Who's afraid of the death penalty?

Last week industrialist Anand Mahindra tweeted that he would “volunteer unhesitatingly” to execute those who rape young girls in this country. His angry tweet, which came after yet another gruesome rape and murder of a little girl, garnered enthusiastic response amongst his six million-plus followers.

Mahindra expressed the fury that a lot of us feel now. Rape is a terrible, violent crime. But the rape of a child? That is an unspeakable horror, an act of incalculable depravity. Yet it happens with sickening regularity in our country. An eight-year-old girl drugged, tortured, gang-raped and murdered in Kathua; a minor allegedly raped by an MLA in Unnao; a nine-year-old girl raped and killed in Surat; a seven-year-old raped and strangled to death in Etah… That’s just the news from the last couple of weeks. In January this year, an eight-month-old baby was raped in Delhi.

So, yes, a lot of us feel that the sociopaths who commit these diabolic crimes should be simply strung up. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau show that the number of child rapes has gone up by 82 per cent between 2015 and 2016 (the latest years for which figures are available). We talk heatedly about the need to do something, anything, to stop this abomination. A five- to 10-year jail term, or even life imprisonment, prescribed by the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act doesn’t seem like adequate punishment, we say.

Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi declared last week that her ministry was in favour of amending the POCSO Act to make the rape of minors below 12 years carry the death sentence. Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh want to do the same. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana have already passed laws to this effect.

Of course, experts point out that worldwide there is no evidence to suggest that capital punishment is a deterrent to crime. They argue that if you make child rape punishable by death, the rate of conviction will plummet and many of these crimes won’t be reported at all.

Let us for a moment try and refute these arguments. Just as there is no evidence to suggest that the death penalty deters crime, nor is there any evidence to show that it encourages crime. Again, the conviction rate for child sexual abuse is pretty abysmal anyway (for example, between January 2013 and September 2015, the conviction rate was less than 17 per cent in Delhi). Why baulk at the death penalty then? Why not make examples of the few whom we do get to convict? Why not applaud the states that are making child rape punishable by death?

I’ll tell you why not. Forget the rightness or wrongness of awarding the death sentence for child rape. It won’t work mainly because it is a hollow political stunt, a feeble and cynical attempt to respond to the public outcry against the growing incidence of child rape, while doing absolutely nothing to fix our flawed — and excruciatingly slow — criminal justice system.

Does it matter what the punishment for child rape is when the rapist is smugly aware that the case against him will likely collapse either because the police are inept or in collusion with him? Or that the establishment will protect him? Or that it will pressure the child’s family to withdraw the charges? Or that the case will drag on for years? Even in the high-profile December 2012 Nirbhaya rape case, and nearly a year after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence, the guilty have still not been executed.

Indeed, as long as criminals sense a culture of impunity, and politicians field men with rape charges and shield them when they’re caught with their pants down, as long as the police are lazy, corrupt and riddled with misogyny, and justice is delayed for years and years, child rape — or any rape — will flourish in our country.
 

Death penalty or no death penalty.