It is ironical that we have been observing December 10 as the World Human Rights day following two most egregious incidents of violation of human rights in India – one by a gang of rapists and the other by the state police, each occurring within a couple of days. In Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, a survivor of gang rape was stabbed and burnt to death by the rapists who had been earlier released on bail by the court. In Hyderabad, the police killed four men accused of raping and murdering a woman, in what is described as `encounter.’
Two questions arise from the events. First, should the judiciary be lenient in granting bail to those accused of rape, since the rapists make use of the reprieve by taking revenge on their victim ? Two, should the police be granted peremptory right to eliminate the accused, even before they are tried by the courts, in extrajudicial executions – like what happened in Hyderabad ? While we can leave the first issue to the judgment of the honourable judges, we should take up the second issue to address the wider question of extrajudicial killings. Both are inter-twined. Public support for encounter killings’ is provoked by the laborious procrastination of the judicial system in punishing the culprits. The general mood is that since the judiciary cannot deliver justice , it is better to support immediate punishment like
encounter ’ killings.
While one can understand the impatient public endorsement of killing of rapist-cum-murderers in the absence of swift judicial sentences, we should also realize that such popular sanction gives widespread powers to the police to extend its extra-judicial aggression against other sections of our society, ranging from ordinary criminals to innocent villagers suspected of extremist or Naxalite association. To give a recent example of such dubious encounters. According to news reports on June 28-29, 2012, some seventeen Naxalites’ were killed in an encounter with the CRPF in Chhattisgarh. The then chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, as well as the then Union Home Minister, P. Chidambaram congratulated the CRPF on their achievement in eliminating the
Naxalites.’ Following widespread allegations about the CRPF’s indiscriminate firing on innocent villagers, the government set up a judicial commission to look into the allegations. After seven years now, the commission headed by retired judge, Justice V.K. Aggarwal has come out with its findings which say that there is no evidence that those killed were Naxalites. Further, he accuses the CRPF of opening unprovoked fire and attacking some of the victims from close quarters with guns and sharp objects.
Encounters (or extra-judicial killings’ as they are described in legal parlance) are of two kinds - one carried out in the name of eliminating criminal gangsters, the other against suspected political insurgents (e.g. Naxalites in central and south India, secessionists in the north-east) . Illustrations of the first are provided by the exploits of
encounter cops’ like the infamous Daya Nayak and Pradeep Sharma of Mumbai, who became toasts of society circles for killing some of the notorious mafia dons of the city. Filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma even made a film Ab tak chappan eulogizing the two. Such extra-judicial police practices spread soon from Mumbai to other parts of India, particularly Uttar Pradesh. They reached such an extreme stage that on January 14, 2019 four UN special rapporteurs felt compelled to observe regarding the situation in Uttar Pradesh : “We are extremely concerned about the pattern of events: individuals being abducted or arrested before their killing, and their bodies bearing injuries, indicative of torture……We have also received allegations of corruption including the police demanding money to release the victim prior to the killing.” Undeterred by such criticism by the UN observers, the Uttar Pradesh police has the temerity to announce that it had killed 203 suspected criminals in encounters over a period of more than two years. (Re: The Hindu, December 8, 2019).
Political encounters’ and
forced disappearances’
The other type of encounters is of a political nature. It has its origins in the methods adopted by the police to suppress the Naxalite movement in the 1970s in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and other parts of India. Youngsters were picked up, taken to isolated spots and gunned down by the police who displayed their bodies and claimed that they were Naxalites killed in `encounters. ’ The most notorious example of such killing in police custody was the murder of Arikkad Varghese , a radical student leader in Kerala on February 18, 1970. More than two decades later, in 1998, the police constable P. Ramachandran Nair who killed him admitted that he shot Varghese on the orders of K. Lakshmana, then deputy superintendent of police. A gun was planted on the dead body to imply that he was shot down in an encounter. On October 28, 2010 , a special CBI court found Lakshmana guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In 1971, in Kolkata in West Bengal on the midnight of August 4/5, the police arrested the Naxalite leader Saroj Dutta and early next morning took him to a secluded spot in the Maidan and shot him dead. On August 12 that year, the police raided Baranagar near Kolkata, raided houses, dragged out some 100 young men suspected of Naxalite leanings and shot them down.
