CRIME AGAINST WOMEN IN DELHI: WHAT NEXT?

| by B.Raman

( December 30, 2012, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The next step in the case relating to the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old  girl in New Delhi, who has  passed away, is the investigation and prosecution  of the six accused in quick time to ensure that justice is done to the Braveheart, whom the shocked nation looks upon as its daughter. Justice means their conviction and sentencing to the severest sentence possible under the existing laws.

The number of additional constables and supervisory staff that would be required for this purpose should be estimated and a special sanction issued by the MHA for the recruitment and training of the additional staff needed for preventing crime against women.

The Government has done well to designate a Special Prosecutor to ensure the successful prosecution of the accused. For this purpose, the proposed Special Prosecutor should be given whatever manpower, resources, and expertise that he might require for a successful  prosecution.

It would be unwise to be self-complacent thinking that since the accused have already confessed, getting them convicted should be no problem. There is every possibility of the accused retracting their confession as public memory and anger fades. It would be necessary to strengthen the other evidence that the police are able to collect to supplement the confessions.

Now that the girl is dead, the most important piece of evidence, inter alia, will be her dying declaration recorded before a magistrate  in a New Delhi hospital and the medical findings of the doctors who treated her in New Delhi and Singapore. The Special Prosecutor and his staff should see that an iron-clad case is made out of such evidence which will withstand attempts that might be made by the lawyers of the accused to question their acceptability before the court.

The Special Prosecutor, his staff and the Police should not let themselves be taken by surprise by any attempts by the lawyers of the accused to question the reliability of the evidence.

An equally urgent measure will be to strengthen physical security for women in public transport and in public places that are used by rapists  to commit their crime. The Government has already announced certain measures such as verification of the character and antecedents of the staff of public transport and removal of the coloured windows of the buses.

While necessary, these measures alone would not be adequate. It is equally important to order that all public transport plying anywhere in Delhi between 7 PM and 7 AM would have a Constable and making the staff of the transport and  their owners liable for criminal action if they ply a transport during these hours without a constable. All public places unfriendly and risky to women should be identified and static guards should be posted at all  such places during these hours.

The number of additional constables and supervisory staff that would be required for this purpose should be estimated and a special sanction issued by the MHA for the recruitment and training of the additional staff needed for preventing crime against women.

The police regulations, manuals, operating procedures and training syllabi having a bearing on the prevention, investigation and prosecution of crime against women should be reviewed and updated in order to make them more women-focussed. There should be a separate training capsule on crime against women with a separate  examination for joining the police at any level---from constables up to IPS officers.

A list of offences against women, which should be treated as heinous offences, needs to be drawn up and incorporated in the police regulations and manuals. All heinous offences against women should be liable to mandatory supervision by senior police officers of the rank of at least a Superintendent of Police.

It should be made obligatory for Station House Officers to record an FIR and start the investigation in respect of all crimes against women ---whether heinous or not so. There should be a computerized data base of all crimes against women indicating the stage of investigation and prosecution in respect of each case.

Separate divisions on crime against women should be created in the office of the Commissioner of Police and in the office of the Secretary, Internal Security, of the MHA, and these should serve as the nodal points for monitoring all action against crime against women. Crime against women should be treated as seriously as terrorism with special squads for investigation and prosecution and special courts for trial.

The need for early implementation of the police reforms recommended by a committee set up by the Morarji Desai Government and subsequent bodies such as the National Security Advisory Board and the Special Task Force headed by Shri Naresh Chandra has been stressed by many. The implementation of the recommendations at the pan-Indian level has been tardy due to resistance from different State Governments and political parties. The delay in implementation at the pan-Indian level is likely to continue.

The Government should, therefore, separate the recommendations relating to the Delhi police from those relating to other States and set up a fast-track implementation mechanism. The Delhi Police cannot be compared to the police of other metropolitan cities. In addition to tasks relating to crime control and law and order, the Delhi Police performs important and sensitive tasks of a unique nature relating to VIP security, including security of visiting foreign VIPS, and diplomatic security.

While there should be no problem in transferring to the supervision of the Delhi State Government the tasks relating to crime control and law and order, the MHA has to have a say in the supervision of matters relating to VIP security and diplomatic security. If this is also transferred in toto to the State Government, problems of co-ordination and command and control could arise if different parties come to power in the Centre and the Delhi State.

 Delhi, therefore, needs a separate policing architecture with the State Government having primacy of supervision in respect of crime and law and order and the MHA in respect of VIP and diplomatic security. All Governments which were in power in the Centre were opposed to changing the status quo in which the MHA has total control. The possibility of an alternate architecture with dual supervision had never been examined. The time has come for examining this.

