Despite media hype, no let in rape cases in India

Wednesday 11th December 2019 05:00 EST
 
 

Only the names have changed. The name of the city, the victim, names of the perpetrators…what remains the same is the monstrosity of the crime. A 27-year-old veterinarian in Hyderabad was subjected to brutal sexual assault by four men in the Telangana capital, strangulated her to death and the body was burnt in an attempt to erase all proof. And, close on the heels of the Hyderabad case came another incident - a rape survivor from Unnao was burnt to death.

Protests spilled out onto the streets and reverberated in Parliament where some lawmakers even called for castration and public lynching of rapists. Amidst the outrage, surfaced the reports of encounter killings of all four accused in the veterinarian gang rape and murder on December 6 morning. This triggered a nationwide debate on justice delivery, with one side supporting it as speedy justice and the other raising concerns over 'extra-judicial' measures. All the noise camouflaged the plight of young woman returning home in Hyderabad and was gang-raped and murdered. Just like the cry of the 22-year-old paramedic gang-raped and brutalised on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012, a crime that triggered nationwide outrage and protests, hastened the fall of a government at the Centre and saw more stringent provisions introduced in India’s rape laws.

Since then, “women’s security” has become political issue and an election slogan. But not much changed in a country considered among the most unsafe in the world, ranked 133 among 167 nations in a recent report by Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security. An earlier global survey by Thomson Reuters Foundation had put India on top of a list of ten most dangerous countries for women, ahead of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Statistics bear out the stark reality faced by women in India, a country where the feminine form is worshipped as the mother goddess. Latest data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that more than 33,600 women were raped in 2017- that is, one rape every 15 minutes. Majority of cases under crimes against women were registered under ‘Cruelty by Husband or his Relatives’ (27.9 per cent) followed by ‘Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty’ (21.7 per cent), ‘Kidnapping & Abduction of Women’ (20.5%) and ‘Rape’ (7.0 per cent). A total of 3,59,849 cases were reported against women in 2017.

Since 1971, when NCRB started collecting rape data, India has recorded a 1,200 per cent increase in cases of sexual assaults. What the data hides is the fact that among the accused are political leaders, elected lawmakers, self-styled godmen and security personnel; a CRPF jawan is among three people arrested in the first week of November for raping a minor in Uttar Pradesh. The story becomes even horrific when crimes such as the multiple rape-and-murder of an eight-year-old girl in a temple in Jammu’s Kathua surfaces, very frequently, from each corner of the country.

Nirbaya's parents' statements raised a fresh debate Indian legal system dealt with crimes against women, with inordinate delay, and sometimes outright denial, in justice. After the Hyderabad case, public anger reached such a head that the Chief Justice of India (CJI) S A Bobde responded. He said justice can never be instant and loses its character when it becomes revenge. At the same time, he admitted that the recent events in the country have sparked off an old debate with new vigour, where there is no doubt that the criminal justice system must reconsider its position and attitude towards the time it takes to dispose of a case. "But I don't think justice can ever be or ought to be instant, and justice must never ever take the form of revenge. I believe justice loses its character of justice if it becomes revenge," the CJI said.

Whenever a rape case triggers widespread outrage among Indians, political leaders respond in one of two predictable ways: some find a way to blame the raped woman for her fate, while others demand stricter laws and harsher punishments for rapists. While castration, lynching or public hangings of rapists would obviously be against the law, calls for more stringent punishments for rape are just as baffling for lawyers and activists who work on rape cases in India. In February 2013, the government did get a stricter rape law in response to the public outrage after Nirbhaya case. While the punishment for rape remains seven years of imprisonment extendable to life term, the new law provides for 20 years to life imprisonment for gangrape and allows death penalty for repeat offenders. Other laws, too, have been amended to introduce harsher punishments for rape. In 2015, the Juvenile Justice Act was amended to allow minors between age 16 and 18 to be tried as adults in cases of murder and rape. In 2018, the central government introduced the death penalty for those who rape children under the age of 12.

The laws, according to several lawyers, are now stringent enough. But do stricter punishments effectively work to reduce rape? Do they help make women safer? Since 2013, how much has justice delivery improved in cases of rape? Here's a look at the legal status of some of the cases that shook the nation.

