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The three-member committee, led by former Chief Justice J S Verma, that is to suggest amendments on laws dealing with sexual assault, must listen to and take on board suggestions from women’s and civil society groups too, not just from political parties. The shock and anger about the gang rape in New Delhi, and the victim’s death, must not translate into a misplaced overemphasis on harshness of laws. Rather, as the measure to institute fast-track courts to death with rapes and crimes against women highlights, the stress should be on enforcing the swiftness and inevitability of justice.
It is a moot point whether the severity of punishment has, and can, act as a deterrent against any crime if that punishment is deferred indefinitely. And given the debacles, stigma and inherent biases victims of rapes face in India, it is necessary to first ensure things like unfailing registration of complaints, and then a speedy investigation and conviction of the perpetrators. The abysmally low conviction rate on rapes is testimony to the fact that these drawbacks in the justice delivery system are most responsible for many perpetrators walking away scot free — even as most rape cases are never even reported because of stigma, pressures and plain coercion. The certainty of the law catching up, and swiftly, is what can deter such crimes more than the spectre of being hanged to death, for example.
While being commensurate with the severity of a crime, the law also needs to encompass all forms of molestation and sexual assault against women. The law, the justice delivery mechanisms, must be geared to protect, encourage and aid the victim in seeking and getting that justice, not further traumatise her, as is the case now. Care must also be taken that rape laws aren’t misused by, for example, parents who seek to control and punish their offspring for relationships they don’t approve of. In the broader perspective, rape is a crime of patriarchy; eliminating the various forms of the latter will be a wider, perhaps slower process. But the law can make a beginning; and its framing, now, must be a genuinely consultative process.
