Brutal rapes often followed with murder are being reported in India on a daily basis. The heinous death of a 31-year old resident doctor working at RG Kar College and Hospital in Kolkata on August 9 is but a continuation of an unending list of heinous crimes being committed against women.
An average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in India in 2022, according to data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The number only increased in 2023. The ghastly nature of sexual assault being inflicted on young and old alike has also increased exponentially.
“Brutality against women has increased manifold. Sexual violence seems to have become the new normal. Two to three cases of rape are being reported on a daily basis. We are witnessing a new India where there is a complete breakdown of law and order,” said Dr Ranjana Kumari, director of Centre for Women Studies.
The fact is that government agencies, both in the states and centre, are primarily responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Crime is no longer being investigated in a non-partisan manner, whether it be in West Bengal, Uttarakhand, UP or Maharashtra where local politicians succeed in putting pressure on the police force to go slow on the FIR and forensic report so that crucial evidence gets destroyed. This is what happened in the Ankita Bhandari case where the room in which Ankita was residing was demolished overnight by a bulldozer. A similar unsuccessful attempt was made in the RG Kar hospital, while in the Badlapur case of two minors being allegedly raped by the cleaning staff while attending school, the police made the parents wait for 12 hours before filing the FIR.
The sad reality of our times is that violence against women has become normalised. The statistics show an 837% increase in rape cases in the last five decades with the police having registered over 250,000 cases. Uttar Pradesh witnessed a 400% rise in cases of child rape in the year of 2016 alone from the 2015 stats according to NCRB data. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s response to these brutal rapes and murders was, “They should be sent to the same place as gangsters have been sent or evil persons in our epics.”
These statistics should have shaken any government in power. But what has been the reaction of the Modi government to these horrifying figures? A decade ago in 2014, the then Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi had proposed the setting up of 660 Nirbhaya Centres where all medical, legal and police aid would be available to a rape victim under one umbrella centre. This scheme was shot down by the PMO as being a “waste of money”.
It has taken the murder of this young 31-year-old doctor who was resting in the lecture room of the hospital to highlight how little security is being provided to women in the workplace. It also took her murder to bring to light how corrupt the former principal of RG Kar Medical College was, with ex-deputy Superintendent of this hospital Akhtar Ali accusing him of deliberately failing students who fell out of his favour, supplying students with alcohol, and taking a commission of 20% on all tender orders which runs into crores of rupees.
None of these details were brought out in the police inquiry. The sad fact is that the police force across all states has been politicised and inquiry reports are being tailormade to suit the ruling dispensation.
We need to examine just three high-profile rape cases to understand the sorry state of affairs. Shoddy investigation and lack of evidence results in a majority of rape cases ensures they end up being dismissed by the law courts. Caste and religious hierarchies are also creating a culture of impunity allowing criminal elements to flourish.
Take the example of the notorious Badauni gang rape case where two Dalit cousin sisters were gangraped, tortured and then hanged from a mango tree on May 27, 2014 in Uttar Pradesh. The accused were arrested and jailed but sadly, two of these men belonged to the dominant Yadav community. A CBI enquiry released the suspects who were rearrested a year later under the POCSO law.
Two years ago, when the 19-year-old Dalit girl was gang-raped by four upper-caste men in Hathras, the UP police had initially refused to even register a case of gang-rape, and chose instead to downplay the incident, insisting it was ‘a small dispute’ arising out of an old enmity.
In the Hathras case, it was only when public pressure intensified and the Dalit politician Chandrashekhar Azad insisted that the victim be treated in Delhi and not Aligarh that she was brought to Safdarjung Hospital, where she died two weeks later.
But, as expected, three of the four men in the Hathras gang-rape case walked scot-free after a special court acquitted them of all charges in March this year. The verdict of the prime accused was watered down to culpable homicide not amounting to murder and he was given a life sentence. So much for Yogi’s statement that the accused be hanged to death.
Or take the example of the polarisation that took place over the rape and murder of the eight-year-old girl in Rassana village of Kathua district in 2014, where two reports of her vaginal swabs, hair strands, and viscera were prepared with one being sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory in Srinagar and the other being sent to the Jammu Medical College. These different reports were subject to different interpretations and it was obvious this exercise was being conducted to polarise the Hindu and Muslim communities.
Following the Nirbhaya case, the laws were made stricter with shorter trials and stricter punishment for the rapist.
Dr Rajesh Kumar, head of the Society of Promotion of Youth and Masses, which works with juvenile delinquents and murderers in Tihar Jail, had then said: “I had then pointed out if the victim survives, she will be a witness. The rapist therefore finds it more convenient to eliminate the witness. For many of those who commit these crimes, there is little difference between living on the streets or spending time in a jail.”
Mamata Banerjee also put in a pitch that the accused should be arrested and hanged immediately. This experiment of swift justice was tried in Madhya Pradesh, where the then chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan succeeded in pushing through a “death penalty law” for those found guilty of raping girls below the age of 12 years.
A special court set up under the POCSO Act ordered 21 death sentences in 2018 and five in 2019. Another 168 rapists were served life imprisonment in 2018. But these verdicts by the special court did not translate into the death penalty.
As per data on the death penalty collected by the National Law University in Delhi, since 1947, 720 prisoners have been executed in India. A large number of death sentences by the lower courts end up being commuted or else end up in acquittals by the Supreme Court.
The trials conducted by the POCSO court in Madhya Pradesh became a mockery of justice with one awarding a death sentence in a matter of just four days.
The only way to end heinous crimes against women is to ensure accountability from all our institutions whether it be the police, the CBI or other bodies. Human rights activist Kavita Srivastava, general secretary of PUCL, one of the organisations which petitioned the Supreme Court for an early hearing of the rape and murder case of the resident doctor, believes, “The immediate need is to ensure institutional accountability and to ensure safety of all sexes in public spaces.” The police must be allowed to operate in an autonomous manner, which means hands off by our netas including Mamata Banerjee.
Rashme Sehgal is an author and an independent journalist
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