https://hk.news.yahoo.com/印度17男輪姦聽障女童 上庭遭50名律師狂毆-041456740.html
印度17男輪姦聽障女童 上庭遭50名律師狂毆
on.cc 東網
6.2k 人追蹤
2018年7月23日 下午12:14
印度真奈警方上周二（17日）拘捕17名男子，他們涉嫌連續7個月強姦一名12歲聽障女童。該批疑犯抵達法庭時，遭逾50名律師痛毆，情境更被拍下。律師公會更表明不會為這些被告辯護，亦反對他們獲得法援。
當時疑犯由法院大樓送往還押候審，警方認為案件具爭議，故將疑犯分成數批，分別護送出法院。不過，大批身穿白襯衫的年輕律師及法律系學生，在梯間堵截疑犯，蜂擁而上將他們打倒在地。部分人擋住欲阻攔的警員，其他人則拳腳交加，痛毆倒在地上的疑犯。
「法院不是警局，不是保障被告的地方！不要包庇這些罪犯！」有年輕律師高喊。有與警員爭辯的女律師直斥︰「要是你們在這之前就痛打這群人，事情就不會發生了。這些犯人現時坐在法院大樓內並笑着。」事件擾攘至晚上，警方才把全部疑犯護送離開。
17 male gang rape in India, hearing impaired girls, courtesy of 50 lawyers
[on.cc East Net]
On.cc East Net
6.2k person tracking
July 23, 2018, 12:14 PM
Indian Chennai police arrested 17 men last Tuesday (17th) who were suspected of raping a 12-year-old hearing-impaired girl for seven months. When the suspects arrived in the court, more than 50 lawyers were beaten and the situation was photographed. The Law Society also stated that it would not defend these defendants and opposed their access to legal aid.
At that time, the suspect was sent to the remand for trial by the court building. The police believed that the case was controversial. Therefore, the suspects were divided into several batches and escorted out of the court. However, a large number of young lawyers and law students wearing white shirts blocked the suspects in the ladder and swarmed them to the ground. Some people blocked the police officers who wanted to block, while others used their fists and fists to hurt the suspects on the ground.
"The court is not a police station, it is not a place to protect the defendants! Don't cover up these criminals!" A young lawyer shouted. There is a female lawyer who argues with the police officer. "If you beat this group before this, things will not happen. These prisoners are now sitting in the court building and laughing." The incident was disturbed until the evening. Escort all suspects away.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/sta...12-year-old-girl-with-a-hearing-disorder.html
In India’s ‘Chennai Horror,’ 17 men face charges in the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl with a hearing disorder
By Rosie DiMannoStar Columnist
Fri., July 20, 2018
WARNING! Graphic content
Men in dress shirts thrashing men in dress shirts. A high-pitched shrieking as the targets of all those blows and kicks scrunch their bodies on the floor in a vain attempt to protect themselves.
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/opinion/star-columnists/2018/07/20/in-indias-chennai-horror-17-men-face-charges-in-the-sexual-assault-of-a-12-year-old-girl-with-a-hearing-disorder/indian_protest.jpg)
April 12: Indian activists and students protest against the alleged political silence over the rape of a child near Jammu and a rape case in Uttar Pradesh state, in New Delhi. (SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES file photo)
The melee spills out into a stairwell.
This appalling scene was captured on Tuesday, in an Indian courthouse, where 17 males were brought for a first appearance on charges of gang-raping and otherwise sexually molesting a 12-year-old girl with a hearing disorder over a seven-month period.
Those inflicting the wallops are lawyers.
Those receiving them are supposed to be their clients.
Except the Chennai High Court Advocate Association has declared none of their attorneys will take the case to represent any of the defendants.
The community’s anger is understandable, expressed in furious and incendiary postings on the comment section of Indian newspapers: Shoot them! Hang them! Burn them!
On the opposite end of the rage spectrum, following the rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in a separate incident earlier this year, a government minister who attended a protest rally in support of the accused was anonymously quoted in the New York Times as saying, “So what if a girl died? Many girls die every day.”
