Serendipity

Imrana Bibi, a Muslim woman from Muzaffarnagar was allegedly raped by her
father-in-law. Instead of pushing for maximum punishment for the guilty, the all
India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) as well as religious leaders have said
that she should separate from her husband and move in with her father-in law.

The 47-year-old Lufthansa Airlines employee from Frankfurt was raped by
an auto-rickshaw driver and his accomplice in Jodhpur on May 11. The duo took
the woman, who had boarded their vehicle to go out for dinner, to a deserted
place and violated her

The victim, a Delhi University student who hails
from the country's northeast, was raped after midnight Saturday in a moving car
after being seized near a roadside eatery in south Delhi's busy Dhaula Kuan
area.

The Mathura rape case was one of the worst instances of custodial
rape. Mathura was a 16 year old tribal girl who had accompanied her relatives to
the police station to lodge a complaint. While her relatives waited outside, two
policemen raped her within the police station. The court acquitted the rapists
on the grounds that Mathura did not carry any visible signs of physical injury
on her and was "habituated to sexual intercourse" as also being of "loose
morals", because she had eloped with her boyfriend.

Bhanwari Devi was a
Dalit grassroot social worker in Rajasthan. She dared to report a child marriage
in a Gurjar family. In retaliation, she was gang raped in front of her husband,
by members of the Gurjar family

Fatima Bibi Md Yaqub Sheikh whose family
lost 19 members including her sisters and brothers during the Gujarat riots, was
raped repeatedly, as were her sister and neice by mobsters. She also has gone on
record to say that the older women who were not raped were stripped and then
burnt alive. Pregnant women were not spared. Those who were not killed, lost
their womb after being repeatedly gang raped.

These are only some of the cases which have hit the news headlines. But the recent Imrana Bibi case in muzzaffarpur has fired the debate that Indian women are not secured in this country. The country which sometimes in history boasts of its “Nari is Devi” slogan is turned into a horrendous habitat. Local Panchayat asked Imrana to abandon her husband, to be put in 7-month isolation, so that she can be purified and then after marry her father-in-law. After this idiocy, AIMPB (All India Muslim Personal; Board) sustain this verdict and proposes a well thought-out “fatwa” against the victim.

Did you know two women are raped somewhere in India every hour and one in every five is not even a woman, but a child? How many rapists do you think are brought to justice? Not even a fraction. Of the 232 rape victims in Delhi this year, 179 (77%) were minors. And of the 274 men arrested for rape this year, 250 (92%) are either illiterate people or have studied only till Class X. These are some of the findings of a report prepared by the Delhi Police, in the aftermath of the recent Dhaula Kuan gangrape.

Well over 80 percent of rapists in India escape any punishment because of several reasons ranging from delays in judicial process to police inaction, experts and lawyers say.According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 81 percent of rape cases taken up by the courts all over the country in 2003 were pending trial at the end of the year. Many reasons are given for this: besides sloppiness in judicial process and police investigation, rape victims are often threatened or asked to withdraw the complaints.

As somebody has said it right- “But woman's grief is like a summer storm, Short as it violent”.

After this laxity from Law, society suggests victim to marry the rapist. How can a woman marry a person who raped her not out of affection but to exhibit his masculinity, power and rage? And in a society with its inherent defects often linked to feudal values, the rapist unfortunately enjoys an advantage. If this situation persists in our country then it would be definitely turned into a manufacturing unit of bandit queens. Should victim be allowed to marry rapist?? My opinion..never..