Indian protesters demand death for
rapists By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI - On a chilly Wednesday evening,
exactly a month after a young woman was gang-raped
and brutalized on a moving bus in New Delhi,
hundreds of sombre citizens gathered at a
candlelight protest in India's national capital.
They had come to remember the victim who,
13 days after the assault on December 16,
succumbed to internal injuries in a hospital in
Singapore, but not before igniting a nation to
rise against a surge in sexual violence, which has
long plagued this South Asian country of 1.2
billion people.
Anger was palpable among
the mourners assembled peacefully at the city's
iconic protest venue, known as Jantar Mantar, to
pay tribute to 23-year-old medical student Jyoti
Singh Pandey, who is
now referred to as
"Braveheart" and "India's daughter" after her
valiant fight against six male attackers.
But the massive wave of protests and
insistent calls for justice that followed the
tragedy has not been a sufficient deterrent to
violence: a series of gang-rapes, including a few
inside buses, have been reported across India in
the last few weeks. The brutality of these
assaults is almost directly proportional to the
passion of the protests, activists and experts
here say.
As a result, crowds have gone
from demanding justice to demanding death: the "We
Want Justice" slogan popularly printed on placards
and banners has been replaced by the mantra: "Hang
the Rapist".
Following an outburst of
street protests, social media exchanges and
politicians' remarks - ranging from assurances to
platitudes and polemics - the primary debate now
raging across the country is whether the death
penalty can end, or at least reduce, such horrific
attacks on women. The debate does not spring from
a void, but rather from intense frustration.
For the past month, Indian authorities
have struggled to pacify urban protesters with
promises of legal amendments and enhanced security
for women, but even as politicians spoke from
podiums and police poured into the streets, brutal
attacks continued unabated.
In the
northern state of Punjab, a woman was gang-raped
inside a bus in early January, while in the
northwestern Rajasthan state a young girl killed
herself after police browbeat her for lodging a
sexual assault complaint. In Goa, a seven-year-old
was raped inside a school toilet.
The
case against the death penalty The question
of rape has forced politicians and scores of
citizens to grapple with the limitations of the
country's justice system.
India's Women
and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath said
laws should be changed to include death as a
penalty for rape in the most brutal cases that
leave the victim incapable of leading a normal
life, while India's leader of opposition in
Parliament, Sushma Swaraj, who hails from the
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
pleaded with the prime minister for capital
punishment.
Such political grandstanding
has found support among many citizens angry with
the rising number of assaults. A recent survey
found that 100% of women respondents feel that
solving the problem of women's insecurity is
India's single greatest challenge. "It's
absolutely rubbish to say that these people [the
attackers] are human and deserve to be kept alive
at the taxpayers' expense," New Delhi-based media
professional Sanchita Guha told IPS. Capital
punishment "also brings a sense of closure to the
victim".
However, a majority of women's
groups are opposed to the death penalty or even
chemical castration for rapists, demanding instead
assurance of rigorous punishment for offenders,
who almost always get away free owing to legal
loopholes and an insensitive judiciary.
Kavita Krishnan, one of the most prominent
faces of the New Delhi street uprising against
rape and secretary of the All India Progressive
Women's Association, told IPS, "All this talk of
the death penalty is a big red herring to divert
attention from gender crimes to severity of
punishment."
"The death penalty is no
solution for a country with misogynistic laws.
There is no evidence anywhere in the world to
prove that the death penalty lessens rape or, for
that matter, deters anyone from committing any
other crime."
If at all, the death penalty
could be a deterrent to harsh sentences against
offenders, "since the courts would be overcautious
before passing such a verdict," according to
Krishnan. "In India a large number of sexual
assaults also take place at home, by close
relations. There would be intense pressure on the
victim to not file the complaint in the first
place, if there is a death penalty."
"Conviction rates should go up in India
and debate should be about surety of punishment
and gender-sensitive laws."
At present,
rapists face a minimum of seven years in jail
under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC),
a sentence that can extend from 10 years to life
imprisonment depending on the severity of the
case. Under Section 375 of the IPC, rape is
defined only as intercourse involving penile
penetration but does not include forced oral sex,
sodomy or penetration by a foreign object, which
can cause more grievous injury, experts say.
These acts are placed under Section 354 of
the IPC dealing with "criminal assault on a woman
with intent to outrage her modesty" and Section
377 of the IPC, covering "carnal intercourse
against the order of nature".
According to
Ranjana Kumari, director of the New Delhi-based
Centre for Social Research (CSR), attaching the
death penalty to rape could mean that the offender
gets no punishment at all, since death-row
prisoners are allowed to file clemency petitions
before the president, who has the power to commute
the sentence.
"If the death penalty is
implemented, the judicial scrutiny will be very
long as well. There are already about 95,000 cases
pending in various courts and it is impossible to
implement capital punishment in large numbers,"
Kumari told IPS. "We want severe punishment, which
includes rigorous imprisonment, because otherwise
it will be only a choice between no punishment or
death as penalty."
Rape cases in India at
present have a 26% conviction rate, she said. "We
also found that no one gets more than three to
four years in jail."
Following the
protests over the Delhi gang-rape, the government
appointed a three-member committee of jurists to
make recommendations on amending laws to increase
the quantum of punishment and ensure speedier
justice. Headed by former Chief Justice of India J
S Verma, the committee received suggestions from
all quarters.
In its suggestion to the
committee, prominent human rights group Amnesty
International appealed for "penalties that reflect
the gravity of the crime, but without recourse to
the death penalty, or any other punishment which
violates the absolute prohibition of torture and
other ill-treatment, such as physical castration
or non-consensual 'chemical castration'."
As the leading women's rights lawyer,
Flavia Agnes, argues, the death penalty could even
prompt the rapist to kill his victim. "If
punishment for rape and murder is the same, many
rapists may kill the victim to destroy evidence,"
she told IPS. Instead, "we should find answers
from our parliamentarians and experts about how we
can make our public places safe for women."
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