On October 18, two judges of the Madhya Pradesh High Court passed a breathtaking judgment. The case involved the rape of a 4-year-old girl. The perpetrator had been sentenced to life in prison and had filed an appeal in the High Court praying for a reduction in his sentence to the 15 years he had already served.
The justices partly allowed the appeal, meaning they agreed somewhat with the rapist, and said the following:
“…considering the demonic act of the appellant who appears to have no respect for the dignity of a woman and has the propensity to commit sexual offence even with a girl child aged 4 years, this Court does not find it to be a fit case where the sentence can be reduced to the sentence already undergone by him, however, considering the fact that he was kind enough to leave the prosecutrix alive, this court is of the opinion that life imprisonment can be reduced to 20 years’ rigorous imprisonment… (emphasis added).
In effect, the court was saying the act of brutalising a child and then allowing her to live demonstrated that the accused was compassionate. And surely, that must count for something.
It was a stunning piece of reasoning. And one that was walked back by the judges, shakily, after the inevitable outrage. On October 30, the bench said the observation was an “inadvertent mistake” and pointed to the fact that they had called the crime “demonic” in the same text.
Inadvertent? Justices Subodh Abhayankar and Satyendra Kumar Singh were well versed with the facts and must have also contemplated whether the perpetrator’s attempt to escape after committing this heinous crime (thus ‘leaving’ the victim alive), was an act of kindness.
The judges felt it was — inadvertently. Once they issued the clarification, they signalled it was time to move on. But is it? A word has been dropped, but the order remains the same, despite the “demonic” nature of the crime and the overwhelming evidence. What is also missing is the primary justification for the reduced sentence.
As a result, one Ramsingh, rapist, will be free in another five years. His victim will be 24 then, living possibly because he had omitted to cause her death. When she was presented in court at the trial in 2007, the 4-year-old couldn’t understand any of the questions she was asked. The judges noted that she just kept weeping. One wonders what she will feel now.
India’s history of crimes against girl children is bleak. In 1889, a girl called Phulmoni Dasi was given in marriage to a 30-year-old man called Hari Mohan Maiti. She was 10, and he tried to have intercourse with her. She died as a result. The fact that the 4-year-old victim in this instance survived can only be attributed to chance, to say it was an act of kindness, even inadvertently, is perverse.
Phulmoni Dasi’s case or ‘Empress vs Hari Mohan Maiti’, was hugely consequential for its time. Maiti had been acquitted, because by the prevailing marital rape laws, all he was doing was exercising his conjugal rights. But the first small steps towards raising the age of consent and criminalising marital rape were taken by the early 1890s, shortly after the trial.
Over the decades, there have been many reforms in the laws concerning the sexual abuse of children. A pivotal moment came after years of proceedings and activism in the form of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1983, that arose out of the patently indefensible judgment of the Supreme Court of India in the ‘Mathura’ Rape case.
Some of the language is almost identical. While covering the appeal in the Aarushi case at the Allahabad High Court, I heard one of the judges tell the courtroom that the murdered 13-year-old girl was “habituated” (to having sex). I could only hang my head and quietly glance at the faces of Aarushi’s parents when this happened; they were aghast.
The reduction of the Ramsingh’s sentence in Madhya Pradesh follows a much more infamous remission of sentence just months earlier. On August 15, the team of 11 that raped Bilkis Bano and killed 14 members of her family during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat were set free.
The men had served 14 years of their life terms but were released at the discretion of the State government for ‘good behaviour’. The videos of them being garlanded and offered sweets outside the jail, as some of the faithful touched their feet, were as nauseating a spectacle as one could have witnessed. Last month, in filings before the Supreme Court, it was revealed that the Union government had approved the release of the men. The orders had trickled down from that reservoir on top.
