We need a systematic change.

We all are understandably enraged by what happened to Late Dr Moumita Debnath on the 9^th of August 2024. Doctors are protesting for their security and ensuring justice for Moumita, followed by nationwide protests of citizens and doctors alike. This all is justified, and probably much more is required to make people accountable for this heinous crime, but the bigger problem is elsewhere. Until that is solved, we will keep seeing the recurrence of such horrific crimes again and again.

I would like to argue that the root of the problem is not the crime or the criminal, it’s the law enforcement and the justice system of India, most of the time which makes a mockery of the complete process, this is not just about the crimes related to females, but any other criminal case you see our police forces keep failing spectacularly. There are all sorts of reasons, incompetency, corruption, lack of application of mind when dealing with cases etc.

Every passing year police keep breaking their own records of botching up cases, and we have reached to a situation where no one trusts them and anything beyond a certain level and there’s a request to transfer the case to CBI every time there’s a complex case. As we can see from the database from National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) we will find that there were a total of 31,516 rape cases registered out of which 1004 were registered for rape of minors (National Crime Records Bureau 2022, p218). According to the same report, there were another 3,288 cases registered in 2022 for attempt to rape. Both of which are amongst the most heinous crimes against women. However, during the same period, only 5,167 cases resulted in a conviction, which resulted in just a 27.4% conviction rate.

Just shouting and doing activism over one case which somehow was TRP-worthy and hence was picked up by the media, will not change anything. We need systematic change, a change where complaint from some world-class wrestlers against some powerful boss with political connections is not ignored, where it doesn’t matter who’s the criminal, where the political motives of a government take a back seat to give a clear message that such things won’t be tolerated. Or where convicts of Gang rape serving life sentences are released due to good behaviour. (‘Abuse of power’: Supreme Court scraps release of Bilkis case rape-murder convicts) The Supreme Court Judgement on the same can be accessed here.

In the Kolkata case itself, we have seen the misuse of state machinery, where if left to the local police, they were ready to declare it as suicide, the principal of the college, who seems to have gotten a new posting to some other college. There will be some other TRP-worthy tragedy and the media will move to that and we will forget about this and the business will continue as usual. Like we have forgotten about the death of three students in the basement of RAU’s IAS, like we have forgotten about the May 19^th hit-and-run case in Pune and other cases before that.

Our police need to do more than try to show they are doing something under the pressure, they need to do justice not just for one case which is under scrutiny by the media and the nation but also for hundreds of other cases which no one knows about and that needs a cultural and systematic change.

Now coming to the 1st tier of the judiciary, the lower courts sometimes completely ignore the law and go against the judgements of higher courts including the Supreme Court of India. In some rare cases, even the High Courts have given less than satisfactory judgements which were later corrected by the Supreme Court of India. Do you remember the Pune hit-and-run case where a juvenile was given bail on the condition of writing a 300-word essay on road safety? I can provide multiple other examples, but then I don’t want to be held under contempt of court.