Abstract
On 16 December 2012, India erupted in national outrage against the rape of a 23-year-old female student in New Delhi, christened “Nirbhaya” (fearless). In the aftermath, there was a convergence of multiple discourses that framed post-independent India’s feminist consciousness. In 2020, four men convicted of Nirbhaya’s rape and murder were executed. An eight-year old girl in Kashmir was brutally raped and murdered in January 2018. The trial court sentenced the main accused to life in prison. In December 2019, four men held in yet another horrific rape and death of a 27-year veterinarian in Hyderabad were killed by the police in what has been called an extrajudicial killing. More recently, in 2020, a 19-year old was raped and killed in rural Uttar Pradesh. The victims came from different social locations, castes, tribes, and religious communities. This paper presents a feminist critique of the legal discourse on rape and the death penalty. It looks at an ironical cooptation of the critique of sexual violence by a patriarchal discourse on social injury and collective conscience. The paper examines how fleeting rage against the culprits and the call for death penalty immunizes larger misogynist cultural assumptions. This myopic rage is oblivious to sexual violence in women’s daily lives. Finally, the paper looks at why legal reforms triggered by brutal acts of sexual violence, receiving widespread media attention, fail to achieve systemic societal changes.
Highlights
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the nodal agency that collects, compiles, and disseminates crime data in India, shows a 5.6% increase in reported rape cases between 1971 and 2013
The NCRB reports an alarming spike in child rape cases (Chandra 2018; Singh 2018)
Using crime data from the NCRB to estimate reporting and NFHS to estimate incidence, Gupta (2014) documents that less than 1% incidents of sexual violence cases were reported to the police
Summary
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the nodal agency that collects, compiles, and disseminates crime data in India, shows a 5.6% increase in reported rape cases between 1971 and 2013. Gupta (2014) argues that the rate of increase in violence against women between 1971–2011 is greater than the 2% rate of population growth in India during the same time period. Actual incidence of violence against women could have gone down, increased or remained more or less the same in this period” Gupta (2014) shows the mismatch between reporting and incidence of violence against women by comparing data from the NCRB and the National Family Health Survey (NFHS, a survey of sample households in India). Using crime data from the NCRB to estimate reporting and NFHS to estimate incidence, Gupta (2014) documents that less than 1% incidents of sexual violence cases were reported to the police
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