There is a sectarian subtext to the rhetoric, with Hindus blaming Muslims, Muslims blaming Hindus, opponents of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party — several of its members have publicly defended the accused — slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi for unacceptable silence in the face of high-profile sexual assaults against young girls across the country, and intellectuals tying the can to the long-gone East India Company imposing western culture on India, as if the sexually diabolical were a cascading outcome of laws that abolished suttee and legalized the remarriage of widows.
You might be interested in
I don’t know what any of that has to do with vile crimes against children, but there’s no dispute that India, most populous democratic country in the world, has been plunged into an existential maelstrom, with many incidents of sexual assault against minors deepening religious, political and ethical divides, as accounts of unspeakable violence grips the public.
Vigilante mobs, infused by a lust for vengeance and apparently corralled via rumours on social apps about child kidnappings and assaults, have been responsible for 20 lynching or beating deaths in the past two months, according to Indian media reports.
While a horrified citizenry recoils, a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll released in June named India as the most dangerous country in the world for women, ahead of such war-torn nations as Afghanistan and Syria — a rape occurring at least every 20 minutes, as per data from the National Crimes Records Bureau. Yet India, in recent years, had also been characterized as one of the countries with the lowest per capita rates of rape, according to a UN comparative study.
It’s difficult to reconcile these two counter claims.
But there’s little doubt that something sinister happened in Chennai, a coastal city in the southeast, and, in January, in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the latter event, the eight-year-old from a seminomadic Muslim community, was abducted, imprisoned for a week in a temple — so says the police charge sheet — drugged, starved, repeatedly raped before she was slain and her body thrown into the forest. One of the accused was also a police officer, and, claims the prosecution, asked his co-conspirators to hold off killing the child so that he could rape her a last time.
Sex crimes against children are hardly exclusive to any country on the planet or any ethnicity. Toronto has sadly seen its share of them.
There’s an extra dimension of savagery, however, in the “Chennai Horror,” as it’s being called, which provoked the chaotic courthouse brawl on Tuesday.
Police say the men allegedly took turns raping the child, feeding her drinks laced with drugs, and videotaping the assaults — in them they are brandishing knives — threatening to make the contents public if the girl told her family.
The girl lives with her mother in an upscale gated community apartment complex, with a jungle gym and a pool, home to some 350 families in multiple blocks. The child’s businessman father resides in another city with an older daughter. It was the sister who, on a visit home last week, concerned about the younger’s girl fatigue and depression, first raised suspicions. When the 11-year-old finally revealed her harrowing experience, the family filed a complaint with the local all-women police department. (India has about 200 all-female police substations, formed specifically to investigate and help curb gender crimes.)
All of the defendants worked in the complex, in security, as elevator operators, handymen and housekeeping staff.
Police say the first sexual assault was by an elevator operator who subsequently encouraged others, including colleagues, to join the episodes of sexual wretchedness, most of it taking place in isolated niches of the complex and vacant units, in the evening, when her mother believed her to playing with other kids.
“They threatened the child at knife-point,” said the captain of the all-woman police station, after arresting the men. “This is the worst crime this world has seen yet, as far as I’m concerned. Few of them raped her; some have fondled her during this act. Some others have sexually harassed her, while others have watched the assault video. They are all guilty, because not one of them tried to stop this brutality. They will all be punished.”
Three of the accused are in their 60s, four in their 50s, three in their 40s, the rest in their 30s and 20s. They have been variously charged with aggravated penetrative sexual assault, sexual assault, harassment upon a child, attempted murder and criminal intimidation.
Since the news exploded, women who live at the complex have taken it upon themselves to guard the community, also preventing both journalists from entering and citizens from the wider city who’ve been demonstrating for swift, lethal justice against the defendants.
“If left to us, we will murder them with our bare hands,” one woman told the Times of India. “How can they do this to a small child?’ ”
Victim assistance groups have also been barred, despite arguing that every child in the complex must be questioned about sexual abuse, because they do not believe that there was just one victim.