The recent incidents of violence in New Delhi  in the wake of the gang-rape incident highlighted the lack of sophistication in crowd control by the Delhi Police. Public were shocked by the crude manner in which the police officers, including the women police, handled women protesters. They used the same high-handed techniques against men as well as women. There is a need for a total revision of our crowd control techniques relating to men and women, in order to make them more sophisticated. 

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com . Twitter: @SORBONNE75 )

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Is no one in Delhi administration responsible for the death of the unfortunate girl?

| by N.S.Venkataraman

( December 30, 2012, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The spontaneous national anguish after the death of 23 year old girl due to assault by rowdies shows that the mindset of the average Indian is sensitive with high feelings of compassion and concern. Now the question is how to prevent such things happening again.

Obviously, those in charge of the administration in Delhi should have resigned on moral ground, since such heinous crime has taken place as they have been in charge of law and order and administration. But nobody has resigned which only indicate that they are insensitive and are really unconcerned. They do not seem to have any sense of guilt and appear to be thick skinned.

The country’s public opinion and concern of the citizens should have an impact on the quality of administration and governance.

 

As the unfortunate girl has now died and the ministers and politicians pay tribute to her with their anguished face, possibly the country will move on to next incident of anguish. If this should not happen, then those in charge of the administration should be made to realise that they will have to pay a price by quitting their job owning responsibility for such lawlessness and they cannot save their skin by joining the chorus of protestors.

Where is the Lt.Governor of Delhi hiding now ? Chief Minister of Delhi says that police is not in her control. Is it enough?

The problem in India today is that the country’s administration has gone into the hands of people who do not have the quality in them to realise that they are in charge of the destiny of the country and have a huge responsibility before them. On the other hand, the politicians in power seem to think that their job is one of pleasure and seem to think they are really answerable to none but themselves and exploit their authority and power to help their family members and the members of their political party. In such circumstances, the safety and security for the citizens have taken a beating and rowdies and gangsters feel bold and even encouraged.

The assault on the 23 year old in Delhi shows the deep rooted malaise in the society with the governance reaching a new low in commitment and standards. It appears that anyone can do anything and get away with any act. Many of the crimes are indulged in by those who have money power and support of the politicians belonging to one party or the other.

The incidents such as the assault on women that are taking place all over the country can be avoided only by putting fear in the minds of politicians and top bureaucrats that the citizens will rebel and protest and will not anymore tolerate such lapses on their part. A sustained peoples’ movement is necessary and the death of this unfortunate girl should be the spark for such a movement to be started a sustained.

While the politicians and criminals seem to be hand in glove in several of such instances, the citizens should also play an active role in preventing assault on women. Eve teasing of women is now a common occurrence all over India and thousands of women silently suffer. Such eve teasing takes place even in the presence of men around who are silent fearing that they would be attacked. The citizens who protest against atrocities on women but would not interfere when such atrocities take place should only be called as impotent protestors.

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India: Rape Happens

The ‘normalcy’ of violence—sexual violence being the most perverted—is India’s lot. One girl’s nightmare focuses the light.

 | by Amba Batra Bakshi, Chandrani Banerjee

 Courtesy: Out Look India 

( December 29, 2012, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) “Didi has always made us proud. Aisa kabhi nahin hua ki hamein unki wajah se kuchh sunna pada. Woh hamare parivar ka garv hai (We never had to hear anything on account of her. She is our family’s pride),” say the two brothers (18 and 20 years old respectively) of the girl whose rape and brutalisation a fortnight ago has stirred the whole nation. They were seated outside her ICU room at Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, hours before she was flown out to Singapore for further treatment.

It often takes one crime or individual to be the pivot of an issue that had never hitherto received its due attention. The young girl, who was the victim of brutal gangrape and savagery has become just that: a hero for thousands across the country. As Jagruti continues to fight for a life that will have to be reconstructed with a lot of medical help and her own tremendous will, fighting alongside her is a whole gamut of Indians: from big towns and small, students and professionals, middle-class individuals to activist groups, women, and men. They are marching in protest, holding candle-light vigils, and venting ire on social networking sites. We at Outlook have decided to name her Jagruti: the awakening. She is our woman of the year.

“I feel for this girl from my heart,” says Valerian Santos, father of Keenan, who was killed last year after he and his friend Reuben tried to intervene in a sexual harassment case in Mumbai. “Perhaps more than my son.... I was crying for her.”

