In the Parliament on Monday, Rajya Sabha member Jaya

Bachchan called for 'lynching' of the accused in full public

view.

MP Roopa Ganguly supported the demand and called for

"public hangings" of rapists, saying that it should be made a
spectacle.
Will incidents of rape cases in India start falling less if
perpetrators are allowed to be lynched instantly by mobs?

Such incendiary comments may help release the collective

frustration of an outraged society and satiate the anger, but
it unwittingly also encourages us to disrespect law.
Social media is filled with statuses asking the rapists in
Hyderabad case to be hanged.
#HangRapists was trending on twitter

Such outrage also stops us from asking the real solution of the
problem.
 What is the punishment for rape in India?

 IPC section 376 lays down the punishment for the offence of
rape.

 Not be less than seven years but which may be for life or for
a term extending up to ten years

 For Gang rape and authority figures – 10 years

After the December 2012 Nirbhaya Rape case,
the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, added new
categories of offenses regarding violence against women and
girls and made punishment more stringent, including death
penalty for repeat offenders.

After Kathua rape case in 2018, further amendments in

provisions for punishment for raping minors.
• Despite these changes to the law, however, India is a country
that is reluctant to carry out the death penalty.

• It is currently prescribed only for the "rarest of rare" cases -

the interpretation of which is left to the court.

• The last convicted rapist to be hanged was in 2004

Why hanging rapists won't solve the problem of rape
or even make it worse?

It actually deters the system from handing out convictions.

The severity of the punishments meant many of the accused

walk free due to "insufficient evidence" and because there
is no option of a less harsh sentence.
In most cases, the perpetrators are mostly known to the
victims and their guardians, who may decide to not report
the crime in guilt of "sending a person they know to the
gallows".

According to the most recent data on rape released by the

National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), as 32,559 rapes
were reported in India in 2017 and in 93.1% of the cases, the
accused were known to the victims.
Victims have to fight cases for a long time as in cases of death
penalty, those convicted have many chances to appeal
against their sentence.
 Nirbhaya case
The men convicted in India's most high-profile rape case in
recent years - of a medical student who died of her injuries
after being raped in December 2012 - are still appealing
against the death penalties handed out by a "fast-track" trial
court that in September 2013.

option of appealing to the president.

Death penalty may lead to more post-rape murder as leaving a
survivor would pose a greater risk of being caught and
sentenced to death.
• Data from 2017 NCRB reveals that in Delhi alone,
92.9 percent cases of crime against women were pending in
various district courts with a conviction rate of just 33.2
percent.

• Conviction rate of people arrested for rape remains stuck

around 25 percent
 No quantifiable data for deterrence
• You will never be able to know how many people didn't
commit the crime because of the fear of death penalty.
• There is no way to measure it.
• It is also wrong that there is no less harsh sentence, just as
in murder death penalty is given in rarest of rare cases, for
rape also we can have similar provisions.
• Surety of punishment > severity of punishment
• We need to have surety and severity both.
 Justice JS Verma committee
and
Law Commission

both came out against the death penalty.

• Multiple studies prove that nowhere in the world, capital
punishment has helped in reducing the no. of rape cases.

• Incidents of rape and violence against women have continued

undeterred even in countries such as Saudi Arabia where rape is
punishable by death and treated at par with terror.

• Experts and anti-death penalty activists repeatedly point out that

hanging criminals for rape may result in a poorer rate of
conviction.
It is easier for the govt to amend laws and bring harsher
punishments, but harder to do such things, which will make
actual difference.

We need to shift our outrage towards systematic solutions and

addressing the root causes of rape culture that exists in the
society.
 What should be done then?
Instead of demanding knee-jerk solutions from the
government, we should demand
 Gender sensitisation
 Structured education and communication about rape and
rape laws in the country
 sensitisation of police so victims feel comfortable to report
the crime and
 better investigations so the conviction rate increases.
 THANK YOU

Dr. Mahipal Singh Rathore

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