Rape Law Reforms in India: Catalyst to Gender Justice or Modernization in Legal Reforms?

Abstract

The chapter explores the issues of rape in India from the broader perspective of feminism(s) and gender justice. The question central to this study is: are adequate to provide gender justice or the modernization of the legal system is merely a part of the neoliberal social order of contemporary India? The chapter has examined the nature of law and/or it’s functioning along with critical assessment of the legal provisions and recent Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 in relation to rape in India. The chapter analyses how historically there is always a clear distinction between law–as-legislation and the law-in-practice. For example, how in every rape trial, a woman goes through a verbal rape in the name of judicial verification, and the judicial discourse objectifies and sexualizes the body by humiliating the victim in a packed courtroom. The chapter thus attempts to evaluate the feminists’ claim that legal reforms and criminal justice, in the main disfavour women’s interests and viewpoints conceptually, procedurally and substantively. This is in spite of the fact that some laws actually promote formal equality while, at the same time, failing by and large to deliver substantial equality and how gender justice remains a pipedream in spite of the fact that the incidence of rape is alarmingly growing and the rape conviction has remained shamelessly low in India. The chapter advocates that promises and premises for delivering gender justice should be Feminist Lawmaking rather than Modernization in Legal Reform for contemporary India.