Comorbidity is an excellent scapegoat. The district authorities of Raigad in Maharashtra blamed it for the death of 13 persons who attended the Maharashtra Bhushan award function held in the Kharghar area of the district. All the victims of sunstroke, who either died or were admitted to various hospitals, suffered from conditions like old age, diabetes and high or low blood pressure. In other words, they were not physically strong enough to withstand the 42°C heat. For the lakhs of people who assembled to witness the award being conferred on Appasaheb Dharmadhikari by Home Minister Amit Shah, there was no protection from the searing heat. Of course, for the VIPs on the stage, there was a roof to protect them from direct heat and pedestal fans to keep them cool. One report said that the government had spent a whopping Rs 16 crore on the programme.
The people were kept in the open so that the government could shower rose petals on them from the sky. Also, drone-cameras could be deployed to take photographs and videos from the sky. In other words, the tragedy was created deliberately, though nobody would say that such a toll was expected. The worst blunder the organisers committed was to hold the function at noon when the sun would be the hottest. Ideally, the meeting should have begun in the late afternoon and concluded by sunset. Instead of accepting its failure, the district administration has blamed the people themselves for the tragedy, saying that they suffered from comorbidities.
When Covid-19 struck the nation and thousands of people began to die, there was a deliberate attempt to downplay the enormity of the spectre then too. And when it became necessary to provide compensation to the victims of Covid-19, doctors began to mention in the death certificates the cause of death as asthma, heart failure, renal collapse etc. They were right as all deaths can be attributed to the failure of one or more organs of the body. What the certificates did not mention was that the organ failures were induced by Covid-19. Therefore, the villain of the piece was Covid-19. The 13 who died and multiples of them who were provided medical treatment would not have suffered, if the government had the common sense not to expose lakhs of people to sunstroke. Blaming them for comorbidities is to rub salt into their wounds.
Parliament’s failure to blame
By now the five-member Constitution bench of the Supreme Court hearing the petitions that seek legal sanction for same-sex marriage would have realised how complicated the issue is. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta questioned even the court’s right to hear the case, as marriage was in the concurrent list. He argued that Parliament alone had the right to deliberate on the issue, a point the Bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, rejected outright. Because of the delicate nature of the case, many religious, cultural and social organisations want to be heard before the court takes a final decision. If conceded, this will force the court to go into the personal laws and the scriptural texts that sanctify them, which can be an interminable process. Obviously, the court does not want to fall in that trap.
The apex court wants to look at the possibility of including same-sex marriage within the ambit of the Special Marriage Act that allows inter-religious and inter-caste marriages. In India, same-sex relationships have already been decriminalised. That is many decades after the Victorian laws that prohibited such relationships were consigned to the dustbin in Britain. In that case too, it was the judiciary which took the initiative and not Parliament.
Today, same-sex marriage is permitted in many countries across Europe and America. The government’s argument that only a biological male and a biological female can marry is tantamount to denying the rights of those who cannot procreate but still want to lead a family life. The fear that it would destabilise the whole social set-up is unfounded, as decriminalisation of homosexuality has not turned the society upside down. It is Parliament’s failure to respond to new situations that forces the judiciary to intervene.