The alleged crimes are sickening. But sexual terrors inflicted on children are apparently hardly unknown across India, especially in rural towns and villages where local justice is malleable and many such crimes go unreported, with families fearful of reprisals, or vengeance is exacted directly.
The mob has no patience with jurisprudence, with reports of men attacked, even killed, for simply offering candy to children or striking up conversations. The atmosphere has become that tense and fraught with menace. India is no different, in the promulgation of fake news, circa 2018 — claims of child kidnappings, harvesting of children’s organs, gang rape — with appeals to baser human instincts, in a nation of more than 200 million social media users.
The real, the allegedly real, is bad enough.
Correction — July 23, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said two of the accused are police officers.
Read more about:
India, Narendra Modi
https://www.firstpost.com/india/rig...ing-trend-worrying-for-judiciary-4765431.html
Right mob vs wrong: Amid lynching trend, praise for lawyers beating Chennai rape accused worry for judiciary
India TS Sudhir Jul 18, 2018 17:26:01 IST
Tweet
54, 60, 66, 40, 50, 60, 58, 40, 55, 42, 36, 32, 32, 23, 23, 23, 26.
For the past 24 hours, this set of numbers has been doing the rounds. It is important to take a long, hard look at them because these are the ages of the 17 men who allegedly raped an 11-year-old differently-abled girl for seven months inside a gated community in Central Chennai. The accused worked as security guards, lift operators, water suppliers and plumbers at the complex, and some were outsiders.
File image of a protest against rapes. Reuters
On Tuesday evening, when the accused were brought to the Mahila Court in Chennai, a few lawyers decided to dispense instant justice. Despite the presence of the Chennai Police, they caught hold of a couple of the accused and thrashed them. That the black coats had indulged in vigilantism is a commentary on what those within the legal system thought of the judiciary's ability to dispense justice fair and fast.
Ironically, the lawyers in Chennai decided to get physical on a day when the Supreme Court urged Parliament to frame a law against lynching. It also came on a day when 80-year-old Swami Agnivesh was assaulted allegedly by activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party's youth wing, the Yuva morcha, in Jharkhand. This was four days after a software engineer from Hyderabad was lynched in Bidar in Karnataka on suspicion that he was a kidnapper.
Without a doubt, India has been shaken by what happened in Chennai. How was it that not one of the 17 men had a moral compass and felt it necessary to raise an alarm, to save the child from predators?
The crime came to light on 13 July, when the girl complained of a pain in her stomach to her elder sister. After her sister pressed her for more information, she revealed that men in the apartment complex had assaulted and even gangraped her repeatedly.
According to the statement of the child's mother to the police, the assaults began on 15 January when the lift operator took the child to an isolated spot in the apartment complex and raped her. He threatened the child to not tell anyone. A few days later, he brought in other men from outside, who also raped her in the basement of a building in the apartment complex. They drugged her and took videos of their act to blackmail her. It sickens one to the stomach to imagine that anyone who got a chance, joined in. It is even more surprising that her parents did not realise something was wrong with the child, and that no one in the complex of 300 flats noticed it.
If the instant reactions on social media are anything to go by, this act of the kangaroo court within the premises of the Chennai court has been much appreciated. That the monsters deserved it and the lawyers did just the right thing was the popular opinion. It should distress the judiciary that their own have zero faith in the painfully slothful, and often corrupt, legal system in India.
This incident reminds me of the acid attack in Warangal in undivided Andhra Pradesh in December 2008. Three boys were accused of throwing acid on two girls — both engineering students — as "punishment" for spurning their advances. The accused were arrested soon after, but within hours, the police shot them dead. Officially, the police maintained that the trio had attacked them, and they had opened fire in self-defence. It was an unconvincing excuse, but very few cared. The girls' parents hailed the encounter killing, as did a minister from Warangal, Ponnala Laxmaiah, and the society at large.
