Despite changes after 2012 horror, India’s rape victims denied speedy justice
NEW DELHI, (Reuters) - India launched fast-track courts and a tougher rape law that included the death penalty after a gruesome assault on a young woman shocked the country in 2012, but crime statistics indicate the situation has got worse, not better, since then.
The data was collated by Reuters amid mounting public anger over crimes against women after two horrific cases in recent months that has, once again, cast a harsh light on systemic problems plaguing the country’s police and courts.
The gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kashmir state and the arrest of a ruling party legislator for the rape of a teenage mother in Uttar Pradesh province have sparked nationwide outrage, drawing nightmarish parallels with the gang rape and murder of a student in New Delhi six years ago.
Amid the wave of anger at that time, the government promised to speed up rape trials, provide harsher penalties, including the death sentence in extreme cases, and a law against stalking.
But statistics show that since 2012, reported rape cases climbed 60 percent to around 40,000 in 2016, with child rape accounting for about 40 percent. The conviction rate of people arrested for rape remains stuck around 25 percent.
The backlog of rape cases pending trial stood at more than 133,000 by the end of 2016, up from about 100,000 in 2012, National Crime Records Bureau data showed. In each year during that period, about 85 percent of the total rape cases being heard remained pending.
In general, conviction rates for crime against women - deaths following demands for dowry, assault, kidnapping as well as rape - are lower than for most other crimes.
“The government can make a hundred laws and yet it will fail because there is no enforcement,” said Dushyant Dave, a senior lawyer at India’s Supreme Court.
“It needs to take this as an epidemic and treat it accordingly, by completely overhauling the police machinery, prosecutors and the judicial system.”
Crime statistics showed that police files remain open for about a third of all rapes that were investigated for each year between 2012 and 2016.
Understaffing is an issue. The government told parliament last month police had a sanctioned strength of nearly 2 million officers, but almost a quarter of those positions were vacant.
Some of the worst accusations against the police stem from cases, like the ones in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, where they are alleged to have bowed to pressure from people of influence to bury cases.
Vappala Balachandran, a former top police officer in the western state of Maharashtra who has criticised the government’s response to the recent cases, described how powerful local politicians stall police investigations.
“The one weapon the politician has is the threat of transfer (of police officers) and which they routinely exercise. So the investigation is slow, improper and weak,” Balachandran said.