Several weeks ago I had occasion to write on this page about the growing numbers of gang rapes of Indian as well as foreign women in large parts of the country, especially in cities like Delhi and Kolkata. The timing of the article was determined by an excruciating coincidence. Tens of thousands of people were out on the main roads of Lutyens’ Delhi to observe the first anniversary of the harrowing rape and murder of a 23-year-old scholar in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, by protesting against such outrages. At the same time, however, some gang rapes, including one of a Danish woman who had lost her way to her hotel, were taking place in the nation’s capital, apparently with impunity. The luckless lady from Denmark was being savaged at a spot where the mandatory visit of a police van every half an hour never took place.
Having given vent to my disgust and fury, I had then calmly suggested what should be done by the government and civil society activists without further delay, thinking there would be no need to return to the subject any time soon. How wrong I was. For since then, not a single day has passed when multiple cases of heinous rapes have not been reported from various places. Strangely, there is little horror over even the most horrific circumstances in which the dastardly crime is committed. For instance, it has become difficult to keep count of the victims of gang rapes that are routinely killed, often by setting them on fire.
A recent survey showed that in West Bengal 61 per cent women feel that they are unsafe while their percentage in Delhi is 46. Barring places like Chennai, other cities and towns figure between Kolkata and Delhi. Is it any surprise therefore that, despite the high court’s directive to the West Bengal government some months ago, no one in authority there has been able to help a traumatised family whose daughter disappeared without a trace after being gang raped by some goons?
In New Delhi in January, a youth from Arunachal Pradesh died after a brawl with a group of shopkeepers who had mocked him for his hairstyle. Except for the fatality, there was nothing surprising about this, for it is of a piece with the way Delhiites treat the young people from the northeast that come to the capital for education or employment. It was a pleasant surprise therefore that there were strong protests against ‘racialism.’ But sadly, there wasn’t even a whimper of protest when a Manipuri girl was abducted and raped, allegedly by the son of her landlord, according to the police.
Something blood-chilling happened in Delhi on two consecutive days in February. On the first day, a neighbour raped a baby girl of two. The next day a drunken labourer did the same to a baby girl a year younger. It is needless to add that a vast majority of victims of gang rapes are minors.
Around the same time came the news from Srinagar that the state’s health minister, Shabir Ahmed Khan, had had to resign because of the complaint of sexual harassment by a doctor working under him. A minister he no longer is. But nobody has arrested him or filed a case against him. Even more horribly, in a tribal village, the tribal council ‘sentenced’ a girl to be ‘gang raped’ by the entire male population of the village. The sentence was carried out in broad daylight, and on an elevated stage.
On Women’s Day, a court in Odisha sentenced three men for gang raping a Roman Catholic nun in 2008 to various terms of imprisonment. Nine others were acquitted ‘for want of evidence.’ According to activist groups and the Catholic Church, the police did not investigate the case properly, nor did the subordinate judiciary take the matter seriously.
A day later, the Delhi high court delivered its judgment on the barbaric crime in the moving bus on December 16, 2012, awarding death sentence to three accused. The two other accused are minor and the sixth had committed suicide in jail. The Supreme Court has stayed the death sentence until March 31, when it will fix a date for hearing an appeal against the high court’s verdict.
What lessons can we draw from this bleak scenario? The first is that although a stringent law was quickly enacted on sexual crimes against women – for which we have to thank the late Chief Jusice of India, J S Varma, who worked day and night to draft the new law – it is obviously not stringent enough. For, no rapist has been deterred by it. Secondly, investigations into crimes against women continue to be shoddy and slow and, at times, are deliberately botched. This is so because a very large number of officers and men in the police force share with the backwoodsmen of the country stupid views that by coming out after dark in western clothes, women provoke men to rape them.
Among politicians and administrators, there is reprehensible reluctance to take any action against kangaroo courts such as khap panchayats in Haryana and Western UP that believe in ‘honour killings’ of girls that marry outside their caste. They also impose on their women restrictions which would do the Taliban of Pakistan and Afghanistan proud. To expect the Union government that is almost certainly on its way out to take the necessary action would be futile. But whatever the composition of the new government, it must give protection and empowerment of women the same priority as the strengthening and reforming of national security so badly neglected during the last ten years.
It does say something about the rulers of this country that not a word is being said in the current election campaign about the Bill to reserve for women one-third of seats in Parliament and state assemblies. This measure was passed by the Rajya Sabha on the last day of 2012, but was never taken up by the Lok Sabha.
INDER MALHOTRA
