By Jose Kavi
New Delhi, June 6, 2022: Catholic women leaders in India say the death sentence awarded to a man who had raped and brutalized a woman in Mumbai would work as a deterrent.
“The perpetrators must be taught a lesson and society at large must come to believe in justice. Women are not to be commodities of man’s lust and vengeance. We have a right to live in dignity,” asserts Presentation Sister Dorothy Fernandes.
The national secretary of the Forum of Religious for Justice and Peace, an advocacy group for Catholic religious, was reacting to the June 2 verdict by Additional Sessions Judge HC Shende of a fast-track court in the Mumbai Sakinaka case.
The 34-year-old woman was raped and brutalized inside a parked tempo in suburban Mumbai’s Sakinaka and she died during treatment in hospital in September 2021.
Sister Jessy Kurian, a Supreme Court lawyer, welcoming the verdict, says stringent and deterrent punishment can reduce crime.
“Law should create fear in citizens. Only then crime will reduce. Therefore the fast trial and deterrent punishment is always welcome,” Sister Kurian told Matters India June 5.
At the same time, law alone cannot reduce crime, she explains.
The lawyer nun says it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the case is rarest of rare cases.
“What is happening sometimes is unfortunate that as Chief Justice of India said ‘Voice of the government is not necessarily be the voice of the victim.’ Most of the time the accused is the friend of the government and the advocate for the victim is appointed by the same government. Purposefully he can avoid evidences to save the accused. This is the sad part of criminal procedure,” she adds
“However no innocent should be punished and no one should be given punishment more than what is prescribed by law,” Sister Kurian adds.
Astrid Lobo Gajiwala, a lay woman theologian and member of the Indian Christian Women Movement, sounds a bit cautious.
“I trust the death sentence is related to the murder and not the rape. If the death sentence is given for rape, rapists will murder their victims to avoid identification,” she adds.
Sister Fernandes says fast track judgment in such cases is welcome especially after to the 2012 amendments to laws dealing with rape.
“Every woman is a sister, daughter, mother of man, then why are they treated as if they do not matter?” she asks. She pleads “all well thinking members of our society to work towards the protection and emancipation of all women, so that trust and faith in the judicial system can be restored.”
At the same the verdict is “a call to us women to be alert, active at all times,” she says.
The Sakinaka case had sparked a massive public outcry, with Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray assuring fast justice and the Mumbai Police fling the chargesheet in less than three weeks.
The convict was Mohan Kathwaru Chauhan and his crime bore disturbing parallels to the gang-rape, torture and murder of a physiotherapy intern in Delhi in December 2012.
Judge Shende gave the death sentence citing the “case falls under the category of rarest of rare cases.” The prosecution had said Chauhan brutalized the woman fatally and left no chance of her survival.
The Mumbai Police in the chargesheet had said Chauhan knew the woman and she had been avoiding him, which prompted him to track her down and attack her.
After the Sakinaka case, the Mumbai Police had set up a special squad staffed with women at every police station and intensified patrolling in areas where crime against women were believed to be high.
The Mumbai Police had directed police stations to keep separate records about people who have been named as accused in crime against women in the last five years.
I oppose capital punishment on principle.
Having said that, a life term in prison without parole will meet the ends of justice.
But one issue is very clear – there must be zero tolerance to rape or any form of gender violence, be it in the city or in the church.