The conviction on Tuesday of four men for the brutal rape and murder of a 23-year-old student late last year in Delhi shows that there is no reason justice cannot be delivered swiftly in India, a country where most legal cases drag on for years. Unfortunately, the case also demonstrates that it takes thousands of people protesting in the streets to put enough pressure on Indian lawmakers to get the wheels of justice moving.
As the world’s largest democracy, India is filled with potential but it also suffers many political and economic handicaps, as we wrote in an editorial on Monday. One of the more important challenges facing the country is ensuring the safety of its citizens, particularly its women. India’s police are notoriously corrupt, underpaid and poorly trained. There are far too few courts, judges and lawyers to serve the needs of the country’s 1.2 billion people. In a speech earlier this year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that the country has a backlog of 30 million legal cases and 26 percent of them had been pending for more than 5 years. Those numbers, of course, do not account for crimes that never get to court because the police are reluctant to file new cases or investigate those that are registered.
Some activists and family members of the 23-year-old victim have been arguing that nothing less than a death sentence for the four convicted men will satisfy them. (A fifth defendant was found dead in his jail cell in March and a sixth was sentenced to three years in juvenile court last month.) The death penalty may seem an appealing end to this case on an emotional level but it will serve no purpose other than to perpetuate violence. It would be a far greater tribute to the memory of the student, who cannot be named because Indian law forbids the identification of rape victims, if Indian society finally got on with the difficult work of making the country safe for its women, and its police and judicial system function for all of its people.
Sadly, there has been no shortage of examples of heinous crimes against women since the Delhi rape. Last month, a photojournalist was assaulted and raped by a gang of men in Mumbai, the country’s financial capital that many Indians consider to be a much safer city for women than Delhi. “It is a crime to be born as a woman in India. You always live in fear as anything can happen to you at any time,” a 27-year-old female police officer who was raped three weeks ago in eastern India as she took the body of her sister to be cremated, told Bloomberg News recently.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Violence Against Women in India
The conviction on Tuesday of four men for the brutal rape and murder of a 23-year-old student late last year in Delhi shows that there is no reason justice cannot be delivered swiftly in India, a country where most legal cases drag on for years. Unfortunately, the case also demonstrates that it takes thousands of people protesting in the streets to put enough pressure on Indian lawmakers to get the wheels of justice moving.
As the world’s largest democracy, India is filled with potential but it also suffers many political and economic handicaps, as we wrote in an editorial on Monday. One of the more important challenges facing the country is ensuring the safety of its citizens, particularly its women. India’s police are notoriously corrupt, underpaid and poorly trained. There are far too few courts, judges and lawyers to serve the needs of the country’s 1.2 billion people. In a speech earlier this year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that the country has a backlog of 30 million legal cases and 26 percent of them had been pending for more than 5 years. Those numbers, of course, do not account for crimes that never get to court because the police are reluctant to file new cases or investigate those that are registered.
Some activists and family members of the 23-year-old victim have been arguing that nothing less than a death sentence for the four convicted men will satisfy them. (A fifth defendant was found dead in his jail cell in March and a sixth was sentenced to three years in juvenile court last month.) The death penalty may seem an appealing end to this case on an emotional level but it will serve no purpose other than to perpetuate violence. It would be a far greater tribute to the memory of the student, who cannot be named because Indian law forbids the identification of rape victims, if Indian society finally got on with the difficult work of making the country safe for its women, and its police and judicial system function for all of its people.
Sadly, there has been no shortage of examples of heinous crimes against women since the Delhi rape. Last month, a photojournalist was assaulted and raped by a gang of men in Mumbai, the country’s financial capital that many Indians consider to be a much safer city for women than Delhi. “It is a crime to be born as a woman in India. You always live in fear as anything can happen to you at any time,” a 27-year-old female police officer who was raped three weeks ago in eastern India as she took the body of her sister to be cremated, told Bloomberg News recently.
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