The gangrape victim of Rohtak, Haryana has said that she has been raped by the same ‘5 accused’ who raped her three years earlier has enraged the nation yet again. Rape is a serious offence and India is perhaps the only country where a rape case can bring the public on streets for days (Nirbhaya and Priyadarshini Mattoo agitations) and threaten the ruling governments.
There are lynchings that have happened when the people as much as get a whiff of an ‘alleged rape’ as it happened in the Nagaland lynching case which later turned out to be a case of consensual sex between the girl and the lynched man Syed Sarif Khan.
In the Nagaland case, the victim was a man who was murdered because people had the belief that he would ‘get away’ with the rape. This belief, that anyone can get away with rape, despite the many laws, is a serious question mark on the efficiency of our law enforcement system.
Rohtak (Haryana) (17.7.16): Gang rape victim allegedly raped again by the “same 5 accused” three years later pic.twitter.com/WOaRXN81EI
— ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2016
There are several cases like this but the problem is that in all cases it is the victim who suffers while the common public feels cheated and aggrieved by the high-handedness and careless approach of the law enforcement agencies while the political class believes that merely by crafting more laws with cleverer words, it has done its job but what they should be asked is that why the prevailing laws are not enough to sort out crimes like rape?
The fact that we need to realize is that we can have more laws, in fact, we can have a new law a day but that won’t sort out the problem.
The accused tried to offer us money but we want justice, we want them to be sentenced to death: Brother of victim pic.twitter.com/KniLxCr9Tb
— ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2016
What India needs, is swifter and progressive investigating agencies which, without fear or favour or laziness, work towards digging the truth out.
What we need is society’s support for the victims and also for the law enforcement agencies and to give it the confidence that justice will be done and that before taking the law into their hands, it should wait and watch.
Rape is a heinous crime, especially in a country like India where matrilineal societies still exist, and there is only one way to stop it; by making our law enforcement agencies to understand that this is one crime which makes Indian public lose confidence in the very idea of justice and that it is a crime that has the potential to bring Indians on to the streets and if that situation has to be averted, then it is up to the law to ensure that justice is done at all costs and at all times.
Let in the case of Rohtak and in every case, law agencies work towards getting justice and justice alone.