Right Mob vs Wrong Mob
Who decides which assault or act of lynching the society should applaud and which it should denounce? It is quite possible that if the lawyers had lynched one of the accused inside the Mahila Court premises, many of us would have celebrated it. If this is right, there will be those from the Right-Wing who will question why it was not right to assault and lynch a cattle trader. They will argue that there cannot be two yardsticks for a Jayant Sinha, who felicitated those convicted of lynching a man in Ramgarh on suspicion that he was carrying beef in his car, and for civil society that is hailing the lawyers.
A protest against child sexual abuse. File image. Reuters
Speak to the villagers in Bidar, and they will tell you they were convinced — thanks to WhatsApp forwards masquerading as the truth and phone calls — that a group of child-lifters was trying to escape in a red car after kidnapping children and was armed with weapons. Both were lies. India, blinded by a technological tool, has slipped back into the dark ages where a common foe can easily be bludgeoned to death. From a democracy that is meant to empower every citizen, India is becoming a "mobocracy" that gives every participant a sense of courage.
The multiple rapes in Chennai, too, were an act of "mobocracy". The 17 beasts must have drawn courage from the fact that they were not alone in the act. Like in each of the 31 cases of lynching that India has seen in the past four months, where the mob operates with the motto of "might is right", where the individual imagines he will get away in the crowd.
The Chief Justice of India should be worried that street justice is the new Supreme Court. I am not sure if a new law to tackle lynching will stop the horrific crime. After all, the country has the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act to deal with crimes against minors, but that did not stop the 17 brutes from raping the 11-year-old girl again and again from January to July.
More than another provision in the Indian Penal Code, India needs to worry about how we, as a society, are okay about giving individuals sanction to take law into their own hands, a moral authority to thrash, assault and even kill. Spontaneous justice cannot be a substitute for a slow legal system. The police machinery and the judiciary are on test because the mob is at our doorstep.
Updated Date: Jul 18, 2018 17:26 PM
Tags : #17 Men Rape Chennai Girl #Bidar Lynching #Chennai Rape #ConnectTheDots #Judiciary #Lynching #Lynching Law #Mob Lynching #Mobocracy #Supreme Court #Swami Agnivesh
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印度17男輪姦聽障女童 上庭遭50名律師狂毆
on.cc 東網
6.2k 人追蹤
2018年7月23日 下午12:14
印度真奈警方上周二（17日）拘捕17名男子，他們涉嫌連續7個月強姦一名12歲聽障女童。該批疑犯抵達法庭時，遭逾50名律師痛毆，情境更被拍下。律師公會更表明不會為這些被告辯護，亦反對他們獲得法援。
當時疑犯由法院大樓送往還押候審，警方認為案件具爭議，故將疑犯分成數批，分別護送出法院。不過，大批身穿白襯衫的年輕律師及法律系學生，在梯間堵截疑犯，蜂擁而上將他們打倒在地。部分人擋住欲阻攔的警員，其他人則拳腳交加，痛毆倒在地上的疑犯。
「法院不是警局，不是保障被告的地方！不要包庇這些罪犯！」有年輕律師高喊。有與警員爭辯的女律師直斥︰「要是你們在這之前就痛打這群人，事情就不會發生了。這些犯人現時坐在法院大樓內並笑着。」事件擾攘至晚上，警方才把全部疑犯護送離開。
17 male gang rape in India, hearing impaired girls, courtesy of 50 lawyers
[on.cc East Net]
On.cc East Net
6.2k person tracking
July 23, 2018, 12:14 PM
Indian Chennai police arrested 17 men last Tuesday (17th) who were suspected of raping a 12-year-old hearing-impaired girl for seven months. When the suspects arrived in the court, more than 50 lawyers were beaten and the situation was photographed. The Law Society also stated that it would not defend these defendants and opposed their access to legal aid.
At that time, the suspect was sent to the remand for trial by the court building. The police believed that the case was controversial. Therefore, the suspects were divided into several batches and escorted out of the court. However, a large number of young lawyers and law students wearing white shirts blocked the suspects in the ladder and swarmed them to the ground. Some people blocked the police officers who wanted to block, while others used their fists and fists to hurt the suspects on the ground.
