THE DEATH OF US
 

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

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In the land of Buddha and Gandhi, a strange anomaly lives on in the statute books. The sanction to sentence citizens to ‘the punishment of death’ for a range of crimes – criminal conspiracy, waging war against the State, abetting the suicide of a child or mentally challenged person, sexual assault and kidnapping leading to murder, to name a few. In addition to the Indian Penal Code, a series of legislations enacted by the Parliament over the years have made further provisions for awarding death penalty for crimes such as honour killings and the ‘maintenance of public order’.

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Perhaps this irony is best captured by the fact that those convicted of the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi were among the first to be executed in independent India. In recent times, there has been a rising demand for the death penalty. For everything from rape to terror related cases to cow slaughter. In this highly polarised scenario I believe it is essential for us as artists and communicators to create works that can generate new conversations that reach beyond the rhetorical to discuss how the death penalty doesn’t just execute people, and keep the horrors of state violence legally in the law books, it dehumanises us all.