Since then similar methods. have been adopted in strife-torn states like Punjab (during the 1980s) and Kashmir in the north, Manipur in the north-east, and Andhra Pradesh in the south among other areas. But instead of publicly announcing them as `encounters,’ the police had been secretly disposing of their bodies in cremation and burial grounds.
During the Khalistani insurgency in Punjab, arrests carried out under the instructions of the late K.P.S. Gill, the then director general of police, ended up with the death of at least 2,000 who were in police custody, and were secretly cremated in Amritsar alone, according to a later day official report. Under pressure from human rights activists, the CBI registered some thirty cases in regard to the allegations of elimination of suspected militants through encounter killings.
Similarly, in Kashmir, according to human rights activists, about 8,000 people who were arrested by the police during the last few years, have disappeared, their families not knowing their fate as the police refuse to give any information. It is suspected that they could have been eliminated. Such cases of elimination of those in police custody have acquired the legal term of `forced disappearances,’ and have led to the formation of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, who are moving from pillar to post in Kashmir to trace their children.
As for the north-east, in 2017, the Supreme Court ordered an inquiry into more than 1,500 deaths, caused by police atrocities in Manipur. Human rights activists alleged that police officers staged fake encounters through which they killed them on the ground that they were all insurgents.
Legal remedies
The judicial system provides certain legal remedies against such extra-judicial killings. Following any such incident, FIRs have to be lodged against the police personnel involved in it, and SITs (Special Investigative Team) should be formed to investigate into the incident. But the system of forming such a team is itself flawed, since they constitute of police officers alone, who may not be all that impartial in judging the behaviour of their colleagues. In connection with the recent Hyderabad encounter killing of the four rape accused, for instance, the police establishment has set up an SIT comprising of senior police officials only. They are expected to examine the role of the police officers, important among whom is the Cyberabad Police Commissioner V.C. Sajjanar, under whose supervision the killing of the four accused took place.
V.C. Sajjanar has garnered popular support as evident from crowds coming out on the streets to congratulate him, and women tying rakhis’ to the hands of his police subordinates. But what is alarming is that the Hyderabad killings bear an eerie parallel to a similar
encounter’ in Warangal in December 2008 – carried out under the orders of the same V. C. Sajjanar who was then the Superintendent of Police there. Three men were arrested following an acid attack on two female students, who were soon after killed by the police. The explanation given by the police then was the same that is being provided now – they were killed when they tried to attack the policemen who were taking them to the crime scene !
Given Sajjanar’s high profile image as an `encounter specialist,’ reinforced by his latest popularity among the public, and the composition of the SIT, there is little hope of its nailing those policemen guilty of the extra-judicial killing in Hyderabad and the mastermind behind it.
Rape and punishment
Although rape is universally denounced as a reprehensible crime, debates rage over the form of punishment that the rapists deserve. Knee-jerk reactions like support of public lynching (as voiced by the Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan) , or of hanging them, have captured the imagination of a public which rightly feels repulsed by their deeds and demands swift justice. But will such punishments deter the potential rapists who are lurking in our society ? Unlike professional thieves and burglars who inhabit the underworld, rapists are found in our domestic sphere , cutting close to our bones. We read reports of a father raping his daughter, a jilted lover raping a woman and killing her, a young man seducing a girl and indulging in an orgy of gang rape with his friends. According to the National Crimes Record Bureau annual report of 2013, there were some 24,923 rape cases recorded across India in 2012, out of which 98% were committed by someone known to the victim.
This brings us to the contentious issue and the grey area of consensual sex followed by betrayal by the male partner. If the female partner accuses her former lover of the crime of rape, transforming in retrospect what was consensual into forcible sex, will that stand judicial scrutiny ?
But it is the more brazen acts of serial rapists that merit attention in the current debate over their punishment. Death sentences do not act as deterrence as evident from the continuation of rape almost every day in all corners of India. The sense of impunity with which the bailed-out rapist attacked and set fire to his victim in Unnao, and encouraged others of his ilk to threaten the women they raped with similar punishment, indicates the failure of the penal system. To give a recent example of the threat faced by the victims, a day before an 18-year old rape survivor was to testify in a court in Delhi’s Rohini area, her family in Baghpat’s Bijrol’s village found a note pasted outside their house, threatening them that the girl will face a a fate worse than the Unnao victim’s if she appeared before the court. (Times of India, December 13, 2019).