"The court is not a police station, it is not a place to protect the defendants! Don't cover up these criminals!" A young lawyer shouted. There is a female lawyer who argues with the police officer. "If you beat this group before this, things will not happen. These prisoners are now sitting in the court building and laughing." The incident was disturbed until the evening. Escort all suspects away.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/sta...12-year-old-girl-with-a-hearing-disorder.html
In India’s ‘Chennai Horror,’ 17 men face charges in the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl with a hearing disorder
By Rosie DiMannoStar Columnist
Fri., July 20, 2018
WARNING! Graphic content
Men in dress shirts thrashing men in dress shirts. A high-pitched shrieking as the targets of all those blows and kicks scrunch their bodies on the floor in a vain attempt to protect themselves.
April 12: Indian activists and students protest against the alleged political silence over the rape of a child near Jammu and a rape case in Uttar Pradesh state, in New Delhi. (SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES file photo)
The melee spills out into a stairwell.
This appalling scene was captured on Tuesday, in an Indian courthouse, where 17 males were brought for a first appearance on charges of gang-raping and otherwise sexually molesting a 12-year-old girl with a hearing disorder over a seven-month period.
Those inflicting the wallops are lawyers.
Those receiving them are supposed to be their clients.
Except the Chennai High Court Advocate Association has declared none of their attorneys will take the case to represent any of the defendants.
The community’s anger is understandable, expressed in furious and incendiary postings on the comment section of Indian newspapers: Shoot them! Hang them! Burn them!
On the opposite end of the rage spectrum, following the rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in a separate incident earlier this year, a government minister who attended a protest rally in support of the accused was anonymously quoted in the New York Times as saying, “So what if a girl died? Many girls die every day.”
There is a sectarian subtext to the rhetoric, with Hindus blaming Muslims, Muslims blaming Hindus, opponents of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party — several of its members have publicly defended the accused — slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi for unacceptable silence in the face of high-profile sexual assaults against young girls across the country, and intellectuals tying the can to the long-gone East India Company imposing western culture on India, as if the sexually diabolical were a cascading outcome of laws that abolished suttee and legalized the remarriage of widows.
You might be interested in
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Mother of Oshawa murder victim alleges police inaction added to ‘nightmare’ of her son’s death
I don’t know what any of that has to do with vile crimes against children, but there’s no dispute that India, most populous democratic country in the world, has been plunged into an existential maelstrom, with many incidents of sexual assault against minors deepening religious, political and ethical divides, as accounts of unspeakable violence grips the public.
Vigilante mobs, infused by a lust for vengeance and apparently corralled via rumours on social apps about child kidnappings and assaults, have been responsible for 20 lynching or beating deaths in the past two months, according to Indian media reports.
While a horrified citizenry recoils, a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll released in June named India as the most dangerous country in the world for women, ahead of such war-torn nations as Afghanistan and Syria — a rape occurring at least every 20 minutes, as per data from the National Crimes Records Bureau. Yet India, in recent years, had also been characterized as one of the countries with the lowest per capita rates of rape, according to a UN comparative study.
It’s difficult to reconcile these two counter claims.
But there’s little doubt that something sinister happened in Chennai, a coastal city in the southeast, and, in January, in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the latter event, the eight-year-old from a seminomadic Muslim community, was abducted, imprisoned for a week in a temple — so says the police charge sheet — drugged, starved, repeatedly raped before she was slain and her body thrown into the forest. One of the accused was also a police officer, and, claims the prosecution, asked his co-conspirators to hold off killing the child so that he could rape her a last time.
Sex crimes against children are hardly exclusive to any country on the planet or any ethnicity. Toronto has sadly seen its share of them.
There’s an extra dimension of savagery, however, in the “Chennai Horror,” as it’s being called, which provoked the chaotic courthouse brawl on Tuesday.
