On Rape and Capital Punishment

Who remembers rape victims
(This was published in New Indian Express on August 22, 2004)

What do you do when a child plays with a matchbox? You keep away the stuff from the child's reach since the child does not know how to handle a matchbox safely. Likewise, a rapist should be castrated, as he does not know how to use his masculinity. This was what a psychiatrist prescribed while discussing the ways and means to deal with rapists. The kind of media attention Dhananjoy Chatterjee got in the last couple of weeks made one sit up with some unease. Even Benjamin Molois, the South African freedom fighter and poet, whom the apartheid regime had sent to the gallows in 1985, did not get as much attention in our media. Dhananjoy is neither a freedom fighter nor an activist convicted for any great cause. Here was a person held guilty of murder and rape. He was given an opportunity to defend and prove his innocence and he did make use of all the legal avenues available. And more than this, it is also important that the crime, particularly the grisly nature of his act is recounted while his execution was discussed. Here was a man who had hit a 14-year-old child's head against the wall and killed her. The pervert had also raped the child. For these, he deserves the maximum punishment. Let me confess here that I am against death penalty; whether it is by hanging, by lethal injection or by the electric chair. Capital punishment, in my view, militates against progress and civilization. But then, the problem is that a life term according to our law will mean imprisonment only up to 14 years in jail. Not a day more. Thus the expression 'imprisonment for life' is a misnomer. Similarly, there is no provision in our penal codes for castration. This might sound a little too uncivilized or even borrowing a leaf out of the medieval justice system! But the trauma of the rape victims and the precarious feeling that women go through even when they imagine of being raped, the sense of insecurity that women go through, will perhaps lend a sense of legitimacy to this return to middle ages! Recently, as part of the field research for a study, I had the not so pleasant experience of interviewing some of the rape victims under 16 years of age in Chennai. One of the victims was a nine year old. She was frail. It was evident that the girl was famished. Her mother earns a living by working as a maidservant in the neighbourhood and her father is a coolie. On a rainy day, this child was playing alone outside their tenement in the slum cluster. There was hardly anybody around. A man in the locality, who knew about this girl's fascination for a ride on a two-wheeler, invited her to go with him. The innocent nine year old seems to have been overwhelmed by the invitation. She was taken to a deserted place and raped. He left her there bleeding profusely. She was almost dead but managed to drag herself to the roadside. An auto driver saw her and took her to the nearest police station. The cops admitted her to a hospital. When I met her it was a year after the crime. The family had to shift their residence. The child is traumatised and refuses to go to school. She is scared of all men and wants her mother with her always. She urinates involuntarily even at the slightest shock. Listening to her story left us in such an angry state that the lady police official who accompanied me simply muttered, "That should be shot". For a moment she had imagined her daughter in that child's place. Then there were cases of a mentally challenged girl whose family had migrated to Chennai from Andhra Pradesh, and that of a 15-year-old school dropout who was raped by someone who had a score to settle with her uncle. In all these instances, the trauma that these girls and their families had gone through was tremendous. They had to move out of the localities and shift residence. The social stigma that the victims and their families are put through forces them to move away from their homes, particularly when they are poor. For all these reasons, many instances of rape are not reported to the police always, though there is a certain amount of attitudinal change visible among the police towards the victims in recent times. Another disturbing fact is that the conviction rate (among the cases that are reported to the police) is very low. Dhananjoy Chatterjee was convicted and sentenced to death because the court was convinced of the heinous nature of the crime. The media, meanwhile, made Dhananjoy look as if he was the victim. The daily bulletins in the media about his life in the condemned cell, the graphic description of how he spent the last few days or the emotional presentation of how his family reacted together conveyed the news in such manner that the grisly act for which he was convicted was forgotten. While opposing the death penalty, those involved in the campaign against capital punishment will serve their cause better if they initiate a debate on the need for more stringent punishment for such criminal acts as rape. The maximum scale prescribed by Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code is imprisonment for life. In other words, up to 14 years in jail.