India is a country with many laws, but little law, and a very little fear of the law

IT IS BOTH poignant and in the broader sense surprising that the year gone by will be defined for many of us by the events of its final fortnight. The horrific and brutal rape of the young woman in New Delhi on the evening of Sunday, December 16, and her subsequent passing in Singapore on December 29, has become the signature of 2012. I remember the night after I heard of the crime. It was difficult to just doze off; there was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and a gnawing concern as I watched my children sleep. What sort of a world and what sort of city would they grow up in? At least two friends—both of them happened to be active on Twitter at that point—too confessed they were unable to sleep and for similar reasons. Somehow, somewhere the episode—not just the rape but the gruesome act of violence that accompanied and followed it—had stunned us. We were not alone. There has conbeen an emotional upsurge in Delhi in the past week. Thanks to the media—shocked by the incident and also driven by the consumer interest in a crime that has such implications for white-collar, middle-class communities in the heart of a metropolis—the issue has been reported and talked about in other cities as well. In 1978, the Billa-Ranga case and the sexual assault on and murder of a young woman in the capital, Geeta Chopra, and the killing of her brother Sanjay had become a national story. In today’s much more connected media age, the quick transmission of the terror of December 16 can only be imagined. To be fair not every—in fact few—rape incident involves such dramatic events on the street and the kidnapping of strangers. Many involve men the victim or survivor knows quite well, as a family member or acquaintance. A study by the police in Indore found “94 per cent of reported molestation of women and children was done by relatives or persons known to the victim”. Apparently a national study came up with a similar figure. A friend of mine who is a police officer once had a long chat with me about sexual crimes against women. She was indignant because a senior police officer in another state had sought to draw a correlation between western clothing and likelihood of being targeted by an assailant. In her 20 years in the Indian Police Service, she said, she had seen victims of rape who ranged from the “age of two to 60”. An overwhelming majority came from rural areas and wore nothing but traditional Indian clothing, dressing in a conservative sari or the like. Most of them had been attacked not by unknown men but those they recognised. My friend’s experiences and assessments reflected both urban and rural settings, because she had been posted in outlying districts as well as larger cities. The broad contours of what she was saying would hold true in Delhi as much as in Dhubri. The problem is a far deeper one. It requires policing and sensitisation of the law, but it also calls for social engineering of the male of the species. Unfortunately, none of this is rocket science. It has been known, acknowledged and agonised over for decades. In 1978, the same year as the Billa-Ranga outrage, a film called Ghar was released. It was a remarkable portrayal of the emotional trauma that is the aftermath of rape, and survives far longer than any physical scar. I have thought a lot of Ghar in the past few days, and not just because of its melodious songs (Lata Mangeshkar singing Aaj kal paoon zameen par). The storyline is eerily similar to what happened to that medical student and her friend. In Ghar a young couple are walking home after a film, they are accosted by roadside thugs and brutalised. The incident becomes a media and political cause and then simply dies away. Over 30 years have passed. Has anything changed? Rekha, the young actor who made a mark for herself in Ghar, is today a senior artiste, almost retired and even an MP. Her life and career have run the gamut. Two generations of Indians have grown up in this period. Yet, the basic, defining problem that was at the core of her first big film all those years ago still remains unresolved. Challenging the mind-set of sexual assault and making our cities and living spaces more secure necessitates education of males and a more equitable gender balance. It also necessitates old-fashioned law enforcement and community policing, including in the form of beat policemen who patrol their streets and know their citizens, whether in the form of sentinels or, in another context, intelligence gatherers. Pitifully, we are seeing too little of this being discussed. Instead, there is talk of the death penalty for rape and esoteric solutions such as chemical castration. Frankly, not all cases of sexual assault deserve the death penalty. If death is pronounced as automatic punishment for proven rape then not only will it incentivise murder of a victim—and removal of the key witness—but it will also raise the threshold of proving guilt in court. As for castration, chemical or otherwise, it can be considered but it should be noted that punishment— whether imprisonment or castration—can come only after conviction. If our criminal justice system is so slow and lackadaisical and our conviction rate for rape is so low (25 per cent) does it matter if the end- punishment is chemical castration, physical castration, limited-term imprisonment or life imprisonment? That is where the nub lies, in a country with many laws but little law and very little fear of the law. The rest— including the convenient expedient of fast-track courts for some cases of some crimes—is only detail.