Police say the men allegedly took turns raping the child, feeding her drinks laced with drugs, and videotaping the assaults — in them they are brandishing knives — threatening to make the contents public if the girl told her family.
The girl lives with her mother in an upscale gated community apartment complex, with a jungle gym and a pool, home to some 350 families in multiple blocks. The child’s businessman father resides in another city with an older daughter. It was the sister who, on a visit home last week, concerned about the younger’s girl fatigue and depression, first raised suspicions. When the 11-year-old finally revealed her harrowing experience, the family filed a complaint with the local all-women police department. (India has about 200 all-female police substations, formed specifically to investigate and help curb gender crimes.)
All of the defendants worked in the complex, in security, as elevator operators, handymen and housekeeping staff.
Police say the first sexual assault was by an elevator operator who subsequently encouraged others, including colleagues, to join the episodes of sexual wretchedness, most of it taking place in isolated niches of the complex and vacant units, in the evening, when her mother believed her to playing with other kids.
“They threatened the child at knife-point,” said the captain of the all-woman police station, after arresting the men. “This is the worst crime this world has seen yet, as far as I’m concerned. Few of them raped her; some have fondled her during this act. Some others have sexually harassed her, while others have watched the assault video. They are all guilty, because not one of them tried to stop this brutality. They will all be punished.”
Three of the accused are in their 60s, four in their 50s, three in their 40s, the rest in their 30s and 20s. They have been variously charged with aggravated penetrative sexual assault, sexual assault, harassment upon a child, attempted murder and criminal intimidation.
Since the news exploded, women who live at the complex have taken it upon themselves to guard the community, also preventing both journalists from entering and citizens from the wider city who’ve been demonstrating for swift, lethal justice against the defendants.
“If left to us, we will murder them with our bare hands,” one woman told the Times of India. “How can they do this to a small child?’ ”
Victim assistance groups have also been barred, despite arguing that every child in the complex must be questioned about sexual abuse, because they do not believe that there was just one victim.
The alleged crimes are sickening. But sexual terrors inflicted on children are apparently hardly unknown across India, especially in rural towns and villages where local justice is malleable and many such crimes go unreported, with families fearful of reprisals, or vengeance is exacted directly.
The mob has no patience with jurisprudence, with reports of men attacked, even killed, for simply offering candy to children or striking up conversations. The atmosphere has become that tense and fraught with menace. India is no different, in the promulgation of fake news, circa 2018 — claims of child kidnappings, harvesting of children’s organs, gang rape — with appeals to baser human instincts, in a nation of more than 200 million social media users.
The real, the allegedly real, is bad enough.
Correction — July 23, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said two of the accused are police officers.
Read more about:
India, Narendra Modi
https://www.firstpost.com/india/rig...ing-trend-worrying-for-judiciary-4765431.html
Right mob vs wrong: Amid lynching trend, praise for lawyers beating Chennai rape accused worry for judiciary
India TS Sudhir Jul 18, 2018 17:26:01 IST
Tweet
54, 60, 66, 40, 50, 60, 58, 40, 55, 42, 36, 32, 32, 23, 23, 23, 26.
For the past 24 hours, this set of numbers has been doing the rounds. It is important to take a long, hard look at them because these are the ages of the 17 men who allegedly raped an 11-year-old differently-abled girl for seven months inside a gated community in Central Chennai. The accused worked as security guards, lift operators, water suppliers and plumbers at the complex, and some were outsiders.
File image of a protest against rapes. Reuters
On Tuesday evening, when the accused were brought to the Mahila Court in Chennai, a few lawyers decided to dispense instant justice. Despite the presence of the Chennai Police, they caught hold of a couple of the accused and thrashed them. That the black coats had indulged in vigilantism is a commentary on what those within the legal system thought of the judiciary's ability to dispense justice fair and fast.
Ironically, the lawyers in Chennai decided to get physical on a day when the Supreme Court urged Parliament to frame a law against lynching. It also came on a day when 80-year-old Swami Agnivesh was assaulted allegedly by activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party's youth wing, the Yuva morcha, in Jharkhand. This was four days after a software engineer from Hyderabad was lynched in Bidar in Karnataka on suspicion that he was a kidnapper.
