While there may be some truth in all these, for a fuller understanding one should examine the other question that crops up in this context: Why don’t Christians in Western countries resort to violence even in the face of extreme provocation, including terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals? Is it because Christianity is a peaceful religion?

That can’t be true, because despite what the New Testament preaches, the history of political Christianity – from Constantine the Great to Christopher Columbus and beyond — is marked by relentless violence. No other religion, not even Islam, comes close to the scale of violence, physical and structural, that has been inflicted in the name of Christianity.

That said, one must note that for the most part — barring revolutions, ethnic and racial pogroms – societal violence for redressing grievances has been notably absent in modern nation-states of the Christian West. It has something to do with the philosophical and inherently secular construct of the European State in which the subjects, as if they were under a social contract, surrender their right to violence to the sovereign.

According to German sociologist Max Weber, the very existence the State is contingent on having “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” As the key appropriator of social passions and competing interests, the State enabled the formation of a civil society and a set of deliberative institutions like parliaments and the media. It also helped develop the modern notion of “citizenship” that inspired what political scientist J.W. Garner terms as a “habitual obedience to law” – by which, for instance, most people pay taxes or respect traffic rules or refrain from encroaching on other peoples’ liberty even when outside the scrutiny or reach of legal authority.

The European State, notwithstanding its Christian orientation, evolved into a secular construct, largely because the intellectual foundation of Western civilization lay, not in the Christian doctrine, but in Greek political philosophy from where the State originated. If anything, the attributes of religion were projected on to the State, thus rendering it the very the embodiment of morality and justice. German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel even compared it to “the march of God on Earth.”

Alongside, the “Protestant ethic” contributed to the rise of the capitalism which also diminished the influence of religion in public affairs. Of course, the same idea of State, in its extreme and perverse form, gave rise to fascism and totalitarianism. (It did not lead to utopian communism that Marx believed would eventually make the State redundant, causing it to wither away.)

Outside the West, only a few countries have been able evolve as modern nation-states where citizens displayed “habitual obedience to law.” Notable are Japan after the Meiji Restoration, and Turkey, where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decided that it was futile to resist what he termed “the impetuous torrent of modernization.” In India, notwithstanding the success of its democratic institutions, the State continues to compete for loyalty with parochial factors like the caste, religion, language and ethnicity. As a consequence, the country remains hostage to violent subnational movements and sporadic rampages by murderous mobs.

In most of the Afro-Arab countries where the idea of State did not take root, competing interests of disparate tribes and sects thrown together by arbitrarily drawn political boundaries were held in check by authoritarian regimes that had the monopoly of violence. But with the fall of dictators in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, and with nascent forces of modernization struggling to assert themselves the power vacuum is being filled by traditional power structures.

Against this background, if the State monopoly of violence accounts for the Western countries taking a legalistic view of violence – only violence sanctioned by the State is deemed legitimate – in Islamic countries, with weak allegiance to the authority of State and relative indifference to law, violence has come to be accepted an expression of popular will in the defense of the tribe, tradition, custom, religion or, a combination of all conveniently swept under the rubric of honor.

Dharun Ravi, center, listens to a court officer with his attorneys Philip Nettl, left, and Steve Altman. Pic: AP.

The judge should have also known better than to chastise Dharun for not apologizing and not showing remorse considering that it could have been the defense strategy to keep Dharun silent, along with the decision not to let him testify during the trial and not make a statement during the sentencing. Particularly bewildering is how Dharun, setting aside the legal implications, was supposed to have conveyed his remorse, beyond what is already evident in his demeanor before the court and his conduct outside. The judge also seemed to have ignored the unsuccessful attempts by the Ravi family to reach out to the Clementis.

Even more confounding is that media critics, including the few who support the lenient sentence that Dharun received, seemed to parrot the judge’s views on the question of Dharun’s remorse and apology. The mighty New York Times in its editorial went so far as to urge Dharun to “take responsibility for his actions and demonstrate he is worthy of the justice he received from Judge Berman.” Really?

Consider this: The kid who beat up and cut the hair of his gay schoolmate can run to become the president of the United States and the guy who experimented with all kinds of drugs, including cocaine, gets to be the president. But the child who has no history of any kind of bias, or is guilty of any bad habit, let alone an illegal one, plays a prank on his roommate who was making out with a “dude” for a few juvenile giggles, has to show remorse and apologize? For what? Just so he can get to live the life of a convicted felon?

Everyone seems to agree with Judge Berman’s characterization of Dharun’s actions as reflecting “colossal insensitivity,” but no one seems to ask themselves how many 18-year-olds are capable of showing “colossal sensitivity” in a dorm, that too, toward gay sexual behavior that even mature adults struggle to come to grips with.