Castration as punishment ?
Judicial punitive measures like life imprisonment, or even death sentences do not deter recidivists like serial rapists from indulging in their habits. The continuing delay in carrying out the death sentence of the Nirbhaya rape and murder accused, after seven years, on some legal ground or other, seems to encourage two trends – one, the rapists confident of getting away through bails , two the public support for swift justice like the Hyderabad encounter killing.
Apart from the hitherto followed modes of punishing rapists, there is an alternative punitive measure which is being advocated by certain judicial experts – castration of the rapists. The most outspoken advocate of this punishment is Justice Michael F. Saldanha, a retired Karnataka High Court judge. According to him, “The reasoning is that such human beings (rapists) have forfeited the right to reproduce and it would be dangerous to allow them to do so, but it will also take care of the possibility of any repetition of the offence in the event of acquittal at a later stage for whatever reason.” (Deccan Chronicle, December 9, 2019). The rapist is thus deprived of his weapon of offence.
But there is a flip side to this argument. Castration as a surgical or chemical medical devise to decrease or finish the sex drive has been legalized as punishment for rapists in certain states in the USA – Ohio, California, Illinois and Arkansas. They offer the culprits the choice of voluntary castration, which allows them to find an easy way out of rigorous imprisonment that they would have otherwise suffer. But it is argued that these serial rapists, once released, can subvert their chemical castration by resorting to libido-enhancing drugs available in the black market.
Beyond judicial or extra-judicial punishment
Neither sentences of life imprisonment or death by hanging by the courts, nor extra-judicial acts like encounter killings by the state agencies, deter habitual criminals like rapist-cum murderers. Long before the popular uproar caused by the Nirbhaya rape case, in 1978 in Delhi, Ranga and Billa were arrested on the charge of kidnapping, sexually torturing and murdering two siblings, Geeta and Sanjoy Chopra. The two hardened criminals committed these acts soon after their release from the Arthur Road jail in Bombay, following their serving a jail sentence for some previous crime. After a prolonged trial of four years, Ranga and Billa were hanged in 1982. Nothing has changed since then – judging by the daily reports of rapes and murders that appear in our newspapers.
It is necessary therefore to go beyond punitive measures – either judicial or extra-judicial – and get to the bottom to understand and eradicate the basic impulses of the rapist. To start with, we should reject the argument that rape in India happens because of suppression of sexual liberty in a conservative society. Rapes happen too in the permissive society of the West, as revealed by disclosures of victims in the Me-Too campaign. Rape is therefore not about sex alone. A rapist does not rape because he has to have sex, but because he needs to dominate a weaker person and subject her to humiliation so that the rapist can feel powerful. This mood is displayed by our para-military forces deployed in the north-east to fight insurgency, where the Assam Rifles jawans in Manipur took into custody Thangjam Manorama suspecting her of being an insurgent, and after raping her killed her on July 11, 2004. Five days after the killing, around 30 middle aged Manipuri women walked naked to the Assam Rifles headquarters shouting “Indian army, rape us too ! We are all Manorama’s mothers !”
The present Indian societal and domestic norms encourage this rapist mentality among the males. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, as mentioned before, in more than 90% of the rape cases, the accused are known to the victims – either relatives or friends. The aggressive mentality is rooted therefore in the domestic upbringing of the Indian males – where they have been trained by their parents (both the domineering conservative father and the traditionally brought up mother who acquiesces with her husband’s will) to treat women as subjects of male dominance. It is this mentality which allows poor parents in the Hyderabad old city in Telangana and other areas of India to sell off their daughters in marriage to sheikhs and businessmen in the Arab states in the name of employment, while they actually become slaved sex workers. These parents unwittingly become a part of the organized rape by traffickers who export women under the cover of providing jobs to them.
How can we detoxify this Indian male rapist mentality ? How can we adjust the popular demand for retributive justice with the lengthy legal requirements for passing judgments ? How can the legal process be expedited ? But more importantly, how do we change the basic patriarchal aggressive mind set that promotes, and even sanctify rapes ? These questions need to be addressed through a broader debate among policy makers, legal experts, social activists, feminist groups and concerned citizens among others.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political and civil rights activist and social scientist. Email: [email protected]
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