Without a doubt, India has been shaken by what happened in Chennai. How was it that not one of the 17 men had a moral compass and felt it necessary to raise an alarm, to save the child from predators?
The crime came to light on 13 July, when the girl complained of a pain in her stomach to her elder sister. After her sister pressed her for more information, she revealed that men in the apartment complex had assaulted and even gangraped her repeatedly.
According to the statement of the child's mother to the police, the assaults began on 15 January when the lift operator took the child to an isolated spot in the apartment complex and raped her. He threatened the child to not tell anyone. A few days later, he brought in other men from outside, who also raped her in the basement of a building in the apartment complex. They drugged her and took videos of their act to blackmail her. It sickens one to the stomach to imagine that anyone who got a chance, joined in. It is even more surprising that her parents did not realise something was wrong with the child, and that no one in the complex of 300 flats noticed it.
If the instant reactions on social media are anything to go by, this act of the kangaroo court within the premises of the Chennai court has been much appreciated. That the monsters deserved it and the lawyers did just the right thing was the popular opinion. It should distress the judiciary that their own have zero faith in the painfully slothful, and often corrupt, legal system in India.
This incident reminds me of the acid attack in Warangal in undivided Andhra Pradesh in December 2008. Three boys were accused of throwing acid on two girls — both engineering students — as "punishment" for spurning their advances. The accused were arrested soon after, but within hours, the police shot them dead. Officially, the police maintained that the trio had attacked them, and they had opened fire in self-defence. It was an unconvincing excuse, but very few cared. The girls' parents hailed the encounter killing, as did a minister from Warangal, Ponnala Laxmaiah, and the society at large.
Right Mob vs Wrong Mob
Who decides which assault or act of lynching the society should applaud and which it should denounce? It is quite possible that if the lawyers had lynched one of the accused inside the Mahila Court premises, many of us would have celebrated it. If this is right, there will be those from the Right-Wing who will question why it was not right to assault and lynch a cattle trader. They will argue that there cannot be two yardsticks for a Jayant Sinha, who felicitated those convicted of lynching a man in Ramgarh on suspicion that he was carrying beef in his car, and for civil society that is hailing the lawyers.
A protest against child sexual abuse. File image. Reuters
Speak to the villagers in Bidar, and they will tell you they were convinced — thanks to WhatsApp forwards masquerading as the truth and phone calls — that a group of child-lifters was trying to escape in a red car after kidnapping children and was armed with weapons. Both were lies. India, blinded by a technological tool, has slipped back into the dark ages where a common foe can easily be bludgeoned to death. From a democracy that is meant to empower every citizen, India is becoming a "mobocracy" that gives every participant a sense of courage.
The multiple rapes in Chennai, too, were an act of "mobocracy". The 17 beasts must have drawn courage from the fact that they were not alone in the act. Like in each of the 31 cases of lynching that India has seen in the past four months, where the mob operates with the motto of "might is right", where the individual imagines he will get away in the crowd.
The Chief Justice of India should be worried that street justice is the new Supreme Court. I am not sure if a new law to tackle lynching will stop the horrific crime. After all, the country has the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act to deal with crimes against minors, but that did not stop the 17 brutes from raping the 11-year-old girl again and again from January to July.
More than another provision in the Indian Penal Code, India needs to worry about how we, as a society, are okay about giving individuals sanction to take law into their own hands, a moral authority to thrash, assault and even kill. Spontaneous justice cannot be a substitute for a slow legal system. The police machinery and the judiciary are on test because the mob is at our doorstep.
Updated Date: Jul 18, 2018 17:26 PM
Tags : #17 Men Rape Chennai Girl #Bidar Lynching #Chennai Rape #ConnectTheDots #Judiciary #Lynching #Lynching Law #Mob Lynching #Mobocracy #Supreme Court #Swami Agnivesh
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