-induced displacement remains central: dams, mines, and industrial corridors have dispossessed tribes and destroyed ecological knowledge. A viable way forward is development that is participatory, ecologically sensitive, and constitutionally grounded, allowing tribal values to shape progress rather than be erased by it.