My Toughest Prayer

    My primary school civics book emphasised the fact that the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian constitution is one of its salient features. One of the rights provided by the constitution is the right to live. This primarily implies the following two points

  i. An individual may (not) exercise the right. A right is a kind of a privilege, and the decision (not) to utilise the privilege should be made by the person.

 ii. Live doesn?t mean medically alive. It means any citizen has the right to live with all the necessary human dignity. This interpretation was made by the Supreme Court.

    These two points together do not imply that suicides are legal (nor do I support suicide). Any right can be exercised only under certain situations and constraints (Eg: Right to vote doesn?t mean I can vote whenever I want to cast my vote!!). Hence, the abovementioned points only mean that under certain situations (on deathbed, with lot of emotional pain for family and self), an individual can exercise his/her right to live.

    If an individual can provide a power of attorney to another individual for running his/her business and voting by proxy are legal, then my contention is that an individual should be allowed to empower somebody else to exercise his /her right to live, although within defined restrictions. So, in cases where doctors see no point in trying to save life or if the doctors believe that the individual?s right to live with human dignity is severely impacted (both present and in future), then the individual (or his family as a proxy) should be allowed to die with little or no further physical and emotional pain.

    I have experienced negative affective state more than once in the past two years. It was these situations that gave me enough emotional courage to pray God (who takes his own sweet time to see sense) for the death of my loved ones. An even greater amount of courage is needed to accept this. This, along with our social setup and upbringing, restrict people from coming forward to support euthanasia.

    As already mentioned, the present constitution doesn?t bar euthanasia. But, we still need to bring in the laws to define the implementation procedures (answer the how, when, who and more such questions). And when that happens, a medico-legal jury may answer my prayers faster than God.