The Times’ Frank Bruni wrote in his blog that he “couldn’t help feeling powerfully frustrated and wondering if Ravi really carries as heavy a heart as he should, and is as inclined toward atonement and as capable of redemption as many of us would wish him to be.” Despite his claims to the contrary, Mr. Bruni obviously blames Dharun for causing Tyler Clementi to commit suicide. After all, atonement and redemption cannot be associated with watching a couple make out for a few seconds on the Web and then tweeting about it, can it?

Besides, Dharun wasn’t charged in Tyler’s tragic and immeasurably heartbreaking suicide nor is he accused of, as Judge Berman himself admitted, “hating” his gay roommate. In that case, where is the question of remorse or apology, let alone the fact that he cannot apologize for charges to which he pleaded not guilty? And stretching the limits of credulity, the judge rebuked Dharun for not apologizing to Tyler’s lover, who still remains anonymous.

And what kind of sensitivity are the media critics showing by taking exception to Dharun’s perceived demeanor? Looking at Dharun all through the trial, all I saw was a child who was petrified by all that was happening to him and around him – the police, the prosecutors, the media, the isolation, the alienation, the anguish of his parents and, aside from all the legalities and whether he admits it to himself or not, the latent guilt by association in the death of his roommate. In that stoical composure, I could only see him bottle up all these emotions, fears, bewilderment and, most of all, defenselessness.

Not every child is groomed to act out for “AC 360″ or op-ed columnists. This is not about playing to the galleries. This is about children making mistakes that sometimes, wittingly or unwittingly, lead to terrible consequences. Justice is a higher value than law. It is not served by extracting that proverbial pound of flesh.

With the jury’s guilty verdict in the so-called Rutgers University webcam spying case, Ravi, it appears, has been turned into the proverbial sacrificial lamb for society’s collective guilt about its own bias intimidation against homosexuals, a condition that probably drove Clementi to commit suicide.

Sure, the jury upheld the law, but was justice served? Didn’t Ravi deserve even the kind of leniency that was shown to Lori Drew, the 49-year-old Los Angeles woman charged in the first federal cyber bullying case in 2008 pertaining to the suicide of a 13-year-old girl? Drew, who allegedly obtained unauthorized access to MySpace by creating a fake profile for a nonexistent 16-year-old boy and bullied the 13-year-old to suicide, was cleared of all but three misdemeanors. And to think that Ravi faces 10 years in prison even without being accused of causing or abetting Clementi’s suicide.

Now, all of us, along with the judge and the jury, will have to delude ourselves into believing that the Rutgers case has been only about the invasion of privacy and Ravi’s prejudice against homosexuality that drove him to intimidate Clementi and his older and anonymous mate (apparently a victim as well).

If the verdict is anything to go by, we all have to believe that this case had nothing to do with the tragedy of Clementi’s suicide – just as the prosecution had dexterously excluded any such linkage. It will remain a mystery in legal annals how someone can be held accountable for intimidation, but not its tragic consequences. One can only wonder if the jury deliberated whether there would have been a court case against Ravi had Clementi not committed suicide.

But there is a reason why all parties, including the defense, shied away from examining the gorilla in the room, as it were. Obviously, linking Clementi’s suicide with Ravi’s actions would have implicated us all – the whole society, whose prejudice and contempt toward homosexuality is what created the intimidating conditions that pushed Clementi to his death plunge from the George Washington Bridge.

Moreover, if Clementi’s suicide would have been (rightly) the focus of the prosecution’s case, the first person to be implicated would have, or should have, been Clementi’s own mother who, by Clementi’s recorded confession, could not bring herself to accept his sexual orientation, causing the kind of distress that would not be comparable to anything that he may have felt at some comments tweeted by his reckless and insensitive roommate.

By making Ravi the sole criminal in this case we have absolved ourselves of any involvement in the psychological makeup of Clementi  – the shame and intimidation he felt at being exposed. And, of course, we don’t need to ponder if Clementi would have felt the same way and been driven to suicide had he been exposed kissing a girl instead.

If the answer to that question is no, that Clementi wouldn’t have ended his life if he were exposed for indulging in a heterosexual act, then it has to be assumed that he was driven to suicide because he felt intimidated at being exposed to an unforgiving society, and not because Ravi did what any reckless and stupid teenager (at the time of events) with access to an array of gadgets and social networking tools would be tempted to do.

There had to be deeper reasons why Clementi was driven to end his life, because if he felt intimidated by Ravi, he wouldn’t have asked him to leave the room a second time so he could be alone with his male friend. And that is the reason why one would have thought Ravi had no role in Clementi’s shame or intimidation or suicide. But that was not to be.

And here one might add that Ravi would have quite likely played a similar prank even if Clementi had a girl over in his room, considering that Ravi is both arrogant and prudish thanks to his nouveau riche upbringing – peculiar to many Asian immigrant families – and Indian cultural values with all their misconceptions about and limitations concerning any kind of premarital sex.

But in the end, perhaps, Ravi’s life is a small price to pay for political correctness of our times, even if it means Atticus Finch loses and Anderson Cooper wins.