- Values Dissonance: Yudhistir is asked how he would dispense justice to four co-conspirators to the same murder. He enquires their castes and gives them increasing sentences, the higher their caste. The shudra (peasant) gets four years, the vaishya (trader) gets eight years, the Kshatriya (soldier) gets sixteen years, while the brahmin murderer is not sentenced, because he is more educated than Yudhistir. Therefore, Yudhistir lets Kripacharya the Royal Priest (also a Brahmin) decide his fate. When questioned as to why, Yudhistir uses casteist stereotypes to justify why lower caste criminals should be punished less severely than higher caste people. Oh, and only Brahmins can judge other Brahmins. This is a patronizing but still discriminatory view of justice, instead of it being restorative.
- The story attempts to present the argument that not all crimes and not all criminals are the same — their intent and their circumstances can mitigate sentencing. But because Yudhistir sentences purely based on caste, rather than intent, it comes off as clunky and Right for the Wrong Reasons at best. What if the warrior was guilty of manslaughter and the servant was guilty of outright murder? That poor warrior just got around triple the jail time for no good reason. By also deferring in sentencing a Brahmin to Kripacharya, Yudhistir introduces the notion of being judged by ones' peers — but because its based on the caste system, it's again lost in the general elitism and comes off, rightly, as unfair. This scene more than any other highlights the gulf between ancient and modern values.
- The narrative presents Duryodhan as unacceptably brutal and draconian, but it never occurs to anyone in the court to mete out long jail sentences, for equal lengths of time, to all four murderers as a compromise.
- Values Resonance: Duryodhan is asked how he would dispense justice to four co-conspirators to the same murder. He proclaims a death sentence for all four of them, stating that all four of them should receive the same punishment for the crime they all committed. While a death sentence may be harsh, he didn’t let such things like caste or status determine their punishment; only the facts of the crime. This is a prime example of equality before the law.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/MahabharataS01E27
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