By Vikram Kilpady
Out-of-the-box ideas are much needed to combat crimes against women. But what if such proposals give short shrift to the right to equality and the right to a fair trial? Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and his Rajasthan counterpart Ashok Gehlot, both from the Congress, have announced that their governments would bar those accused of molestation, rape and other crimes against women and girls from state government employment.
Baghel made the announcement in his Independence Day speech while announcing a slew of measures. Gehlot had aired his decision a week or so before and included history-sheeters in the ban.
Rajasthan has been in the news in August following the gangrape and killing of a 14-year-old. Her remains were later found in a coal furnace. Initial reports said the girl was four years old, stoking political reactions across the board.
Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh will be going to the polls in the next cycle of assembly elections along with Madhya Pradesh, and the Gehlot and Baghel governments are in the last year of their terms. Unless the one nation, one election plan lumps these elections with the Lok Sabha poll, the electoral battle will make it shriller for Gehlot who has held his own despite efforts to unseat him by former deputy Sachin Pilot.
An internal report of the Rajasthan Police has noted that the rape of girls under the age of 10 has been increasing over the last few years. By June this year, the state had reported 848 such cases, while 2022 saw 825 cases, and 2021, 694. This underlines the greater incidence of this crime.
Rajasthan reported the highest number of rapes in 2021 as per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report. The report says of the 31,677 rape cases registered in the country in 2021, Rajasthan logged 6,337 cases. The state also had the most rape cases the previous year as well. Chhattisgarh, in comparison, stood at 11th position in the number of rape cases.
The NCRB 2021 data also notes a disturbing increase in crimes against women, their figures going up by 15.3% nationwide. Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 56,083 such crimes, followed by Rajasthan with 40,738 cases and Maharashtra with 39,526 cases. Rape, however, did not occupy the first position among crimes against women; cruelty by husbands was the oft-cited head.
Gehlot may have had reason to come up with the decision to bar people accused of sexual crimes from government jobs. But the sheer incidence of rape cases aside, how constitutional is denying a person accused of such crimes a government job? Anyone accused of a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, the PMLA being an exception. The business of barring people accused of such crimes violates their right to equality guaranteed by the Constitution and sounds much like the crassly populist deployment of “bulldozer justice” in other states.
The Congress has been a strident critic of punishment being meted out before the legal process is completed when it comes to bulldozer justice in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. But its own extra-constitutional effort has gone without notice. If there have been rumblings within the party over this populist turn, one hasn’t heard of it.
Getting government employment is riding a huge socio-economic escalator in states like Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and as well as in most of India. Reservation has been a boon for historically marginalised communities and castes, thereby increasing their numbers in government employment. Barring history-sheeters from employment in government jobs is one thing, while excluding people with accusations against them is another, without giving them the right to a fair trial.
Tougher punishment such as excluding them from government employment need not work the magic in reducing crimes against women and girls in Rajasthan. But for the political class which is due to face an election, any measure against such crimes is a short-term lifesaver until the last vote is cast on election day.
But can such ham-handed government measures to bar people accused of sexual crimes against women work? It is pertinent to point out that the Association for Democratic Reform (ADR) and National Election Watch (NEW) recently studied the affidavits furnished by candidates in the Lok Sabha and assembly polls. After parsing 762 of 776 affidavits of sitting members of Parliament and 4,001 of 4,033 sitting MLAs from 28 states and two Union Territories, their report found that 21 MPs and 113 MLAs have declared crimes against women. Of the total 134, 18 sitting legislators had declared rape cases against them and were in various stages of trial. And they are not limited to just one political party.
If a measure as thought up by the Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh chief ministers had been in force, would the legislators have been able to stand for an election? ADR has been in pursuit of cleaning up politics through cleaner politicians, but how can clean minds win an electoral contest given the high-decibel campaigns that render any such attempt oxymoronic even before their start.
Seen in this context, the decisions of the Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh governments sound almost comic. When the corridors of power have not been barred for people accused of crimes against women, denying government employment to those accused of similar crimes is, in fact, robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Politics is quixotic, larger issues are swept under the carpet while minor ones assume gargantuan proportions. The Supreme Court’s acquitting the three rape accused in the Chhawla rape case (where on February 9, 2012, a 19-year-old girl was brutally raped and murdered at Chhawla, in Dwarka, Delhi) didn’t see an outpouring of public anger and outrage like the one after the Nirbhaya case. But snide attacks were made. In such populist notions of justice, death is the only punishment worthy of being meted out to a rape convict and that too, after a superfast trial.
With a similar idea in mind, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Bill, 2023, which seeks to replace the Indian Penal Code, says that gangrape against a girl under 18 can fetch capital punishment for all those involved in the crime. Earlier, the law laid down death sentence as the maximum punishment for gangraping a girl below 12 and life term for a girl between 12 and 16.
In the melee surrounding the politically expedient policy of barring people accused of sex crimes, not one voice has spoken up for the hyper-sexualisation that goes on in everyday India. Educating adolescents on consent along with clinical precision in sex education classes is what is needed to be rid of rapes and other sexual crimes.
Empowering the girl child needn’t take off with karate classes, but in teaching her classmates that she is not to be treated like an object, but as a person with likes and dislikes, upheld as utterly legitimate.