How the demand for summary justice for rapists will backfire on India's poorest citizens

This comment piece by me appeared in The Telegraph, London on December 12, 2019

Link: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/09/demand-summary-justice-rapists-will-backfire-indias-poorest/

The gruesome rape and murder of a 26-year-old woman, within the city limits of Hyderabad on November 27, has set off a furious debate in India on crimes against women. 

There are growing demands for summary justice, including public lynching of rapists, even though the death penalty was included in the rape law in 2012. Have people lost faith in the law and in the criminal justice system? Or does this represent growing lawlessness and demands for retribution and revenge that have come to dominate public discourse in India?

In 2012, when a 23-year-old woman was brutally raped by six men in New Delhi, there was nationwide outrage and demands for a change in the law. 

The law was changed in 2013. The death penalty was introduced. Policemen refusing to note rape complaints were to be held criminally liable. A special fund was created to set up one-stop crisis centres across India. And state governments were directed to fast-track rape trials so that they were not indefinitely delayed, as they tend to be.

Six years later, crime statistics show that the incidents of rape have not decreased. The conviction rate is an abysmal 27 per cent even of the cases reported. Police continue to ignore complaints by poor and marginalised women despite the law. And only 20 per cent of the funds for the one-stop crisis centres have been used. Also, many states have failed to set up fast-track courts for rape. 

Clearly, a stronger law alone makes little difference when the criminal justice system continues to fail women, from the first step of registering a complaint to the trial that stretches for years. Many women simply give up. Many more, stay quiet. 

This apart, what is more worrying for the future of women in India, and for India itself, is what followed the Hyderabad rape. 

Within days, the police had rounded up four suspects and claimed they had confessed. Their names were made public. One happened to be a Muslim. This led to demands for summary justice on social media, dominated as it is by Islamophobia. 

Then a woman member of parliament demanded that rapists should be lynched in public. Another suggested chemical castration.  Instead of disgust, such demands were applauded. 

The calls for lawlessness by our lawmakers were heeded, it would appear, by our law enforcers. In the early hours of December 6, the four suspects, who incidentally could find no one to represent them in court, were taken out to the scene of the crime and shot dead. 

The police claim the men tried to escape and snatched their weapons. They had to fire in retaliation, they say. Yet there is no evidence yet of anyone from the police contingent being injured. The four suspects are dead. And the case is closed. 

As worrying as is this extra-judicial killing, of men against whom even a charge sheet had not been prepared, has been the response of the public and politicians. Almost across the board, there has been praise of the actions of the Hyderabad police. People showered flowers on the policemen. And there are demands for similar action, known locally as ‘encounters’ against other rapists. 

In fact within days of the Hyderabad incident, a young woman was set on fire by men she had accused of rape in a village in the northern statue of Uttar Pradesh. She died a few days later. Now her parents are demanding that the accused be ‘encountered’. 

It is this deadly mix of demands for public lynchings, and for the police to simply eliminate suspects of crime, that should worry us. India still calls itself a constitutional democracy. But when law-makers endorse lawlessness and law enforcers implement this, you are looking at the beginning of a serious breakdown in civilisational norms. 

Since 2015, we have witnessed public lynchings of poor Muslim men, in the name of protecting the cow, held sacred by Hindus. The ruling  Bharatiya Janata Party has deliberately turned a blind eye to this. 

Today, in the name of protecting Indian women, summary justice is being demanded. The men who will receive this will only be the poor, the marginalised, those unable to mount a defence. While the rich, the powerful, including so-called godmen, remain untouched. 

Indian women will only feel safe if we fix the criminal justice system, deal with the rape culture being reinforced by mass media and end embedded patriarchy that still views women as property.