Mumbai couple
“Physician assisted dying is possible in a few countries, all democracies with very effective law and justice systems. However, it is reserved for terminally ill patients with unacceptable suffering,” he said. He added that no one should to have to ask to be put to death because they have no family to take care of them in their old age. The couple’s letter to the President says, “Both the petitioners are in reasonably good health, not afflicted by any serious ailment as on the date of this petition.”
It adds, “’It is unfair to compel them to wait till some serious ailment/deformity bells befalls on them (us) and would urge that they may be saved from such a contingency by passing sentence of death.” The couple wrote the letter on December 21. The President’s office said it would take time to respond to the letter.
Lavate retired as an employee of the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation after working for nearly 30 years; his wife, an ex-principal of Aryan E S High School, Charni Road, was a science teacher for 37 years.
Lavate said he wrote to the president because the latter has the constitutional power to pardon life sentences, and should also have the power to allow ‘right to death’.
A national discourse on euthanasia started in in India in 2011, when the Supreme Court, while hearing the case of a nurse from KEM Hospital, Aruna Shanbaug, who was in a vegetative state for nearly 30 years, legalised passive euthanasia. Shanbaug was in a vegetative state since 1973 after she was sexually assaulted in the hospital premises. However, she herself couldn’t benefit from the case as the petitioner in the case was not her kin. The nurses of KEM, who were caring for her after her family stayed away refused to allow euthanasia. Shanbaug died in 2015, while on a ventilator for several days after suffering from pneumonia. There have been applications, including one in 1997 from CA Thomas Master, a Kerala teacher, before Indian courts seeking permission for active euthanasia. The Kerala high court rejected the teacher’s plea. He subsequently killed himself in April 2004.