Singapore-bound Jagruti being taken to the airport. (Photograph by Hindustan Times)

Till the other day, Jagruti was like any other ordinary girl, who had gone for a movie with a friend and was coming back home by bus. Her friend’s objection to lewd comments by six men on the bus visited upon her a nightmare from which only death seems to promise an early exit. If she fights off the physical odds, which we hope she will, full emotional recovery will likely take longer. Gratifyingly, Jagruti has shown immense determination so far, telling her friend who was with her through the ordeal, “mujhe sangharsh karna hai (I have to fight)” when he went to Safdarjung Hospital to meet her (see interview).

Rape is a sordid reality in India, in all its gruesome manifestations (see column by Meena Kandasamy), so routine that, most often, it evokes no notice. Jagruti’s case has brought the reality closer home, shaking the indifference of middle-class India, reminding them how vulnerable women are in a world both modern and traditional, a world with antiquated attitudes towards women, a world of strange predators in the guise of men, a world of perverts who prey on children....

Photograph by Jitender Gupta

And so the anger erupted. There was the genuine citizen came to express his or her solidarity, along with the curious onlooker, the rabble-rouser and those keen to get a piece of the political and human action. The media kept a constant vigil as  well, both outside the hospital where Jagruti lay and with relentless coverage, in print and on television.

First, the political class treated the protesters as an administrative problem, then they started to deliver political homilies.

A political class with credibility should have been able to strike a chord with protesters expressing human concerns. Instead, they first treated the process as an administrative problem, then started to deliver political homilies. Eventually, the scale of public outrage compelled high offices to speak up: the prime minister on television, the President and the Lok Sabha Speaker, a sitting judge of the Supreme Court. The government also set up several committees to look into the incident as well as the overall issue of women’s safety. Union minister of state for home R.P.N. Singh told reporters that photographs, names and addresses of the rapists will be uploaded on the Delhi police website (www.delhipolice.nic.in). He also said the government-run National Crime Records Bureau had been told to prepare a directory of convicted rapists and upload their photos and personal details on its official website (www.ncrb.nic.in).

 But the statistics remain depressing. The young Akhilesh Yadav, on assuming the chief ministership of Uttar Pradesh, had promised to deliver better law and order. In the 10 months of his leadership, 35 cases of minor girls being raped and killed have been registered. There were 1,895 rapes in the state in 2011. “There is no denying that men are getting increasingly insolent in committing crimes against women,” says Arun Kumar, the state’s additional director-general of police. “In fact, the women’s powerline service that we launched to curb harassment of women through crank calls received 61,000 complaints in just one month.”

In Mumbai, the Maharashtra State Commission for Women has been without a chief for four years. “It’s meaningless to have a commission without a head as no one can put pressure on the government to act,” says a former chairperson. “Women actually have no one to go to now.” In fact, fed up with the inaction of the administration and the corruption of the police, victims of sexual abuse in Lucknow have organised themselves under the banner of what they call the Red Brigade. Comprising largely of young girls in the 17-25 age group, they wear red kurtas and black salwars and help victims fight rape cases in court.


Felled by the mob? Grieving family of Delhi cop Subhash Tomar. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

Jagruti’s case has become a lightning rod for all such women across the country. There is outrage in Calcutta as well and as sociologist Bula Bhadra there says, “The act of rape, as the one that happened in Delhi, is the manifestation of a complex social problem which does not have a ready solution. It requires a complete overhaul of the system where we look at many different aspects of society. From the patriarchal content of our children’s textbooks to the manner in which advertisements portray women, society is perennially conditioned to treat women as subservient. Rape and molestation of women in our society is a reflection of this.”
Indeed, women in India regularly deal with objectification, trivialisation and different forms of sexual harassment. Jagruti is typical of the young urban woman in modern India—educated, ambitious, wears western clothes, visits malls, watches movies, uses public transport—yet struggles to negotiate her space in a society ruled by archaic values.
The eldest of three siblings, Jagruti had just finished a four-year course in physiotherapy at a private medical college in Dehradun. Her father, who has a modest job in the aviation sector in Delhi, had sold his ancestral land in his UP village to ensure an education for all his children. He thought himself a “lucky man” as his children were the first generation to be educated in his family. His daughter was doing her internship before she would start her career as a paramedic.

She was alert, say doctors, when she was brought into emergency at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences before she was taken to Safdarjung Hospital. Her state had left even the hardened doctors shaken. The unspeakable acts of bestiality had ruptured her intestines and damaged her reproductive organs. The doctors did not think she would survive the night. At the time of writing, she has survived a fortnight.

