Ordinance on rape is deliberate dodge by govt: Yogendra Yadav

Swaraj India national president Yogendra Yadav is of the view the central government’s ordinance for capital punishment to rapists of girls of below 12 years was a deliberate dodge on the government’s part to distract public attention from its failure on law and order and lacunae in the system which allows influential criminals to escape the law with temerity.

Yadav who was in Bhopal to take part in a protest said Unnao and Kathua incidents demonstrated amply as to how accused were shielded by those in power. In Unnao case a lawmaker from the ruling party itself happened to be the main accused and entire police machinery appeared to be at his beck and call. This was the reason the main accused’s brother could easily walk into the police station and beat up father of the rape victim.

“These are the real lacunae in the system and it cannot be improved by any piece of law until and unless it is implemented effectively”, said Yadav.

Yogendra Yadav said, “The critical question about Kathua and Unnao is not merely that rape happened and that it was a heinous crime. What makes it critical is the third level of the incidents that those in charge of defending the Constitution and ensuring rule of law were siding with criminals.”

Yadav said, “Sadly thousands of rapes happen in the country every day. Mostly go unreported. We don’t expect the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to respond to every heinous crime in the country but he must respond to the situation when those in power use the law enforcing agencies to shield themselves after committing crimes and harass the victims at will.”

But what happened was that the PM kept silence for a very long time and when he spoke he was abstract, philosophical, didn’t name the incident and also didn’t acknowledge the fact that his own party men were involved in the crime. He didn’t offer any concrete step either to improve the situation, he said.

He said spontaneous outrage in public and their demand for a capital punishment was understandable but ‘when a government says that it will bring an ordinance for a capital punishment to a rapist it is nothing but a deliberate dodge on its part to distract people’s attention from real issues so that they don’t ask questions to the government.”

According to Yadav, it’s not severity of punishment but certainty of punishment which is a deterrent. “What causes fear to the mind of criminal is not that he will get life imprisonment or death sentence but that he will be caught and tried and that he cannot escape the law even if he is in power. JS Verma Committee has already said that death sentence to a rapist can be a counter-productive”, he added.