Congress taps students opinion to build campaign against release of juvenile rapist

BENGALURU: The Congress’ student wing National Students Union of India (NSUI) has taken up a signature campaign against the release of the juvenile rapist of Jyothi Singh in Karnataka, the largest state ruled by the party and in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Karnataka unit of the body, which drew up the programme, held signature campaigns in colleges including the prestigious Mount Carmel in Bengaluru city, where party vice-president Rahul Gandhi recently delivered a lecture on women’ empowerment and safety.

“We wanted feedback from the students on how they felt about the release of the juvenile rapist, so that we could plan our future action against it. We have got a tremendous response and the students are very angry about his release,” NSUI Karnataka president H S Manjunatha, who studies at Sheshadripuram law college, told ET.

The petition, signed by over 20,000 students in colleges in Bengaluru alone, besides additional signatures from Mysuru, the backward Raichur district and the communally sensitive Mangaluru city, will be sent to President Pranab Mukherjee, reflecting the voice of the students.

The petition states its intent is to “Oppose and boycott the custodial release of the rapist in the 2012 NIRBAYA (as Jyothi Singh was dubbed by the media) rape case, which took place in Delhi.”

The petition says: “We agitate and refute this act releasing the culprit just because he was under 18, a minor, when the incident took place .Such an injustice will provoke other evil and cruel people to execute such acts. To diminish and destroy such evil minds, NSUI and the whole of the student fraternity should raise their voice through this signature campaign shows support in getting justice in that case and any such cases in future.”

Students from Mount Carmel college, Bengaluru’s most prestigious all-girls college, have written a flood of comments. Sanjana, studying final year BCom, wrote: “Get him (the juvenile rapist) to Mount Carmel college. We will punish him.”

Sanika Athavale, also a third year commerce student and cultural secretary of the Mount Carmel college students union told ET: “The decision to release the rapist is very foolish. When he committed the crime, he was no juvenile, it is not something a normal and sane 25 or 30-year-old would have done. Age is not how you judge whether someone is juvenile or not. It is really disheartening that the rule was not changed to stop his release, something that the entire nation wants to see.”

Students at Christ University, another prestigious institution in Bengaluru which is co-education, took a different tone. Student Rakshita, studying law in Christ University, wrote: “We could have kept him in the prison for some more time , educated him and made him a good person and then released him.”