Her condition looked “positive” in the first three days, with her being able to communicate clearly with the doctors through writing. She told the doctors that her throat felt itchy with the ventilator. She had written—“there is irritation in my throat, please clean it with suction”—according to Safdarjung Hospital medical superintendent B.D. Athani. A paramedic herself, Jagruti perhaps understands her situation better. She has had to give her statement to the subdivisional magistrate twice, partially in writing, with gestures and responding to questions.

However, once the infection spread, her condition deteriorated, with doctors claiming that the iron rod inserted into her body could lead to septicemia. She has already been through three major surgeries in the last 10 days, one in which most of her large intestine had to be removed. Then she developed respiratory problems and suffered two cardiac arrests. She was critical before being flown to Singapore for organ transplant.

Although her family is grateful for all the support and help, they are upset over the problem between the SDM and the police over taking their daughter’s statement. Says D.K. Mishra, uncle of the male friend who was with Jagruti, “This fight between the police and SDM has been very disappointing and diverts the focus from the issue. One should not go after publicity in such sensitive issues wherein every word matters. It would have been encouraging had it been handled more responsibly.”

“From the patriarchal content of textbooks to ads portraying women, our society’s conditioned to treat women as subservient.”

Likewise, while people have every right to express this scale of indignation at what happened to Jagruti, they also have to be responsible in their reactions and desist from vigilantism. “Hang them,” has been almost the universal reaction, and castration a close alternative. It brings to mind the December 2008 incident in Andhra Pradesh when two women engineering students of Warangal—T. Pranitha and K. Swapnika—became victims of an acid attack by three young men. The main accused, Srinivas, was apparently targeting Swapnika as she had spurned his advances. People were angry, and three days after the attack, the police shot dead all three, allegedly “in self-defence”. Swapnika died a month later. Human rights activists raised the issue of “mob justice”, but to this day, the then Warangal SP, V.C. Sajjanar, is hailed as a hero for the “encounter” and “instant justice” he delivered.

 The Lucknow-based Red Brigade, of whom we have spoken earlier, also admit to vigilantism. “Yes, we believe in public thrashing of people who indulge in physical exploitation of women or sexual abuse with minor girls,” asserts Usha Vishwakarma, the brigade’s ‘commander’. Basically, it speaks of a yawning deficit in justice delivery, which the people are themselves seeking to fill.

The rage in Jagruti’s case has been unprecedented. But it should not make us blind. The outrage has touched various strands of society. But there cannot be a kneejerk reaction to a complex issue. Even on the night Jagruti was being flown out to the state-of-the-art Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore, a 42-year-old woman was gangraped by three men in a vehicle and then dumped in Kalkaji in south Delhi, some kilometres away from the mall Jagruti and friend had gone to and returning from where they had boarded a bus that was to become a chamber of horrors.

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Rape And Our Politicians
No sitting member of the Lok Sabha faces a rape charge

• Six persons who declared that they had rape charges against them contested the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Of them, one is from the Rashtravadi Communist Party, one from the RPP, a third from the Bahujan Samaj Party, another from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha while two were independent candidates.
• Political parties gave tickets to 27 candidates who contested state elections in the last five years and who declared they had rape charges against them. Of these, seven were independent, five from the SP, two each from the BJP and one from the Congress. Ten of these are from UP alone and five from Bihar.
• Six sitting MLAs have declared rape charges against them. They are Sribhagwan Sharma (SP, Khurja, UP), Anoop Sanda (SP, Sultanpur, UP), Manoj Kumar Paras (SP, Nagina, UP), Mohammad Aleem Khan (BSP, Bulandshahr, UP), Jethabhai G. Ahir (BJP, Shahera, Gujarat) and Kandikunta Venkata Prasad (TDP, Kadiri, AP).
• When Outlook called Paras, he said the Delhi gangrape incident was “shameful”. “The culprits should be punished. It’s an open-and-shut case.” But what about the charges against him? “They are politically motivated and were slapped on me by someone who was instigated by the BSP.”

