Although the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013 (aka the anti-rape Bill) based on the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee, became law on March 22 after getting the President’s assent, in the streets of India’s chaotic cities and isolated hamlets of rural India where the rule of law is at best nominal, nothing seems to have changed. Readers may recall that the anti-rape Bill is the outcome of the vicious gang-rape on December 16 of a 23-year-old paramedic student, and her subsequent death in Singapore where she was belatedly sent for medical treatment. Following national outrage over the Union government’s casual response to the atrocity, an expert committee chaired by Justice J.S. Verma — a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of India — was appointed to recommend ways and means to roll back the wave of gender crimes sweeping the nation. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act incorporates some of the committee’s radical recommendations — including making stalking and voyeurism hitherto celebrated in mainstream Indian cinema, if not society, as innocent courtship rituals — into criminal offences. However, not all of the committee’s recommendations have been accepted by the Congress-led UPA-II government which piloted the legislation through Parliament. Notable omissions are application of the provisions of the Act to the armed forces, initiating police reforms, and reducing the age of consent to 16 to avoid criminalisation of consensual teenage sex.
However, as argued in our detailed cover story this month, conceding women citizens their rightful equal and honourable status in Indian society which prides itself on its ancient culture and civilization, requires more ambitious initiatives than cosmetic legal reforms which are certain to be implemented half-heartedly in a stubbornly patriarchal social order where gender discrimination and oppression is pervasive and deep-rooted. Stern new laws, police and judicial reforms recommended by the Justice Verma Committee apart, the country’s educators — schools, teachers, parents — have a crucial role to play. They need to preach and practice gender egalitarianism and respect for the girl child and women in classrooms, workplaces and at home. Moreover parents need to review the tradition of strict segregation of the sexes which is normative in Indian society. It prevents the development of respectful socialisation skills, particularly within dominant males in patriarchal communities. Such parental oppression and unnatural segregation are to a great extent the cause of gender discrimination and violence in our society.
And as every April, in our special report feature, there’s the now familiar lament about the neglect of education and missed opportunity to develop the nation’s abundant human capital. It’s astonishing but true: for the world’s largest child population (480 million), the Union Budget 2013-14 spares only 0.70 percent of GDP and less than 5 percent of budgetary outlay. If the Central government had been willing to spend a mere Rs.23,204 crore or 0.21 percent of GDP additionally, it could have equipped every government primary school countrywide with a library, laboratory and lavatories. We have been running an updated EW lib-lab-lav funding calculus for four years now, without any reaction from government or intelligentsia/academia. For this, I blame not just the uncaring Central and state governments, but also the country’s apathetic middle class — an unholy combination robbing India’s children of their future.
