Guest post by KALPANA KANNABIRAN
The Supreme Court judgement reported in some newspapers on 24 February 2011, legitimizing compromise in rape cases, is cause for serious concern. For thirty years now human rights groups and women’s groups have fought difficult battles to have rape recognised as a serious offence both in communities and by courts. Rights advocates have been concerned by the fact that all too often the view of the judiciary converges with the view of the community in seeing women’s sexuality as communally owned property, thus removing any articulation of violence from the crime of rape.
Some years ago, at a workshop of judicial officers, we had one senior officer arguing that if a man found guilty of raping a woman offered to marry her, this offer should be considered as a “mitigating circumstance,” and his sentence reduced to the bare minimum. That done, since his continuing in jail will be detrimental to his new family life, he should be set at liberty under the provisions of the Probation of Offenders Act. Fortunately in that gathering, the majority of officers, most of them junior to the officer concerned, felt strongly that this is a gross misapplication of the law. But the existence of the possibility that a judge might actually rationalize the gross misinterpretation of a law as critical to women as this, has far reaching consequences.
Continue reading Compromise in Rape Cases: Whither Constitutional Morality?: Kalpana Kannabiran
…quipped my brother Dilip in response to the following mail from my sister Pramada:
Presented at conference organized by Department of English (Delhi University) February 14, 2011. The title of the conference was “Postfeminist Postmortems? Gender, Sexualities and Multiple Modernities”.
Thervoy Kandigai Industrial Complex. The Government issued orders alienating 1127 acres of poramboke land in favour of SIPCOT for formation of a new Industrial Complex in Thervoy Kandigai village of Gummidipoondi Taluk, Thiruvallur District. The land development work is in progress now.
