Many years ago a Delhi school bus fell into the Yamuna. Children trapped in it couldn't be rescued because the windows had been barred. Following public outrage, the city fathers ordered that school bus windows shouldn't be barred.
A few years later, a child was killed when he leaned out of the window of his school bus and his head hit a pole. Again, the city fathers listened to public opinion, and ordered school buses to have their windows barred. Lawmaking in India, like these two orders, has become whimsical, reactive to public outcry, and self-defeating. Mamata Banerjee’s new law, that proposes death to rapist-murderers, is no different. Following a public outcry over the rape-murder of a doctor in a college, she drafted a law that would hang the rapist if his victim dies or slips into coma. The bill was passed with opposition support—all guilt washed, consciences cleaned, catharsis achieved.
Would it make any difference? Not to the dead doctor nor to any living woman.
First, the doctor’s assailant can’t be tried under the new law; no law can be used for punishing a crime committed before it was made. Next, the bill has to pass several musters. If a state law contradicts a Central law, it must receive the president's assent. Mamata’s law awards death to rapists who cause death; the Centre’s new codes, named in Sanskrit, let them live. A life-and-death difference, literally.
Illustration: Deni Lal
Droupadi Murmu has already two death-for-rape bills pending before her, one made by Andhra Pradesh in 2019 after the rape-murder of a vet, the other by Maharashtra in 2021 calling for death to those who violate women and kids. Mamata’s law would be the third. Two things may hold the president back. One, she may agree with Benjamin Disraeli that “what we call public opinion is generally public sentiment”. Two, she may think that laws made in haste and anger will be regretted in leisure.
Yet let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the president assents. Would it make West Bengal, or any state that makes such a law, safer for women? Fat chance. We have been making laws at the drop of every hat, or the cry of every woman. The outcry over the acquittal of Mathura’s custody-rapists led to three sections being added in 1983 to the criminal code, and one to the evidence law, which sanctified the victim’s word in court over any consent claimed by the accused. Yet a court acquitted Bhanwari Devi’s defiler saying “an upper-caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman.”
The Nirbhaya shock led to a series of amendments to the criminal and penal codes. When one of the devils escaped the gallows by claiming to be younger than 18, they changed the law to bring rapists under 17 to be covered by the rape law. What if the next villain is under 16?
The next two, at Unnao and Kathua, led to amendments in the criminal law, the penal law, the evidence law, and in the law that protects kids from sex. Then last year, the Narendra Modi regime overhauled all the criminal, penal and evidence codes in one go. Now comes Mamata’s law. Ladies and gentlemen in legislatures! Laws don’t make the land safer; lawmen do. What we need are not more or better laws, but more and better policing. The Kolkata rapist would have fled the place if he had heard a sentry shouting “hey, who’s there?” in that ghostly hour, or a beat cop knocking his baton on a window of that deserted seminar hall. And the young doc would have been with us to tell a survivor’s tale.
prasannan@theweek.in