Where’s the political will to fight rapes?

Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s sudden visit to Jind in Haryana was heartening. For she had gone there to meet the family of a dalit victim of a particularly ghastly rape in a state that seems to have become a land of unending rapes and other sexual assaults on women, especially those belonging to dalit families.

That the country’s most powerful woman should have felt so revolted — she took on the bigots of khap panchayats when they tried to make light of the problem and suggested that lowering of the marriage age would solve it — gave rise to the hope that something decisive might be done at last to deal with the menace. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind has happened yet.
On the contrary, a rape took place elsewhere in Haryana while Mrs Gandhi was talking to the traumatised family. Two others followed the next day and some more later, adding up to 13 in one month. No political leader of Haryana, and certainly not the Congress chief minister of the state, B.S. Hooda, speaks up against the unending outrage. Indeed, the state government, especially its director-general of police, is busy claiming that the incidence of this heinous crime is “coming down”. It is also trying to find other glib excuses and justifications. “These things happen in other states and countries, too,” they say, adding that cases that used to go unreported in the past are being reported now. And, believe it or not, the limit to effrontery is reached when it is alleged that there is a “design to discredit” the state government.
What are the facts? According to Central statistics, in 2011, the total number of rapes reported from across the country was a little over 24,000. The relatively sparsely populated state of Haryana accounted for 733 of these. This year the incidence is obviously on the increase. The number of cases over the last 34 days, despite the Congress president’s visit and the countrywide condemnation, is 19. The latest case, exposed to the light of day on October 14, should chill the blood of any sensitive individual, but apparently not of the Haryanvis.
A day earlier at the Khai village in the Fatehabad district of Haryana the police arrested a 60-year-old fruit vendor operating outside a girls’ school after he admitted that he had been raping a 13-year-old schoolgirl for four months. The village panchayat then took over the matter. After some discussion the sarpanch decided that the fruit-seller should pay the victim’s father Rs 35,000. It is alleged that the poor man was put under intense pressure to accept this as a full and final settlement of the case. So far no superior authority in the district, leave alone at the state capital in Chandigarh, has deemed it fit to intervene in the monstrous proceedings. Is a sum of Rs 35,000 now the standard price of the honour of an innocent 13-year-old girl who has been wronged so cruelly? Meanwhile, what have the school authorities done? They have banned the fruit-seller’s entry to any spot in the vicinity of the school, of course. But they have also ordered the victim as well as her sister out of the school — on the ground that their presence would be a “bad influence on other girls”.
Sadly, even more perverse than the mentality prevailing at the village, town and district levels is the thought process governing the rulers of Haryana, irrespective of their party allegiance and affiliations. One has to just look at what has happened during the short few days since Mrs Gandhi’s return from Jind. Almost immediately, khap panchayat leaders, who have been having a free run for their advocacy of “honour killings” and other archaic practices, returned to the argument, rejected by her, that the only way to reduce, if not eliminate, rapes was immediately to lower the age of marriage for both girls and boys. In other words, abolish the ban on child marriages (not yet fully honoured in several parts of the country), which India had the good sense to impose in the 1930s when, well before Independence, the Central Assembly passed the Sarda Act.
Incidentally and coincidentally, October 11 was the International Day of the Girl. Nothing much happened in this country, but it was celebrated enthusiastically all over the world. The message from everywhere was that child marriages were the main cause for the lack of development among women and for malnutrition. The figures released by the United Nation’s Population Fund revealed that child brides are “most common in South Asia — 46 per cent — compared with 37 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa and 29 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
No one in Haryana is bothered. Only the other day, Om Prakash Chautala, a former chief minister and leader of the Indian National Lok Dal, strongly endorsed early marriages. Within 24 hours, however, he decided to back-track. But there seems to be no such inhibition among Congressmen who consider themselves far more “modern” than Mr Chautala. For, one of these worthies, a member of Mr Hooda’s Cabinet, pontificated that 90 per cent of rapes taking place were “consensual” because women went out “looking for them”. I am stunned, not so much because such a remark was made but because neither the Congress president nor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made the slightest move to rebuke and discipline the culprit.
The slow-moving judiciary — the proportion of pending rape cases in various courts has gone up from 78 per cent to 83 per cent — alone cannot cope with the scourge of rapes. The battle has to be fought politically, too. For this no political party appears to have the stomach. Caste-based electoral calculations are more
compelling.