Juvenile Justice Bill: Dropping the age bar is an eyewash, not a safety net for women

The flaw in the swift manner in which the Houses of Parliament have cleared the juvenile act is the knee-jerk fashion in which it was done. Seeing as how the Lok Sabha had cleared the dropping of the age from 18 to 16 years in August 2014, the only reason the Rajya Sabha suddenly gave it priority was because the minor-aged offender in the iconic ‘Nirbhaya’ case was set free after three years. And it did not sit well with the public.

Eighteen months have passed with no steps taken to have the bill passed, so let’s not shower too much praise on the ’elders’ who were not sufficiently bothered about the issue until it became populist, and there was public pressure.

Those are the operative words.

Does action have to be initiated only when there is a major backlash and public opinion becomes hostile and demands change?

Why was this not an issue deserving of debate and reform on its own merit and not personalised because of one specific case. If the killer had stayed in for another two years, would the change in age have been duly deferred. The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’.

Since 16 is also an arbitrary number, one has to ask how much research has gone into the discussions, and how has the age of 16 been identified as the right one to deem an individual an adult. In the US, for example, even a 13-year-old can be charged as an adult depending on the nature of the crime. What would happen if a 15-year-old lout commits a rape this week? Do we go back to the drawing board?

Ironically, that offender whose heinous act of rape and murder instigated the change in age is home free since the bill is not retrospective.

Is Ghulam Nabi Azad being unutterably naive when he says that Nirbhaya’s (Jyoti Singh) mother is not fighting for justice only for her daughter, but to ensure that such a crime doesn’t happen again?

There is no guarantee against the crimes of rape or murder, and it would be absurd to think that this two-year drop will act as a deterrent. After the brutal murder of the girl in the bus and now the rape graph has risen by 75 percent. We are living in a warp if we truly think that rapists are particularly concerned about the niceties of the law when they carry out their dastardly deed.

In fact, in a convoluted manner — but certainly one that needs to be acknowledged — the concern that the announcement of 16 as the new age of adult reckoning might be seen as an encouragement to the 15-plus group, whose hormones are running equally wild. Ask any girl in urban and rural India about the teenage hoodlums in the train, in the bus, in the fields, on the short walk home and their scary and palpable insolence. You and I both know that this act in Parliament is appeasement to the public outrage at the release of the murderer and on its own, is pretty much ineffective.

Which one of us has not seen the roadside Romeo make obscene comments, touch a woman on a train, cop a feel on a bus, stand rabidly with his buddies at a street corner leering as a girl comes home from school. Fourteen, 15, whatever.

But as a first step in a reform package the drop in age carries weight, if there are more steps to be taken. And that reform has to be linked directly to the basic tenet of respect for women, full stop.

Without that mental foundation, no amount of laws will change anything. The present hypocritical approach where women are venerated and mocked at the same altar has to be ended. We have to possess the national will to do it. So long as women are seen as sex objects, as property, or a commodity to be exploited, and the mindset sees them as prey, the future remains bleak.

We have to start from scratch.

We are still a country where a panchayat can order a rape of a woman as a punishment and it is accepted tacitly. A country where husbands beat wives for sport. Where there are people who still believe in sati and propagate it. That is how abysmally low we are on the issue.

We then have to judicially list the crimes for which the option of treating the perpetrators as adults is available. In the case of rape or murder, the circumstances and the parameters of the act have to factored in and age made a secondary consideration. Even 14 is okay if the crime was ghoulish and unspeakable.

For now, let us hope that government and the lawmakers will go several bridges further and not con themselves into believing they have made India a safer place by this standalone step.

They have not.