Intolerable cruelties

An editorial in today's Times of India addresses the case of an Indian in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to be blinded in one eye:

Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that the degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. The observation can be extended to crime and punishment as well.
That being the case, the punishment meted out to P V Naushad, a working-class Indian expatriate, by a shariat court in Saudi Arabia is a blot on the system of justice in that country.

The court has ordered that one of Naushad's eyes be gouged out as punishment for injuring the eye of an Arab in a scuffle. An eye for an eye is not just barbaric, but a perversion of justice.

[...]

The quest for a more humane definition of justice should not be debated as a clash of civilisations. It is just another, but an important and necessary, step towards the creation of a world that values mercy more than revenge.

Indeed.