Source: Individual affidavits/Association for Democratic Reforms
***
20 Horrific Cases Up To December 2012

• 1973: Aruna Shaunbag: A junior nurse at King Edward Memorial hospital in Mumbai, tied with a dog chain, assaulted and raped by a ward boy. She lost her eyesight and has been in a vegetative state since. SC turns down mercy killing.
• 1978: Geeta and Sanjay Chopra were kidnapped for ransom in Delhi in the infamous Ranga-Billa kidnapping case. The culprits raped Geeta before killing them both.
• 1982: Tulasa Thapa, a 12-year-old Nepali girl, was repeatedly raped before being sold into prostitution. Ten months later, she was brought to JJ Hospital in Mumbai where she died of brain tuberculosis and three sexually transmitted diseases.
• 1990: A 14-year-old school girl was raped at her residence in Calcutta and killed by a security guard. Dhananjoy Chatterjee was executed in August 2004, the country’s first hanging since 1995.
• 1996: A 16-year-old girl was sexually harassed and assaulted continuously for 40 days by 42 men in Kerala. In 2000, a special court sentenced 35 persons to rigorous imprisonment but the Kerala High Court acquitted them in 2005.
• 1996: 25-year-old law student Priyadarshini Mattoo was found raped and murdered at her house in Delhi. Ten years later, the Delhi High Court found Santosh Kumar Singh guilty.
• 1999: The estranged wife of an Indian Forest Service officer, Anjana Mishra’s car was stopped at a desolate place on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar. She was gangraped in front of the friend she was travelling with.
• 2002: A fourth-year medical student was gangraped at knifepoint on the terrace of the Khooni Darwaza monument situated on the busy Bahadurshah Zafar Marg in the capital.
• 2003: Shari S. Nair, a teenaged girl hailing from Kiliroor, Kottayam, Kerala, was sexually abused after being promised roles in TV serials. Shari later died after giving birth to a daughter.

• 2004: 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama was tortured and allegedly executed by personnel of the paramilitary force of 17 Assam Rifles stationed in Manipur, after being picked up from her house.
• 2005: 28-year-old Imrana was raped by her father-in-law in Uttar Pradesh. The village elders and Sharia courts nullified her marriage saying her husband was now her son.
• 2005: A Delhi University student was gangraped by four men inside a Santro for several hours and dumped in south Delhi, unconscious and without clothes.
• 2009: Two young women were raped and murdered in Jammu under mysterious circumstances, allegedly by CRPF personnel. One of them was two months pregnant at the time.
• 2010: A 30-year-old BPO employee was raped by five men near her home in south Delhi. The woman was pulled into a mini truck, raped repeatedly and thrown out two hours later.
• 2011: A nine-year-old mentally disabled girl was raped on a Mumbai train in front of five other passengers. The child could not scream or shout or speak because she was disabled.
• Feb 2012: A 37-year-old woman was gangraped in a car on Calcutta’s Park Street after coming out of a bar. Mamata Banerjee first said the case was cooked up to embarrass her government.
• Dec 2012: An eighteen-month-old baby, the daughter of pavement dwellers, was found by her mother one morning covered in blood. Doctors said she had been raped and tortured.
• Dec 2012: A two-year-old was raped, allegedly by her maternal uncle, and thrown into a thorny bush in Baroda, Gujarat. She died after being taken to the hospital.
• Dec 26, 2012: A 20-year-old woman was allegedly gangraped by 10 people on the banks of Manimuktha river near Virudhachalam in Tamil Nadu, according to police.

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By Amba Batra Bakshi and Chandrani Banerjee with Prachi Pinglay-Plumber and Prarthna Gahilote in Mumbai, Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow, Madhavi Tata in Hyderabad and Dola Mitra in Calcutta

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India: I protested at Jantar Mantar today

| by  Amit Chaturvedi

Nishtha Gautam, 27, is a lecturer at Delhi's Lady Shriram College. She is at the protests at Jantar Mantar demanding tougher punishment for accused who gang-raped 23-year-old medical student in a moving bus in Delhi.

( December 29, 2012, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian)  I am shocked beyond words at the death of this girl. But this movement should not die down with her death. The issue is much beyond that. And as a woman and as a mother, I would ensure that it stays alive.

I got the message at night from a friend in Singapore that the girl is no more. I couldn't sleep after that. I came to Jantar Mantar this morning to take part in the protests. And I am here since then. I would request the media to keep the movement alive. Because women's security is integral to our security, so we should do something about it.

I would like to keep a track on all the promises that are being made to us by our leaders - that how much they've fulfilled it? I would try and ensure that a meeting takes place every month on what is being done, what steps are being taken. The government will have to do something because it's not just a women's issue, it's about a larger sense of security.

I don't believe in death sentence, it would set a bad precedent. I would like the accused to be sentenced for life. And the government should increase the conviction rate in such cases. But for the moment, I will try and keep alive this movement.

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