28

Jul

All is not well with women

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New Delhi, July 28, 2023

This Amended Law, as everyone knows, redefined laws and definitions of the term rape and enhanced the penalties. It also, for the first time in India, made human trafficking a criminal offence.

Amitabh Srivastava

Amidst all the Hulla Baloo in Parliament over the ‘Manipur shame’ with INDIA even bringing a No Confidence motion against NDA despite knowing its fate the Press Information Bureau has come out with a report on ‘Missing Women’.

The report dated July 26 is one of the several releases sent by the PIB to its regular subscribers like me.

What shocked me most was that the Press Information Bureau still sends its reports with the tagline Government of India and not Bharat. How dare they?

But then it is quite predictable that at a time when questions are being raised about a horrific ‘rape and naked parade’ of two women three months back, the Ministry of Home Affairs will try to wash its hands off the issue by blaring its own trumpet.

The first para of the report states that Police and Public Order are state subjects. Unfortunately, the person who prepared this report was not aware that Manipur and the Centre are currently under the same party-BJP.

Then the report goes to talk about the Criminal Law Amendment Act (2013) which came about after Justice Verma and his team prepared the report within months of the Nirbhaya incident of December 2012.

This Amended Law, as everyone knows, redefined laws and definitions of the term rape and enhanced the penalties. It also, for the first time in India, made human trafficking a criminal offence.

But the release lays its emphasis on the Amendment of this Law in 2018 when Modi came to power, prescribing death penalty for rape of girls under 12. It also stipulated that the investigation would be over in two months and charge sheets would be filed in two months.

The decision of death penalty taken in a huff by then Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi was put on hold when NGOs pointed out that this would lead to murders of the rape victims by the offenders to destroy evidence.

As for investigation being completed in two months and charge-sheets filed Dr.Kiran Aggarwal, noted social activist and member of the Indian Pediatric Association says,” No one is even talking about it since then. In my knowledge there was only one case in Indore where the punishment was decided in one month and the culprit was also hanged.”

When the Nirbhaya case was in the limelight the then Home Minister had also declared that decisions in rape cases would be taken in fast track courts. But that never happened and even in the Nirbhaya case the four culprits were hanged after 7 years of the incident. One had committed suicide while the sixth being a minor had to be released.

Senior judges had also voiced their opinion that fast-track courts were not properly equipped for the task. In some recent cases where death penalty had been announced by Hugh Courts the Supreme Courts have released the culprits citing faulty investigation.

The PIB release also does not take notice of the various developments since 2013 such as conflicting opinion about the age of consent for sex and the age of marriage.

Says Dr.Aggarwal, ”It is a pity that India of 2023 is still governed by the Indian Penal Code of 1860. Earlier the age of marriage of the girl was 12, then it was raised to 15 and now it is 18. There is a proposal to raise it to 21 now but that would be impractical as in states like Haryana or anywhere else in India married girls are treated like sex slaves. Personally I would like the age to be 21 so that by that time a girl is married she would be able to complete her graduation and take a skilling course so that she is able to stand on her own feet.”

Speaking from her experience of traveling to various cities in India and abroad Dr. Kiran Aggarwal says,” I have seen super rich families in treating their wives like slaves. They are told whatever their social status ;Jhadu Pocha’ has to be done by the daughter- in- law.”

There was a lobby that was arguing that since adolescents are now much more aware and open about their sexual needs the age of consent should be brought down. That would spare a lot of litigation against teens who are charged under POCSO if caught in sexual offences. The issue has yet to reach a decisive stage.

According to the latest PIB release India has started safe city projects in cities like Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata , Lucknow and Mumbai.

Manipur obviously is not on the list and hence any happening can be ignored.

“Intezar keejiye Aap Queue mein Hain” says the Jingle.

Meanwhile Manipur can rejoice in the fact that during the third term of Modi (which he is taking for granted) India will be the country with the third highest growth rate in the world.The report also mentions that a National Database on Sexual Offences has been created in 2018.We came to know how efficient this was when it took three months for the brutality of two women in Manipur to reach Delhi.

But of course law and order is a state subject!

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