India's last resource
The measure was established to contain the growing violations in India, considered as an epidemic. The Government of Narendra Modi wants to respond to the indignation that has settled in society, after the savage rape and death of an innocent eight-year-old girl in the Kashmir area of the Asian country.
According to the National Crime Registry Agency of India, during 2016 almost 20,000 of the 38,947 rape complaints filed to the Indian Police had minors as victims. The policy of toughening the Penal Code is not new in India. Previous governments have had similar procedures: in case of rape, wave of indignation and protests, more legal upsurge. But, the problem of violations does not seem to remit.
The torture, rape, and murder of the girl in Kashmir generated in the last weeks a great indignation in India. The Government responded the situation with another hardening of sentences. On this occasion, they approved the death penalty for rapists of children under 12 years of age.
In the Asian country, many people consider that it is not necessary to toughen prison sentences, is only required that the aggressors know that they will be condemned. According to data from the Government itself, there are more than 100,000 cases of rape pending resolution in the courts in India. For example, there is only 28 percent of convictions in cases of children’s rape.
In addition, the hardening antecedents are not encouraging. Five years after the rape and murder of a university student in New Delhi on December 2012, everything remains undone, because most of the reforms are still to be implemented. In fact, many consider that, far from being a solution, the death penalty is a distraction from the Government, which tries to appeal to public anger.
It is valid to mention that the caste system that dominates India favors, above all in rural areas, that high-caste men violate lower-level women with total freedom and impunity, and that is a great injustice. The well-known sociologist Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar, said that for them to rape a woman of low caste is nothing more than a crime, they do not consider it that way, and many times they are covered up by the police and other institutions of power.
