VIEWPOINT
AMITABH SHUKLA
The death of the Delhi
gang rape victim in a Singapore Hospital Patiala
district of Punjab, has made us hang our heads in shame, brought tears to the
eyes and made us think why the Homo Sapiens indulge in acts of bestiality.
Or are these beasts on the prowl
in the cities and towns still in the process of evolution and have not yet
become Homo Sapiens? Do they have their place in the jungles, away from human
civilisation and interaction even though they accidentally acquired two hands
and two legs and do not walk on all fours but on their two legs?
But then these perverts and
mentally-physically-emotionally sick individuals would even spoil the serenity of
the forests and jungles. No one has ever heard animals perpetrate bestiality on
another animal in a forest without reason. Even the carnivorous kill and eat
other animals only when they are hungry. That is their normal behavior. They do
not kill for fun.
But in the national Capital a few
men killed a girl simply for fun because they were out on a joyride on a bus.
To call them beasts would be bringing shame to the animal kingdom. They raped
the hapless girl and then perpetrated the worst kind of torture one could
imagine without any reason. Perhaps her intense pain and cries for help gave
them a pleasure. One has to invent words to describe such people because there
is nothing there for them in the existing vocabulary. It is too horrifying even
to recall the incident as it causes pain and anguish. Any person would know the
consequences of his act. They knew that what they were doing with the girl
would lead to her death - penetrating a foreign object in her body, hitting her
with an iron rod and then throwing her out of the moving bus.
Clearly, what they did was
“rarest of the rare”. I may not be a legal expert but this case has all the
ingredients of the Supreme Court definition of rarest of rare for giving
Capital punishment. I have been a journalist for over a decade and a half now
but had never even heard about such an incident ever. If this incident does not
come under the category of rarest of rare, then nothing perhaps could. It is
similar in nature, in fact much more brutal than the rape incident in which one
Dhananjoy Chatterjee was found guilty and hanged a few years ago in Kolkata.
So when the protestors in New
Delhi and the rest of the country are calling for
awarding death punishment to the perpetrators of the ghastly crime, they are
not entirely off the mark. As a citizen, I have my reservations against capital
punishment in general but in this case, I simply do not have any argument. I
have lost the argument on Capital punishment in this case. Here, the law of the
land should be followed to its logical conclusion and from the very beginning
the premise of the trial should be the invocation of the clause of “rarest of
rare”.
The legal proceedings should be
done swiftly so that the potential rapists and killers get the chilling message
that they have no place in this society, in the cities and the country. While
writing this, I got an SMS from a friend which said that if the victim could be
sent to Singapore
for “better treatment”, though she lost her battle with life, why the accused
can’t be sent to a country which awards instant punishment for “better
justice”. Nothing could be more telling - an indictment on the judicial system
of the country where delay is the norm. Despite the high octane outburst of
anger on the streets and the television studios, the protestors in Delhi
and citizens in the rest of the country is still skeptic whether justice would
be done at all and wouldn’t be delayed.
The way the protestors were
treated, kicked, abused and got water cannons and police batons, are still fresh
in memory. They were common students, citizens and activists who wanted to vent
their anger against the system in which cases linger on for decades, punishment
is a rarity as courts keep on giving one date after the other on the flimsiest
of excuse. They needed to be reassured and told that look this is a “rarest of
rare case” and what happened to the Mumbai terror accused Ajmal Kasab and
before that to Dhananjoy Chatterjee would be repeated in this case.
But the problem is that the Home
Minister, other ministers and even bureaucrats and police officials are
completely out of sync with the realities which exist today. The Ministers in
their 70s simply cannot understand the language of a 20-25 year old and do not
even make an attempt to do so.
They just don’t know how to react
to the situation where youth are protesting and directed the police to bring in
the Standard Operating Procedure prevalent in the British rule in the country
before 1947. That was to abuse, kick and baton charge the protestors. Come on,
you have to give up this colonial mindset. You are not dealing with your
“subjects” or the “ruled”. You are neither the emperor nor the colonial master.
You are dealing with your fellow citizens who have sent you to the position
where you are in. These very people have sent you to the legislature and it is
because of them that you move in beacon fitted vehicles with security personnel
in and around you. Making a mockery of the protests and then lip service to the
cause is not going to help. Part of the anger is also against this mindset of
the ruling politicians.
It was almost the same people who
had joined Anna Hazare’s anti-graft movement at Ramlila Maidan last year. The
Government then promised to call a session of Parliament and pass the Lok Pal
Bill. Entire Parliament discussed the issue and what happened to the Lok Pal
Bill. It still lies in limbo. I may or may not agree with the Lok Pal Bill but
the entire episode exposed the intentions of the Government. The Government
applied techniques of “anger management” then when the youth had joined Anna
and now when the same youth wants to know the answers, wants to know why the
Government is so cut off from them and wants to know if there is sincerity
behind the assertions of ministers. You have to reach out to the youth. You
have to engage them and find the way forward together. (December 31, 2012)
http://www.dailypioneer.com/state-editions/chandigarh/119320-delhi-gang-rape-rarest-of-rare.html
http://www.dailypioneer.com/state-editions/dehradun/119339-delhi-gang-rape-rarest-of-rare.html
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