Unnao rape case
The 2017 case of alleged kidnapping and rape of the then minor girl by ex-BJP legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Unnao was transferred by the Supreme Court to a trial court in Delhi with a direction to CBI to complete the investigation within seven days. On August 2 it directed that CBI could avail additional seven days in exceptional circumstances. The court initiated 'in-camera' proceedings from September 11 at AIIMS, where she was admitted after an accident on July 28, for recording her statement. The victim and her lawyer were critically injured and two of her aunts were killed in the accident.

Besides the main rape case and the accident case, three other matters transferred to Delhi are -- the FIR against victim's father under Arms Act; his custodial death and a separate gang rape of the victim. The three accused in the gang rape case -- Naresh Tiwari, Brijesh Yadav Singh and Shubham Singh -- are all out on bail. The final arguments in the case are on under District Judge Dharmesh Sharma, who recently concluded recording statements of defence witnesses and started hearing the CBI's arguments.

Muzaffarpur Shelter Home case

Several minor girls were sexually and physically assaulted in a shelter home in Bihar's Muzaffarpur, which came to light after a TISS report was given to the Bihar government on May 26, 2018, in which former Bihar People's Party MLA Brajesh Thakur is the prime accused. The verdict in the case is likely on December 12, a month after its earlier decided date.

The CBI told the special court that there was enough evidence against all the 20 accused in the case.

On May 29 last year the state government shifted the girls from the shelter home to other protection homes and on May 31 the FIR was lodged against the 11 accused in the case. The Supreme Court on August 2 took cognisance of the case and transferred the probe to CBI on November 28. On February 7 this year, the cases were transferred from a local court in Muzaffarpur to a POCSO court at Saket district court in Delhi. The court reserved order on September 30 after final arguments by the CBI counsel and 11 accused in the case, also including ex-Bihar Social Welfare Minister and the then JD(U) leader Manju Verma, who faced flak as allegations surfaced that Thakur had links with her husband.

Nirbhaya rape case
In the December 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case of a 23-year old paramedic student in Delhi, the Supreme Court in July last year dismissed review pleas of three of the four convicts, upholding their death penalty. It rejected the review pleas filed by Mukesh (30), Gupta (23) and Sharma (23), saying no grounds were made out by them for a review of the verdict. The fourth death row convict, Singh (32), did not file a review petition against the apex court's May 5, 2017 judgment.

Recently three convicts, facing gallows in the gang rape and murder case, wrote to the jail authorities, seeking withdrawal of an October 29 notification granting them seven days' time to file mercy pleas with the President against their execution. The jail authorities had informed the Nirbhaya gang rape case convicts that they had exhausted all legal remedies and were only left with the provision of filing a mercy petition against the death sentence before the President. The top court, in its 2017 verdict, upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by Delhi High Court and trial court. One of the accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail. A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board. He was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.

Kathua rape case
The 2018 rape and murder of an 8-year-old nomadic girl in a Kathua village had seen conviction of six people. Four months later, in October, a court in Jammu, however, directed the police to register an FIR against six members of the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which probed the case, for allegedly torturing and coercing witnesses to give false statements. Judicial Magistrate Prem Sagar gave the direction to senior superintendent of police (SSP) of Jammu on an application by Sachin Sharma, Neeraj Sharma and Sahil Sharma, who were witnesses in the case, saying cognizable offences are made out against the six.

In June this year, District and Sessions Judge Tejwinder Singh sentenced to life imprisonment the three main accused, while awarding five years in jail to three others for destruction of evidence in the case that shook the nation. The trial was shifted to Pathankot in Punjab on the order of the Supreme Court after lawyers in Kathua attempted to prevent submission of the charge sheet in court. Day-to-day in-camera trial was held for a year. According to the charge sheet, the girl who was kidnapped on January 10 last year, was allegedly raped in captivity in a small village temple in the district after being kept sedated for four days before she was bludgeoned to death. The abduction, rape and killing of the child was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority nomadic community from the area, it said.

The rise of crime against women and rape cases in India is alarming. It has unfortunately become a routine to find mention of few rape incidents on a daily basis in the news reports. One of the major reason of no deterrence or increase of the incidents of rape in India is its judicial system which takes extremely long time in punishing the perpetrator and this delayed rather lethargic judicial process has become a routine in all cases of rape including even those cases which have been reported widely, generated huge public uproar, been debated for days together. This delay is not attributable to one wing of the justice delivery system but virtually to all - the police, judicial process and the legislators.


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